My glasses have scratches on both lenses near the apex of the curve... which of course happens to be right where my eyes are. They're still usable, but there's a definate blurriness to them. I'm guessing that this is from using them with eye-protective goggles and having the two rub together.
According to the people at the glasses store, there isn't a real way to fix them up, but if it works for CD's.... perhaps there's a way to at least make my prescription eyeware more useful again?
Luckily, I only need the things at night when driving, or when playing airsoft in dim light (which is of course where my extra protection happily scratched them in the first place), but it would sure be nice to fix them up rather than getting a new pair....
I could see big problems with trying to get MIDI notes out of a real guitar's (or really any instrument's) output due to the aforementioned issues with polyphonics, vibrato, and other massive amounts of combinations/differentials.
However, what if you had a program where you could take a guitar, and tune it to the application rather than the other way around, with possibly a bit of back-tuning to compensate for guitar/string differences. After all, all the app needs to know is if the input, with a variation for error, matches the expected result.
It would take some serious CPU power to determine from the thousands to millions of possible combinations what the actual input was, but if you're just saying "does the input match this expected (correct for the game) result, within a particular deviation", it should be a fair bit more doabl.
From what I read, it comes bundled with downloads of realplayer, but realplayer is not bundles with downloads of firefox.
In other words: Firefox=Firefox, Realplayer=Realplayer+Firefox
Still not the nicest company to bundle with in terms of reputation, but at least it doesn't seem that you're getting stuck with Real when installed firefox.
Go to a shoe store. Go look at the men's section, then go to the women's section. Compare sizes, variety of selection, etc.
Compare the amount of customers buying shoes, especially non-utilitarian and/or expensive shoes (although workboots with steel-toes, etc are rather pricey).
My girlfriend, mother, sister, grandmother, and many other women I know are insane about shoes. I do have female friends that are much more practical about it, and like me they look at which shoes will last the longest and still look decent, but overall I've found most women I know have a large number of fancy overprice shoes that rarely get worn.
You briefly mention it, but I think that it's the artificial diamonds that are probably keeping DeBeers et al up late at night with nightmares of profit-loss.
When we're talking about a substance that is cheaper, and most easily identifiable by its lack of flaws in comparison to the competing product, then I'd imagine that DeBeers is not very happy. I'm also happy that it appears the Canadian industry has resisted DeBeers takeover, probably because they were dealt with rather heavy-handedly to start with.
Still, in the end I'd rather go for a Sapphire, it's nicer - though possibly a bit more costly - and I'll just try to avoid any that might be associated with the evil aforementioned rock merchants.
As another aside, I believe that humans were supposed to make nice diamonds, so I might opt to become one after being cremated, as the end result would be of more social and sentimental value than an urn full of dust (assuming there's enough in me to make a diamond from).
Throwing an object at somebody could fall under normal laws, possibly as assault or various others. Walking around brandishing knives, as a group, would likely designate them as 'weapons' and fall under existing laws as well.
There is a difference between behavioral issues (which might catch some of the foulmouthed, disruptive, but not actually violent buggers around) and criminal and/or violence issues.
Depending on the area, I've heard quite a few stories where individuals who are black have often been pulled over (when driving, particular when driving a new car in a 'white' area) without strong reason. This is sometimes referred to as DWB.
While you might not have been harassed while being pulled over, have you ever run into incidents where your race seemed to be a factor in that you were pulled over in the first place?
I agree that there probably aren't *that* many bad cops out there, but like individuals of any group the really bad ones tend to stand out a whole lot more, and they can make your life rather miserable. I do think that one of the two primary reasons for being a cop would be either the classic 'to serve and protect' or 'to be in power', and a lot of people from group #2 do tend to be jerks.
Nexuiz,an FPS which I believe is based on the Darkplaces engine. It runs natively on 'nix, and is actually pretty spiffy in the graphics+gameplay arena if you have a decent/good card.
