The last time I played D&D was over 20 years ago. The rules have changed significantly since AD&D (DDO is based on 3.5), and none of the minutia remained in my memory.
I didn't have a detailed pre-existing mental picture of how the game should work when I downloaded it last year and started playing. Instead, the game met and exceeded my hazy recollections, and then some. I don't have to use my imagination for the video game version, but the convenience of assembling a group, the ability to play anytime, and the variety offered by the character building and development process made it a very fun experience for me. Having a consistent DM who didn't entirely suck (my experience in the past) also helped.
I can relate to your experience. I only ever made it half-way through the first LoTR movie before turning it off in disgust, and will never watch the rest, or the remaining movies by Peter Jackson. I had read the books so many times that the movie was an immense let-down. It didn't even come close to the story as pictured in my mind, and I chose to remain with my mental images of Middle Earth, rather than somebody else's bastardization.
Due to the outcry from their customers, Turbine has taken the Offer Wall down while they sort out the issues that arose due to the half-assed broken way they implemented this lame idea.
I am probably part of the target audience they hoped to attract when they went free to play - someone who hadn't played an MMO before, who had played a bit of pen and paper way back when, and who has disposable income that they are willing to spend if the game is fun enough. So far, it has worked well - I have spent $200 on the game in the past five months on my account and my son's account.
I don't want to deal with a company that I cannot trust, or leave my credit card information in their hands. I absolutely do NOT trust lowlife criminal scum like SuperRewards, and by extension, I do not trust any company that has any dealings with them whatsoever. That means you, Turbine.
I know better than to take any of those offers, but Turbine royally screwed up in their implementation. Even viewing the list of offers on the Turbine site meant that my email address and account name for login was likely transmitted to those parasitic bottom-feeders.
I'll still be playing the game as I bought a ton of content that I have yet to explore, but I will be getting Turbine to remove my credit card info from their billing system if this isn't fixed, and a formal apology issued to their customers by next week. I seriously love this game - it is a ton of fun, many of the players are older, and I don't have to worry about most forms of griefing or PvP emphasis that has kept me away from the entire MMO genre so far. I get to explore instanced dungeons in a small group, and have only explored less than a quarter of the content.
Time to turn the heat up to eleven - DDO players haven't killed it for good yet, or received a formal apology for this privacy breach. Group seppuku by the PHBs who thought up this scheme would be an entirely acceptable response at this time, and would go a long ways towards restoring confidence in the company.
I don't think that Miguel is all that popular. The last time I saw a long thread with him here, he suffered pretty badly. Making mono a dependency in Gnome exposes the project to unnecessary risk.
I respect Stallman far more than de Icaza, both for his thoughts and his actions over the years. Stallman is often taken out of context, but he is very consistent, and his statements almost always make sense years later - sometimes prophetically so.
There are a group of people (mostly affiliated with corporations) who have a hate-on for Stallman, because he values his principles more than he does development speed, ease of use, profits, or being able to use the latest shiny thing from MS.
Been using it since way back around M8, when it was still the Mozilla Suite. Thanks to the Seamonkey crew for keeping it alive. Firefox hasn't been faster in a long time, and the menus and configurability of Seamonkey offer far more configuration options. I deny cookies as my default, and allowing session cookies for a given site is a PITA on Firefox that requires diving through the preferences. In Seamonkey, it's right there in a menu, takes under a second. At the risk of starting a flamewar, Firefox reminds me a bit of Gnome - no options, because the developers don't think you can handle them. Seamonkey is a bit more like KDE - enough options in the dialogs to tweak it to your satisfaction.
I use both, but make sure that Seamonkey is installed on the machines that I spend a lot of time using. I haven't checked in a while to see if it still has about:kitchensink and the Book of Mozilla, but I loved having a browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.
We already know, as there are manual snow course surveys and snow pillows all over the place. Here is a list of 400 or so (some are historic and no longer sampled) snow courses in BC. Many of those get visited every two or four weeks from Jan-Feb through June each year.
I've done the surveys, and you need to measure both snow depth, and moisture content. The process of manual measurement hasn't changed in decades - you drop a metal tube into the ground, pull it up, dig out the soil, measure the weight of the snow that the tube collected, and the depth of the snow. Of the two numbers, the overall moisture content is of greater interest. I hardly even look at snow depth when trying to decide if the water systems I run are facing a drought - the moisture content compared to historic trends is what matters most.
Even then, snow depth is only a guide. If you get high evaporation rates during spring freshet, or lots of wind and moisture loss, what appears to be a healthy snowpack in April can turn into near-record low runoff by June. This year that is exactly what happened in my region. We had a good snowpack, with normal amounts of water equivalent in April, but by June, very little runoff to the reservoirs had taken place. This mostly affected the low and mid elevation watersheds in the Okanagan. The really high elevation watersheds such as Mission Creek had normal runoff, while adjacent watersheds such as Mill and Hydraulic Creeks ended up with varying levels of drought.
