The fireballs were reported to have been traveling different directions at the same time of day, so it would stand to reason that they didn't come from the same rock.
Still, many people are misinterpretting the CU Professor's words. He said simply that the occurance of a fireball is rare when we are not in a meteor storm. We happen to be in the middle of two, the Leonids and the G-something (I forget the name; it's a wierd one). Therefore the probability is much greater that there will be fireballs.
What I find strange is that they were so proximal nearly 24 hours apart and from different sources without tons of other sitings elsewhere at night. I'd say it was chance, though. After all, there was a siting in the Netherlands.
A while ago, there was a rumor among the folk who make nasty treats like disk bombs that one could do a similar thing with CDs.
It ended up just being a product of an accident, as so many destructive things are. If you crack a CD and put it in one of the new high speed readers (or my bloody noisy plextor cd burner), the cd with fly apart and make horrible sounds, not to mention possibly break all kinds of things inside your drive.
Some friends of mine and I have been discussing similar ideas. It turns out insane asilums usually have their own power plants which have sizable capacitors. Some years ago many were closed down and you can loot em if you watch your backs. =)
The team interface allows great team coordination. Huge maps allow huge team games to be really fun. More importantly, the larger the map, the more team interaction is required. For instance one must use infantry-transport vehicles to bring in the heavy guns (they move really slowly). Fun fun fun.
It's actually a pretty interesting relationship. GarageGames was founded by the dev team of Dynamix with the idea of making a deal with Sierra for the source code of Tribes2. I don't know what sort of royalties they pay, but $100/developer for a license of the source is a damn good deal, if you ask me.
Because the Torque Engine (used to be called the V12 Engine, but someone had previously trademarked it) is based on the Tribes2 engine, many of the fixes require very little work to make it back into the Tribes2 tree. A great amount of work is going into the Torque Engine for cross platform support, and thus the Tribes2 linux patches are born. =)
A problem with ruling: The right thing to for your people isn't always the best thing for your people.
In this case, the right thing to do, obviously, is to protect privacy and require opt-in, not opt-out.
Opt-out begs for spam, while opt-in will simply result in illegal spam. Illegal means it cannot fund a big business. The reason this is bad, is because a fair part of the *tech* economy revolves around advertising distribution.
Notice the tech economy troubles? Well, the government needs to step in to keep the wonderful tech developments we all take for granted comming. The best thing for the people, clearly, is to keep the mainstream free software and services alive, and thus keep the tech economy going strong.
The annoying deleting of spam pays for things of which we enjoy the use.
This anti-privacy bill is a feeble attempt, methinks, because the tech industry is affected little by spam. Now setting the heartless calculating and decision-making econ people have to do aside, I bloody well hate opt-out. I think if any government measure is taken, it should not be another false inflation of the tech economy.
How about an email client that sends email without all the ridicules bloat?
If we want an instant messenger, we'll get an IM client. If we want file sharing, we can use a tried and tested secure method, not an email client which is likely a gaping security hole.
Why does every commercial software developer feel compelled to bundle everything into a single titanic, monolithic, monsterous program? Look at antivirus programs; now they are all computer protection suites. Not just antivirus, but internet firewalls too. How about a system tuner, and a resource monitor, too? Sure stick it in there!
Don't they understand that people like having atomic systems? Lots of little programs that each provide a separate service. Ever tried uninstalling IE from M$ Windows, or even M$ Messenger? I personally like AIM and Opera, and I can tell you that I needlessly have duplicate services installed.
I don't think it's so controversial. It's just like having an identical twin, except at different ages. Twins aren't the same people, just as clones aren't.
The genetic engineering scares me a bit, though. I'm not religious, but I know there can be serious risks. How about an airborne gene therapy retro-virus? Ever seen those two episodes of Outer Limits where they time travel into the future and see the results of genetic horrors? Yikes. But, putting it in perspective, it's just another tool, and tools are neither good nor evil. It can be used for as great good as evil. Just need to genetically engineer all the evil out of people and we'll be all set!;)
Anyway, the cloning is really cool. If anything, clones'll be used in psychological studies to resolve the personality from dna vs. experience debate. Except that scientists have no concept of analog. =)
LCDs are polarized. What I was saying was that if they had the front one horizontal and the back vertical (or vice versa) and the front one lets light pass between pixles, with a pair of glasses polarized horizontally on one lense and vertically on the other, one eye would see one screen and the other would see the other. The technique used to make you see 3D in this is called stereo disparity.