As a bonus for my fellow Debianites, it's also available on Debian/testing (and I believe the equivilent in Ubuntu, as well).
But unfortunately, these often don't work for multiplayer games, as the security checks/updates will detect and either overwrite your crack, or refuse to start the game.
Still, normal Wine+cracks is good for single-player stuff in most cases
Did this strike a familiar chord with anyone else who's read books by Ringo/Weber (military futuristic sci-fi authors). I remember in particular that the series starting with "March Upcountry" had chameleon suits which, in addition to camoflague, had very similar properties in that they would absorb and spread out hits by kinetic weapons.
One of the comments attached to the article mentions an offensive use as well in sci-fi:
Life imitates art; John M. Brunner anticipated this many years ago in his science fiction classic, "Stand on Zanzibar." Characters wore what was called a "Karatang" on their hand. Worn like a glove, they remained flexible until they were used to strike an object, whereupon they hardened into a steel-like gauntlet, packing a serious "punch.
I prefer the idea of dissipative armor, but it's nice to see that fantasy can still become reality.
Actually, this made me thing of something interesting in terms of parental vocabulary.
Mothering a child: Usually means to some degree controlling or organizing the life, and participating to possible an un-necessary level
Fathering a child: Getting somebody pregnant
Just a thought that crossed my mind, as even in such common terms we basically associate men as sperm-doners and not with the general rearing of children. There are, however, families where fathers are the more active participant in childrens' lives, or the only one, or one of two in the same gender. I have heard of men "mothering" children before, but never of a woman "fathering" one, so it does seem that there's a lot of parental-gender focus in such things.
Drug companies are being evil by not caring for those that have suffered serious injury or side-effects as a result of their tests. Test-subjects are stupid for having signed up in the first place, as $4000 isn't worth the possibly life-altering or life-ending side effects.
Even if windows made themselves the sole retailer for new copies of XP, etc, there is still the issue of selling used copies (which in many countries you really can't illegitimize, despite what many corps are trying to do).
is contention was that Linux gives handset manufacturers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) "complete control"
I would imagine that it also empowers the users, as many of the licenses would require the cellphone providers to supply their code if they've used GPL components. Consequently, the phone-service providers probably wouldn't be very happy with this as it makes it easier to bypass their $2/ringtone and assorted other lockdowns and crippling of the phones they provide. Speaking of which, wherabouts do the cellphone makers provide their source for OS-using apps?
Hmmm, I notice that they have a 'family guy' banner amongst a few others. Were they granted the rights to use that character, or are they perhaps in violation?
Indeed, I've seen the same done with "skill points" in both fantasy and sci-fi settings. Higher skill lets you used bigger, badder weapons. Personal skills also give you higher health, better healing rate, better ability to dodge, hack computers or whatever. Star Wars KOTR pulled this off fairly well, but I've seen many previous games that did it just as well.
Assuming that the story poster is connecting right through the PC without some weird PC-to-phone stuff (I'm not sure what the plantronics headset looks like), why not just get a soundcard that allows direct audio capture. I know my SBLive card has a "what u hear" option in the recording area, which basically lets you capture all the audio going through the card. This should give the same quality as whatever you're hearing during the actual conversation.
Yeah, doesn't make sense to me. They're going to ban a major bookselling online entity in libraries. Now there's a whole latta sense. And slashdot, hmmm, well while there are definately a certain number of creepy people on here (you know who you are), I'd have to say that they tend to be creepy in the lack-of-social-knowhow sense rather than the dangerous-to-children sense.
For the mostpart the "other races" are still humanoid though, but fantasy has plenty of things beyond that such as dragons, beholders, and various other tentacle monsters. There are plenty of identifiable aliens as well, those from the Alien movie (bipedal/quadripedal), predators, klingons, kilrathi (sp?), Kzinti, Posleen, etc etc
Yeah, somebody might not immediately identify with a Posleen (basically centaur-structured lizards), but the badasses from the Alien series are pretty identifiable (ever played AvP), and the Kzinti/Kilrathi are pretty much fuzzy people.