More data is always a good thing, but the moisture content matters more than the depth. And even if the data looks promising, that can change in a matter of weeks. You never really know for sure how much water you're going to get until the reservoirs stop filling.
Anecdote for you - not Linux specific, but it relates to software familiarity.
I had a summer student doing some basic GIS work for me this year. Bright guy, third year civil engineering student, familiar with Autocad.
We tried a few different open source gis packages. Based on ease of use, features, and what we needed, I had already narrowed down the likely candidates to QGis and Openjump. QGis has an interface reminiscent of Arcview, which I used for a few projects back in the late 90s. Openjump has an interface that is more cad-like.
I preferred and was more productive in QGis. He preferred and was more productive in Openjump. He used Openjump, which was fine with me - it got the job done.
Experience has provided me with some skepticism regarding the intelligence of crowds. This Sidewiki would be like having a running commentary on the web, written by the same type of people who write Youtube comments and -1 rated comments on Slashdot.
Thanks, but no thanks. Hope that one dies in beta, unless they figure out how to filter out the crap, and bring the valuable contributions to the top. They could start by testing their filters on Youtube.
I haven't used Access since Office 97 or 2000. Base is pretty close in features to those, but I don't think it is up to the latest versions of Access. I'm using Base at work for asset inventory reporting and water quality database (replacing excel, which is all that the techs have used in the past).
I haven't been able to get the Sun report builder extension working yet in either Linux or Windows, but that is about the only piece that is missing. I can generate reports, but the graphing crashes, and that is what I want.
If it was important enough to me, I'd just install Pentaho and use that for reports, but I don't really need the reporting tools yet. They should be more stable by the time I need them.
DeBeers owns a Canadian mine already, Snap Lake. The other mines are pipes, and are being mined using open pits. Snap Lake is a dyke, and they are using conventional tunneling. Way less material to move, and less disturbance of the surrounding area.
I visited Snap Lake in 2000 to work on problems they were having with their wastewater treatment plant, before DeBeers bought Snap Lake. It was only in exploration phase, but when I arrived on site, I was given a form to sign. They are rather paranoid about theft, as the options given to me were to either sign the form and agree to be searched (up to and including a body cavity search), or take the next plane out.
They were still only in advanced exploration phase, but I was told to not look at or pick up rocks on the ground, or to take photos without authorization. I was told that the rules would get even tighter once they hit production.
I got up there in early August, just after black fly season ended. I was the only person who didn't have scabs all over from insect bites. There was still over 20 hours of daylight, and it was quite pretty, although it could be viewed as a bleak and barren landscape compared to the areas south of 60.
He recently donated $7 million to UBC Okanagan. They asked for $5 million, but he wanted to make sure they had some of the best equipment available.
Fipke's daughter went to the same high school as I did, graduating the year ahead of me, a few years before his diamond discoveries made him famous. Back in grade 9, half of the guys in my class had a crush on her.
And withglowinghearts.ca is also taken. Looks like a site for a book about paralympic athletes. Wonder when (not if) the sick heartless [expletive deleted] at IOC will try and yank the domain.
They are terrified of a Conservative majority. If the Liberals, Bloc, or NDP lose just a few more seats, and if the Conservatives somehow gain a majority government, then the Liberals are stuck being the Official Opposition for 5 years.
The Liberals don't want to pull the trigger too early and risk a Conservative majority, so they'll hold their nose until polling results show some improvement in their chances in a general election.
A majority government in Canada looks a lot like the US government when one party has the Presidency, as well as control of Congress and the Senate. The thing that makes it worse in Canada is that the Prime Minister has the executive powers, as well as the equivalent powers to the US Congress House Leader. A majority government has no real checks or balances in Canada.
People have said as a joke that OpenOffice.org or similar programs will take over once they have their own clippy, but may a true word is said in jest.
Well, it worked for vi. Ever since vigor was released, emacs hasn't stood a chance.
The use of door locks and deadbolts could make organizations vulnerable to new risks and threats, a panel of security experts warned Monday.
Many organizations are locking their doors to relieve concerns over material theft or loss - for example, U.S. break and enter statutes do not apply to unlocked doors.
However, experts from IBM Internet Security Systems, Juniper, nCipher and elsewhere said that locking doors also brings new risks, in particular via attacks - deliberate or accidental - on the key management infrastructure.
The change comes particularly with the shift from leaving doors open, as was common in the 1800's, to locking doors and securing buildings with perimeter fences - often in response to regulatory demands - said Richard Moulds, nCipher's product strategy EVP.
"Lot of organizations are new to door locks," he added. "Their only exposure to it has been with padlocks on remote sites, but that's something very few staff have to deal with, and infrequently. When you shift to locking your entire building, right down to the individual executive offices, if you lose the key you trash your access - it's a self-inflicted denial-of-service attack.
