- If you are today in Congress/Senate, you are a rich motherfucker who doesn't give a crap about the salary and is in it for either (a) bribes, (b) your own agenda, or (c) both (see also: Obama).
The problem is that in order to get elected, you need SO much money (acquired either legitimately, or like Obama/Clinton through money laundering of foreign donations, such as the millions of $ that came from "Palestine, Wyoming" when his campaign deliberately disabled all normal security features on their website's credit-card system) that no honest person could realistically afford to run.
Further, once they get in, they're in fundraising mode until the next election, or they're in bribe mode as a lame-duck.
The solution - at least partially - would be to prohibit them having ANY access to non-salary money, and set up government funds such that each candidate for a position had a budget of $X to spend in a given campaign - NO MORE and NO LESS.
Take the money out of the system, let the message and policy differences of the candidates decide who gets elected.
But we won't be able to do this - after all, the corrupt politicians we have now got in under the old system. Anything that offers a chance that their corrupt asses won't see (re-)election, is never going to pass.
What made the original Xbox controller nice (for anyone who actually used it, as opposed to Sony fanwanks and Tycho/Gabe who don't ever even fucking play the games or consoles they talk shit about) is basic ergonomics.
The original Xbox controller is not designed to be held in the "traditional" controller position (wrists curled, hands tucked under, 3rd/4th/5th fingers curled in to support the console). That position is why people get carpal tunnel and "nintendo thumb".
Instead, you can keep your hands vertically oriented ("handshake position", like these absolutely fucking fantastic mice), rest the controller in the crease of your palm, and allow the fingers to rest. Much less worry about RSI, much easier to actually use the damn buttons without worrying about losing your grip on the controller.
If Gabe/Tycho and the Sony fanwanks would ever have used it, they'd know this. Instead, they just screwed around hating on it because it was from Microsoft, and the rest of us now have to suffer with ergonomically incorrect pads because of it.
Different people, of different ages, will play your game console. Those different people, for the most part, will want (at least if they are going to be comfortable) different-sized controllers.
Yeah. Most of the Japanese population has small hands. They're also shorter. Remember, the reason that Asian societies never had much use for the idea of the straight-blade sword, and never developed the single-handed "lunge" maneuver, is that those don't work very well for people whose arms and legs are proportionally shorter than most of the Western people. If they wanted something to poke at someone at distance, their best bet was a spear.
Look back on controllers and what do you see? Large-sized (Atari 2600, Colecovision etc controllers). American companies. Switch forward after the crash, what do you have? NES/SNES - kiddie-sized controllers. Hard for adults to use for long. Genesis, a little better but not that great.
N64 controllers - heck, these things are just as big as an original Xbox controller. Set them side by side once. Playstation controllers, back to the small size, but your help came from companies like Pelican and Nyko that released adult-sized controller replacements.
Gamecube controller - smaller again, looked like something drawn by someone's 5-year-old.
Now we're stuck in the same boat. Xbox360 controllers could do to be a bit bigger for adults, smaller for kids. PS3 uses the same damn form factor, and I've wound up buying a couple of 3rd-party replacements once more.
BTW, I don't have "huge hands." According to standard sizing I use a Men's Medium and my girlfriend uses a "Women's Small." I prefer the larger controllers anyways (original Xbox especially) because I can hold my wrist straight in "Handshake position" and don't have to curl my 4th and 5th fingers underneath just to support the damn thing. The crease of my palm can do all the holding work and leave my thumbs and trigger fingers free to manipulate the buttons and triggers.
Odd how the current residents of Mesopotamia are the least civilized on the planet, then, too.
How the fuck they all fell victim to a pagan moon-god cult run by a guy who spent his days getting into rancid water and then going off to get dehydrated for "visions" I'll never know.
It is NOT illegal, however, to run "unauthorized" code (alternate operating system, non-"licensed" game, etc) on a console.
THAT right was established in court back in the days of the NES, when companies found a way around Nintendo's crappy "security" chip and began manufacturing non-licensed cartridges. Big N, at least in the US, had no legal ground to stop them from producing same.
"Unlicensed code" is the equivalent to your "car part" in the analogy you describe.
Think what you want about the ACLU and the NAACP, but the fact is, they're trying to fight for people's rights that so often get trampled.
Bullshit. They stopped fighting for the rights of anyone but criminals 20 years ago. They have actually been involved in suing homeowners for injuries suffered BY BURGLARS.
