I used to like Enterprise until they started doing all the time travel stories and cliffhangers. Having to wait months to see the end of a story just pisses me off and makes me lose interest. Time travel stories are for lazy writers. Oh, the show opens with the captain in WW2 and a nazi alien. How did he get there? Why is he there? Do I care? No (changes channel).
Good riddance, although I will miss looking at T'pal. The episode where she had to get decontaminated in a sauna in her undewear was pretty nice:)
We (rightly) put down rebellions within our borders(cf. the Civil War). They are terrorism. It doesn't matter how political they are; actually, being especially political means you are committing treason and not just causing destruction.
But do we send in tanks to run over non-violent student protesters?
We execute lots of people. Why is it so important that they use cheap bullets rather than expensive injections?
But do we do it because someone spoke out against the government's policies?
Further doesn't that mean that the only legal way for the owner of an Atari Asteroids stand-up machine to play the game in an emulator is to obtain a license for the ROM for that purpose (which, incidentally, StarROMs does).
I guess that could depend on whether the games you are playing on an emulator were licensed or sold to you. If you licensed the originals only for playing on the original machines, then you would need a separate license for running them on an emulator. If you bought the originals (not sure if shrink-wrap licensing would be valid), then you can pretty much use them in any way you see fit.
There was a case where Company A had a software product and also provided support for it for a fee. Company B started providing support for Company A's software product as well. One year, let's say 1987, Company A stopped "selling" the software to their customers and started "licensing" it instead. The court found that Company B was violating Company A's copyright just by loading the programs into memory to provide support for their customers, but only for the customers that purchased a license after 1987. Company B could still provide support for customers that had originally "bought" the software prior to 1987.
Kutaragi acknowledged that the button is less responsive than the others,... Because there isn't enough room to put the square button's detection switch directly underneath, it's off to the right, making it less responsive--and sometimes causing it to stick.
I didn't want the PSP's LCD screen to become any smaller than this, nor did I want its machine body to become any larger.
So how the system looks is more important than how it plays games? The PSP couldn't be 1/8 inch wider to make it work flawlessly? That's just too big? This is crazy. Why would you purposfully design a flaw into your product?
He didn't win a judgment against the movie studios, he won against Marvel. The movie studios pay Marvel and they were supposed to give Stan Lee 10% of that. You can hide all kinds of costs in the making and marketing of a movie, but when you're a company that's just collecting licensing fees for your characters, it's a lot more difficult.
Some people say the controller vibrates when a cheat is entered, so the wires that make it vibrate could be hooked up to the parrallel port as well. I think a sound playes and text is displayed on the screen when a cheat is activated as well. He could just be sitting reading a book while the program is running and stop it when he sees a cheat. Then his program could step back through the last however many codes were tried to find the one that was the cheat.
When I first read the snippet, I thought "Here may be an insightful article on the intersection of religion and virtual reality games." Then I clicked on the link and saw that it takes you to the Landover Baptist Church website. Check out some more articles from them:
Landover Baptist Ministries puts its reputation on the line by promising to retain only 85% of the $2,304 cost of this deluxe one DVD set if you are not completely satisfied -- all you have to do is tell us you weren't 100% happy and pay the $350 shipping costs and allow the Landover Baptist Sin Patrol to scan your hard drive to ensure you didn't make a copy of this proprietary software -- or have photographs or movies that Pastor Deacon Fred has deemed after careful study to be offensive or sickening."
Leap Start Learning Table - Marketed to Caucasian children and Colored adults, this so-called "Learning Table" spits out lies about math, science and other secular bunk Christ-haters teach in public schools. We suggest you just start your toddler out with an illustrated King James Bible and a spanking instead.
2. If your boy approaches you in a contemplative manner about giving up sports (that is, he hasn't quite made up his mind, but is just coming to you for advice), hold your hand up with the backside toward his face and smack him firmly across his cheeks repeatedly until he cries like a little sissy. This is called, "bitch slapping." It is a humiliating and extremely effective way of showing your boy that he is embarrassing you by acting like a little girl.
... had many Christians convinced they were going to witness the final battle in the valley of Armageddon. As it turns out, unlike the KJV Bible, the film is just a silly made-up fantasy story written by some old homo in England.
