IIRC, on Mythbusters, they couldn't get the discs to reliably explode at 30krpm. So, they hooked a bench router's motor directly up to their mains. It spun up so fast that the discs exploded every time after a half-second. They were going a whole lot faster than this kid with a Dremel.
And the ballistics gel dummy was very close, and in the plane the CD was spinning in, so the fragments went directly into it. The Dremel kid is perpindicular to the CD's plane, so the chances he'd get hit directly are very low.
Its huge popularity with fansubbers is probably what's made it take forever to get licensed. The Japanese license holder certainly knows how quickly the show is fansubbed in the US, and how popular it is.
Thus, they know it's going to be extremely popular in the US when it's finally on TV and DVD.
That means they know they can charge an arm and a leg for the US license. Same reason ADV didn't get the Evangelion movies: the series was so popular, Gainax wanted an obscene amount of money for the movies. Manga Entertainment coughed up more money than ADV would. I'm just guessing that pretty much every US distributor is in a protracted bidding war to get the rights to the series. Maybe the Japanese license holder is also holding out for simultaneous merchandising rights or they want assurances the series will be picked up in whole and won't be picked up by a butcher, like One Piece.
My grandfather's always had trouble with his computers. He brought one over when he came for Thanksgiving. I cleaned it up, got it working again...only to have him somehow hose it a week after he got home. He brought it (and a new computer) when he came for Christmas. The older box was completely hosed. XP wouldn't start up at all. Either it'd freeze on a grey screen or freeze on an XP logo (when in safe mode). He needed his files transfered to the new machine.
So, I decided to try out the Bart Pre-installed Environment, which I had learned about at work. It was just what I needed to pull files off of a screwed NTFS XP install. I built an image, booted the machine with it...but it wouldn't find the NIC. So, I built another image with the drivers specifically for the NIC, and Nero, just in case. Still didn't work. Tried a variety of network combinations. Nothing. Oh, and Nero crashed when I tried to do anything worthwhile with it (to be fair, the Nero loader was designed for an earlier version of the software). Tried to build it with drivers for a USB stick. No go.
Out of desperation, I torrented the newest Knoppix ISO, burned it, and booted the dead machine with it.
Now, Knoppix has always scared me a bit. I'm not a Linux guy; I'm mostly lost in it, even with a GUI, and Knoppix has so much crap in its menus that I hardly knew what to use or how to use it.
But, anyway. It worked. Flawlessly. Networked right off the bat. CD burner worked great. USB keys detected fine. The three hours and half-dozen CDs I wasted with BartPE could've been eliminated if I had just gone with Knoppix from the start. BartPE might be a great, free (of a sort) preinstalled environment, but it just seemed completely hacked together and half-assed to me. Knoppix blew it out of the water.
A green laser pointer, at night, can have a visible beam. It can be used to point things out. Check out thinkgeek's description of their green laser pointer: they specifically mention using it to point out stars.
We've got 'The Twenty' up here in Washington, too (presumably all Regal theaters have them), except they're just a cycling batch of ads and inane things that take up the time between showings. They end The Twenty at showtime, then start up the usual sequence of ads and trailers.
The Twenty replaced still ads of what were usually local businesses, which replaced a black screen with crappy music playing over the speakers.
Nowadays I just bring a book or gameboy along to amuse me until the movie itself actually starts.
You seem to be using the wrong definition of 'theory'.
The 'theory' of evolution is a scientific theory: a hypothesis that makes predictions ("Humans and chimps have markedly similar morphologies. I wonder if they're related."), has been repeatedly tested ("Hey, howabout we test the DNA?") and repeatedly confirmed ("Wow. 97%+ similar to human DNA. That's a very close relationship!"). Refer to the theory of gravity, electron theory, and germ theory.
The 'theory' of creationism is not a scientific theory: it makes no predictions beyond "God Did It". The absence of predictions means it cannot be tested. Thus, creation theory is a layman's theory: an unproven assumption.
