How about this. Speed limits on frontage roads (side roads that run along side limited access freeways) are typically 55 MPH around here.
Except... they are putting in new freeways now around Austin. Most of them are replacing older, regular roads, which had 55 MPH speed limits.
All of the new freeways are toll roads. Guess what speed limits their frontage roads get? You guessed it - 45 MPH. In other words, the same type of road in the same town goes from 55 to 45 when the road it follows happens to be built with private funds and has a toll if you use it.
I don't mind charging people to use the roads they drive on. I do mind artificially lowering the speed limit on neighboring roads to force more people onto the road that generates profit for the bigwigs that had money to invest in its construction.
Any speed limit set to create a profit, either for the city or private enterprise, is wrong. Speed limits should be set for safety alone.
Sure there is. After the election, Florida newspapers and universities succeeded in getting all the votes for a statewide recount.
Gore would have lost his recount, had it continued.
Had the entire state been recounted, Gore would have won the presidency.
Gore was asking for recounts only in large Democratic counties, where it seemed that more Democratic votes would have been miscounted.
It turned out that more of the undercounted Democratic votes were in the more conservative areas of the state.
In other words, if every vote had been counted as they should have been, Gore would have won. But no, if Gore would have gotten his recount as he asked for, he still would have lost.
>> It appears as a large black mass in the World At Night map
Not that Africa hasn't gone through more than its share of troubles, but is it really a bad thing that it appears as a black mass in the World At Night map? What exactly does it prove if the US is a huge fiery glow at night? That we waste energy? It's being picked up by a satellite.
Just like many countries without landline telephone infrastructures are moving directly to cellular service from nothing at all, perhaps one day African nations will implement efficient directional night lighting as is necessary, and it can be proud to be less wasteful on the World At Night.
>> The down side to this tack is that someone must go through the time consuming task of manually writing the chip in a Hardware Design Language such as VHDL or Verilog.
That's why there are products such as LabVIEW FPGA. Nothing says that something like that couldn't be done for supercomputing, as it is now done for data acquisition.
It has been VERY useful when looking for a new place to live. I've ruled out some otherwise nice areas because of the high crime, while other areas rose to the top of my list.
Plus, the city crime viewer has satellite data with higher resolution than Google maps, albeit a bit older. I can zoom in to 1 inch = 100 feet, enough to tell if the house I want to buy had rusted cars in the front yard and a bad roof 3 years ago. I can also figure out if there's enough space to build an addition without driving to it.
Read the page in the WINDOWS COMPONENTS dialog. It says:
"Add or removes access to Outlook Express from the start menu."
Removing the Start Menu shortcut is not removing the program. You are on Slashdot; shame on you for not knowing the difference.
I just "removed" it like you said. Then I clicked on your email address in the post I'm replying to. Guess what? OE launched to handle the email request? But how could it do that when it's been "uninstalled"??????????
And how does one uninstall Outlook Express? There is not an option to do so in Add/Remove Programs. (There is one entry for an OE quick fix, but uninstalling that just restores the previous state.)
For some reason, I don't see the option to uninstall Internet Explorer either, but when I delete its.exe it is restored, too...
And how do I stop the File Protection Service? (And I don't mean with a hex editor.)
>> And why do modern boards still have serial and Parralell ports? They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world, why are they even included as standard on ALL boards? On Some us because they still have some value but ALL?
My new (as of January) Dell at work doesn't have them. It just has 6 USB ports (8, if you also count the two on the front).
Dell can remove them, because they are selling a complete system and know that customers don't need a PS2 keyboard slot, for example.
The separate motherboard vendors still include them because it is cheaper to sell one motherboard version than it is to sell two, where one has a reduce featureset.
In a few more years they will be phased out. It just takes time. ISA took forever to be phased out as well. PCI is obsolete now, too, but even you might hope that they keep a few PCI slots around for a few years until all your old PCI add-on cards have been replaced. (Assuming you don't use all motherboard built-in features.)
This is not true. Microsoft hasn't upgraded the Word standard since Office 97. The same format can be read and written by all programs since then. I've never upgraded past Office 2000 at work or home, but I can share files flawlessly back and forth between 2000 and 2003 and XP and even 97 on my old laptop.
Microsoft realized that, once they had the dominant market share, changing formats with each release just made their own customers resist upgrades. It cost them more money than it saved by frustrating their out-of-business competitors.
(Yes, I also use OpenOffice, and no, it isn't flawless in its conversions.)