Let's look at that... The earth has a circumference (at the equator) of 24,901.55 miles. If we say that there were 86,400 seconds in a day (24 hours * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds / minute), then someone standing on the equator was moving at 0.288212384259259 miles per second. Taking into account the shorter day, we are now moving at 0.288212393199181 miles per second, a difference of 0.000000008939921 miles per second.
To determine time dilation, we look at the lorentz transformation, 1/sqrt(1-(v*v)/(c*c)), where v is the velocity and c is the speed of light. The transformation from the perspective of someone that didn't spin with the earth would be going from 1.00000022295876 to 1.00000022295877, a difference of 1 * 10 to the -14th power. So the time difference is 0.00268 seconds per day and the time dilation is 0.000000000864 seconds per day.
The measurement of 2.68 microseconds/day isn't accurate enough to seem to take time dilation into account, but I would bet it was measured from the perspective of someone that is on earth, therefore it would have already been taken into account anyway. Considering that the time dilation factor is slightly smaller than the accuracy maintained by the government's atomic clocks (10 to the -9th seconds / day), I'd consider it negligible.
The meteor probably passed the field of view in under a second, if not then it was a VERY slow meteor. If it were travelling as fast as a normal meteor, and it was in multiple pieces travelling that fast, the gravity would have to have been extreme to keep the parts from flying apart. We're lucky it just grazed our atmosphere or it could have ended all life on earth with it's impact.
It is much more likely that there was some vibration in the telescope causing it. If the meteor took about 1/2 second to pass the field of view then maybe the 60 hz frequency of AC power was working with the motors. If not, maybe it was a passing vehicle or the guy was walking or listening to the radio. If it was an open dobsonian telescope, the secondary mirror would be sensitive to vibration from sound waves, especially if it wasn't secured very well. You can see some blur in the stars that would indicate wobbling of the scope.
The next paragraph they talk about keys instead of players. Each player could have multiple keys. If one KEY is cracked, new movies wouldn't work with that KEY, but they would still work with other KEYS on the same player.
If the movies are encrypted with AES 128 bit, the players and any software to play the discs can no longer be exported to China (or most other countries) where most of the piracy takes place. Of course they lose out on 100% of the legitimate sales too...
I've seen shows about them before and they are not like the giant tidal waves you see in movies. Tsunamis show up more like a rising water level than a 60 foot wave that comes and passes. They make splashes as the water rushes in and over things, but it's not like what most people think of a wave coming in or like you see on the extended version of "The Abyss" or that comet movie where Morgan Freeman was the president.
If you are out in the deep water on a boat you might not even notice the wave passing under you. It would only lift your boat a few feet and it would do it gently. As that water heads towards shore though, the mass of water has nowhere else to go so it goes up onto land.
I get flamed by an immature little brat for posting my thoughts on slashdot? Not everyone spends 4 hours a day reading web sites about the newest games or buys every valve game. I enjoyed the original Half Life a lot so I bought Half-Life 2. I had heard of Steam but I didn't know what it was, and I hadn't bought any other Valve games like counter strike.
Well, you don't get to the EULA until you buy the product and open it to install it. Guess what? Stores don't take games back if they've been opened. So you either agree or you have a worthless $50 coaster and some kindling for your fireplace.
If I would have known that Half-Life 2 forced Steam on you, I wouldn't have bought it. That's all I need, another icon in my system tray supposedly to "help" me. Every time I start Half-Life 2 it goes out to the internet and searches for friends. It takes an extra 20 seconds to load the game because of this bloated idiotware. When I want to play a game, I just want to click the icon and be in.
To the people that say "get your money back", don't they know you can't return software if it has been opened?
I see, you could hit that square at -4x, 0y, then your speed would get cut in 1/2 to -2x, then each round you would add 2 to be -4 and it would get cut in 1/2 to -2 again. I was just thinking before that hitting any block would stop it for some reason.
I didn't take into account the velocities. For the much simpler test problem, there would be about 10 million possible points, and about 5 times that many links (6 possible thrust values, but many of the points will already be at maximum thrust or will result in the same point).
You'd have to make a point on your graph for every possible pixel/velocity combination and link them together by each possible thrust value. You'd end up with on the order of 200,000 points and 600,000 or so links.
That's right. That lets you slide along the ground by continually thrusting sideways. You will always be moving at only 1 speed though. Initially your horizontal velocity gets set to 2, but because of gravity setting your vertical velocity to -1, you hit the ground. Your velocity is halved so you end up with 1 horizontal and 0 vertical velocity, letting you move one pixel. The next round your velocities are 3 and -1, then get cut in 1/2 to 1 and 0. I wondered why they put that path in the map that is just big enough for your ship to get through.