The old lady who was being unruly on the side of the road could have easily been restrained and handcuffed, but instead, she was tased. Another incident that got me mad as hell was an incident in Southern Illinois at a state home for orphaned children. The cops went in and tased three minors, threatened one with sodomy, held a 17 year-old girl up against a wall by her neck while the cop asked if she wanted to live or die. Now I concede that as there's no video of this incident there's no way of knowing if that's the truth or not, but as the police department only responded with, "the officers acted appropriately", that's the only side I have to go by.
Yawn. In the first place, the "old lady" bit? I've seen the video. She was tased to prevent her from running into traffic and getting her ass run over.
As for the kids bit, I have to wonder what really went on. You're believing the story of a bunch of kids, who have every reason to lie, and you're basing it on the fact that the police acted properly within their legal limitations by keeping as much commentary OUT of the media as possible (something, I assure you, the chickenshit-little types who love to sue police departments never do: they always want to try the case in the media, rather than a courtroom where facts actually matter).
Your attempted insinuation that only those "hopped up on cocaine" are susceptible to fatal consequences from tasers is laughable. A countless number of situations, circumstances, and medical conditions could put someone at risk of fatal injury from high voltage electric shock. All police officers have to keep this in mind when they are considering employing such means to subdue a suspect.
Please, please don't get me wrong. If a suspect is attempting to attack and officer or someone else, I have absolutely no problem with tasers being used! In fact, in some cases, with the kind of evil criminals that are out on their streets, I wish sometimes that there was no less lethal solution to be utilized and we could avoid the trouble of a trial with a trip to the morgue. (I'm not condoning murder, just a shortcut to justice.)
Oh please. The cases we have seen in lawsuits in our area are never the "oops they have a health condition" sort. They are the "this guy was drugged up so far that even after 8 taser hits he STILL DIDN'T FUCKING FALL OVER, and the NAACP is suing on behalf of his family because they don't like the fact that a black druggie with a knife/gun got tasered" sort.
I am very appreciative of those good police who approach their jobs with humility and respect for others. I understand the risks they incur to protect the rest of us. I'm not sure that the 'vast majority', as you say, approach their jobs in this manner. I wish they did. I think that the police who treat people with respect, until they lose that right, will most times receive the same in return. If you are a police officer as I suspect, do you really have a problem finding people who appreciate what you do? I really can't imagine that being true. Unless you're out there throwing the book at everyone while being disrespectful. Why don't you try and think about how you'd act if someone acted toward you the same way you act toward them?
I'm not a cop. I do, however, have multiple friends and family members who are in that line of work.
I have participated in ride-alongs (citizen outreach program). I have seen, firsthand, what kind of behavior they get from anyone at all in the neighborhoods they are assigned. This is not a racial thing - if anything, the predominant attitude a black/hispanic seems to have towards a black/hispanic cop is to
What's truly ironic is that the anti-taser nonsense exposes the real goals of the nutbag/hoplophobic groups.
The American Criminal Liberties Union, National Association for the Ascendancy of Crappy People, New Black Panthers, et al spent an amazing amount of time in the late '90s/early '00s suing police departments across the country, demanding more "nonlethal" weaponry be used by police (because if you draw a gun, you had better be prepared to shoot to kill.)
Thus we wound up with cops carrying pepper spray (useful only at a range of melee combat: bad thought) and then the Taser, which is normally nonlethal unless someone fits certain conditions; sadly, one of those conditions is "hopped up on drugs like cocaine."
Once they'd gotten that concession, however, the anti-police groups weren't done. Now they want to harm the police even further. The goal is to make it impossible for the police to ever do their jobs. Thus, if they taser someone who's trying to start a fight, and that person happens to have a heart condition or turns out to be on drugs that cause the body to mimic one, and it sends them into cardiac arrest or arrhythmia, then the nutbag groups scream bloody murder about how the cops "should have known" and shouldn't have used the taser.
It's all about the fact that they hate the cops. I agree that there are cops out there that are dicks, but the vast majority of cops are incredible people. They do a job that is almost always thankless. They deal with people every day who approach them with incredibly disrespectful attitudes or try to bait them (see: Henry Louis Gates Jr the Racist Professor), merely because they think they can get away with it or because they have authority issues. They deal with working 12-14 hour shifts, because first they have to work their beat time, and then they have to do the paperwork AFTER their patrol hours. They have to deal with the stress of wondering, every time they put on their uniform, "is today the day some drunk/stoned motherfucker pulls a gun and instead of me coming home, it's the police chief/sergeant coming to my door to tell my wife and kids that I'm dead or in the hospital." They walk into every situation wondering if some stupid motherfucker is going to do something stupid that ends in them getting stuck in lawsuit hell. They get paid an incredibly small paycheck for the enormous amount of work they do.
