While I liked Fallout 3, the fact that I hadn't even started the final mission before I hit the cap was kind of irritating.
'Grim Reaper's Sprint' is so awesomely broken. You want to have only one mission in which to play with it?
Personally, I kind of like having a fair amount of game still there in which to run around the wasteland with godlike abilities. It beats getting something awesome only after it would have been useful. I mean, I hit level 20 at about the time I got the GECK, and I haven't even found Tenpenny Tower. No, don't tell me where it is. Now I've finished the game I'm going back to a save game at around the 'free the Little Lamplight slaves' point, just before the plot goes into its final stage, and heading off to explore:-)
... can we have an expansion in which characters who are entirely immune to radiation are in fact willing to walk into irradiated rooms in order to press four buttons and then leave? As opposed to, you know, just standing there and watching while someone else does the job and dies horribly?
Actually, the Asus EEE and the Acer Aspire One, probably the two most popular, use KDE. Not sure about the others. Sorry to be so pedantic.
I think they use XFCE out of the box, but with a lot of KDE applications and the Qt libraries. Couldn't confirm this, though, I installed Ubuntu on my Eee:-)
So that would be a bit of an impractical grid to put around you, now wouldn't it ? A metal wire every 15 centimeter seems a bit ridiculous.
Not really. Hippies are known to sit inside pyramids or yurts while realigning their chakras or whatever it is they do. Wire your Faraday cage into that so that they can meditate on an RF-free zone.
Of course there will be no observable phenomena from being inside or outside the grid so selling them a faraday cage that doesn't in fact block cell phone radiation would not be discovered any time soon.
Well, apart from the fact that the hippie's mobile phone would show 'NO SIGNAL'.
Can they get sound-cancelling orgone generators too? Then maybe the locals can quit whining about the noise, and we can get a decent sound system on the Pyramid stage this year...
You underestimate the popularity of random bullshit. It attracts vast numbers of people. Of course few of them have anything worthwhile to say desu desu desu desu desu. I can has cheezburger?
And what did that accomplish? Well, the host nations managed to spread their languages and gene pools to their "New World" destinations, but 300 years later the "mighty conquests" have all but melted into air as almost all of America's nations have attained independence.
What did it cost England to plant colonies in the Americas? Quite a bit. It needed ships, supplies, sailors. Tools and guns and trade goods. Massive investment by the government in the navy needed to protect the colonies and the trade links across the ocean. Massive investment by private enterprise in settlement for profit.
And oh, what profit. Of course it began with straightforward piracy, simply sailing out of Caribbean bases and plundering the Spanish Main. Sir Francis Drake is a national hero in England; in Spain he's a bogeyman to frighten children to this day. Gloriana in her majesty glittered with stolen gold.
And what of later, with the Spanish defeated, and a new Dutch king in England bringing from his homeland new systems of finance and trade? Read your history of the Industrial Revolution. It began with cotton mills in the north of England - whose purpose was to convert the cotton shipped back from the Americas into fine finished cloth. Vast cargos of American cotton brought into Liverpool had to get to the water mills up in the hills - hence the canals to Manchester, and when they proved inadequate, the first railways. And then there was the enormous sugar trade, essential to a nation addicted to tea. And the tobacco. All brought to England and processed and sold on.
And who grew all the cotton and sugar and tobacco? What workforce provided the cheap labour needed for such crops? Why, it was a workforce recruited by British merchants, taken from Africa, and brought to America. If you know your history, you will know where I'm coming from. Now that was a profitable trade indeed. Vast fortunes were made in Bristol and London and Liverpool, fortunes that funded further business ventures and imperial expeditions once the slave trade was abolished.
The growth of the empire in Africa and Asia was powered by this industry, this commerce. That was the basis for the British power that went essentially unchallenged in the world for a hundred years, from the fall of Napoleon to the Great War.
So, investment quite large, returns absolutely colossal. Enormous wealth gained and reinvested, country developed from agrarian wool exporter to industrial superpower, world hegemony for a century: I'd say that settling the Americas was a bloody good move, even if in the long run we didn't get to keep them.
Thankyou, before about 2000 it was mainly estate agents and other sales types who had mobiles, in the UK at least.
Are you quite sure of that? I got my first mobile in 2000 or 2001ish, but through my last few years at high school they got increasingly popular. By the start of 1998 schoolyard bragging rights consisted chiefly of who had the highest score on Snake.
Video phones generally will be camera phones - and it's difficult to imagine a UI where the lens can be shared by both and used in both modes successfully.
Take a closer look at your phone. There's good odds there's another lens on the front. Video phones are here now and you probably already have one and don't realise it; nobody uses video because 3G connectivity is still expensive on most contracts. And because it's kind of awkward to hold the phone that way anyway.