So if a move would make you hit a block, then both your x and y velocities are divided by 2? What actually happens in the movement? Let's say your ship is travelling at +10 x velocity and 0 y velocity and you hit a vertical wall, but your box would be 9/10 way inside the wall (you were 1 pixels away). Would you stay 1 pixel away and then have you're velocity cut in 1/2 and stay at the same vertical position? The next round the same thing would happen and your x velocity would go down to 2. The next time your x velocity would go down to 1, the next time you would move one pixel over and be touching the wall and would have a -1 y velocity added. The next time you would hit the wall again and you would have a 0,0 velocity, then finally you would start to slide down the wall?
That seems like what the rules imply, but it doesn't make sense naturally to have your ship hover away from the wall for three turns without falling down at all...
That's strange... That county had 218,000 FEWER voters than it did 4 years ago (per the data linked to in this slashdot article), and they STILL had too many votes? I think the federal election commission needs to take a look there...
Their conclusions make little sense. Sort the data by % that voted for bush this year. There are e-voting counties that lost percentages for bush and non-e-voting counties that gained more than any e-voting county. Their summary paper shows a ridiculous number for Broward county. They say:
In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.
Look at the data yourself:
1996 - 142,834 Dole to 320,736 Clinton, Dole got 30.8% of their votes (I note they ignore Ross Perot and Nader who both had significant votes)
2000 - 177,902 Bush to 387,703 Gore, Bush got 31.4 percent of the votes
2004 - 238,397 Bush to 443,535 Kerry, Bush got 34.9 percent of the votes
If you take the total turnout and apply the lowest percentage for a republican in the last three elections (30.8%), then Bush would have gotten 210,115 votes. That's only 18,000 excess votes this year. If you take the 72,000 figure, then bush should have only gotten 166,397 votes. That's only 27.3%. So the authors of the paper assume for some reason that the county that had the absolute lowest percentage for push in 2000 (31.45 %) should have had even 4% less in 2004 when the country as a whole voted MORE for Bush. Not only that, but bush would have lost 11,000 people who voted republican in 2000 and Kerry would have gained 128,000 votes. That's ridiculous.
The change in Bush % of vote from non-evoting counties ranges from -11.5% to +10.7%. For e-voting counties it ranges from -6.4% to +7.4%. If you look down each list (evoting and non-evoting) from change in percent, there is little difference whether it was a democratic or republican voting county, they're scattered.
If you want to look at something strange, look at Cuyahoga county, Ohio. This county had 218,000 FEWER voters than in the 2000 election. That's in a record turnout year with only one other county in the list losing votes (Franklin, OH lost 9,486 out of the 519,255 they had in 2000). That's 108,000 fewer votes for Bush than in 2000 and 111,000 fewer votes for the democrats. Not a big shift in the election, but very strange nonetheless.
I don't put any weight into the paper. I haven't analyzed very much of the data yet, but I looked at the one county they specifically mention in their report:
In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.
Look at the data THEY have for Broward County:
1996 - 142,834 Dole to 320,736 Clinton, Dole got 30.8% of their votes (I note they ignore Ross Perot and Nader who both had significant votes)
2000 - 177,902 Bush to 387,703 Gore, Bush got 31.4 percent of the votes
2004 - 238,397 Bush to 443,535 Kerry, Bush got 34.9 percent of the votes
For one thing, they are ignoring the fact that Bush gained a much higher percent of the popular vote this time. Instead of slightly losing the popular vote, he won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. Unless every single one of those was e-voting fraud, that easily explains the jump from 31.4 to 34.9 percent in this county since it's almost 3% nationwide. Bush simply got more people to vote for him, whatever the reason was.
The most disturbing thing though was their quote that Bush got 72,000 excess votes in Broward County here. Even if you give bush only the lowest percent of republican votes, the 30.8% Dole got in '96, that is still only a swing of 18,000 votes from what Bush should have had. Where do they get the 72,000 excess votes number from? It appears to have been made up out of thin air. Can someone look into this and explain it to me?
Reminds me of the quote "There are three types of lies. Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics."