Both do have a place in a science class, however: one as an example of science, one as an example of what science isn't.
The activation is essentially transparent. You connect to Steam, you double-click Half-Life 2, and it says 'Unlocking content' or something. Then you get to play. This happens just once per installation of the game.
What's going on is Steam decrypts the game's files (which are encrypted whether you download them or get them on the retail discs).
As far as I can tell, the 'crack' in the article is actually just a key that someone distributed. There were some 20,000 registrations with that key before Valve shut it down. All the complaints here about no-CD cracks and Steam cracks are seemingly irrelevant to the actual article.
You don't need an internet connection to run the game. You need one to ACTIVATE it. Once HL2 is activated, you can run it offline as often as you like.
In fact, I think this fact alone will let you easily play both copies simultaneously in Offline mode. You won't be able to play both copies online at once, though, and I'm not sure how they'd react on a non-internet-connected LAN.
Besides, if I purchased via Stream, what do I do when I nuke and pave? It happens about every 8 months, if not every semester. (Yes, I'm a college student.) Can I download a copy to store on cd/dvd for when I reload, or do I have to download from stream everytime?
Steam has a built-in backup system, and will automatically separate the backup files into 640mb or 4.7GB chunks, for easy burning.
While Steam crashed on me when I tried to cram everything in the Silver package into one file (nearly 5gb), when I spread it out into a few different backups it worked fine.
And what do I do when the company changes, fails, stops supporting it? (That's not speculation, it will happen, and probably way too soon...)
It is speculation. Valve has made precisely two games in their history: Half-Life and Half-Life 2, with a couple of expansion packs and absorption of a few popular mod developers.
Half-Life 1 is still supported. Half-Life 2 is a success, despite all the complaints about Steam. Valve will still be around in the years to come, and there's absolutely no reason to think that they wouldn't release a 'Remove Authentication' patch should they ever close Steam down.
Second, I usually only have time to play games when I'm on the road. That means I use a laptop. This thing requires me to have my battery-sucking CD attached all the time, and that's a deal killer.
Then the deal isn't dead. Hook the laptop up to the internet, buy HL2 over Steam, download it (or have someone give you their Steam Backup files), and activate it on the laptop. Disconnect it from the internet.
That's it. You'll never have to put the laptop online again. You won't have to hook up the CD drive. Steam runs in Offline mode, and HL2 will run fine until your graphics chipset drains the last erg from your batteries.
As for the pricing, well, there's rumors out there that HL2 would've been cheaper to buy over Steam than to buy in stores, but their publisher would have none of it and took them to court over it. Valve could've sold HL2 over Steam for $15, and still made more per copy than VU pays them for retail box sales.
I just fixed a client's machine that was heavily infected with spyware. While I was finishing up protecting the machine, I decided to look at his Zone Alarm programs list (my clients rarely have firewalls installed, so it didn't occur to me to check earlier).
There were something like two or three dozen spyware entries in the programs list. 90% of them were 'allowed'. And they were all manually configured! That means that Zone Alarm popped up "awojethk.exe wants to access the internet" warnings, the person clicked the "Remember this setting" box, and clicked yes!
Argh!
I had a Win98 machine in the lab that wouldn't connect to the Internet at all. Opened up Spybot S&D and use its LSP viewer to see if my suspicions were correct, and they were: there were SAHagent entries in winsock. I ran Spybot's scanner, and it removed the bad entries and fixed winsock.
Debt really tends to curb off in the +35 zone. It's pretty pathetic (a single death now gets you a small fraction of a bar of debt, rather than a half-bar or more), and XP flows almost as freely as Influence. With increased mission bonuses, you can pay off debt in the high-end game very quickly. Especially if you're teamed with a Scrapper!