When he said "broad band" he was comparing against (probably 9600 baud) modems. Today when we say broad-band we mean broad enough to do streaming video while we are downloading a new distro.
Bit off there. By 1999 56k modems were standard, and I think 512k ADSL was becoming available.
Very high-bandwidth? Do I even need to address this one? Who here can watch streaming-HD on their cell or PDA? Who can even watch streaming SD on their home desktop with a wired broadband connection without stutter?
That's a 2009 definition of 'very high bandwidth'. In 1999, the best bandwidth a home user could expect to get was ADSL at 512kb. A typical 3G mobile connection today is around 330kb. At the time of writing, that's high bandwidth all right.
Now the truth is becoming apparent, Obama is no different then any other politician except he has a greater personal charisma.
Two words: Tony Blair.
The whole Obama election had such a strong 1997 feel to it. So much hope. So much belief. So much potential for horrible, crushing disappointment a few years down the line. And because the victory was so completely devastating, there will be no meaningful opposition, because the other party is too busy fighting over the leadership in the conviction that they'll be back in power soon, they only lost because they weren't right-wing enough...
To be fair though, there's reason to hope for better here. Blair fell out of favour chiefly because he got the country embroiled in somebody else's war on the basis of the worst pack of lies ever seen. But I don't think Obama will be taking orders from anybody in quite the same way that Blair had to kowtow to Bush. He won't have to lurch drastically to the right in order to maintain good relations with any foreign feudal overlord, should an election overseas go the wrong way.
This subject is gone into in greater detail in Sudhir Venkatesh's book Gang Leader for a Day - he's the source for the Freakonomics chapter on the economics of the drug trade, and after the success of that book he wrote up the whole story of his study of the underground economy and society.
The economically rational human is a myth. [..] No, it isn't. It's just that people value things other than just money.
You're an idiot.
Not a bit of it, he's spot on. Money is of value solely insofar as it can be exchanged for stuff people want. For goods or services. Only a few nerdy numismatists value money for itself. The game of economics isn't a game of getting money - it's a game of getting stuff you want.
Now the thing is, once you get past basic essentials, what people want can be anything. Entirely up to you. Market economics assumes that people act rationally in how they go about obtaining what they want, but not in deciding what they want in the first place. You really really like Beanie babies? Wow, I've got a bunch of them off my aunt and I don't care for them much. It seems you assign a higher value to Beanie babies than I do. Let's trade! That's why we have an economy in the first place: different people for their own personal reasons assign different values to each commodity, and we all trade, giving away what we value less for what we value more.
So, if a certain person values some abstract called 'dignity' and feels that this would be lost if they took a particular job, then that job will have to offer them a premium to compensate for this. How large a premium it takes will depend on how high a value is put on 'dignity'. It's no different from someone who hates commuting weighing up whether it's worth taking that high-paying job that's thirty miles away, or the lower-paying one within walking distance. Whether it's worth it depends on just how much he hates commuting. So also whether the stripper job is worth it depends on how much you value your dignity.
As I understood it, the 90-day figure was because dust was expected to accumulate on the solar panels. The rovers should have died from lack of power a long time ago. But, as it turned out, the Martian winds are a little stronger than had been thought, and the dust rather lighter; OK, so the rovers are hardly clean, but enough dust blows away that they're able to keep going.
Seems like they have been burning through regenerations in the latter Dr. Who series. What are they gonna do when they hit twelve? No more Dr. Who?
Twelve regenerations was never a biological limit; it was something imposed by the Gallifreyan leadership. ISTR that once they offered the Master an extra set of regenerations, in exchange for doing some of their dirty work. Now that the other Time Lords have been exterminated, who's to say there can't be a Fourteenth Doctor?
As for the regeneration rate, the Ninth was short-lived, but the Tenth has had a good long innings. He first appeared in 2005 in the final episode of the first new series, and is scheduled to regenerate in early 2010. So... four or five years. That's quite long for a Doctor. The First did three years, so did the Second and the Fifth. The Third did four, the Sixth two, the Seventh two (well, nine, but he was off the air for most of that), the Eighth and Ninth one each (again, the Eighth technically nine years, same objection).
It's only really Tom Baker who's outdone Tennant in terms of years in the TARDIS. And since he has an enormous TV fanbase from Blackpool, Casanova and Doctor Who, and has lately proved himself to considerable acclaim on the legitimate stage as Hamlet, I imagine he thinks it's about time to move on to some extremely lucrative roles.
Anybody with strong feelings about which web browser is the best is probably spending too much time surfing the web, and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction. IE 7, Opera, and Firefox are all pretty similar from a normal end-user perspective.