Re-read what I just posted. Now the next time you see a police officer, whether it is because you got pulled over for speeding or just that they happen to be in a store at the same time you are, tell them THANK YOU for doing the job they do.
If you are stuck in most of the places I've been stuck, that constitutes a Really Bad Idea.
And again, I was making the point: a car, even in 70 degree weather, heats up like nobody's business. Now try the same thing when it's 100 degrees out.
Why just sign here on the dotted line, sir. We have several reasonable payment plans:
- An arm and a leg - Your firstborn son - Your firstborn daughter (provided she can sew) - Your eternal soul
The millions of people who have short commutes who live in urban areas would do just fine with a car like this
I want, seriously, to know where the fuck you think these people are. In my urban area, the average commute is over 25 miles. The only people who could have a "short" commute on the order of what you think is "short" have other people to drive their cars FOR them, or live in a penthouse high-rise building within a couple blocks of their workplace.
Now here in the real world, this supposed "100 mile range" goes away pretty quickly. Remember: never trust a fucking theoretical maximum.
1. Stuck idling in traffic? Either your heater, or your A/C (especially your A/C) is running and drawing juice, reducing your range.
2. Ambient temperature gotten outside the battery's "optimal operating range"? There went 20% of your power right there.
3. Used the "quick charger" or didn't get a full charge? Had a power outage in the middle of the night? WHOOPS!
4. Batteries older than a month? There went 1% power. Older than three months? You're down 5%. Older than a year? There went 12% of your power. Reaching that 2 year mark? Hm, all of a sudden our "100 mile range" is down to 76% and falling...
Take this theoretical "100 mile range car", get a 2 year old version into rush hour traffic on a nice 100-degree middle of fucking July day, and watch it fail at around 35 miles.
Oh, and forget about just calling Motorist Assistance to dump a gallon of gas in so you can limp to the gas station. Nope, sorry. You're in for a tow and a long wait to try to recharge it. Oh, and remember your basics: charging an overheated battery (whether lead/acid, lithium, or nickel-tech) is a great way to do further damage to it.
You obviously have not had to sit in a car on the freeway with the sun beating down on it. The A/C is going to need to run almost nonstop to keep it tolerable.
Consider the fact that, in as little as 30 minutes, a parked car can turn itself into a fucking OVEN. As in, a car can raise itself by 1 degree per minute even if the outside ambient temperature is a mere 70 degrees.
The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming.
Counterpoint: the real culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is:
- anticompetitive business practices (price fixing, etc) that have given potential customers a sour attitude towards music labels - destruction of diversity in radio broadcasting (something the music industry ironically pushed for) via the death of media ownership regulations mid-'90s
And finally, the main reason:
- replacement of almost all talented acts that produced good music, with hyperproduced kiddie-shit "artists" whose assets are not musical talent or singing voices, but barely-covered bikini bottoms and tits. Just you wait: in 4 years, tops, "Hannah Montana" will be pulling a Britney-style selfdestruct. And neither of them are capable of producing "music" even remotely worth listening to.
The only "sciences" that start with the propaganda point and work backwards to the "answer" from there.
As always, you can't take any of these "papers" seriously. They're never even close to mathematically rigorous, and always designed merely to attack someone.
Welcome to the U$: government by the corporations, for the corporations.
Track how much slush fund money Obama got under the table from certain groups if you don't believe me. Keep track of why certain Florida/California representatives might as well tag their names with (D-Disney) rather than (D-State).
Look at who paid for - and got - the last three copyright extensions, the DMCA, etc.
This is what happens when your campaigns are privately financed and not on level playing fields (e.g. same budgetary restrictions per candidate).
If "god" really did design humanity, he was drunk when he did it.
I mean really. What sort of omniscient being would deliberately design us to have the windpipe crossing the foodpipe, thus ensuring that millions would manage to choke to death?
What sort of omniscient being would attach reproductive organs to areas normally used for waste elimination?
What sort of omniscient being would design a brain that is so vulnerable to the slightest shock, and then put it in such an unprotected place? The sensory organs could much more easily have been put on the same pedestal (neck) while the brain was tucked safely down in the chest. Given that the eyes he/she/it designed don't work much faster than 30-40 fps tops in gathering information, the increased "lag" for a slightly longer optical cord (which would protected just fine with less brainstem to use up space in the spinal column) is minimal.