"Organizations experienced with door locks are standing back and saying this is potentially a nightmare. It is potentially bringing your business to a grinding halt."
Locking doors is also as big an interest for the bad guys as the good guys, warned Anton Grashion, European security strategist for Juniper. "As soon as you let the cat out of the bag, they'll be using it too," he said. "For example, it looks like a great opportunity to start attacking key infrastructures, as a little bit of epoxy in the keyhole, and whammo, your building is inaccessible."
"It's a new class of DoS attack," agreed Moulds. "If you can go in and damage a lock and then demand a 'protection money' so that it doesn't happen again, it's a fantastic way of attacking a business."
Another risk is that over-zealous use of door locking will damage an organization's ability to legitimately share and use critical business facilities, noted Joshua Corman, principal security strategist for IBM ISS.
"One fear I have is that we're all going to hide and lock up all of our assets such as pens, paper and coffee makers, but companies are asset-driven, so we take tactical decision and stifle ability to collaborate," he said.
"Sometimes, the result of implementing security technology is actually a net increase in risk," added Richard Reiner, chief security and technology officer at Telus Security Solutions.
In the US - and elsewhere - most people have no clue how to help a car accident victim and any attempt by an untrained individual to help is invariably counter-productive.
The best thing to do is to stop, observe, and call 911. Trying to do anything else in a car accident situation is almost always going to cause more harm than good.
That is so wrong that I am almost speechless (luckily I can still type). The skills you learn in a basic (one day) first aid course can make a huge difference as those courses train you to:
Assess the incident scene and hazards - is it safe to help / is further harm going to take place to the patients
Ensure that the victim does not move - that can cause more injury, especially in a crash where spinal trauma is expected, such as any vehicle collision. They may also be able to stabilize the person to prevent accidental movement.
Check vital signs and if airway, breathing or circulation is not present, clear the airway / perform artificial repsiration / CPR as necessary.
Manage a major bleed
The above isn't as much care as a paramedic or hospital can provide, but good initial response is critical for the safety and health of the victim. If your airway is blocked and you are not breathing, you're facing brain damage within 5 minutes. If you get moved improperly when you have a spinal injury, you're more likely to end up in a wheelchair.
I spent 3 years as a volunteer ski patroller, and 3 years as a volunteer firefighter for a department which averaged a few first medical response calls a week. Sure, I've received a lot more training in the past than a one day course can provide - just my spinal management ticket alone took me a weekend. However, anyone with a recent one day first aid training course can be ready to stop a major bleed, apply CPR, and monitor vital signs so that paramedics know if the victim's condition is deteriorating. Most importantly of all, a trained individual can prevent some stupid and misguided untrained know-it-all (and many such idiots exist) from doing something stupid such as improperly moving a patient with a potential spinal injury, etc.
I strongly believe that everyone should at least have a basic level of first aid training, and carry a small first aid kit in their cars. I carry a lot more than a basic kit, but it provides me a higher level of comfort knowing that I'll have both the tools and the training that I need in event of an emergency. There is nothing sadder to hear than the story of parents whose child died from an incident that basic first aid training could have managed, but they either stood by helplessly, or even worse, exacerbated the situation with their improper efforts to help their child.
As others have noted already in this thread, that sort of behaviour is expressly forbidden under the QT licensing. The GPL licensing only applies to open source code developed with QT. If you wish to release commercially, you have to make that decision before you start writing code, and follow their commercial license terms (not the GPL). Their commercial license overview is fairly clear in stating that you cannot legally release commercial code that was developed using the GPL edition.
You must purchase a Qt Commercial License from Trolltech or from any of its authorized resellers before you start developing proprietary software. The Commercial license does not allow the incorporation of code developed with the Open Source Edition of Qt into a proprietary product.
Here's a reference, but it hardly supports your argument.
From the article:
But ongoing maintenance, development and support costs rocketed out of control. Between 1996 and 2001, about $688 million was spent on the program. Of that amount, $250 million went to the computer systems. Support, such as call centers, accounted for $300 million. The remaining $138 million went to advertising and public outreach programs to encourage compliance.
For something a little more recent, the Auditor General's 2006 report includes an update on this sorry program. After wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS), they went out and have wasted another 90 million so far on CFIS II.
Although it was originally planned that the CFIS II development phase initiated in April 2002 would take nine months, after three years it is still under way......The cost of CFIS II was originally estimated at $32 million but is now expected to be at least $87 million.
It is a rather polarized issue, and I don't fully trust the numbers from either side of the debate. For a firearm owners perspective, look here. The numbers should be verifiable, as they reference government websites in Myth's #5 and #6, so if you're going to do any research, please try to find the sources they referenced first. I should note that the next reference corroborates most of the myths.