Well, the Epic power pools may curb the squishy nature of non-defensive ATs in the 30+ game. All of the Blaster Epic sets seem to have at least one Tanker-like defense power. Defenders and Controllers may be similarly squishy, but a good Defender or Controller either won't be drawing lots of aggro or will be locking down the mobs one way or another. The Controller who runs around not paying attention to what his Pets are doing deserves to get pasted. Blasters really get the short end of the stick in high-end. They draw aggro by default, they have little to no ability to mez the mobs, and they will die in two hits from a boss, period (to say nothing of attacks from AVs or Monsters--The Psychic Clockwork King plastered me in one attack for about 2000 damage with its Psychic Nova).
When I see a L36 SR Scrapper friend surrounded by a pack of mixed +2s, and not getting hit, while I have to be careful about taking on two +0 LTs...I really hope the Epic pools bring me some worthwhile defense.
The feature set to a new user is completely overwhelming. It's like they took every suggestion from a user survey and that's how the feature set was derived.
I've been an Opera user for years; since 3.6 or so, before the ads came around. I migrated off of Netscape 3.0, which I had been using since forever (I used it for a while afterwards just for its simple integrated email & news client). I loved Opera. It was fast, it had tabs, the majority of pages I used worked fine, the interface was uncomplicated and streamlined...
My biggest complaint now is the initial install of newer versions results in an awful interface filled with utterly unnecessary clutter, toolbars, and tabs. With version 7, it took me about a half-hour to figure out how to simplify the interface to an Opera 3.6-era style (address & status bar at bottom of tabs, tab bar at bottom of screen, separate Transfers tab).
Opera really needs to change their 'Show the user everything!' default interface to something much simpler. Even IE's just got the Standard Buttons, Links, and Address Bar displayed by default.
He essentially composed every piece of music in games 1-8. I'm not at my own computer right now, so I can't look at the MP3 credits, but I think he started collaborating on 9, and something like a third to a half of the music in FFX wasn't his.
By all accounts, it is. If antimatter comes into contact with normal matter, they annhilate. In other words, antimatter leaking out of its containment device isn't a contamination problem. It could very well be a "Well, should we bother rebuilding the city?" problem.
With a nuke, everything has to be imploded at precise timings and angles, or the runaway reaction won't occur. If it's off just a little, you'll get a nice local irradiation, but you won't level a city.
It doesn't really fit in to the FF mythos; it just uses it.
Kingdom Hearts is a surprisingly good game spawned from the unholy partnership between Square and Disney. Many characters from the Final Fantasy games cameo (most of them are player characters from 7, 8, and 10), with a few who are bosses in the arena. Disney Bad Guys make up most of the bosses for the rest of the game, while Disney Good Guys have some supporting roles or are semi-playable characters in your party.
Kingdom Hearts 2 should be out in a year, and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for the GBA (a story-bridger between the PS2 games) should be out in November.
I read a sci-fi story a few years ago that touched on this. I swear it was one of the Rama books, but can't remember for sure. An alien commented that humans can only instantly recognize between 5 and 7 objects, while they could recognize up to a dozen or two, and a third alien race couldn't reocgnize anything below 47 (or something) but could instantly count any other number. Sort of like the opposite of the OP: They have words for 47 and up, but anything lower than that is simply 'few'.
Re:The customer is not *always* right
on
Best Buy Sued By Ohio
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was told to lie about service policies, suggest that the product would be broken and unusable in a year without the PSP
God, I hate that the most.
Years ago, my mom was gonna buy my dad a CD jukebox for Christmas or his birthday or something. She went to Good Guys for it, and the salesperson pushed her hard on their service plan. He used the "You know, we've had a lot of returns on this..." line, and that made up her mind. She asked, "Then why should I buy a defective model?" Then she left and bought one elsewhere.
I recently bought a Canon SD100 at Best Buy for my sister's wedding present (I delayed too long and couldn't trust an online order coming in time). And Best Buy was actually the same price as online shops, so... Got the camera, a 256mb card, and a leather case/battery combo. Price was about $460, all-told. I couldn't swing the price at the time, so my mom agreed to use her Best Buy credit card to get it (0% interest). I was a bit annoyed that I wasn't even allowed to -touch- the camera box--he said he had to carry it to the sales kiosk.