In short: if "god" really did design human anatomy, he was either drunk, or he's an asshole who deliberately designed something very defective.
Yawn. The Lenin Brigade ("A lie told often enough becomes truth") of the left wing can repeat lies like that as often as they like. It doesn't make them true.
Or if you're looking for an alternate source of that quote, go to William James - "There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."
I'm getting pretty tired of the left wing smear campaigns. How about you?
We get it. You have more flexible hands than most people. You have adult-sized hands (rather than child-sized hands).
As for the deal about "gamer (or the more expensive) keyboards" - if you're designing a game, you don't design for that. You design your game's default controls to be accessible to as many people as possible. And you have to factor in the millions of people in the world who are still using the cheap-ass keyboard that came with their Dell or HP or Gateway or other prebuilt box.
As for the terms, yes, "6-key rollover" is the term for the feature of being able to store 6 keypresses at once. "Keylock" is the term to represent a keyboard that is already storing its maximum and cannot accept any more inputs. And as to the reason they used sdf/jkl, we're back to the fact that it's being used for an entirely different purpose and that the blind have a good reason to be centering on the nubbed "home" keys.
I've got a pretty large collection of old games. One of the things I've noticed about them is that, even for factory-pressed discs, you have to deal with the following factors:
- Unsealing. If the disc wasn't sealed properly, it will begin to oxidize. Several of mine have done this. It moves from the edge inwards.
- Plastic clouding. Even if it's stored in a cool, dry place and kept out of sunlight, clouding can and will occur. The cheaper the disc was produced, the sooner this happens. Many of my older titles (Civ 2 among them) suffer from precisely this problem and that's one reason I began taking them all and making ISO backups just in case as well.
- Physical usage. If it's something you use often, wear and tear occurs. Games have access patterns that are clearly different from music CD's. For one, music CD's tend to spin at the standard 1X rate (unless you're seeking), which doesn't cause the disc to deform much (as opposed to full-speed data access... see the high-speed footage from the Mythbusters ep on this if you want). Two, data CD's access a lot more erratically - and the more "back and forth" you have, the more likely you are to scratch the disc from ordinary use. If you put an older CD (not physically designed for higher-speed drives) into a modern higher-speed drive, you can make the problem worse.
Of course, sure, you could abuse them. I saw a Rock Band disc once that looked like an LP - someone had put it in at a convention 15 feet away from the DDR setup, and the room had been bouncing so violently that the disc read head had literally put grooves into the disc. But I doubt that's what happened to the gpp's Civ 2 disc.
Yes, but ctrl/shift/alt/capslock are more likely to use different control lines from the letter keys, because you expect someone to be holding them when hitting other keys.
This became important when you realize that most keyboards hit keylock somewhere between two and four keypresses. If you're running forward, strafing right (holding both E and W, perhaps) and press A to crouch or run, don't be surprised if that keypress doesn't register.
ESDF, when you look at the limitations of the most common hardware on which the games will be played, is inferior not because you have more keys on a given side, but because the keys that you can almost guarantee won't be subject to keylock limitations are further away.
FFXI, in certain game areas, is almost completely taken over by the chinese/korean "gold farmer" types. The ones who you have to pay REAL WORLD money to for either in-game money or in-game items.
The problem is, certain "necessary" items are dropped by mobs that spawn on a very slow schedule (sometimes greater than 24 hours) and are ALWAYS camped by a dozen or more of the chinese/korean "gold farmer" types. Try to camp them yourself and you get a bunch of "go away" message through the auto-translator. Stick around and one of them will run off, train a bunch of mobs, then come back and deliberately die right next to you in order to grief-aggro you. Normal players rarely, if ever, have a chance of getting these items legitimately.
WASD also keeps you nearby to the traditional "alter function" keys - Shift for running/walking, ctrl/alt for strafing or "sneaking", tab for weapon or preassigned group cycling, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, slashdot.
Mention that Obama's just as corrupt as any other politician out there, get modded "troll."
The left-wingers are really entrenched.
The problem is as follows:
- If you are today in Congress/Senate, you are a rich motherfucker who doesn't give a crap about the salary and is in it for either (a) bribes, (b) your own agenda, or (c) both (see also: Obama).