IE7 has an Adblock Plus equivalent? News to me. Whenever I have to use IE to browse the web, it's a nightmare. With effective filtering, I've lost my ad-blindness, so now when I go online unprotected I actually see all that crap. Horrible.
For the record, the Queen is very popular indeed. Far, far more popular than any mere politician could ever dream of. But it seems to me that popularity is her own, personally, rather than deriving from her position as Queen. She is generally considered to have been an excellent public servant for many decades, and an absolute national treasure, and nobody would dream of firing her at this point.
The prospect of King Charles is another matter. The Prince of Wales is quite widely considered to be a bit of a prat. That's the moment at which the question of a Republic might be raised.
Please explain to me how this isn't a perfect description of what the situation is ALREADY LIKE RIGHT NOW.
Because suddenly the 'everyone' that pirates films includes the cinemas, who can charge the public to watch the film on the big screen, but don't have to pay the studio for it. Beats having to gouge on popcorn and Pepsi to turn a profit, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
'Grim Reaper's Sprint' is so awesomely broken. You want to have only one mission in which to play with it?
Personally, I kind of like having a fair amount of game still there in which to run around the wasteland with godlike abilities. It beats getting something awesome only after it would have been useful. I mean, I hit level 20 at about the time I got the GECK, and I haven't even found Tenpenny Tower. No, don't tell me where it is. Now I've finished the game I'm going back to a save game at around the 'free the Little Lamplight slaves' point, just before the plot goes into its final stage, and heading off to explore :-)
Thanks!
I think they use XFCE out of the box, but with a lot of KDE applications and the Qt libraries. Couldn't confirm this, though, I installed Ubuntu on my Eee :-)
Not really. Hippies are known to sit inside pyramids or yurts while realigning their chakras or whatever it is they do. Wire your Faraday cage into that so that they can meditate on an RF-free zone.
Of course there will be no observable phenomena from being inside or outside the grid so selling them a faraday cage that doesn't in fact block cell phone radiation would not be discovered any time soon.
Well, apart from the fact that the hippie's mobile phone would show 'NO SIGNAL'.
Can they get sound-cancelling orgone generators too? Then maybe the locals can quit whining about the noise, and we can get a decent sound system on the Pyramid stage this year...
I'll go one further:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2C+digg%2C+4chan
You underestimate the popularity of random bullshit. It attracts vast numbers of people. Of course few of them have anything worthwhile to say desu desu desu desu desu. I can has cheezburger?
What did it cost England to plant colonies in the Americas? Quite a bit. It needed ships, supplies, sailors. Tools and guns and trade goods. Massive investment by the government in the navy needed to protect the colonies and the trade links across the ocean. Massive investment by private enterprise in settlement for profit.
And oh, what profit. Of course it began with straightforward piracy, simply sailing out of Caribbean bases and plundering the Spanish Main. Sir Francis Drake is a national hero in England; in Spain he's a bogeyman to frighten children to this day. Gloriana in her majesty glittered with stolen gold.
And what of later, with the Spanish defeated, and a new Dutch king in England bringing from his homeland new systems of finance and trade? Read your history of the Industrial Revolution. It began with cotton mills in the north of England - whose purpose was to convert the cotton shipped back from the Americas into fine finished cloth. Vast cargos of American cotton brought into Liverpool had to get to the water mills up in the hills - hence the canals to Manchester, and when they proved inadequate, the first railways. And then there was the enormous sugar trade, essential to a nation addicted to tea. And the tobacco. All brought to England and processed and sold on.
And who grew all the cotton and sugar and tobacco? What workforce provided the cheap labour needed for such crops? Why, it was a workforce recruited by British merchants, taken from Africa, and brought to America. If you know your history, you will know where I'm coming from. Now that was a profitable trade indeed. Vast fortunes were made in Bristol and London and Liverpool, fortunes that funded further business ventures and imperial expeditions once the slave trade was abolished.
The growth of the empire in Africa and Asia was powered by this industry, this commerce. That was the basis for the British power that went essentially unchallenged in the world for a hundred years, from the fall of Napoleon to the Great War.
So, investment quite large, returns absolutely colossal. Enormous wealth gained and reinvested, country developed from agrarian wool exporter to industrial superpower, world hegemony for a century: I'd say that settling the Americas was a bloody good move, even if in the long run we didn't get to keep them.
Are you quite sure of that? I got my first mobile in 2000 or 2001ish, but through my last few years at high school they got increasingly popular. By the start of 1998 schoolyard bragging rights consisted chiefly of who had the highest score on Snake.
Take a closer look at your phone. There's good odds there's another lens on the front. Video phones are here now and you probably already have one and don't realise it; nobody uses video because 3G connectivity is still expensive on most contracts. And because it's kind of awkward to hold the phone that way anyway.
'This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.'