I thought that it would take me most of the day to try and pull together semi-reliable information on how many of the firearms used in crimes are handguns instead of long rifles (I'd guess mostly handguns), and even more time to determine how many were registered (likely most were stolen or imported from the US by criminals). I got lucky, though, from a Wikipedia article, here's a PDF from Statscan.
Between 1997 and 2000, there were 365 homicides committed
with handguns. In 30% (110) of these homicides where the
handgun was recovered, more than two-thirds (69%) of the
handguns were not registered.
There's plenty more information in that PDF, including gems such as the following:
Handguns were used in about 3 in 10 firearm homicides until
1990. Between 1990 and 1992, homicides using handguns
increased significantly, representing half of all firearm
homicides during those years. This proportion has remained
relatively constant until 2000, when handguns accounted for
six in ten firearm-related homicides. In Australia, some
researchers have attributed increases in the use of handguns
in homicides to the introduction of new, more restrictive firearm
regulations - "offenders tend to use firearms that are easily
concealable and available on the black market, such as
handguns".
The Wikipedia article above indicated that handgun regulations have been in place in Canada since 1892, and registration of handguns has been mandatory in Canada since 1934. When I look at how few deaths long gun registration is likely to prevent, I cannot see any reason to justify the money spent on the program. If we could save a lot more lives in other ways with the same amount of money, it would be criminally negligent to spend so much money for such little return.
GREYCstoration. Ugly name, but does the same job, and is open source. Haven't tried it, but there appear to be several plugins for various open source digicam programs and image editors (bottom of their downloads page).
One site I check every few months is the Victoria Transit Policy Institure . They have a lot of resources on sustainable transportation policy. When I watched my previous employer start paying for additional parking spots for new employees, I looked to VTPI for information on parking cash out. Cash out is an incentive program to not drive - if it costs the company $30/month for a parking spot, cash out programs pay employees the savings from not providing a parking spot. This encourages people to bus and bike to work. In my case, the employer wasn't interested, one of many reasons I no longer work there, but that's another story.
When I read the title of this article, I immediately though of VTPI. There is actually a PDF cowritten by Lawrence Frank which is listed on the VTPI main page, which is available from Smart Growth BC. Lawrence Frank is mentioned in TFA, and several of his studies are linked at the bottom. The Smart Growth BC PDF did not appear to be in the list of links at the bottom of the TFA at Science News Online. The PDF is 52 pages long, and is titled Promoting Public Health Through Smart Growth (also an HTML version from Google cache to avoid melting down Smart Growth BC's server). It's more about how to design your cities properly, to avoid the health issues cited in TFA. From the preface to the PDF:
This report explains how our built
environment shapes our transportation
choices, and in turn, human health. It
reviews the existing research for a range of
transportation-related health impacts on
seven public health outcomes: Physical
Activity and Obesity, Air Quality, Traffic
Safety, Noise, Water Quality, Mental Health,
and Social Capital.
I enjoy most of the information on the VTPI site, but then again, for me, they're mostly preaching to the converted. I'd rather relax and read on the bus for an hour, or enjoy a 1 hour bike ride to work than fight rush hour traffic in a car for a half hour.
I watched the video as well, and agree. He wasn't making threats. Dr. Bussard was pleading that the opportunity not be lost by the US. He believes it is promising enough that his work will be built upon and completed by someone in the world. In spite of the problems with the American empire, there are many countries with the resources to do this fusion work that I would not want to see in a dominant economic position in the world. All it would take is a 15 year monopoly in a working version of this technology to basically own the world economy.
While I watched it the video early this morning, I clearly remember him stating that while the physics side of the work was almost done, the engineering challenges would take at least 10x the money to solve - I think he actually said that proving the physics is the easy part. Unlike the slur in the grandparent post, Dr. Bussard did not in any way dismiss the engineering challenges that remain.
If he were selling 80% of the company for $200 million, I'd put $5k into purchasing shares (to get 0.002% of the company). I'm not rich, but it has an attractive risk/reward ratio, and while losing $5k would suck, it wouldn't break me. All Dr. Bussard needs to do now is find 40,000 other people like me, but as he said, he's tired.
July, 1983 - The Sony Walkman has dominated the portable cassette player market so far. It began the ultimate revolution in how we listen to our music......
Back to the present, the Walkman ceased to dominate the industry 15 years ago or more. The iPod will someday share it's fate. TFA is a lame blog article written by some fanboy who thinks he is creative, insightful, and discerning.
You know Taco, if it is a slow news day, it's better to leave the front page alone than to post "stories" like this just for the sake of filling space.
See if you can get your power company to install an electrical meter with radio-read capabilities. I'm more familiar with water meters, which come in at least two flavours - radio read that sends a signal back in response to a message from the meter reader (using a hand-held meter reading "gun"), and a unit which sends a small packet of meter information every 1-5 minutes. Some info on Wikipedia about automatic meter reading (AMR).