Aye, one of my college professors ran NASA's fusion program in the 70s, and created the EFBT (Electric Field Bumpy Torus) fusion reactor. I don't know if you would call it a similar device to a tokamak - it used electric fields to stabilize the plasma instead of magnetic - but it also worked well.
I think any new method that could possibly draw money away from the tokamak model is a good thing. I think it is one of the reasons that fusion research has been so stagnant. When the Princeton TFTR was being built, the contractor dropped one of the tokamak's huge flywheels. To pay for its replacement, most other fusion research programs were cut entirely, such as the one at NASA Langley.
>> Since you have to buy from other players, there shouldn't be an overabundance of high end items for sale. (if you get something cool, you want to use it.)
You are assuming that, well, all players play the game to play it.
IGE employs a workforce in low wage countries specifically to farm items. Those people never keep any of the items, they maximize the availability of the items by camping the spawns, and they block real players from using the content, through simple hording or through PvP or training mobs.
Without the assumption that all players play to have fun, your argument doesn't work.
>> This isn't going to legitimize IGE, this is going to put them out of business, once Sony gets rolling with this.
Absolutely untrue. Sony is not selling new copies of items that they create for the sale. They are facilitating sales of items that players have acquired through normal adventuring/or farming/.
That last bit is important. Who has more items to sell? Someone who plays the game normally, and might sell off one or two random things now and then, or a company that employs a large workforce in low wage countries to play hours on end, hording spawns (preventing others from getting the content) and collecting massive amounts of currency and items to sell. This makes IGE's activities/legitimate/.
And this won't be limited to the new servers. Even if it is still disallowed on other servers, Sony will be less likely to fight it there. And its not like people who buy things will all move to the new servers. Why move to a new server where you have to buy stuff just to/keep up/, when you can be on a server where few people buy and you can do so the/get ahead/?/Only/ if Sony were to start manufacturing items at the point of sale would this put IGE out of business. However, this would put EverQuest out of business at the exact same time. Very few people want to play a game where those who work to earn items and develop skill have to compete with those with no skill but a bigger checkbook. And yet most groups and raids would see the person with better gear and take them.
Bad bad bad Sony! I'm very glad I swore off all SoE games after how they screwed us in EQ1.
Not at all. This is typical pointy-hair boss strategy from Sony.
The people who have most of the items to sell are farmers - people who spend all their time killing creatures for in-game currency or items. These people are being paid by companies like IGE to do this farming, at low wages (relative to US scales).
The problem is that these people take over content that would otherwise be free for real people to use. Farmers tend to horde all the mobs in an area for days on end, not letting anyone else complete in-game activities in that area. Then they sell the items, at an "inflated" prices because they control the entire supply.
Think of it like having an apple tree in a public park near your house. Anyone can go and pick a few apples from the tree, and enjoy a nice snack. But these people come along, pick all the apples from the public tree, then try to sell them to you. Might not be illegal, no, but it disrupts the community.
However, it happens, and it is a $40 million or more industry, which Sony gets no part of. Indeed, they pay for it, in terms of their own customer service costs for people who get ripped off in the process. So some pointy-haired boss sees this and decides to save Sony money and make it legitimate, not realizing what it does to the people of the community.
This will only be done on new, dedicated servers, but that doesn't matter. People who buy stuff now do so to get/ahead/ of their peers. People who move to the new dedicated servers will be forced to do it to/keep up/ with their peers. Instead, those who want to benefit from their purchases should stay on a regular server (where most people do not buy items) but keep buying stuff. It's not like IGE will move all their farmers to the new server - there are plenty of people willing to work for low wages to farm items no matter how many servers.
However, not that it is legitimate on some servers, SoE will do an even worse job policing it on other servers. Blizzard in World of Warcraft bans the accounts of farmers when they are found. While this doesn't stop the activity, it puts a damper on it. SoE won't be able or willing to do that anymore.
I don't play EverQuest II. After original EQ and how bad Sony screwed us, I vowed to never again play an SoE game. My one friend that does (did) play EQ2 cancelled this morning, with a note that he won't support a company with this mindset.
>> If little Billy just needs to use the WiFi at the truck stop (just sounds like a bad idea, no?), you STILL have options.
Heck, I wouldn't let little Billy use the restroom at the truck stop. He's just as likely to see profanity or obscene drawings scrawled on the walls in there, and I won't even mention what else might happen a few stalls down...
In this sense, I think the Internet is not "public communication" because it is listener initiated. In other words, individual members of the public have to request the materials (by visiting web sites, viewing blogs, subscribing to mailing lists, etc.) to be contacted.