But they didn't do that; they only took two LCD screens set up in a normal fasion, the front one the exact same thing as the partially transparent LCDs one would place on a cheap overhead projector.
-Altaic
The scary thing is that people are more reluctant to part with their money than their personal privacy, freedom, etc. After all, no one would pay for Napster, but most are too lazy to give a crap about spyware and freeloading capitalist distributed processing applications taking residence with them.
They passed up the excellent opportunity to use a polarized filter on the lcds. With a pair of polarized glasses, you could have true 3D with that setup. That's what they use in the 3D IMAX setups these days (polarized light on a screen that preserves the polarization), and it works amazingly well. You can sit down for hours and watch those with no problem, despite the bs (why their product is better) from the Actual Depth guy.
The setup Actual Depth uses is only two layers. As far as 3D gaming goes, there is little to no difference. I don't see the other applications as doing too well either, except perhaps for the medical ones. Even then, though, it's nothing a normal single layered lcd couldn't do with overlays.
-Altaic
The first thought I had when I read about Blizzard hitting bnetd was not how they twisted bnetd's purpose (ok perhaps it was a parellel thought), but that Blizzard's behavior is anti-competitive.
Come on, people, with M$'s major loss on the legal side regarding "bundling" why has no one mentioned Blizzard actually is selling two products in each game box: the game and the "free Battle.net service" which they could charge for at any time.
The fact is that Battle.net does not in any way keep a pirate from playing a Blizzard game; it keeps a pirate from using the Battle.net service (duh) which happens to be bundled with said game. Battle.net does *not* authenticate the game; the CD key algorithm in the software does. A pirate is able play the game; single-player and multi-player (via IPX, and IPX over TCP/IP). Should it be illegal to write or distribute a server to be an IPX gateway over TCP/IP, and therefore provide the same functionality as Battle.net? People really need to take a stance on this. The ramifications of this case are quite impressive. It disgusts me how large companies muscle the open source developers around to keep tighter control of their market.
I am particularly appalled at this exerpt from Blizzards official announcement on their front page, "Furthermore, because these programs allow access without a CD key, they render malicious users unaccountable, thereby eliminating Blizzard's ability to protect legitimate consumers." If I didn't see it for myself, I simply would not have believed they would claim bnetd could allow malicious users to disrupt Battle.net's functioning.
Bnetd allows access to bnetd servers without a CD key. Great, so what? Malicious users are held unaccountable? Malicious users on Battle.net? Obviously not! Malicious users of said game? When a comsumer runs the game they are automatically out of Blizzard's realm of protection because of all of the other components in a system! What if you are behaind a firewall? You're SOL! What if you run wine instead of M$ Windows? What if you connect to bnetd instead of Battle.net? SO WHAT?
What you are witnessing, my friends, is F.U.D. from yet another anti-competitive corporation.
We have a kickass connection here. I would be very surprised if/. took it down. Half the eastern cost bandwidth at one point or another passes through CMU. Cert is here, too.
He lives two floors below me-- it's pretty wild. It doesn't actually need to spin the platters, though, and that not how the sound is created; the noise comes from moving the heads over the platters. Hard drive heads move via by a coil like those in a speaker, which he drives with a home-brewed amplifier. Similarly, he did it with a cpu fan, which yielded much more quiet results. Headphones, anyone? =)
Slashdot Mirror
The fireballs were reported to have been traveling different directions at the same time of day, so it would stand to reason that they didn't come from the same rock.
Still, many people are misinterpretting the CU Professor's words. He said simply that the occurance of a fireball is rare when we are not in a meteor storm. We happen to be in the middle of two, the Leonids and the G-something (I forget the name; it's a wierd one). Therefore the probability is much greater that there will be fireballs.
