"Maybe it's like the forever flashlite over at Think Geek and all you need to do is shake it for 10-15 seconds then play for up to 5 minutes =]"
I thought it was common knowledge that shaking a controller in the direction you want to go can make you jump higher and turn corners sharper and even run just a little bit faster so you don't get smooshed.;)
It makes sense to make use of that wasted energy.
"1) The RIAA has deep pockets. He would have blown through $12k in attorney's fees in no time, had he decided to fight. I have a good attorney, and he charges $300/hr. $12k is one week of his time."
Kind of off topic but doesn't it seem a little odd that one person's weekly pay is equivalent to another person's life savings?
Laws weren't written so that the person/company with the most money wins but that seems to be how it usually ends up.
Other than the fact that automobiles are a poor example as a couple of other people have already pointed out, that is a perfectly valid point.
When I buy a car, I don't concern myself with where it or its components were made. My decision would mostly be based on price, how it looks, features and how safe it is. I probably missed a few but where it was built is towards the bottom of the list.
When I buy my groceries at Wal-Mart, I don't pick up a head of lettuce and say 'hrm, this one is $.15 more but it was grown in the U.S. vs. the cheap one which was grown in Mexico. Again, I base my purchase on how fresh it looks and the cost.
One more example, when I buy my hardware from newegg.com I don't think wow, I'm getting a better deal but if I drive down the road and buy parts from this place in town then I'm helping out the local economy.
Basically, I guess my point is that in general when people buy something, they'll try to get the best deal they can because we all have a limited amount of money. We don't worry about how negatively that may affect someone else if it's a benefit to us personally.
Businesses do the same thing but on a larger scale and when they do it, it very clearly affects many people's jobs.
Thereâ(TM)s no question in my mind that most of you, if it was possible, would love an LCD plopped in front of you rather than a conventional CRT which hogs up 50% of your desk space, well, what if it was not only an LCD but one which is larger than most of your mates home TV? With a viewable area of 29â
In one sentence, they're complaing about how much space CRTs take up on your desk and the next is about 29" of LCD goodness. I'm not sure that would even fit on my desk.:)
Senator writing bill to oppose this sort of thing (Score:2)
by Phoenix666 (184391) Alter Relationship on Thursday June 05, @02:58PM (#6125991)
I submitted this story [com.com] earlier today, but it didn't make it. Basically, Sen. Sam Brownback from Kansas is announcing the "Consumer,Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management Awareness Act," which will, among other things, require that a copyright holder win a lawsuit in order to obtain the name of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate.
In the meantime, I say turn about's fair play: let's all of us accuse the RIAA of illegally distributing our copyrighted material and invade their privacy without bothering with the courts. Let's rat out every music executive out there who's downloading kiddie porn or sending naughty emails to their mistresses. Hey, if they can do it to us, why can't we do it to them?
" How could this be a big blow to those who are file swapping legit? If you are legit but the activity looks like you are a major illegal abuser, you will probably be investigated, but the chances of that are slim."
What if I'm one of those people that has a vast cd collection that I want to convert to MP3s so I can queue up several hundred songs on my computer without swapping CDs and I'm also to lazy to encode them all myself so I download them. Is that legit?
Or if I sat my big ass down on my favorite CD and broke it.. is it legit to download that one? Or to take that further, what if it's an old casette that sounds like crap now.
Personally, I think all of those are legit but there's no way for Verizon or the RIAA to know if you fall into one of those categories when you download a copyrighted song.
Granted, the majority probably don't fall into those categories but some people do.
"Whitty noted one perk that would accompany the elimination of the gas tax. "The price of gas will come down," he said."
I really hope he was trying to be funny with that statement. What's the point of one tax going down if you have to pay it elsewhere? Not to mention that it seems like when 1 tax is replaced with another, the new tax always ends up costing more than the one it replaced.
