Interestingly, "Star Trek: Enterprise" (STE) also ended after 4 seasons. It started okay but gradually degenerated into a final episode in which weak characters from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (STTNG) flashback to the past.
More like it started weak and stayed that way until early in season 4 when Manny Coto took over. But I guess Berman couldn't stand to put him in charge of the series finale, so it was as mediocre as the previous three seasons.
But yes, I am glad BSG is going to go out with a bang instead of fading away.
Yes, it is pretty insulting. Fark's owner publishes a book that essentially criticizes the mass media for watering down their content in order to make the most money, then almost immediately afterwards changes the rules of his site to get rid of user-posted content that isn't advertiser-friendly.
There is no such thing in the US neither. You simply are paranoid and over sensitive.
Uh, no. The OP is correct. While most people will put up with it, it's not something they actually *like*. Some of them take it a bit more seriously - I saw a very large guy screaming at someone for photographing him on the street years ago. It looked like it was going to devolve into a fistfight pretty rapidly.
I'm sure the apparent intent of the photographer makes a difference as well. I try not to get in the FOV of peoples' cameras when they're shooting street scenes, but I don't *really* care if I'm visible in the background. But if someone goes out of their way to photograph me in particular, that makes me uneasy.
The Coffee table uses infra-red sensors. What happens you place a a cup of hot coffee on the coffee table? what happens when you spill some? Will the coffee flowing over the table set off a touch sensor?
MS' interactive displays use near IR, not thermal IR. Probably because:
1 - NIR gear is incredibly cheap, whereas thermal IR gear is still very pricey. 2 - There are lots of materials that are transparent to NIR but translucent to visible light. Their displays have a NIR camera and an NIR LED array in addition to the video projector behind the projection surface, which the NIR light passes through in both directions. The user sees the visible light on the projection surface, and the system sees the user. AFAIK material that would work like that for thermal IR is more exotic.
Anyway, coffee would probably look transparent enough to the camera to not register a hit. But even if it did, the video shows little CGI bubbles moving away from the cup set on the table, so I'm sure they've thought of this kind of thing.
single-player, non-linear RPGs, however, do not. Elder Scrolls, I'm looking at YOU!
That's an interesting statement, given how successful Oblivion was.
I liked Oblivion, but I hate online games. I can't be the only one. I like having a sandbox to play in that has no connection to anyone else. I don't want to have to worry about people cheating, or bad behaviour from other people. Conversely, I want to be able to cheat and use the world editor to change or screw things up as much as I like without causing problems for other people. I also want to be able to install the game at some date in the indeterminate future and have it still work.
What disturbs me is the unknown idea in your head as to what you'd be using the spagetti for.
Maybe inside the jar, behind the plastic wrap, to simulate the muscles of the vaginal walls?
I've put more thought into this than I really should have.
You're telling me. Ew.
Re: The original hardware store experiment
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 1
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you wrote, but it sounds like the same basic argument Einstein made against "spooky action at a distance". If I'm right, then you should read up about particle entanglement to see why it doesn't allow information to be transmitted FTL.
Still no appreciable terrain, just two non-deformable levels flat as a griddle.
Watch the artwork video. There is some in-game footage of a planet that is much more varied. The gameplay video is on a space platform, which makes sense as a blocky environment.
It's several multiples of a thousand dollars. The exact price depends on where you go. The average when I researched it seemed to be about US$4000. However, IMO the results are pretty poor - most of the "after" pictures I saw looked like the guy still had noticeably thinning hair instead of a completely bald spot. For an actor or model, I guess it would make sense to get something like that done that can be fudged by the makeup department to look passable on film, but it didn't seem worth it for regular people.
(Again IMO) there is currently no truly worthwhile way to get around baldness, so I started shaving my head a little over a year ago. If one of the various sci-fi treatments ends up working better I would consider having it done, but in the meantime it's no big deal. Having no hair is a lot easier to take care of.
Don't feel too badly. When you upgrade, you can pop off the heatsinks like opening a vintage wine and smell the air that was actually trapped there in 2006. Let your nose travel back in time to those heady days of yesteryear!
I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did.
I think they'd have an easier time of it now in some respects. As many computer nerd points as it may earn you to be able to code in assembly, it's a lot easier to write software when you have access to things like arrays and for/next loops instead of building them yourself out of e.g. register checks and jump commands.
Is it an artifact of ancient religion or superstition maybe?
I think it's human nature - when something bad happens, most people's first assumption is that it's related to something that changed recently. This is usually at least a good place to start, although obviously jumping to conclusions based on it is the wrong thing to do.
In this case, the cell phone argument at first seemed hokey to me, but then I thought of a way that it might not be completely ridiculous. Maybe some people with more than an amateur understanding of the topic can correct one or both of them.
The first thing I thought of was that bees probably aren't even big enough to pick up a 1.6GHz (highest cellphone frequency mentioned in the article I read) radio wave. IIRC, the wavelength is something like 6 inches, so even a quarter wave is longer than most bees.
Then I remembered reading somewhere that wax acts as a microwave lens. So I thought maybe it wasn't the bees, but their hives that were "picking up" the cell tower waves and maybe heating up parts of the hive to the point that the bees were compelled to leave?