The problem is that in order to get elected, you need SO much money (acquired either legitimately, or like Obama/Clinton through money laundering of foreign donations, such as the millions of $ that came from "Palestine, Wyoming" when his campaign deliberately disabled all normal security features on their website's credit-card system) that no honest person could realistically afford to run.
Further, once they get in, they're in fundraising mode until the next election, or they're in bribe mode as a lame-duck.
The solution - at least partially - would be to prohibit them having ANY access to non-salary money, and set up government funds such that each candidate for a position had a budget of $X to spend in a given campaign - NO MORE and NO LESS.
Take the money out of the system, let the message and policy differences of the candidates decide who gets elected.
But we won't be able to do this - after all, the corrupt politicians we have now got in under the old system. Anything that offers a chance that their corrupt asses won't see (re-)election, is never going to pass.
What made the original Xbox controller nice (for anyone who actually used it, as opposed to Sony fanwanks and Tycho/Gabe who don't ever even fucking play the games or consoles they talk shit about) is basic ergonomics.
The original Xbox controller is not designed to be held in the "traditional" controller position (wrists curled, hands tucked under, 3rd/4th/5th fingers curled in to support the console). That position is why people get carpal tunnel and "nintendo thumb".
Instead, you can keep your hands vertically oriented ("handshake position", like these absolutely fucking fantastic mice), rest the controller in the crease of your palm, and allow the fingers to rest. Much less worry about RSI, much easier to actually use the damn buttons without worrying about losing your grip on the controller.
If Gabe/Tycho and the Sony fanwanks would ever have used it, they'd know this. Instead, they just screwed around hating on it because it was from Microsoft, and the rest of us now have to suffer with ergonomically incorrect pads because of it.
Nope. That shipped built in.
What did you THINK was eventually going to form Skynet anyways?
Therein is the underlying problem.
Different people, of different ages, will play your game console. Those different people, for the most part, will want (at least if they are going to be comfortable) different-sized controllers.
Yeah. Most of the Japanese population has small hands. They're also shorter. Remember, the reason that Asian societies never had much use for the idea of the straight-blade sword, and never developed the single-handed "lunge" maneuver, is that those don't work very well for people whose arms and legs are proportionally shorter than most of the Western people. If they wanted something to poke at someone at distance, their best bet was a spear.
Look back on controllers and what do you see? Large-sized (Atari 2600, Colecovision etc controllers). American companies. Switch forward after the crash, what do you have? NES/SNES - kiddie-sized controllers. Hard for adults to use for long. Genesis, a little better but not that great.
N64 controllers - heck, these things are just as big as an original Xbox controller. Set them side by side once. Playstation controllers, back to the small size, but your help came from companies like Pelican and Nyko that released adult-sized controller replacements.
Gamecube controller - smaller again, looked like something drawn by someone's 5-year-old.
Now we're stuck in the same boat. Xbox360 controllers could do to be a bit bigger for adults, smaller for kids. PS3 uses the same damn form factor, and I've wound up buying a couple of 3rd-party replacements once more.
BTW, I don't have "huge hands." According to standard sizing I use a Men's Medium and my girlfriend uses a "Women's Small." I prefer the larger controllers anyways (original Xbox especially) because I can hold my wrist straight in "Handshake position" and don't have to curl my 4th and 5th fingers underneath just to support the damn thing. The crease of my palm can do all the holding work and leave my thumbs and trigger fingers free to manipulate the buttons and triggers.
Odd how the current residents of Mesopotamia are the least civilized on the planet, then, too.
How the fuck they all fell victim to a pagan moon-god cult run by a guy who spent his days getting into rancid water and then going off to get dehydrated for "visions" I'll never know.
It is NOT illegal, however, to run "unauthorized" code (alternate operating system, non-"licensed" game, etc) on a console.
THAT right was established in court back in the days of the NES, when companies found a way around Nintendo's crappy "security" chip and began manufacturing non-licensed cartridges. Big N, at least in the US, had no legal ground to stop them from producing same.
"Unlicensed code" is the equivalent to your "car part" in the analogy you describe.
No, your post is moronic.
Think what you want about the ACLU and the NAACP, but the fact is, they're trying to fight for people's rights that so often get trampled.
Bullshit. They stopped fighting for the rights of anyone but criminals 20 years ago. They have actually been involved in suing homeowners for injuries suffered BY BURGLARS.