The salesman began his PSP push at the kiosk, and started on a road that was obviously leading towards a 'gets returned a lot' destination, but my mom cut him off at the pass. This guy jeopardized $460 in sales because he was going to lie to us. He kept going, though, and tried to make it seem like the free cleanings were worth the PSP. Cleanings for a sealed digital camera whose only openings are a battery and card slot? At worst, my sister will have to wipe dust off the lens (and I bet Best Buy's 'cleaning' goes about as far).
Claiming a product is so defective it needs an extra warranty at +20% in cost is bad enough; continuing to push the extra warranty with a lame reason after a firm 'No' is just insulting.
Another problem with tests like these is formatting. Am I supposed to hit enter at the end of a line, or let the program auto-scroll me to the next line? Does it behave differently if the line ends with a punctuation mark or a space? Is that a paragraph break expecting an enter, or just a sentence end expecting a space? And, most frustrating, how many spaces does it expect after a setence? I learned 2 spaces, and being forced into using just one is infuriating and it seriously affects my speed and the overall accuracy/speed the program reports. And when they start throwing in very unnatural structure in there in an attempt to use the entire keyboard...ugh. Online tests, I can range anywhere from 40 to 80wpm. Typing straight from my head, while on a roll, can easily bring me to the 110+ range (to say nothing of muscle-memory login/password combos).
Actually, if you read the link he posted, she began her story in '85, when her husband discouraged her from getting radial keratotomy because she was tired of her hard contact lenses. She didn't get her LASIK until 1999, when the procedure was still relatively new, but was already being bandied about for its 'easy miracles'. She got a rather incompetent doctor (he denies the cutting blade jammed despite the physical evidence left behind in her eye, and went on with it anyway when the surgery should've been delayed at least three months), but the chances of complications are still pretty high and can be utterly devestating to your life (even the 'common' problems can screw your night vision over and leave you with dry eyes).
Reading her story has pretty much discouraged me from getting any sort of corrective eye surgery until the technology advances and matures for at least another decade. My brother-in-law had it done about a year ago (my sister chickened out of it at the last second (they had mis-set the eyeball lock thing and had to remove it and reset it, which broke her resolve)), and hasn't had any real complications, but dammit, these are my eyes. I'll stick with my -7.5 diopter eyes and glasses.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, on Mythbusters, they couldn't get the discs to reliably explode at 30krpm. So, they hooked a bench router's motor directly up to their mains. It spun up so fast that the discs exploded every time after a half-second. They were going a whole lot faster than this kid with a Dremel.
And the ballistics gel dummy was very close, and in the plane the CD was spinning in, so the fragments went directly into it. The Dremel kid is perpindicular to the CD's plane, so the chances he'd get hit directly are very low.
Its huge popularity with fansubbers is probably what's made it take forever to get licensed. The Japanese license holder certainly knows how quickly the show is fansubbed in the US, and how popular it is.
Thus, they know it's going to be extremely popular in the US when it's finally on TV and DVD.
That means they know they can charge an arm and a leg for the US license. Same reason ADV didn't get the Evangelion movies: the series was so popular, Gainax wanted an obscene amount of money for the movies. Manga Entertainment coughed up more money than ADV would. I'm just guessing that pretty much every US distributor is in a protracted bidding war to get the rights to the series. Maybe the Japanese license holder is also holding out for simultaneous merchandising rights or they want assurances the series will be picked up in whole and won't be picked up by a butcher, like One Piece.
My grandfather's always had trouble with his computers. He brought one over when he came for Thanksgiving. I cleaned it up, got it working again...only to have him somehow hose it a week after he got home. He brought it (and a new computer) when he came for Christmas. The older box was completely hosed. XP wouldn't start up at all. Either it'd freeze on a grey screen or freeze on an XP logo (when in safe mode). He needed his files transfered to the new machine.