What I find strange is that they were so proximal nearly 24 hours apart and from different sources without tons of other sitings elsewhere at night. I'd say it was chance, though. After all, there was a siting in the Netherlands.
A while ago, there was a rumor among the folk who make nasty treats like disk bombs that one could do a similar thing with CDs. It ended up just being a product of an accident, as so many destructive things are. If you crack a CD and put it in one of the new high speed readers (or my bloody noisy plextor cd burner), the cd with fly apart and make horrible sounds, not to mention possibly break all kinds of things inside your drive.
Some friends of mine and I have been discussing similar ideas. It turns out insane asilums usually have their own power plants which have sizable capacitors. Some years ago many were closed down and you can loot em if you watch your backs. =)
"It also has one potentially serious drawback: almost no passenger would have a window."
Two words: glass bottom =)
Or failing transparent aluminium, a plexiglass portal hole in the floor.
The team interface allows great team coordination. Huge maps allow huge team games to be really fun. More importantly, the larger the map, the more team interaction is required. For instance one must use infantry-transport vehicles to bring in the heavy guns (they move really slowly). Fun fun fun.
It's actually a pretty interesting relationship. GarageGames was founded by the dev team of Dynamix with the idea of making a deal with Sierra for the source code of Tribes2. I don't know what sort of royalties they pay, but $100/developer for a license of the source is a damn good deal, if you ask me.
Because the Torque Engine (used to be called the V12 Engine, but someone had previously trademarked it) is based on the Tribes2 engine, many of the fixes require very little work to make it back into the Tribes2 tree. A great amount of work is going into the Torque Engine for cross platform support, and thus the Tribes2 linux patches are born. =)
Will
A problem with ruling:
The right thing to for your people isn't always the best thing for your people.
In this case, the right thing to do, obviously, is to protect privacy and require opt-in, not opt-out.
Opt-out begs for spam, while opt-in will simply result in illegal spam. Illegal means it cannot fund a big business. The reason this is bad, is because a fair part of the *tech* economy revolves around advertising distribution.
Notice the tech economy troubles? Well, the government needs to step in to keep the wonderful tech developments we all take for granted comming. The best thing for the people, clearly, is to keep the mainstream free software and services alive, and thus keep the tech economy going strong.
The annoying deleting of spam pays for things of which we enjoy the use.
This anti-privacy bill is a feeble attempt, methinks, because the tech industry is affected little by spam. Now setting the heartless calculating and decision-making econ people have to do aside, I bloody well hate opt-out. I think if any government measure is taken, it should not be another false inflation of the tech economy.
...I had thought people were stupid, but then they unanimously make the right decision. A step in the right direction :)
How about an email client that sends email without all the ridicules bloat?
If we want an instant messenger, we'll get an IM client. If we want file sharing, we can use a tried and tested secure method, not an email client which is likely a gaping security hole.
Why does every commercial software developer feel compelled to bundle everything into a single titanic, monolithic, monsterous program? Look at antivirus programs; now they are all computer protection suites. Not just antivirus, but internet firewalls too. How about a system tuner, and a resource monitor, too? Sure stick it in there!
Don't they understand that people like having atomic systems? Lots of little programs that each provide a separate service. Ever tried uninstalling IE from M$ Windows, or even M$ Messenger? I personally like AIM and Opera, and I can tell you that I needlessly have duplicate services installed.
-Altaic
Too early... that's supposed to read "have the chance" at the end. I think I'm going to sleep those days away.
Before the sky falls. Anyone might perish under the batteries crashing down. Live your life to the fullest before you no longer habe the change.
Ask any identical twin if they had any choice in the matter. =) -Altaic
I don't think it's so controversial. It's just like having an identical twin, except at different ages. Twins aren't the same people, just as clones aren't.