The government has a serious problem. The USPTO is overwhelmed with patent applications and it cannot keep up. Because of this, they are likely to just issue a patent for whatever someone asks for, they don't have time to review them all. This is frivilous, it borders on insane. This same operator under a different name has been in other programming languages such as C since their creation (!= will do that for pointers). It is able to be done in basic by simply writing it as "Not (a Is b)". It is not a new invention worthy of patent protection by any stretch of the imagination.
To get the USPTO back in working order, congress should institude a fine for frivilous patent applications. They should increase their staff and review each patent carefully and be able to throw them out. I recommend a tiered system. Your first frivilous patent application is just the cost of a normal patent application, but it doubles for each frivilous application after the first. If patents cost $1000 to apply for, the 10th frivilous application would cost $1 million. The 16th would cost you $65 million, and the 24nd would cost you $16 billion.
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Good riddance, although I will miss looking at T'pal. The episode where she had to get decontaminated in a sauna in her undewear was pretty nice :)
There was a case where Company A had a software product and also provided support for it for a fee. Company B started providing support for Company A's software product as well. One year, let's say 1987, Company A stopped "selling" the software to their customers and started "licensing" it instead. The court found that Company B was violating Company A's copyright just by loading the programs into memory to provide support for their customers, but only for the customers that purchased a license after 1987. Company B could still provide support for customers that had originally "bought" the software prior to 1987.
He didn't win a judgment against the movie studios, he won against Marvel. The movie studios pay Marvel and they were supposed to give Stan Lee 10% of that. You can hide all kinds of costs in the making and marketing of a movie, but when you're a company that's just collecting licensing fees for your characters, it's a lot more difficult.
Some people say the controller vibrates when a cheat is entered, so the wires that make it vibrate could be hooked up to the parrallel port as well. I think a sound playes and text is displayed on the screen when a cheat is activated as well. He could just be sitting reading a book while the program is running and stop it when he sees a cheat. Then his program could step back through the last however many codes were tried to find the one that was the cheat.
You guys can tell that this is a satirical web site, right?
To determine time dilation, we look at the lorentz transformation, 1/sqrt(1-(v*v)/(c*c)), where v is the velocity and c is the speed of light. The transformation from the perspective of someone that didn't spin with the earth would be going from 1.00000022295876 to 1.00000022295877, a difference of 1 * 10 to the -14th power. So the time difference is 0.00268 seconds per day and the time dilation is 0.000000000864 seconds per day.
The measurement of 2.68 microseconds/day isn't accurate enough to seem to take time dilation into account, but I would bet it was measured from the perspective of someone that is on earth, therefore it would have already been taken into account anyway. Considering that the time dilation factor is slightly smaller than the accuracy maintained by the government's atomic clocks (10 to the -9th seconds / day), I'd consider it negligible.
It is much more likely that there was some vibration in the telescope causing it. If the meteor took about 1/2 second to pass the field of view then maybe the 60 hz frequency of AC power was working with the motors. If not, maybe it was a passing vehicle or the guy was walking or listening to the radio. If it was an open dobsonian telescope, the secondary mirror would be sensitive to vibration from sound waves, especially if it wasn't secured very well. You can see some blur in the stars that would indicate wobbling of the scope.
The next paragraph they talk about keys instead of players. Each player could have multiple keys. If one KEY is cracked, new movies wouldn't work with that KEY, but they would still work with other KEYS on the same player.
If the movies are encrypted with AES 128 bit, the players and any software to play the discs can no longer be exported to China (or most other countries) where most of the piracy takes place. Of course they lose out on 100% of the legitimate sales too...
If you are out in the deep water on a boat you might not even notice the wave passing under you. It would only lift your boat a few feet and it would do it gently. As that water heads towards shore though, the mass of water has nowhere else to go so it goes up onto land.
I get flamed by an immature little brat for posting my thoughts on slashdot? Not everyone spends 4 hours a day reading web sites about the newest games or buys every valve game. I enjoyed the original Half Life a lot so I bought Half-Life 2. I had heard of Steam but I didn't know what it was, and I hadn't bought any other Valve games like counter strike.
Well, you don't get to the EULA until you buy the product and open it to install it. Guess what? Stores don't take games back if they've been opened. So you either agree or you have a worthless $50 coaster and some kindling for your fireplace.
To the people that say "get your money back", don't they know you can't return software if it has been opened?
Then only outlaws will have camera phones.