" Taxing miles driven? Heck no! Tax the gas used so that a person who drives a fuel efficient hybrid gets an INCENTIVE versus folks (like me) who drive gas guzzling Suburbans."
In addition to the environmental benefits...
I could be wrong here but I'm guessing that the fuel efficient hybrid would have less of an impact on the life of the road vs. the big heavy gas guzzling suburban so maybe there should be more of a tax on the suburban.
A gas based tax accounts for that while a mileage based tax does not.
" The long-term plan calls for auto manufacturers to install the systems in new cars."
So every car manufactured in the US will have to be equipped for their plans? I really don't see why I should pay the extra cost for my new car to have this when I don't live anywhere near Oregon.
"The traditional solution has simply been to raise the tax rate, but that approach is always unpopular with voters."
Apparently though, voters don't mind having a GPS unit installed in their car so they can be tracked and taxed per mile they drive.
i dunno about the bathroom deal
on
A Tour of Pixar
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"If you have bathrooms that are scattered throughout the building, you use the bathroom nearest to where you're sitting. If there was one bathroom, all kinds of people would come together and talk with one another all the time -- you'd meet different people if you were waiting in line. It would enhance communication, and you'd be talking about things outside of work."
Maybe it's the introvert side of me but I'd rather not have someone talking to me while I'm trying to take a whiz and talking 'while we wait in line' doesn't sound much better. I generally don't want to wait to go to the restroom. It's a nice idea but I think it should be left to other things like maybe a single spot for vending machines or something.
" What worries me is that they'll sell you 1 liter of milk and conveniently "reprice" the product to make more money."
Or sell a liter of gas for the same price as a gallon so they don't have to change their signs. They may even throw in a little 'discount' to make it look good. i.e. that $1.54/gallon gas is now only $1.50/liter.
"Photoshit had to play catch up for quite a while"
huh? Photoshop catch up with Gimp? I've used several different paint programs and Gimp irritates me more than any other one except maybe Microsoft Paint.
I really don't know if it's just the interface or the features but at least for me, Photoshop blows the Gimp away.
" The John had a.plan update before which pointed out that NVidia's card is actually cranking out more precision by default compared to ATI. That could explain why ATI runs faster by default."
According to the summary, it produces higher quality images too. I suppose the higher quality image test may be independant of the speed test. Personally, I don't have the money to blow on one of these cards, let alone both so I really can't do side by side comparison.:)
It seems to me like every day, I become less of a professional employee and more of a robotic assembly line type employee that's just supposed to follow orders and crank out code.
I assume it's not just where I work and it's more of a general trend in IT. It seems like the job market is saturated with out of work IT employees so management no longer sees a need to pay IT people high salaries and give them special considerations like 'oh, you come in half an hour earlier every day? well I don't ming if you take an extra 15min for lunch then.. so long as you get your work done'
There's a problem there though.. I used to come up with little projects to work on when my job was kind of slow. One of those was a handy little system to track patches to the various software systems we support and also keep track of modifications we make to it. Once I rewrote a process to be more efficeint when getting data out of our database. It went from running in about 2hrs to 5 minutes. But both of those, along with almost every other thing I worked on in my spare time was ignored by management so I decided to pass the time with a nice game of freecell. I was so happy when I upgraded to XP because I got to play Spider Solitaire too.:)
Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe it's like the forever flashlite over at Think Geek and all you need to do is shake it for 10-15 seconds then play for up to 5 minutes =]"
;)
I thought it was common knowledge that shaking a controller in the direction you want to go can make you jump higher and turn corners sharper and even run just a little bit faster so you don't get smooshed.
It makes sense to make use of that wasted energy.
"1) The RIAA has deep pockets. He would have blown through $12k in attorney's fees in no time, had he decided to fight. I have a good attorney, and he charges $300/hr. $12k is one week of his time."
Kind of off topic but doesn't it seem a little odd that one person's weekly pay is equivalent to another person's life savings?