;)
The genetic engineering scares me a bit, though. I'm not religious, but I know there can be serious risks. How about an airborne gene therapy retro-virus? Ever seen those two episodes of Outer Limits where they time travel into the future and see the results of genetic horrors? Yikes. But, putting it in perspective, it's just another tool, and tools are neither good nor evil. It can be used for as great good as evil. Just need to genetically engineer all the evil out of people and we'll be all set!
Anyway, the cloning is really cool. If anything, clones'll be used in psychological studies to resolve the personality from dna vs. experience debate. Except that scientists have no concept of analog. =)
LCDs are polarized. What I was saying was that if they had the front one horizontal and the back vertical (or vice versa) and the front one lets light pass between pixles, with a pair of glasses polarized horizontally on one lense and vertically on the other, one eye would see one screen and the other would see the other. The technique used to make you see 3D in this is called stereo disparity. But they didn't do that; they only took two LCD screens set up in a normal fasion, the front one the exact same thing as the partially transparent LCDs one would place on a cheap overhead projector. -Altaic
The scary thing is that people are more reluctant to part with their money than their personal privacy, freedom, etc. After all, no one would pay for Napster, but most are too lazy to give a crap about spyware and freeloading capitalist distributed processing applications taking residence with them.
They passed up the excellent opportunity to use a polarized filter on the lcds. With a pair of polarized glasses, you could have true 3D with that setup. That's what they use in the 3D IMAX setups these days (polarized light on a screen that preserves the polarization), and it works amazingly well. You can sit down for hours and watch those with no problem, despite the bs (why their product is better) from the Actual Depth guy. The setup Actual Depth uses is only two layers. As far as 3D gaming goes, there is little to no difference. I don't see the other applications as doing too well either, except perhaps for the medical ones. Even then, though, it's nothing a normal single layered lcd couldn't do with overlays. -Altaic
The first thought I had when I read about Blizzard hitting bnetd was not how they twisted bnetd's purpose (ok perhaps it was a parellel thought), but that Blizzard's behavior is anti-competitive.
Come on, people, with M$'s major loss on the legal side regarding "bundling" why has no one mentioned Blizzard actually is selling two products in each game box: the game and the "free Battle.net service" which they could charge for at any time.
The fact is that Battle.net does not in any way keep a pirate from playing a Blizzard game; it keeps a pirate from using the Battle.net service (duh) which happens to be bundled with said game. Battle.net does *not* authenticate the game; the CD key algorithm in the software does. A pirate is able play the game; single-player and multi-player (via IPX, and IPX over TCP/IP). Should it be illegal to write or distribute a server to be an IPX gateway over TCP/IP, and therefore provide the same functionality as Battle.net? People really need to take a stance on this. The ramifications of this case are quite impressive. It disgusts me how large companies muscle the open source developers around to keep tighter control of their market.
I am particularly appalled at this exerpt from Blizzards official announcement on their front page, "Furthermore, because these programs allow access without a CD key, they render malicious users unaccountable, thereby eliminating Blizzard's ability to protect legitimate consumers." If I didn't see it for myself, I simply would not have believed they would claim bnetd could allow malicious users to disrupt Battle.net's functioning.
Bnetd allows access to bnetd servers without a CD key. Great, so what? Malicious users are held unaccountable? Malicious users on Battle.net? Obviously not! Malicious users of said game? When a comsumer runs the game they are automatically out of Blizzard's realm of protection because of all of the other components in a system! What if you are behaind a firewall? You're SOL! What if you run wine instead of M$ Windows? What if you connect to bnetd instead of Battle.net? SO WHAT?
What you are witnessing, my friends, is F.U.D. from yet another anti-competitive corporation.
altaic == Will =) (Scobell 3) I'll be down later on.
We have a kickass connection here. I would be very surprised if /. took it down. Half the eastern cost bandwidth at one point or another passes through CMU. Cert is here, too.
He lives two floors below me-- it's pretty wild. It doesn't actually need to spin the platters, though, and that not how the sound is created; the noise comes from moving the heads over the platters. Hard drive heads move via by a coil like those in a speaker, which he drives with a home-brewed amplifier. Similarly, he did it with a cpu fan, which yielded much more quiet results. Headphones, anyone? =)