This is no different than you or I calling up or visiting a local campaign office. The candidate or his staff can "campaign" at us all they want if we choose to walk in the door of their office.
If this is the definition from which they base "public communication" though, then politicians resorting to Unsolicited Political Email (is there a name for that? Pork?) would still have problems. (...as they should, but not because it is political, but because it is unsolicited...)
All of your points are very good, yes. It is possible to block radiation.
But the International Space Station (altitude 220 to 224 miles) remains below the inner Van Allen radiation belt (min altitude 250 miles or so in some places).
So using it as an example of people living with solar radiation is a bad idea. They get more exposure than people on the ground, yes, due to the lack of atmosphere to block radiation, but they avoid the worst of it by staying below the earth's magnetic shields.
Not true. Plasma byproducts can also sterilize. There has been much research into plasma sterilization, and it works well now with viable products on the market.
When I was in college in the late '90s, my plasma science professor and a biology professor had gotten together to examine the effects of plasma byproducts (i.e. atomic oxygen, basically) on organisms. They found the same total cell destruction in the microorganisms exposed to the plasma byproducts as when an autoclave is used. But the plasma sterilized in less than a minute. (The byproducts have been cooled to room temperature before they are exposed to the materials to be sanitized, so the effects are from the byproducts themselves, not their heat.)
Note the links from the Google search - the first one is for a Johnson and Johnson plasma sterilization product (though their process takes a few hours). Those aren't places that would lightly confuse sanitation and sterilization. This is truly new technology, that will render autoclaves obsolete.
(My professor's work appears here in abstract form.)
I had a bunch of those once. I managed to get rid of them by finding people who, like you saw, thought they were "worth something." I sold them all for $1.50 each. Heheheh
Slashdot Mirror
How about this. Speed limits on frontage roads (side roads that run along side limited access freeways) are typically 55 MPH around here.
Except... they are putting in new freeways now around Austin. Most of them are replacing older, regular roads, which had 55 MPH speed limits.
All of the new freeways are toll roads. Guess what speed limits their frontage roads get? You guessed it - 45 MPH. In other words, the same type of road in the same town goes from 55 to 45 when the road it follows happens to be built with private funds and has a toll if you use it.
I don't mind charging people to use the roads they drive on. I do mind artificially lowering the speed limit on neighboring roads to force more people onto the road that generates profit for the bigwigs that had money to invest in its construction.
Any speed limit set to create a profit, either for the city or private enterprise, is wrong. Speed limits should be set for safety alone.
Why would a casual movie watcher pay $8.50 to see one movie a month in the theater?
$8.50 for just two hours of entertainment makes no sense at all.
Sure there is. After the election, Florida newspapers and universities succeeded in getting all the votes for a statewide recount.
Gore would have lost his recount, had it continued.
Had the entire state been recounted, Gore would have won the presidency.
Gore was asking for recounts only in large Democratic counties, where it seemed that more Democratic votes would have been miscounted.
It turned out that more of the undercounted Democratic votes were in the more conservative areas of the state.
In other words, if every vote had been counted as they should have been, Gore would have won. But no, if Gore would have gotten his recount as he asked for, he still would have lost.
>> It appears as a large black mass in the World At Night map
Not that Africa hasn't gone through more than its share of troubles, but is it really a bad thing that it appears as a black mass in the World At Night map? What exactly does it prove if the US is a huge fiery glow at night? That we waste energy? It's being picked up by a satellite.
Just like many countries without landline telephone infrastructures are moving directly to cellular service from nothing at all, perhaps one day African nations will implement efficient directional night lighting as is necessary, and it can be proud to be less wasteful on the World At Night.
>> The down side to this tack is that someone must go through the time consuming task of manually writing the chip in a Hardware Design Language such as VHDL or Verilog.
That's why there are products such as LabVIEW FPGA. Nothing says that something like that couldn't be done for supercomputing, as it is now done for data acquisition.
My representative? Us folks in Austin, Texas don't have one of those. I'm "represented" by a guy in suburban Houston now.
They've already screened "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" at the original house, which was moved from the original site but is still near Austin.
See this story.
The city of Austin (Texas) already has this:
City of Austin Crime Viewer
It has been VERY useful when looking for a new place to live. I've ruled out some otherwise nice areas because of the high crime, while other areas rose to the top of my list.
Plus, the city crime viewer has satellite data with higher resolution than Google maps, albeit a bit older. I can zoom in to 1 inch = 100 feet, enough to tell if the house I want to buy had rusted cars in the front yard and a bad roof 3 years ago. I can also figure out if there's enough space to build an addition without driving to it.