Laws weren't written so that the person/company with the most money wins but that seems to be how it usually ends up.
anyone else have the 'dirty deeds, done dirt cheap' song just pop into their head? :)
Other than the fact that automobiles are a poor example as a couple of other people have already pointed out, that is a perfectly valid point.
When I buy a car, I don't concern myself with where it or its components were made. My decision would mostly be based on price, how it looks, features and how safe it is. I probably missed a few but where it was built is towards the bottom of the list.
When I buy my groceries at Wal-Mart, I don't pick up a head of lettuce and say 'hrm, this one is $.15 more but it was grown in the U.S. vs. the cheap one which was grown in Mexico. Again, I base my purchase on how fresh it looks and the cost.
One more example, when I buy my hardware from newegg.com I don't think wow, I'm getting a better deal but if I drive down the road and buy parts from this place in town then I'm helping out the local economy.
Basically, I guess my point is that in general when people buy something, they'll try to get the best deal they can because we all have a limited amount of money. We don't worry about how negatively that may affect someone else if it's a benefit to us personally.
Businesses do the same thing but on a larger scale and when they do it, it very clearly affects many people's jobs.
Wow, i got modded +5 funny an no one even commented on me accidentaly getting my italics messed up. What's slashdot coming to these days? :)
Thereâ(TM)s no question in my mind that most of you, if it was possible, would love an LCD plopped in front of you rather than a conventional CRT which hogs up 50% of your desk space, well, what if it was not only an LCD but one which is larger than most of your mates home TV? With a viewable area of 29â
:)
In one sentence, they're complaing about how much space CRTs take up on your desk and the next is about 29" of LCD goodness. I'm not sure that would even fit on my desk.
scroll up a few posts...
Senator writing bill to oppose this sort of thing (Score:2)
by Phoenix666 (184391) Alter Relationship on
Thursday June 05, @02:58PM (#6125991)
I submitted this story [com.com] earlier today, but it didn't make it. Basically, Sen. Sam Brownback from Kansas is announcing the "Consumer,Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management Awareness Act," which will, among other things, require that a copyright holder win a lawsuit in order to obtain the name of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate. In the meantime, I say turn about's fair play: let's all of us accuse the RIAA of illegally distributing our copyrighted material and invade their privacy without bothering with the courts. Let's rat out every music executive out there who's downloading kiddie porn or sending naughty emails to their mistresses. Hey, if they can do it to us, why can't we do it to them?
Sue them for publishing your phone number in the phone book too. :)
Let us all here at slashdot know how that works out for ya.
" Yes. It's called foreinsic computing."
;)
:)
Haven't you ever seen a movie with a hacker in it... just get some big magnets like that funny looking guy in the Core.
Or you could booby trap your house like Gene Hackman did in Enemy of the State. I doubt they could recover data in that case.
" How could this be a big blow to those who are file swapping legit? If you are legit but the activity looks like you are a major illegal abuser, you will probably be investigated, but the chances of that are slim."
What if I'm one of those people that has a vast cd collection that I want to convert to MP3s so I can queue up several hundred songs on my computer without swapping CDs and I'm also to lazy to encode them all myself so I download them. Is that legit?
Or if I sat my big ass down on my favorite CD and broke it.. is it legit to download that one? Or to take that further, what if it's an old casette that sounds like crap now.
Personally, I think all of those are legit but there's no way for Verizon or the RIAA to know if you fall into one of those categories when you download a copyrighted song.
Granted, the majority probably don't fall into those categories but some people do.
That's ok... I lied about having mod points anyway ;)
... if any karma whore out there has a bittorrent of it or something ;)
"Whitty noted one perk that would accompany the elimination of the gas tax. "The price of gas will come down," he said."
I really hope he was trying to be funny with that statement. What's the point of one tax going down if you have to pay it elsewhere? Not to mention that it seems like when 1 tax is replaced with another, the new tax always ends up costing more than the one it replaced.