Thinking about it, one of the previous comments definately hits near the mark. People will identify with being an orc, hill-giant, or hobbit because they're common fantasy characaters. People could also identify with being a Klingon, Geiger-Alien, Predator, Kzinti, etc.... but that's not going to happen because when you include them all you're probably going to have your ass sued into the next starsystem by the copyright owners of Star Trek, Aliens, Predator, and the Larry Niven books. I suppose you could make similar characters and/or use parody (a-la SpaceQuest), but look at what happen with City of Heroes and the lawsuits wherein players could make characters similar to movie entities.
Anothe reason why current Intellectual Property laws suck ass, while using a Klingon named "Worf" in your game might be dubious, you shouldn't be attacked for having something klingon-like, hell it's a compliment to the creators.
Don't a lot of the fantasy genre still have thing like projectile-casting spells (fireballs, etc) or various types of bows, spears, or other manual projectile launchers. How is this different from guns or laser beams in terms of implementation? In the end, many of the projected sci-fi technology (time distortion fields, transmogrifiers, etc) is still just a fantastic as things in fantasy worlds having hobbits and orcs.
Did the US government or some related body ban the use of Lenovo laptops because of suspicions that they might contain hardware/software used to spy on the user?
To be safe, I find it's better to use a VPN (openVPN or whatnot is cross-OS compatible). You get key-based authorization, a higher level of encryption, and you can just ditch the non-VPN traffic (or send it to goatse)
Well, first of all then they're quite likely to just go jack somebody else's connection. It's much more fun to mess with 'em.
I wonder if you could write something that took all P2P traffic, redirected it locally, and uploaded copies of custom video files etc in the place of their kazaa/torrent downloads:-)
Slashdot Mirror
My glasses have scratches on both lenses near the apex of the curve... which of course happens to be right where my eyes are. They're still usable, but there's a definate blurriness to them. I'm guessing that this is from using them with eye-protective goggles and having the two rub together.
According to the people at the glasses store, there isn't a real way to fix them up, but if it works for CD's.... perhaps there's a way to at least make my prescription eyeware more useful again?
Luckily, I only need the things at night when driving, or when playing airsoft in dim light (which is of course where my extra protection happily scratched them in the first place), but it would sure be nice to fix them up rather than getting a new pair....
Reminds me of This quote
I could see big problems with trying to get MIDI notes out of a real guitar's (or really any instrument's) output due to the aforementioned issues with polyphonics, vibrato, and other massive amounts of combinations/differentials.
However, what if you had a program where you could take a guitar, and tune it to the application rather than the other way around, with possibly a bit of back-tuning to compensate for guitar/string differences. After all, all the app needs to know is if the input, with a variation for error, matches the expected result.
It would take some serious CPU power to determine from the thousands to millions of possible combinations what the actual input was, but if you're just saying "does the input match this expected (correct for the game) result, within a particular deviation", it should be a fair bit more doabl.
From what I read, it comes bundled with downloads of realplayer, but realplayer is not bundles with downloads of firefox.
In other words: Firefox=Firefox, Realplayer=Realplayer+Firefox
Still not the nicest company to bundle with in terms of reputation, but at least it doesn't seem that you're getting stuck with Real when installed firefox.
Go to a shoe store. Go look at the men's section, then go to the women's section. Compare sizes, variety of selection, etc.
Compare the amount of customers buying shoes, especially non-utilitarian and/or expensive shoes (although workboots with steel-toes, etc are rather pricey).
My girlfriend, mother, sister, grandmother, and many other women I know are insane about shoes. I do have female friends that are much more practical about it, and like me they look at which shoes will last the longest and still look decent, but overall I've found most women I know have a large number of fancy overprice shoes that rarely get worn.