You should offer to contract with them. Clearly their in-house IT is too expensive. Yet another opportunity for corporate outsourcing...
The "dude" and the extra question marks were purely for effect. I was trying to convey a sense of incredulity.
Dude, you are absolutely completely 100% wrong.
Read the page in the WINDOWS COMPONENTS dialog. It says:
"Add or removes access to Outlook Express from the start menu."
Removing the Start Menu shortcut is not removing the program. You are on Slashdot; shame on you for not knowing the difference.
I just "removed" it like you said. Then I clicked on your email address in the post I'm replying to. Guess what? OE launched to handle the email request? But how could it do that when it's been "uninstalled"??????????
This is for county jails. That is where people are held after they have been arrested, before they are convicted.
You know, before conviction, when they are still considered innocent.
(No, I'm not against this proposal. This isn't any worse than the arrest process in general. But your argument against it is completely flawed.)
And how does one uninstall Outlook Express? There is not an option to do so in Add/Remove Programs. (There is one entry for an OE quick fix, but uninstalling that just restores the previous state.)
.exe it is restored, too...
For some reason, I don't see the option to uninstall Internet Explorer either, but when I delete its
And how do I stop the File Protection Service? (And I don't mean with a hex editor.)
>> And why do modern boards still have serial and Parralell ports? They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world, why are they even included as standard on ALL boards? On Some us because they still have some value but ALL?
My new (as of January) Dell at work doesn't have them. It just has 6 USB ports (8, if you also count the two on the front).
Dell can remove them, because they are selling a complete system and know that customers don't need a PS2 keyboard slot, for example.
The separate motherboard vendors still include them because it is cheaper to sell one motherboard version than it is to sell two, where one has a reduce featureset.
In a few more years they will be phased out. It just takes time. ISA took forever to be phased out as well. PCI is obsolete now, too, but even you might hope that they keep a few PCI slots around for a few years until all your old PCI add-on cards have been replaced. (Assuming you don't use all motherboard built-in features.)
This is not true. Microsoft hasn't upgraded the Word standard since Office 97. The same format can be read and written by all programs since then. I've never upgraded past Office 2000 at work or home, but I can share files flawlessly back and forth between 2000 and 2003 and XP and even 97 on my old laptop.
Microsoft realized that, once they had the dominant market share, changing formats with each release just made their own customers resist upgrades. It cost them more money than it saved by frustrating their out-of-business competitors.
(Yes, I also use OpenOffice, and no, it isn't flawless in its conversions.)
Aye, one of my college professors ran NASA's fusion program in the 70s, and created the EFBT (Electric Field Bumpy Torus) fusion reactor. I don't know if you would call it a similar device to a tokamak - it used electric fields to stabilize the plasma instead of magnetic - but it also worked well.
I think any new method that could possibly draw money away from the tokamak model is a good thing. I think it is one of the reasons that fusion research has been so stagnant. When the Princeton TFTR was being built, the contractor dropped one of the tokamak's huge flywheels. To pay for its replacement, most other fusion research programs were cut entirely, such as the one at NASA Langley.
>> Since you have to buy from other players, there shouldn't be an overabundance of high end items for sale. (if you get something cool, you want to use it.)
You are assuming that, well, all players play the game to play it.
IGE employs a workforce in low wage countries specifically to farm items. Those people never keep any of the items, they maximize the availability of the items by camping the spawns, and they block real players from using the content, through simple hording or through PvP or training mobs.
Without the assumption that all players play to have fun, your argument doesn't work.
>> This isn't going to legitimize IGE, this is going to put them out of business, once Sony gets rolling with this.
/or farming/.
/legitimate/.
/keep up/, when you can be on a server where few people buy and you can do so the /get ahead/? /Only/ if Sony were to start manufacturing items at the point of sale would this put IGE out of business. However, this would put EverQuest out of business at the exact same time. Very few people want to play a game where those who work to earn items and develop skill have to compete with those with no skill but a bigger checkbook. And yet most groups and raids would see the person with better gear and take them.
Absolutely untrue. Sony is not selling new copies of items that they create for the sale. They are facilitating sales of items that players have acquired through normal adventuring
That last bit is important. Who has more items to sell? Someone who plays the game normally, and might sell off one or two random things now and then, or a company that employs a large workforce in low wage countries to play hours on end, hording spawns (preventing others from getting the content) and collecting massive amounts of currency and items to sell. This makes IGE's activities
And this won't be limited to the new servers. Even if it is still disallowed on other servers, Sony will be less likely to fight it there. And its not like people who buy things will all move to the new servers. Why move to a new server where you have to buy stuff just to
Bad bad bad Sony! I'm very glad I swore off all SoE games after how they screwed us in EQ1.