Then all you have to do is possibly reverse engineer their protocol, or at least connect a radio transceiver to your PC and program your own meter reading software.
Of course, I think you are worrying too much about having instantaneous data. I would approach your power usage as an environmental auditing problem. Your power use is more a result of your long term habits and the devices you use. Does it really matter whether your computer and 22" CRT use 600 or 800 watts combined when you know that a Mac mini and LCD would probably use half of that or less? Do you really need to leave your computer on overnight? Does it matter that you have energy saving light bulbs if you leave every light in the house on all day? Is your refrigerator more than 10 years old? Are your appliances energy star rated? Do you hang your clothes to dry outside whenever you can, or do you use an electric clothes dryer?
For power consumption, average long term values are more going to be more important than real-time numbers. By changing your habits and the way you use energy, and tracking the changes and the effects on power consumption as you do that, you'll have more of an impact, that will last far longer than your current fascination with your power usage. You might want to measure the total energy used in a day or a week by various appliances such as your fridge or your TV, in order to determine whether it makes sense to replace them with more energy-efficient models. Beyond that, electrical powered devices use power, just like cars use gasoline. If you choose to use them, you're going to have to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I played D&D was over 20 years ago. The rules have changed significantly since AD&D (DDO is based on 3.5), and none of the minutia remained in my memory.
I didn't have a detailed pre-existing mental picture of how the game should work when I downloaded it last year and started playing. Instead, the game met and exceeded my hazy recollections, and then some. I don't have to use my imagination for the video game version, but the convenience of assembling a group, the ability to play anytime, and the variety offered by the character building and development process made it a very fun experience for me. Having a consistent DM who didn't entirely suck (my experience in the past) also helped.
I can relate to your experience. I only ever made it half-way through the first LoTR movie before turning it off in disgust, and will never watch the rest, or the remaining movies by Peter Jackson. I had read the books so many times that the movie was an immense let-down. It didn't even come close to the story as pictured in my mind, and I chose to remain with my mental images of Middle Earth, rather than somebody else's bastardization.
Due to the outcry from their customers, Turbine has taken the Offer Wall down while they sort out the issues that arose due to the half-assed broken way they implemented this lame idea.
I am probably part of the target audience they hoped to attract when they went free to play - someone who hadn't played an MMO before, who had played a bit of pen and paper way back when, and who has disposable income that they are willing to spend if the game is fun enough. So far, it has worked well - I have spent $200 on the game in the past five months on my account and my son's account.
I don't want to deal with a company that I cannot trust, or leave my credit card information in their hands. I absolutely do NOT trust lowlife criminal scum like SuperRewards, and by extension, I do not trust any company that has any dealings with them whatsoever. That means you, Turbine.
I know better than to take any of those offers, but Turbine royally screwed up in their implementation. Even viewing the list of offers on the Turbine site meant that my email address and account name for login was likely transmitted to those parasitic bottom-feeders.
I'll still be playing the game as I bought a ton of content that I have yet to explore, but I will be getting Turbine to remove my credit card info from their billing system if this isn't fixed, and a formal apology issued to their customers by next week. I seriously love this game - it is a ton of fun, many of the players are older, and I don't have to worry about most forms of griefing or PvP emphasis that has kept me away from the entire MMO genre so far. I get to explore instanced dungeons in a small group, and have only explored less than a quarter of the content.
Time to turn the heat up to eleven - DDO players haven't killed it for good yet, or received a formal apology for this privacy breach. Group seppuku by the PHBs who thought up this scheme would be an entirely acceptable response at this time, and would go a long ways towards restoring confidence in the company.
I don't think that Miguel is all that popular. The last time I saw a long thread with him here, he suffered pretty badly. Making mono a dependency in Gnome exposes the project to unnecessary risk.
I respect Stallman far more than de Icaza, both for his thoughts and his actions over the years. Stallman is often taken out of context, but he is very consistent, and his statements almost always make sense years later - sometimes prophetically so.
There are a group of people (mostly affiliated with corporations) who have a hate-on for Stallman, because he values his principles more than he does development speed, ease of use, profits, or being able to use the latest shiny thing from MS.
Been using it since way back around M8, when it was still the Mozilla Suite. Thanks to the Seamonkey crew for keeping it alive. Firefox hasn't been faster in a long time, and the menus and configurability of Seamonkey offer far more configuration options. I deny cookies as my default, and allowing session cookies for a given site is a PITA on Firefox that requires diving through the preferences. In Seamonkey, it's right there in a menu, takes under a second. At the risk of starting a flamewar, Firefox reminds me a bit of Gnome - no options, because the developers don't think you can handle them. Seamonkey is a bit more like KDE - enough options in the dialogs to tweak it to your satisfaction.