The old lady who was being unruly on the side of the road could have easily been restrained and handcuffed, but instead, she was tased. Another incident that got me mad as hell was an incident in Southern Illinois at a state home for orphaned children. The cops went in and tased three minors, threatened one with sodomy, held a 17 year-old girl up against a wall by her neck while the cop asked if she wanted to live or die. Now I concede that as there's no video of this incident there's no way of knowing if that's the truth or not, but as the police department only responded with, "the officers acted appropriately", that's the only side I have to go by.
Yawn. In the first place, the "old lady" bit? I've seen the video. She was tased to prevent her from running into traffic and getting her ass run over.
As for the kids bit, I have to wonder what really went on. You're believing the story of a bunch of kids, who have every reason to lie, and you're basing it on the fact that the police acted properly within their legal limitations by keeping as much commentary OUT of the media as possible (something, I assure you, the chickenshit-little types who love to sue police departments never do: they always want to try the case in the media, rather than a courtroom where facts actually matter).
Your attempted insinuation that only those "hopped up on cocaine" are susceptible to fatal consequences from tasers is laughable. A countless number of situations, circumstances, and medical conditions could put someone at risk of fatal injury from high voltage electric shock. All police officers have to keep this in mind when they are considering employing such means to subdue a suspect.
Please, please don't get me wrong. If a suspect is attempting to attack and officer or someone else, I have absolutely no problem with tasers being used! In fact, in some cases, with the kind of evil criminals that are out on their streets, I wish sometimes that there was no less lethal solution to be utilized and we could avoid the trouble of a trial with a trip to the morgue. (I'm not condoning murder, just a shortcut to justice.)
Oh please. The cases we have seen in lawsuits in our area are never the "oops they have a health condition" sort. They are the "this guy was drugged up so far that even after 8 taser hits he STILL DIDN'T FUCKING FALL OVER, and the NAACP is suing on behalf of his family because they don't like the fact that a black druggie with a knife/gun got tasered" sort.
I am very appreciative of those good police who approach their jobs with humility and respect for others. I understand the risks they incur to protect the rest of us. I'm not sure that the 'vast majority', as you say, approach their jobs in this manner. I wish they did. I think that the police who treat people with respect, until they lose that right, will most times receive the same in return. If you are a police officer as I suspect, do you really have a problem finding people who appreciate what you do? I really can't imagine that being true. Unless you're out there throwing the book at everyone while being disrespectful. Why don't you try and think about how you'd act if someone acted toward you the same way you act toward them?
I'm not a cop. I do, however, have multiple friends and family members who are in that line of work.
I have participated in ride-alongs (citizen outreach program). I have seen, firsthand, what kind of behavior they get from anyone at all in the neighborhoods they are assigned. This is not a racial thing - if anything, the predominant attitude a black/hispanic seems to have towards a black/hispanic cop is to
What's truly ironic is that the anti-taser nonsense exposes the real goals of the nutbag/hoplophobic groups.
The American Criminal Liberties Union, National Association for the Ascendancy of Crappy People, New Black Panthers, et al spent an amazing amount of time in the late '90s/early '00s suing police departments across the country, demanding more "nonlethal" weaponry be used by police (because if you draw a gun, you had better be prepared to shoot to kill.)
Thus we wound up with cops carrying pepper spray (useful only at a range of melee combat: bad thought) and then the Taser, which is normally nonlethal unless someone fits certain conditions; sadly, one of those conditions is "hopped up on drugs like cocaine."
Once they'd gotten that concession, however, the anti-police groups weren't done. Now they want to harm the police even further. The goal is to make it impossible for the police to ever do their jobs. Thus, if they taser someone who's trying to start a fight, and that person happens to have a heart condition or turns out to be on drugs that cause the body to mimic one, and it sends them into cardiac arrest or arrhythmia, then the nutbag groups scream bloody murder about how the cops "should have known" and shouldn't have used the taser.
It's all about the fact that they hate the cops. I agree that there are cops out there that are dicks, but the vast majority of cops are incredible people. They do a job that is almost always thankless. They deal with people every day who approach them with incredibly disrespectful attitudes or try to bait them (see: Henry Louis Gates Jr the Racist Professor), merely because they think they can get away with it or because they have authority issues. They deal with working 12-14 hour shifts, because first they have to work their beat time, and then they have to do the paperwork AFTER their patrol hours. They have to deal with the stress of wondering, every time they put on their uniform, "is today the day some drunk/stoned motherfucker pulls a gun and instead of me coming home, it's the police chief/sergeant coming to my door to tell my wife and kids that I'm dead or in the hospital." They walk into every situation wondering if some stupid motherfucker is going to do something stupid that ends in them getting stuck in lawsuit hell. They get paid an incredibly small paycheck for the enormous amount of work they do.