Not at all. This is typical pointy-hair boss strategy from Sony.
/ahead/ of their peers. People who move to the new dedicated servers will be forced to do it to /keep up/ with their peers. Instead, those who want to benefit from their purchases should stay on a regular server (where most people do not buy items) but keep buying stuff. It's not like IGE will move all their farmers to the new server - there are plenty of people willing to work for low wages to farm items no matter how many servers.
The people who have most of the items to sell are farmers - people who spend all their time killing creatures for in-game currency or items. These people are being paid by companies like IGE to do this farming, at low wages (relative to US scales).
The problem is that these people take over content that would otherwise be free for real people to use. Farmers tend to horde all the mobs in an area for days on end, not letting anyone else complete in-game activities in that area. Then they sell the items, at an "inflated" prices because they control the entire supply.
Think of it like having an apple tree in a public park near your house. Anyone can go and pick a few apples from the tree, and enjoy a nice snack. But these people come along, pick all the apples from the public tree, then try to sell them to you. Might not be illegal, no, but it disrupts the community.
However, it happens, and it is a $40 million or more industry, which Sony gets no part of. Indeed, they pay for it, in terms of their own customer service costs for people who get ripped off in the process. So some pointy-haired boss sees this and decides to save Sony money and make it legitimate, not realizing what it does to the people of the community.
This will only be done on new, dedicated servers, but that doesn't matter. People who buy stuff now do so to get
However, not that it is legitimate on some servers, SoE will do an even worse job policing it on other servers. Blizzard in World of Warcraft bans the accounts of farmers when they are found. While this doesn't stop the activity, it puts a damper on it. SoE won't be able or willing to do that anymore.
I don't play EverQuest II. After original EQ and how bad Sony screwed us, I vowed to never again play an SoE game. My one friend that does (did) play EQ2 cancelled this morning, with a note that he won't support a company with this mindset.
>> If little Billy just needs to use the WiFi at the truck stop (just sounds like a bad idea, no?), you STILL have options.
Heck, I wouldn't let little Billy use the restroom at the truck stop. He's just as likely to see profanity or obscene drawings scrawled on the walls in there, and I won't even mention what else might happen a few stalls down...
In this sense, I think the Internet is not "public communication" because it is listener initiated. In other words, individual members of the public have to request the materials (by visiting web sites, viewing blogs, subscribing to mailing lists, etc.) to be contacted.
This is no different than you or I calling up or visiting a local campaign office. The candidate or his staff can "campaign" at us all they want if we choose to walk in the door of their office.
If this is the definition from which they base "public communication" though, then politicians resorting to Unsolicited Political Email (is there a name for that? Pork?) would still have problems. (...as they should, but not because it is political, but because it is unsolicited...)
All of your points are very good, yes. It is possible to block radiation.
But the International Space Station (altitude 220 to 224 miles) remains below the inner Van Allen radiation belt (min altitude 250 miles or so in some places).
So using it as an example of people living with solar radiation is a bad idea. They get more exposure than people on the ground, yes, due to the lack of atmosphere to block radiation, but they avoid the worst of it by staying below the earth's magnetic shields.
>> when someone says "software," is IBM one of the first things you think of?
When someone says "IBM software", I pause, look at my email client on the other monitor (Lotus Notes), and begin to cry...
>> Only heat (and radiation) can truly sterilize.
Not true. Plasma byproducts can also sterilize. There has been much research into plasma sterilization, and it works well now with viable products on the market.
When I was in college in the late '90s, my plasma science professor and a biology professor had gotten together to examine the effects of plasma byproducts (i.e. atomic oxygen, basically) on organisms. They found the same total cell destruction in the microorganisms exposed to the plasma byproducts as when an autoclave is used. But the plasma sterilized in less than a minute. (The byproducts have been cooled to room temperature before they are exposed to the materials to be sanitized, so the effects are from the byproducts themselves, not their heat.)
Note the links from the Google search - the first one is for a Johnson and Johnson plasma sterilization product (though their process takes a few hours). Those aren't places that would lightly confuse sanitation and sterilization. This is truly new technology, that will render autoclaves obsolete.
(My professor's work appears here in abstract form.)
I had a bunch of those once. I managed to get rid of them by finding people who, like you saw, thought they were "worth something." I sold them all for $1.50 each. Heheheh