" Taxing miles driven? Heck no! Tax the gas used so that a person who drives a fuel efficient hybrid gets an INCENTIVE versus folks (like me) who drive gas guzzling Suburbans."
In addition to the environmental benefits...
I could be wrong here but I'm guessing that the fuel efficient hybrid would have less of an impact on the life of the road vs. the big heavy gas guzzling suburban so maybe there should be more of a tax on the suburban.
A gas based tax accounts for that while a mileage based tax does not.
" The long-term plan calls for auto manufacturers to install the systems in new cars."
So every car manufactured in the US will have to be equipped for their plans? I really don't see why I should pay the extra cost for my new car to have this when I don't live anywhere near Oregon.
yea I don't think I get it either
"The traditional solution has simply been to raise the tax rate, but that approach is always unpopular with voters."
Apparently though, voters don't mind having a GPS unit installed in their car so they can be tracked and taxed per mile they drive.
"If you have bathrooms that are scattered throughout the building, you use the bathroom nearest to where you're sitting. If there was one bathroom, all kinds of people would come together and talk with one another all the time -- you'd meet different people if you were waiting in line. It would enhance communication, and you'd be talking about things outside of work."
Maybe it's the introvert side of me but I'd rather not have someone talking to me while I'm trying to take a whiz and talking 'while we wait in line' doesn't sound much better. I generally don't want to wait to go to the restroom. It's a nice idea but I think it should be left to other things like maybe a single spot for vending machines or something.
Maybe some company should start selling some type of insurance to help people in these trying times.
Now please excuse me while I begin laughing hysterically.
" What worries me is that they'll sell you 1 liter of milk and conveniently "reprice" the product to make more money."
Or sell a liter of gas for the same price as a gallon so they don't have to change their signs. They may even throw in a little 'discount' to make it look good. i.e. that $1.54/gallon gas is now only $1.50/liter.
"Artificial Black Hole Escapes Laboratory, Eats Chicago"
:)
If it sucked up some of the traffic and people but left Six Flags untouched, I'd be happy.
"Photoshit had to play catch up for quite a while"
huh? Photoshop catch up with Gimp? I've used several different paint programs and Gimp irritates me more than any other one except maybe Microsoft Paint.
I really don't know if it's just the interface or the features but at least for me, Photoshop blows the Gimp away.
" The John had a .plan update before which pointed out that NVidia's card is actually cranking out more precision by default compared to ATI. That could explain why ATI runs faster by default."
:)
According to the summary, it produces higher quality images too. I suppose the higher quality image test may be independant of the speed test. Personally, I don't have the money to blow on one of these cards, let alone both so I really can't do side by side comparison.
"Exactly what useful skills am I honing? Mouse skills? Spatial relations? Ye olde Hand-I co-ordination"
;)
Minesweeper is all about logic... something we programmers are supposed to use a lot?
Or course, we also need practice in socializing so we can communicate better with users. Maybe that makes it ok to flirt with the cute secretary.
It seems to me like every day, I become less of a professional employee and more of a robotic assembly line type employee that's just supposed to follow orders and crank out code.
I assume it's not just where I work and it's more of a general trend in IT. It seems like the job market is saturated with out of work IT employees so management no longer sees a need to pay IT people high salaries and give them special considerations like 'oh, you come in half an hour earlier every day? well I don't ming if you take an extra 15min for lunch then.. so long as you get your work done'
"Or perhaps, say, actually working?"
:)
There's a problem there though.. I used to come up with little projects to work on when my job was kind of slow. One of those was a handy little system to track patches to the various software systems we support and also keep track of modifications we make to it. Once I rewrote a process to be more efficeint when getting data out of our database. It went from running in about 2hrs to 5 minutes. But both of those, along with almost every other thing I worked on in my spare time was ignored by management so I decided to pass the time with a nice game of freecell. I was so happy when I upgraded to XP because I got to play Spider Solitaire too.