So, I decided to try out the Bart Pre-installed Environment, which I had learned about at work. It was just what I needed to pull files off of a screwed NTFS XP install. I built an image, booted the machine with it...but it wouldn't find the NIC. So, I built another image with the drivers specifically for the NIC, and Nero, just in case. Still didn't work. Tried a variety of network combinations. Nothing. Oh, and Nero crashed when I tried to do anything worthwhile with it (to be fair, the Nero loader was designed for an earlier version of the software). Tried to build it with drivers for a USB stick. No go.
Out of desperation, I torrented the newest Knoppix ISO, burned it, and booted the dead machine with it.
Now, Knoppix has always scared me a bit. I'm not a Linux guy; I'm mostly lost in it, even with a GUI, and Knoppix has so much crap in its menus that I hardly knew what to use or how to use it.
But, anyway. It worked. Flawlessly. Networked right off the bat. CD burner worked great. USB keys detected fine. The three hours and half-dozen CDs I wasted with BartPE could've been eliminated if I had just gone with Knoppix from the start. BartPE might be a great, free (of a sort) preinstalled environment, but it just seemed completely hacked together and half-assed to me. Knoppix blew it out of the water.
A green laser pointer, at night, can have a visible beam. It can be used to point things out. Check out thinkgeek's description of their green laser pointer: they specifically mention using it to point out stars.
We've got 'The Twenty' up here in Washington, too (presumably all Regal theaters have them), except they're just a cycling batch of ads and inane things that take up the time between showings. They end The Twenty at showtime, then start up the usual sequence of ads and trailers.
The Twenty replaced still ads of what were usually local businesses, which replaced a black screen with crappy music playing over the speakers.
Nowadays I just bring a book or gameboy along to amuse me until the movie itself actually starts.
Yes, virtually every modern flash storage device has load-balancing firmware. Still, you don't want to use them for your swap file.
The 'theory' of evolution is a scientific theory: a hypothesis that makes predictions ("Humans and chimps have markedly similar morphologies. I wonder if they're related."), has been repeatedly tested ("Hey, howabout we test the DNA?") and repeatedly confirmed ("Wow. 97%+ similar to human DNA. That's a very close relationship!"). Refer to the theory of gravity, electron theory, and germ theory.
The 'theory' of creationism is not a scientific theory: it makes no predictions beyond "God Did It". The absence of predictions means it cannot be tested. Thus, creation theory is a layman's theory: an unproven assumption.
Both do have a place in a science class, however: one as an example of science, one as an example of what science isn't.
The activation is essentially transparent. You connect to Steam, you double-click Half-Life 2, and it says 'Unlocking content' or something. Then you get to play. This happens just once per installation of the game.
What's going on is Steam decrypts the game's files (which are encrypted whether you download them or get them on the retail discs).
As far as I can tell, the 'crack' in the article is actually just a key that someone distributed. There were some 20,000 registrations with that key before Valve shut it down. All the complaints here about no-CD cracks and Steam cracks are seemingly irrelevant to the actual article.
Yes, you can. Steam has an offline mode for these very reasons.
You don't need an internet connection to run the game. You need one to ACTIVATE it. Once HL2 is activated, you can run it offline as often as you like.
In fact, I think this fact alone will let you easily play both copies simultaneously in Offline mode. You won't be able to play both copies online at once, though, and I'm not sure how they'd react on a non-internet-connected LAN.
Steam has a built-in backup system, and will automatically separate the backup files into 640mb or 4.7GB chunks, for easy burning.
While Steam crashed on me when I tried to cram everything in the Silver package into one file (nearly 5gb), when I spread it out into a few different backups it worked fine.
And what do I do when the company changes, fails, stops supporting it? (That's not speculation, it will happen, and probably way too soon...)