-- Punk fanzine Sideburns, December 1976
Bit off there. By 1999 56k modems were standard, and I think 512k ADSL was becoming available.
That's a 2009 definition of 'very high bandwidth'. In 1999, the best bandwidth a home user could expect to get was ADSL at 512kb. A typical 3G mobile connection today is around 330kb. At the time of writing, that's high bandwidth all right.
'Don't blame me - I voted for Kudos!'
Two words: Tony Blair.
The whole Obama election had such a strong 1997 feel to it. So much hope. So much belief. So much potential for horrible, crushing disappointment a few years down the line. And because the victory was so completely devastating, there will be no meaningful opposition, because the other party is too busy fighting over the leadership in the conviction that they'll be back in power soon, they only lost because they weren't right-wing enough...
To be fair though, there's reason to hope for better here. Blair fell out of favour chiefly because he got the country embroiled in somebody else's war on the basis of the worst pack of lies ever seen. But I don't think Obama will be taking orders from anybody in quite the same way that Blair had to kowtow to Bush. He won't have to lurch drastically to the right in order to maintain good relations with any foreign feudal overlord, should an election overseas go the wrong way.
This subject is gone into in greater detail in Sudhir Venkatesh's book Gang Leader for a Day - he's the source for the Freakonomics chapter on the economics of the drug trade, and after the success of that book he wrote up the whole story of his study of the underground economy and society.
Not a bit of it, he's spot on. Money is of value solely insofar as it can be exchanged for stuff people want. For goods or services. Only a few nerdy numismatists value money for itself. The game of economics isn't a game of getting money - it's a game of getting stuff you want.
Now the thing is, once you get past basic essentials, what people want can be anything. Entirely up to you. Market economics assumes that people act rationally in how they go about obtaining what they want, but not in deciding what they want in the first place. You really really like Beanie babies? Wow, I've got a bunch of them off my aunt and I don't care for them much. It seems you assign a higher value to Beanie babies than I do. Let's trade! That's why we have an economy in the first place: different people for their own personal reasons assign different values to each commodity, and we all trade, giving away what we value less for what we value more.
So, if a certain person values some abstract called 'dignity' and feels that this would be lost if they took a particular job, then that job will have to offer them a premium to compensate for this. How large a premium it takes will depend on how high a value is put on 'dignity'. It's no different from someone who hates commuting weighing up whether it's worth taking that high-paying job that's thirty miles away, or the lower-paying one within walking distance. Whether it's worth it depends on just how much he hates commuting. So also whether the stripper job is worth it depends on how much you value your dignity.
On the London Underground, the custom is seven hollowpoints in the face and one in the shoulder.
Plus, y'know, Romana.
As I understood it, the 90-day figure was because dust was expected to accumulate on the solar panels. The rovers should have died from lack of power a long time ago. But, as it turned out, the Martian winds are a little stronger than had been thought, and the dust rather lighter; OK, so the rovers are hardly clean, but enough dust blows away that they're able to keep going.
Lore? Join the 21st century. Nobody memorises things these days. I looked up the dates on Wikipedia :-)
Twelve regenerations was never a biological limit; it was something imposed by the Gallifreyan leadership. ISTR that once they offered the Master an extra set of regenerations, in exchange for doing some of their dirty work. Now that the other Time Lords have been exterminated, who's to say there can't be a Fourteenth Doctor?
As for the regeneration rate, the Ninth was short-lived, but the Tenth has had a good long innings. He first appeared in 2005 in the final episode of the first new series, and is scheduled to regenerate in early 2010. So... four or five years. That's quite long for a Doctor. The First did three years, so did the Second and the Fifth. The Third did four, the Sixth two, the Seventh two (well, nine, but he was off the air for most of that), the Eighth and Ninth one each (again, the Eighth technically nine years, same objection).
It's only really Tom Baker who's outdone Tennant in terms of years in the TARDIS. And since he has an enormous TV fanbase from Blackpool, Casanova and Doctor Who, and has lately proved himself to considerable acclaim on the legitimate stage as Hamlet, I imagine he thinks it's about time to move on to some extremely lucrative roles.
IE7 has an Adblock Plus equivalent? News to me. Whenever I have to use IE to browse the web, it's a nightmare. With effective filtering, I've lost my ad-blindness, so now when I go online unprotected I actually see all that crap. Horrible.
The prospect of King Charles is another matter. The Prince of Wales is quite widely considered to be a bit of a prat. That's the moment at which the question of a Republic might be raised.
Ah, I see. Stabbed in the back, were you?
Because suddenly the 'everyone' that pirates films includes the cinemas, who can charge the public to watch the film on the big screen, but don't have to pay the studio for it. Beats having to gouge on popcorn and Pepsi to turn a profit, doesn't it?