I use both, but make sure that Seamonkey is installed on the machines that I spend a lot of time using. I haven't checked in a while to see if it still has about:kitchensink and the Book of Mozilla, but I loved having a browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.
We already know, as there are manual snow course surveys and snow pillows all over the place. Here is a list of 400 or so (some are historic and no longer sampled) snow courses in BC. Many of those get visited every two or four weeks from Jan-Feb through June each year.
I've done the surveys, and you need to measure both snow depth, and moisture content. The process of manual measurement hasn't changed in decades - you drop a metal tube into the ground, pull it up, dig out the soil, measure the weight of the snow that the tube collected, and the depth of the snow. Of the two numbers, the overall moisture content is of greater interest. I hardly even look at snow depth when trying to decide if the water systems I run are facing a drought - the moisture content compared to historic trends is what matters most.
Even then, snow depth is only a guide. If you get high evaporation rates during spring freshet, or lots of wind and moisture loss, what appears to be a healthy snowpack in April can turn into near-record low runoff by June. This year that is exactly what happened in my region. We had a good snowpack, with normal amounts of water equivalent in April, but by June, very little runoff to the reservoirs had taken place. This mostly affected the low and mid elevation watersheds in the Okanagan. The really high elevation watersheds such as Mission Creek had normal runoff, while adjacent watersheds such as Mill and Hydraulic Creeks ended up with varying levels of drought.
More data is always a good thing, but the moisture content matters more than the depth. And even if the data looks promising, that can change in a matter of weeks. You never really know for sure how much water you're going to get until the reservoirs stop filling.
Anecdote for you - not Linux specific, but it relates to software familiarity.
I had a summer student doing some basic GIS work for me this year. Bright guy, third year civil engineering student, familiar with Autocad.
We tried a few different open source gis packages. Based on ease of use, features, and what we needed, I had already narrowed down the likely candidates to QGis and Openjump. QGis has an interface reminiscent of Arcview, which I used for a few projects back in the late 90s. Openjump has an interface that is more cad-like.
I preferred and was more productive in QGis. He preferred and was more productive in Openjump. He used Openjump, which was fine with me - it got the job done.
Experience has provided me with some skepticism regarding the intelligence of crowds. This Sidewiki would be like having a running commentary on the web, written by the same type of people who write Youtube comments and -1 rated comments on Slashdot.
Thanks, but no thanks. Hope that one dies in beta, unless they figure out how to filter out the crap, and bring the valuable contributions to the top. They could start by testing their filters on Youtube.
I haven't used Access since Office 97 or 2000. Base is pretty close in features to those, but I don't think it is up to the latest versions of Access. I'm using Base at work for asset inventory reporting and water quality database (replacing excel, which is all that the techs have used in the past).
I haven't been able to get the Sun report builder extension working yet in either Linux or Windows, but that is about the only piece that is missing. I can generate reports, but the graphing crashes, and that is what I want.
If it was important enough to me, I'd just install Pentaho and use that for reports, but I don't really need the reporting tools yet. They should be more stable by the time I need them.
DeBeers owns a Canadian mine already, Snap Lake. The other mines are pipes, and are being mined using open pits. Snap Lake is a dyke, and they are using conventional tunneling. Way less material to move, and less disturbance of the surrounding area.
I visited Snap Lake in 2000 to work on problems they were having with their wastewater treatment plant, before DeBeers bought Snap Lake. It was only in exploration phase, but when I arrived on site, I was given a form to sign. They are rather paranoid about theft, as the options given to me were to either sign the form and agree to be searched (up to and including a body cavity search), or take the next plane out.
They were still only in advanced exploration phase, but I was told to not look at or pick up rocks on the ground, or to take photos without authorization. I was told that the rules would get even tighter once they hit production.
I got up there in early August, just after black fly season ended. I was the only person who didn't have scabs all over from insect bites. There was still over 20 hours of daylight, and it was quite pretty, although it could be viewed as a bleak and barren landscape compared to the areas south of 60.
He recently donated $7 million to UBC Okanagan. They asked for $5 million, but he wanted to make sure they had some of the best equipment available.
Fipke's daughter went to the same high school as I did, graduating the year ahead of me, a few years before his diamond discoveries made him famous. Back in grade 9, half of the guys in my class had a crush on her.
And withglowinghearts.ca is also taken. Looks like a site for a book about paralympic athletes. Wonder when (not if) the sick heartless [expletive deleted] at IOC will try and yank the domain.
Am I the only one who read that as "Eternal Beta"?
They are terrified of a Conservative majority. If the Liberals, Bloc, or NDP lose just a few more seats, and if the Conservatives somehow gain a majority government, then the Liberals are stuck being the Official Opposition for 5 years.
The Liberals don't want to pull the trigger too early and risk a Conservative majority, so they'll hold their nose until polling results show some improvement in their chances in a general election.