It is speculation. Valve has made precisely two games in their history: Half-Life and Half-Life 2, with a couple of expansion packs and absorption of a few popular mod developers. Half-Life 1 is still supported. Half-Life 2 is a success, despite all the complaints about Steam. Valve will still be around in the years to come, and there's absolutely no reason to think that they wouldn't release a 'Remove Authentication' patch should they ever close Steam down.
Then the deal isn't dead. Hook the laptop up to the internet, buy HL2 over Steam, download it (or have someone give you their Steam Backup files), and activate it on the laptop. Disconnect it from the internet.
That's it. You'll never have to put the laptop online again. You won't have to hook up the CD drive. Steam runs in Offline mode, and HL2 will run fine until your graphics chipset drains the last erg from your batteries.
As for the pricing, well, there's rumors out there that HL2 would've been cheaper to buy over Steam than to buy in stores, but their publisher would have none of it and took them to court over it. Valve could've sold HL2 over Steam for $15, and still made more per copy than VU pays them for retail box sales.
I just fixed a client's machine that was heavily infected with spyware. While I was finishing up protecting the machine, I decided to look at his Zone Alarm programs list (my clients rarely have firewalls installed, so it didn't occur to me to check earlier).
There were something like two or three dozen spyware entries in the programs list. 90% of them were 'allowed'. And they were all manually configured! That means that Zone Alarm popped up "awojethk.exe wants to access the internet" warnings, the person clicked the "Remember this setting" box, and clicked yes!
Argh!
I had a Win98 machine in the lab that wouldn't connect to the Internet at all. Opened up Spybot S&D and use its LSP viewer to see if my suspicions were correct, and they were: there were SAHagent entries in winsock. I ran Spybot's scanner, and it removed the bad entries and fixed winsock.
Debt really tends to curb off in the +35 zone. It's pretty pathetic (a single death now gets you a small fraction of a bar of debt, rather than a half-bar or more), and XP flows almost as freely as Influence. With increased mission bonuses, you can pay off debt in the high-end game very quickly. Especially if you're teamed with a Scrapper!
Well, the Epic power pools may curb the squishy nature of non-defensive ATs in the 30+ game. All of the Blaster Epic sets seem to have at least one Tanker-like defense power.
Defenders and Controllers may be similarly squishy, but a good Defender or Controller either won't be drawing lots of aggro or will be locking down the mobs one way or another. The Controller who runs around not paying attention to what his Pets are doing deserves to get pasted.
Blasters really get the short end of the stick in high-end. They draw aggro by default, they have little to no ability to mez the mobs, and they will die in two hits from a boss, period (to say nothing of attacks from AVs or Monsters--The Psychic Clockwork King plastered me in one attack for about 2000 damage with its Psychic Nova).
When I see a L36 SR Scrapper friend surrounded by a pack of mixed +2s, and not getting hit, while I have to be careful about taking on two +0 LTs...I really hope the Epic pools bring me some worthwhile defense.
The quick-cool solder tool they show is only $20 MSRP, and 25% cheaper at Costco.
The feature set to a new user is completely overwhelming. It's like they took every suggestion from a user survey and that's how the feature set was derived.
I've been an Opera user for years; since 3.6 or so, before the ads came around. I migrated off of Netscape 3.0, which I had been using since forever (I used it for a while afterwards just for its simple integrated email & news client). I loved Opera. It was fast, it had tabs, the majority of pages I used worked fine, the interface was uncomplicated and streamlined...
My biggest complaint now is the initial install of newer versions results in an awful interface filled with utterly unnecessary clutter, toolbars, and tabs. With version 7, it took me about a half-hour to figure out how to simplify the interface to an Opera 3.6-era style (address & status bar at bottom of tabs, tab bar at bottom of screen, separate Transfers tab).
Opera really needs to change their 'Show the user everything!' default interface to something much simpler. Even IE's just got the Standard Buttons, Links, and Address Bar displayed by default.
He essentially composed every piece of music in games 1-8. I'm not at my own computer right now, so I can't look at the MP3 credits, but I think he started collaborating on 9, and something like a third to a half of the music in FFX wasn't his.