Re-read what I just posted. Now the next time you see a police officer, whether it is because you got pulled over for speeding or just that they happen to be in a store at the same time you are, tell them THANK YOU for doing the job they do.
The rebranding of "The Shack" is because it's the only thing the marketing company could come up with that beat the more-apt "Crap Shack" moniker.
Remember: Even the Radio Shack CEO can't figure out how his company stays in business.
If you are stuck in most of the places I've been stuck, that constitutes a Really Bad Idea.
And again, I was making the point: a car, even in 70 degree weather, heats up like nobody's business. Now try the same thing when it's 100 degrees out.
I just wish I knew how much this thing costs.
Why just sign here on the dotted line, sir. We have several reasonable payment plans:
- An arm and a leg
- Your firstborn son
- Your firstborn daughter (provided she can sew)
- Your eternal soul
The millions of people who have short commutes who live in urban areas would do just fine with a car like this
I want, seriously, to know where the fuck you think these people are. In my urban area, the average commute is over 25 miles. The only people who could have a "short" commute on the order of what you think is "short" have other people to drive their cars FOR them, or live in a penthouse high-rise building within a couple blocks of their workplace.
Now here in the real world, this supposed "100 mile range" goes away pretty quickly. Remember: never trust a fucking theoretical maximum.
1. Stuck idling in traffic? Either your heater, or your A/C (especially your A/C) is running and drawing juice, reducing your range.
2. Ambient temperature gotten outside the battery's "optimal operating range"? There went 20% of your power right there.
3. Used the "quick charger" or didn't get a full charge? Had a power outage in the middle of the night? WHOOPS!
4. Batteries older than a month? There went 1% power. Older than three months? You're down 5%. Older than a year? There went 12% of your power. Reaching that 2 year mark? Hm, all of a sudden our "100 mile range" is down to 76% and falling...
Take this theoretical "100 mile range car", get a 2 year old version into rush hour traffic on a nice 100-degree middle of fucking July day, and watch it fail at around 35 miles.
Oh, and forget about just calling Motorist Assistance to dump a gallon of gas in so you can limp to the gas station. Nope, sorry. You're in for a tow and a long wait to try to recharge it. Oh, and remember your basics: charging an overheated battery (whether lead/acid, lithium, or nickel-tech) is a great way to do further damage to it.
You obviously have not had to sit in a car on the freeway with the sun beating down on it. The A/C is going to need to run almost nonstop to keep it tolerable.
Consider the fact that, in as little as 30 minutes, a parked car can turn itself into a fucking OVEN. As in, a car can raise itself by 1 degree per minute even if the outside ambient temperature is a mere 70 degrees.
No shit.
The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming.
Counterpoint: the real culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is:
- anticompetitive business practices (price fixing, etc) that have given potential customers a sour attitude towards music labels
- destruction of diversity in radio broadcasting (something the music industry ironically pushed for) via the death of media ownership regulations mid-'90s
And finally, the main reason:
- replacement of almost all talented acts that produced good music, with hyperproduced kiddie-shit "artists" whose assets are not musical talent or singing voices, but barely-covered bikini bottoms and tits. Just you wait: in 4 years, tops, "Hannah Montana" will be pulling a Britney-style selfdestruct. And neither of them are capable of producing "music" even remotely worth listening to.
The only "sciences" that start with the propaganda point and work backwards to the "answer" from there.
As always, you can't take any of these "papers" seriously. They're never even close to mathematically rigorous, and always designed merely to attack someone.
Welcome to the U$: government by the corporations, for the corporations.
Track how much slush fund money Obama got under the table from certain groups if you don't believe me. Keep track of why certain Florida/California representatives might as well tag their names with (D-Disney) rather than (D-State).
Look at who paid for - and got - the last three copyright extensions, the DMCA, etc.
This is what happens when your campaigns are privately financed and not on level playing fields (e.g. same budgetary restrictions per candidate).
The RIAA's "objection" came in the form of a new pool quietly installed in the judge's backyard, more than likely...
If "god" really did design humanity, he was drunk when he did it.
I mean really. What sort of omniscient being would deliberately design us to have the windpipe crossing the foodpipe, thus ensuring that millions would manage to choke to death?
What sort of omniscient being would attach reproductive organs to areas normally used for waste elimination?