A majority government in Canada looks a lot like the US government when one party has the Presidency, as well as control of Congress and the Senate. The thing that makes it worse in Canada is that the Prime Minister has the executive powers, as well as the equivalent powers to the US Congress House Leader. A majority government has no real checks or balances in Canada.
The use of door locks and deadbolts could make organizations vulnerable to new risks and threats, a panel of security experts warned Monday.
Many organizations are locking their doors to relieve concerns over material theft or loss - for example, U.S. break and enter statutes do not apply to unlocked doors.
However, experts from IBM Internet Security Systems, Juniper, nCipher and elsewhere said that locking doors also brings new risks, in particular via attacks - deliberate or accidental - on the key management infrastructure.
The change comes particularly with the shift from leaving doors open, as was common in the 1800's, to locking doors and securing buildings with perimeter fences - often in response to regulatory demands - said Richard Moulds, nCipher's product strategy EVP.
"Lot of organizations are new to door locks," he added. "Their only exposure to it has been with padlocks on remote sites, but that's something very few staff have to deal with, and infrequently. When you shift to locking your entire building, right down to the individual executive offices, if you lose the key you trash your access - it's a self-inflicted denial-of-service attack.
"Organizations experienced with door locks are standing back and saying this is potentially a nightmare. It is potentially bringing your business to a grinding halt."
Locking doors is also as big an interest for the bad guys as the good guys, warned Anton Grashion, European security strategist for Juniper. "As soon as you let the cat out of the bag, they'll be using it too," he said. "For example, it looks like a great opportunity to start attacking key infrastructures, as a little bit of epoxy in the keyhole, and whammo, your building is inaccessible."
"It's a new class of DoS attack," agreed Moulds. "If you can go in and damage a lock and then demand a 'protection money' so that it doesn't happen again, it's a fantastic way of attacking a business."
Another risk is that over-zealous use of door locking will damage an organization's ability to legitimately share and use critical business facilities, noted Joshua Corman, principal security strategist for IBM ISS.
"One fear I have is that we're all going to hide and lock up all of our assets such as pens, paper and coffee makers, but companies are asset-driven, so we take tactical decision and stifle ability to collaborate," he said.
"Sometimes, the result of implementing security technology is actually a net increase in risk," added Richard Reiner, chief security and technology officer at Telus Security Solutions.
The above isn't as much care as a paramedic or hospital can provide, but good initial response is critical for the safety and health of the victim. If your airway is blocked and you are not breathing, you're facing brain damage within 5 minutes. If you get moved improperly when you have a spinal injury, you're more likely to end up in a wheelchair.
I spent 3 years as a volunteer ski patroller, and 3 years as a volunteer firefighter for a department which averaged a few first medical response calls a week. Sure, I've received a lot more training in the past than a one day course can provide - just my spinal management ticket alone took me a weekend. However, anyone with a recent one day first aid training course can be ready to stop a major bleed, apply CPR, and monitor vital signs so that paramedics know if the victim's condition is deteriorating. Most importantly of all, a trained individual can prevent some stupid and misguided untrained know-it-all (and many such idiots exist) from doing something stupid such as improperly moving a patient with a potential spinal injury, etc.
I strongly believe that everyone should at least have a basic level of first aid training, and carry a small first aid kit in their cars. I carry a lot more than a basic kit, but it provides me a higher level of comfort knowing that I'll have both the tools and the training that I need in event of an emergency. There is nothing sadder to hear than the story of parents whose child died from an incident that basic first aid training could have managed, but they either stood by helplessly, or even worse, exacerbated the situation with their improper efforts to help their child.
As others have noted already in this thread, that sort of behaviour is expressly forbidden under the QT licensing. The GPL licensing only applies to open source code developed with QT. If you wish to release commercially, you have to make that decision before you start writing code, and follow their commercial license terms (not the GPL). Their commercial license overview is fairly clear in stating that you cannot legally release commercial code that was developed using the GPL edition.
From Trolltech:
Don't joke. Something similar has been done before.
A vacuum pump would lead to the loss of even more of the volatile flavour compounds. It would probably give you worse coffee than gravity filtration.
Here's a reference, but it hardly supports your argument.
From the article:
For something a little more recent, the Auditor General's 2006 report includes an update on this sorry program. After wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS), they went out and have wasted another 90 million so far on CFIS II.It is a rather polarized issue, and I don't fully trust the numbers from either side of the debate. For a firearm owners perspective, look here. The numbers should be verifiable, as they reference government websites in Myth's #5 and #6, so if you're going to do any research, please try to find the sources they referenced first. I should note that the next reference corroborates most of the myths.
I thought that it would take me most of the day to try and pull together semi-reliable information on how many of the firearms used in crimes are handguns instead of long rifles (I'd guess mostly handguns), and even more time to determine how many were registered (likely most were stolen or imported from the US by criminals). I got lucky, though, from a Wikipedia article, here's a PDF from Statscan.