By all accounts, it is.
If antimatter comes into contact with normal matter, they annhilate.
In other words, antimatter leaking out of its containment device isn't a contamination problem. It could very well be a "Well, should we bother rebuilding the city?" problem.
With a nuke, everything has to be imploded at precise timings and angles, or the runaway reaction won't occur. If it's off just a little, you'll get a nice local irradiation, but you won't level a city.
It doesn't really fit in to the FF mythos; it just uses it.
Kingdom Hearts is a surprisingly good game spawned from the unholy partnership between Square and Disney. Many characters from the Final Fantasy games cameo (most of them are player characters from 7, 8, and 10), with a few who are bosses in the arena. Disney Bad Guys make up most of the bosses for the rest of the game, while Disney Good Guys have some supporting roles or are semi-playable characters in your party.
Kingdom Hearts 2 should be out in a year, and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for the GBA (a story-bridger between the PS2 games) should be out in November.
I read a sci-fi story a few years ago that touched on this. I swear it was one of the Rama books, but can't remember for sure. An alien commented that humans can only instantly recognize between 5 and 7 objects, while they could recognize up to a dozen or two, and a third alien race couldn't reocgnize anything below 47 (or something) but could instantly count any other number. Sort of like the opposite of the OP: They have words for 47 and up, but anything lower than that is simply 'few'.
God, I hate that the most. Years ago, my mom was gonna buy my dad a CD jukebox for Christmas or his birthday or something. She went to Good Guys for it, and the salesperson pushed her hard on their service plan. He used the "You know, we've had a lot of returns on this..." line, and that made up her mind. She asked, "Then why should I buy a defective model?" Then she left and bought one elsewhere.
I recently bought a Canon SD100 at Best Buy for my sister's wedding present (I delayed too long and couldn't trust an online order coming in time). And Best Buy was actually the same price as online shops, so... Got the camera, a 256mb card, and a leather case/battery combo. Price was about $460, all-told. I couldn't swing the price at the time, so my mom agreed to use her Best Buy credit card to get it (0% interest). I was a bit annoyed that I wasn't even allowed to -touch- the camera box--he said he had to carry it to the sales kiosk.
The salesman began his PSP push at the kiosk, and started on a road that was obviously leading towards a 'gets returned a lot' destination, but my mom cut him off at the pass. This guy jeopardized $460 in sales because he was going to lie to us. He kept going, though, and tried to make it seem like the free cleanings were worth the PSP. Cleanings for a sealed digital camera whose only openings are a battery and card slot? At worst, my sister will have to wipe dust off the lens (and I bet Best Buy's 'cleaning' goes about as far).
Claiming a product is so defective it needs an extra warranty at +20% in cost is bad enough; continuing to push the extra warranty with a lame reason after a firm 'No' is just insulting.
Another problem with tests like these is formatting. Am I supposed to hit enter at the end of a line, or let the program auto-scroll me to the next line? Does it behave differently if the line ends with a punctuation mark or a space? Is that a paragraph break expecting an enter, or just a sentence end expecting a space? And, most frustrating, how many spaces does it expect after a setence? I learned 2 spaces, and being forced into using just one is infuriating and it seriously affects my speed and the overall accuracy/speed the program reports.
And when they start throwing in very unnatural structure in there in an attempt to use the entire keyboard...ugh.
Online tests, I can range anywhere from 40 to 80wpm. Typing straight from my head, while on a roll, can easily bring me to the 110+ range (to say nothing of muscle-memory login/password combos).
Reading her story has pretty much discouraged me from getting any sort of corrective eye surgery until the technology advances and matures for at least another decade. My brother-in-law had it done about a year ago (my sister chickened out of it at the last second (they had mis-set the eyeball lock thing and had to remove it and reset it, which broke her resolve)), and hasn't had any real complications, but dammit, these are my eyes. I'll stick with my -7.5 diopter eyes and glasses.