I see, you could hit that square at -4x, 0y, then your speed would get cut in 1/2 to -2x, then each round you would add 2 to be -4 and it would get cut in 1/2 to -2 again. I was just thinking before that hitting any block would stop it for some reason.
I didn't take into account the velocities. For the much simpler test problem, there would be about 10 million possible points, and about 5 times that many links (6 possible thrust values, but many of the points will already be at maximum thrust or will result in the same point).
You'd have to make a point on your graph for every possible pixel/velocity combination and link them together by each possible thrust value. You'd end up with on the order of 200,000 points and 600,000 or so links.
That's right. That lets you slide along the ground by continually thrusting sideways. You will always be moving at only 1 speed though. Initially your horizontal velocity gets set to 2, but because of gravity setting your vertical velocity to -1, you hit the ground. Your velocity is halved so you end up with 1 horizontal and 0 vertical velocity, letting you move one pixel. The next round your velocities are 3 and -1, then get cut in 1/2 to 1 and 0. I wondered why they put that path in the map that is just big enough for your ship to get through.
That seems like what the rules imply, but it doesn't make sense naturally to have your ship hover away from the wall for three turns without falling down at all...
That's strange... That county had 218,000 FEWER voters than it did 4 years ago (per the data linked to in this slashdot article), and they STILL had too many votes? I think the federal election commission needs to take a look there...
- 1996 - 142,834 Dole to 320,736 Clinton, Dole got 30.8% of their votes (I note they ignore Ross Perot and Nader who both had significant votes)
- 2000 - 177,902 Bush to 387,703 Gore, Bush got 31.4 percent of the votes
- 2004 - 238,397 Bush to 443,535 Kerry, Bush got 34.9 percent of the votes
If you take the total turnout and apply the lowest percentage for a republican in the last three elections (30.8%), then Bush would have gotten 210,115 votes. That's only 18,000 excess votes this year. If you take the 72,000 figure, then bush should have only gotten 166,397 votes. That's only 27.3%. So the authors of the paper assume for some reason that the county that had the absolute lowest percentage for push in 2000 (31.45 %) should have had even 4% less in 2004 when the country as a whole voted MORE for Bush. Not only that, but bush would have lost 11,000 people who voted republican in 2000 and Kerry would have gained 128,000 votes. That's ridiculous.The change in Bush % of vote from non-evoting counties ranges from -11.5% to +10.7%. For e-voting counties it ranges from -6.4% to +7.4%. If you look down each list (evoting and non-evoting) from change in percent, there is little difference whether it was a democratic or republican voting county, they're scattered.
If you want to look at something strange, look at Cuyahoga county, Ohio. This county had 218,000 FEWER voters than in the 2000 election. That's in a record turnout year with only one other county in the list losing votes (Franklin, OH lost 9,486 out of the 519,255 they had in 2000). That's 108,000 fewer votes for Bush than in 2000 and 111,000 fewer votes for the democrats. Not a big shift in the election, but very strange nonetheless.
- 1996 - 142,834 Dole to 320,736 Clinton, Dole got 30.8% of their votes (I note they ignore Ross Perot and Nader who both had significant votes)
- 2000 - 177,902 Bush to 387,703 Gore, Bush got 31.4 percent of the votes
- 2004 - 238,397 Bush to 443,535 Kerry, Bush got 34.9 percent of the votes
For one thing, they are ignoring the fact that Bush gained a much higher percent of the popular vote this time. Instead of slightly losing the popular vote, he won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. Unless every single one of those was e-voting fraud, that easily explains the jump from 31.4 to 34.9 percent in this county since it's almost 3% nationwide. Bush simply got more people to vote for him, whatever the reason was.The most disturbing thing though was their quote that Bush got 72,000 excess votes in Broward County here. Even if you give bush only the lowest percent of republican votes, the 30.8% Dole got in '96, that is still only a swing of 18,000 votes from what Bush should have had. Where do they get the 72,000 excess votes number from? It appears to have been made up out of thin air. Can someone look into this and explain it to me?
Reminds me of the quote "There are three types of lies. Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics."
To get the USPTO back in working order, congress should institude a fine for frivilous patent applications. They should increase their staff and review each patent carefully and be able to throw them out. I recommend a tiered system. Your first frivilous patent application is just the cost of a normal patent application, but it doubles for each frivilous application after the first. If patents cost $1000 to apply for, the 10th frivilous application would cost $1 million. The 16th would cost you $65 million, and the 24nd would cost you $16 billion.