There's plenty more information in that PDF, including gems such as the following: The Wikipedia article above indicated that handgun regulations have been in place in Canada since 1892, and registration of handguns has been mandatory in Canada since 1934. When I look at how few deaths long gun registration is likely to prevent, I cannot see any reason to justify the money spent on the program. If we could save a lot more lives in other ways with the same amount of money, it would be criminally negligent to spend so much money for such little return.GREYCstoration. Ugly name, but does the same job, and is open source. Haven't tried it, but there appear to be several plugins for various open source digicam programs and image editors (bottom of their downloads page).
One site I check every few months is the Victoria Transit Policy Institure . They have a lot of resources on sustainable transportation policy. When I watched my previous employer start paying for additional parking spots for new employees, I looked to VTPI for information on parking cash out. Cash out is an incentive program to not drive - if it costs the company $30/month for a parking spot, cash out programs pay employees the savings from not providing a parking spot. This encourages people to bus and bike to work. In my case, the employer wasn't interested, one of many reasons I no longer work there, but that's another story.
When I read the title of this article, I immediately though of VTPI. There is actually a PDF cowritten by Lawrence Frank which is listed on the VTPI main page, which is available from Smart Growth BC. Lawrence Frank is mentioned in TFA, and several of his studies are linked at the bottom. The Smart Growth BC PDF did not appear to be in the list of links at the bottom of the TFA at Science News Online. The PDF is 52 pages long, and is titled Promoting Public Health Through Smart Growth (also an HTML version from Google cache to avoid melting down Smart Growth BC's server). It's more about how to design your cities properly, to avoid the health issues cited in TFA. From the preface to the PDF:
I enjoy most of the information on the VTPI site, but then again, for me, they're mostly preaching to the converted. I'd rather relax and read on the bus for an hour, or enjoy a 1 hour bike ride to work than fight rush hour traffic in a car for a half hour.I watched the video as well, and agree. He wasn't making threats. Dr. Bussard was pleading that the opportunity not be lost by the US. He believes it is promising enough that his work will be built upon and completed by someone in the world. In spite of the problems with the American empire, there are many countries with the resources to do this fusion work that I would not want to see in a dominant economic position in the world. All it would take is a 15 year monopoly in a working version of this technology to basically own the world economy.
While I watched it the video early this morning, I clearly remember him stating that while the physics side of the work was almost done, the engineering challenges would take at least 10x the money to solve - I think he actually said that proving the physics is the easy part. Unlike the slur in the grandparent post, Dr. Bussard did not in any way dismiss the engineering challenges that remain.
If he were selling 80% of the company for $200 million, I'd put $5k into purchasing shares (to get 0.002% of the company). I'm not rich, but it has an attractive risk/reward ratio, and while losing $5k would suck, it wouldn't break me. All Dr. Bussard needs to do now is find 40,000 other people like me, but as he said, he's tired.
July, 1983 - The Sony Walkman has dominated the portable cassette player market so far. It began the ultimate revolution in how we listen to our music......
Back to the present, the Walkman ceased to dominate the industry 15 years ago or more. The iPod will someday share it's fate. TFA is a lame blog article written by some fanboy who thinks he is creative, insightful, and discerning.
You know Taco, if it is a slow news day, it's better to leave the front page alone than to post "stories" like this just for the sake of filling space.
See if you can get your power company to install an electrical meter with radio-read capabilities. I'm more familiar with water meters, which come in at least two flavours - radio read that sends a signal back in response to a message from the meter reader (using a hand-held meter reading "gun"), and a unit which sends a small packet of meter information every 1-5 minutes. Some info on Wikipedia about automatic meter reading (AMR).
Then all you have to do is possibly reverse engineer their protocol, or at least connect a radio transceiver to your PC and program your own meter reading software.
Of course, I think you are worrying too much about having instantaneous data. I would approach your power usage as an environmental auditing problem. Your power use is more a result of your long term habits and the devices you use. Does it really matter whether your computer and 22" CRT use 600 or 800 watts combined when you know that a Mac mini and LCD would probably use half of that or less? Do you really need to leave your computer on overnight? Does it matter that you have energy saving light bulbs if you leave every light in the house on all day? Is your refrigerator more than 10 years old? Are your appliances energy star rated? Do you hang your clothes to dry outside whenever you can, or do you use an electric clothes dryer?
For power consumption, average long term values are more going to be more important than real-time numbers. By changing your habits and the way you use energy, and tracking the changes and the effects on power consumption as you do that, you'll have more of an impact, that will last far longer than your current fascination with your power usage. You might want to measure the total energy used in a day or a week by various appliances such as your fridge or your TV, in order to determine whether it makes sense to replace them with more energy-efficient models. Beyond that, electrical powered devices use power, just like cars use gasoline. If you choose to use them, you're going to have to pay.