What sort of omniscient being would design a brain that is so vulnerable to the slightest shock, and then put it in such an unprotected place? The sensory organs could much more easily have been put on the same pedestal (neck) while the brain was tucked safely down in the chest. Given that the eyes he/she/it designed don't work much faster than 30-40 fps tops in gathering information, the increased "lag" for a slightly longer optical cord (which would protected just fine with less brainstem to use up space in the spinal column) is minimal.
In short: if "god" really did design human anatomy, he was either drunk, or he's an asshole who deliberately designed something very defective.
Aaaand what a surprise. Downmodded for speaking truth to left-wingers with mod points.
Yawn. The Lenin Brigade ("A lie told often enough becomes truth") of the left wing can repeat lies like that as often as they like. It doesn't make them true.
Or if you're looking for an alternate source of that quote, go to William James - "There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."
I'm getting pretty tired of the left wing smear campaigns. How about you?
Cut it out already.
We get it. You have more flexible hands than most people. You have adult-sized hands (rather than child-sized hands).
As for the deal about "gamer (or the more expensive) keyboards" - if you're designing a game, you don't design for that. You design your game's default controls to be accessible to as many people as possible. And you have to factor in the millions of people in the world who are still using the cheap-ass keyboard that came with their Dell or HP or Gateway or other prebuilt box.
As for the terms, yes, "6-key rollover" is the term for the feature of being able to store 6 keypresses at once. "Keylock" is the term to represent a keyboard that is already storing its maximum and cannot accept any more inputs. And as to the reason they used sdf/jkl, we're back to the fact that it's being used for an entirely different purpose and that the blind have a good reason to be centering on the nubbed "home" keys.
Bullshit.
I've got a pretty large collection of old games. One of the things I've noticed about them is that, even for factory-pressed discs, you have to deal with the following factors:
- Unsealing. If the disc wasn't sealed properly, it will begin to oxidize. Several of mine have done this. It moves from the edge inwards.
- Plastic clouding. Even if it's stored in a cool, dry place and kept out of sunlight, clouding can and will occur. The cheaper the disc was produced, the sooner this happens. Many of my older titles (Civ 2 among them) suffer from precisely this problem and that's one reason I began taking them all and making ISO backups just in case as well.
- Physical usage. If it's something you use often, wear and tear occurs. Games have access patterns that are clearly different from music CD's. For one, music CD's tend to spin at the standard 1X rate (unless you're seeking), which doesn't cause the disc to deform much (as opposed to full-speed data access... see the high-speed footage from the Mythbusters ep on this if you want). Two, data CD's access a lot more erratically - and the more "back and forth" you have, the more likely you are to scratch the disc from ordinary use. If you put an older CD (not physically designed for higher-speed drives) into a modern higher-speed drive, you can make the problem worse.
Of course, sure, you could abuse them. I saw a Rock Band disc once that looked like an LP - someone had put it in at a convention 15 feet away from the DDR setup, and the room had been bouncing so violently that the disc read head had literally put grooves into the disc. But I doubt that's what happened to the gpp's Civ 2 disc.
Yes, but ctrl/shift/alt/capslock are more likely to use different control lines from the letter keys, because you expect someone to be holding them when hitting other keys.
This became important when you realize that most keyboards hit keylock somewhere between two and four keypresses. If you're running forward, strafing right (holding both E and W, perhaps) and press A to crouch or run, don't be surprised if that keypress doesn't register.
ESDF, when you look at the limitations of the most common hardware on which the games will be played, is inferior not because you have more keys on a given side, but because the keys that you can almost guarantee won't be subject to keylock limitations are further away.
FFXI, in certain game areas, is almost completely taken over by the chinese/korean "gold farmer" types. The ones who you have to pay REAL WORLD money to for either in-game money or in-game items.
The problem is, certain "necessary" items are dropped by mobs that spawn on a very slow schedule (sometimes greater than 24 hours) and are ALWAYS camped by a dozen or more of the chinese/korean "gold farmer" types. Try to camp them yourself and you get a bunch of "go away" message through the auto-translator. Stick around and one of them will run off, train a bunch of mobs, then come back and deliberately die right next to you in order to grief-aggro you. Normal players rarely, if ever, have a chance of getting these items legitimately.
WASD also keeps you nearby to the traditional "alter function" keys - Shift for running/walking, ctrl/alt for strafing or "sneaking", tab for weapon or preassigned group cycling, etc.