You briefly mention it, but I think that it's the artificial diamonds that are probably keeping DeBeers et al up late at night with nightmares of profit-loss.
When we're talking about a substance that is cheaper, and most easily identifiable by its lack of flaws in comparison to the competing product, then I'd imagine that DeBeers is not very happy. I'm also happy that it appears the Canadian industry has resisted DeBeers takeover, probably because they were dealt with rather heavy-handedly to start with.
Still, in the end I'd rather go for a Sapphire, it's nicer - though possibly a bit more costly - and I'll just try to avoid any that might be associated with the evil aforementioned rock merchants.
As another aside, I believe that humans were supposed to make nice diamonds, so I might opt to become one after being cremated, as the end result would be of more social and sentimental value than an urn full of dust (assuming there's enough in me to make a diamond from).
Throwing an object at somebody could fall under normal laws, possibly as assault or various others. Walking around brandishing knives, as a group, would likely designate them as 'weapons' and fall under existing laws as well.
There is a difference between behavioral issues (which might catch some of the foulmouthed, disruptive, but not actually violent buggers around) and criminal and/or violence issues.
Depending on the area, I've heard quite a few stories where individuals who are black have often been pulled over (when driving, particular when driving a new car in a 'white' area) without strong reason. This is sometimes referred to as DWB.
While you might not have been harassed while being pulled over, have you ever run into incidents where your race seemed to be a factor in that you were pulled over in the first place?
I agree that there probably aren't *that* many bad cops out there, but like individuals of any group the really bad ones tend to stand out a whole lot more, and they can make your life rather miserable. I do think that one of the two primary reasons for being a cop would be either the classic 'to serve and protect' or 'to be in power', and a lot of people from group #2 do tend to be jerks.
Nexuiz,an FPS which I believe is based on the Darkplaces engine. It runs natively on 'nix, and is actually pretty spiffy in the graphics+gameplay arena if you have a decent/good card.
As a bonus for my fellow Debianites, it's also available on Debian/testing (and I believe the equivilent in Ubuntu, as well).
But unfortunately, these often don't work for multiplayer games, as the security checks/updates will detect and either overwrite your crack, or refuse to start the game.
Still, normal Wine+cracks is good for single-player stuff in most cases
Did this strike a familiar chord with anyone else who's read books by Ringo/Weber (military futuristic sci-fi authors). I remember in particular that the series starting with "March Upcountry" had chameleon suits which, in addition to camoflague, had very similar properties in that they would absorb and spread out hits by kinetic weapons.
One of the comments attached to the article mentions an offensive use as well in sci-fi:
Life imitates art; John M. Brunner anticipated this many years ago in his science fiction classic, "Stand on Zanzibar." Characters wore what was called a "Karatang" on their hand. Worn like a glove, they remained flexible until they were used to strike an object, whereupon they hardened into a steel-like gauntlet, packing a serious "punch.
I prefer the idea of dissipative armor, but it's nice to see that fantasy can still become reality.
Actually, this made me thing of something interesting in terms of parental vocabulary.
Mothering a child: Usually means to some degree controlling or organizing the life, and participating to possible an un-necessary level
Fathering a child: Getting somebody pregnant
Just a thought that crossed my mind, as even in such common terms we basically associate men as sperm-doners and not with the general rearing of children. There are, however, families where fathers are the more active participant in childrens' lives, or the only one, or one of two in the same gender. I have heard of men "mothering" children before, but never of a woman "fathering" one, so it does seem that there's a lot of parental-gender focus in such things.
Drug companies are being evil by not caring for those that have suffered serious injury or side-effects as a result of their tests. Test-subjects are stupid for having signed up in the first place, as $4000 isn't worth the possibly life-altering or life-ending side effects.
IBM Linux Drivers (for a random chipset) [intel.com]
When did IBM buy Intel?
Even if windows made themselves the sole retailer for new copies of XP, etc, there is still the issue of selling used copies (which in many countries you really can't illegitimize, despite what many corps are trying to do).
is contention was that Linux gives handset manufacturers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) "complete control"
I would imagine that it also empowers the users, as many of the licenses would require the cellphone providers to supply their code if they've used GPL components. Consequently, the phone-service providers probably wouldn't be very happy with this as it makes it easier to bypass their $2/ringtone and assorted other lockdowns and crippling of the phones they provide. Speaking of which, wherabouts do the cellphone makers provide their source for OS-using apps?
Hmmm, I notice that they have a 'family guy' banner amongst a few others. Were they granted the rights to use that character, or are they perhaps in violation?
Maybe we could ask the MPAA about that, hmmmmm...
Indeed, I've seen the same done with "skill points" in both fantasy and sci-fi settings. Higher skill lets you used bigger, badder weapons. Personal skills also give you higher health, better healing rate, better ability to dodge, hack computers or whatever. Star Wars KOTR pulled this off fairly well, but I've seen many previous games that did it just as well.
Assuming that the story poster is connecting right through the PC without some weird PC-to-phone stuff (I'm not sure what the plantronics headset looks like), why not just get a soundcard that allows direct audio capture. I know my SBLive card has a "what u hear" option in the recording area, which basically lets you capture all the audio going through the card. This should give the same quality as whatever you're hearing during the actual conversation.
Yeah, doesn't make sense to me. They're going to ban a major bookselling online entity in libraries. Now there's a whole latta sense. And slashdot, hmmm, well while there are definately a certain number of creepy people on here (you know who you are), I'd have to say that they tend to be creepy in the lack-of-social-knowhow sense rather than the dangerous-to-children sense.
... I hate election-year politics.
For the mostpart the "other races" are still humanoid though, but fantasy has plenty of things beyond that such as dragons, beholders, and various other tentacle monsters. There are plenty of identifiable aliens as well, those from the Alien movie (bipedal/quadripedal), predators, klingons, kilrathi (sp?), Kzinti, Posleen, etc etc
Yeah, somebody might not immediately identify with a Posleen (basically centaur-structured lizards), but the badasses from the Alien series are pretty identifiable (ever played AvP), and the Kzinti/Kilrathi are pretty much fuzzy people.
Thinking about it, one of the previous comments definately hits near the mark. People will identify with being an orc, hill-giant, or hobbit because they're common fantasy characaters. People could also identify with being a Klingon, Geiger-Alien, Predator, Kzinti, etc.... but that's not going to happen because when you include them all you're probably going to have your ass sued into the next starsystem by the copyright owners of Star Trek, Aliens, Predator, and the Larry Niven books. I suppose you could make similar characters and/or use parody (a-la SpaceQuest), but look at what happen with City of Heroes and the lawsuits wherein players could make characters similar to movie entities.
Anothe reason why current Intellectual Property laws suck ass, while using a Klingon named "Worf" in your game might be dubious, you shouldn't be attacked for having something klingon-like, hell it's a compliment to the creators.
Don't a lot of the fantasy genre still have thing like projectile-casting spells (fireballs, etc) or various types of bows, spears, or other manual projectile launchers. How is this different from guns or laser beams in terms of implementation? In the end, many of the projected sci-fi technology (time distortion fields, transmogrifiers, etc) is still just a fantastic as things in fantasy worlds having hobbits and orcs.
Did the US government or some related body ban the use of Lenovo laptops because of suspicions that they might contain hardware/software used to spy on the user?
To be safe, I find it's better to use a VPN (openVPN or whatnot is cross-OS compatible). You get key-based authorization, a higher level of encryption, and you can just ditch the non-VPN traffic (or send it to goatse)
Well, first of all then they're quite likely to just go jack somebody else's connection. It's much more fun to mess with 'em.
:-)
I wonder if you could write something that took all P2P traffic, redirected it locally, and uploaded copies of custom video files etc in the place of their kazaa/torrent downloads