Of course, a parasite or other biological cause makes much more sense.
You can create new servers on the fly, Really high performance Easily scalable, and virtual worlds will never go down for any reason outside the code.
Don't forget these added bonuses:
So expensive you could buy an entire data center's worth of x86 servers instead of leasing a single mainframe for a year. Requires members of the dwindling cult of mainframe experts to administer.
There should be plenty of OSS image-viewing programs available for you to use as a reference for the GIF spec. If I can find example code for something strange and proprietary like Hitachi/Sega's VQ texture format (and I have), GIF should be a cakewalk.
Self-horntoot warning - I am also very proud of the game I did before King of Chicago - ChipWits - which I am reviving at http://chipwits.com/
Wow, that is old school. I remember when the family of a friend of mine in elementary school got a first-generation Mac and ChipWits was the one game they had for it. It seemed impossibly complex at the time, and every once in awhile I've wondered what it would be like now. I'm glad you're reviving it.
You could even carry your characters over to the sequel title!
The Bard's Tale games on my Apple IIe when I was a kid let you do the same thing. In fact, at least one of them (III) let you carry over your characters from other series entirely - e.g. Wizardry.
The obscure and unfinished Star Saga trilogy let you migrate your characters from the first game to the second.
I believe Might & Magic II let you bring your characters from the first game over as well.
Nothing against the Amiga - it was an awesome platform years ahead of its time - but it wasn't the first to allow that kind of thing.
Ah, very interesting, thanks. I'm happy that the warnings it reports are minor and easy to fix. I actually hadn't bothered with any validation yet, just made the code look the way I'd want it to if I were reading it for the first time =).
The bottom line is expensive special effects don't make good movies. Never have. Ever heard of Citizen Kane? Casablanca? The Graduate? On the Waterfront? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Not a single explosion in any of those movies.
But imagine how much *better* a few... hundred... explosions could make those films. Imagine a Citizen Kane where Orson Welles screams "Roooooosssebuuuuuuudddd!", his hair poofs up Dragonball Z style, and he emits a shockwave of grief which levels Neo-Tokyo.
Seriously though, I don't think special effects are the problem. Movies like Sky Captain and Once Upon a Time in Mexico actually used special effects to save a great deal of money on production. It's more like blockbuster films involve spending a ton of money on everything - actors, vast crews, giant sets, location shooting, orchestras, etc. And really, given that they rake in a considerable amount of money, can you *blame* all of those people for insisting on relatively generous salaries? Would it somehow be more fair if the profit stayed the same, but the studio execs kept even more of it and everyone who actually made the movie got less?
Funny, that's how I feel about people who don't use CSS. Seriously, if you are that concerned with the size of pages and bandwidth, like you say in your other comment, then why are you transmitting your style information on every single page load?
Agreed.
To the GP: I recently redesigned my main website after running it for five years with a design very much like the one you describe - all coded by hand, HTML 3.2, no CSS (although I had some equally old Javascript for highlighting the navigation buttons).
The new version uses CSS, and since I designed it using the "strict" mode of newfangled HTML, it renders more or less identically on different browsers. I also built a batch build content management system, so that I don't have to manually edit a bunch of HTML when I change the design or whatever. I made sure the output is basically what I would have done if I did it all by hand though.
I was very skeptical about it before I started, but it really is a much better way to build websites. It saves time, it makes redesigns and multi-platform stuff easier (like theoretically I could swap out CSS files to make a version formatted for PDAs if I were running a website that would be at all useful on them), and it's *much* easier to get relatively consistent rendering across platforms. The only visible difference I'm aware of between Firefox and IE6/7 is related to tables without a fixed width. Neither one looks superior, they're just different.
Future revisions could allow for a pool of blacklisted keys. Any key in the blacklist will be ignored, regardless of whether or not it's in the list of acceptable keys. Every entry in the blacklist is write-once. Sure, you'll only be able to store a limited number of keys in this blacklist, but you don't need to store an unlimited number - just enough to be inconvenient.
Spam the blacklist with enough entries to fill it to capacity as the first thing you do when you buy a player. Or am I missing something?
I've known people that bought all their equipment -- cable modem or DSL modem and line filters -- and still got hit with the "early termination" fee. It's not about the equipment.
Yes, I am one of those people. And Speakeasy's ridiculous $300 termination fee is about three times the price of the modem that I bought from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, "Star Trek: Enterprise" (STE) also ended after 4 seasons. It started okay but gradually degenerated into a final episode in which weak characters from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (STTNG) flashback to the past.
More like it started weak and stayed that way until early in season 4 when Manny Coto took over. But I guess Berman couldn't stand to put him in charge of the series finale, so it was as mediocre as the previous three seasons.
But yes, I am glad BSG is going to go out with a bang instead of fading away.
Yes, it is pretty insulting. Fark's owner publishes a book that essentially criticizes the mass media for watering down their content in order to make the most money, then almost immediately afterwards changes the rules of his site to get rid of user-posted content that isn't advertiser-friendly.
There is no such thing in the US neither. You simply are paranoid and over sensitive.
Uh, no. The OP is correct. While most people will put up with it, it's not something they actually *like*. Some of them take it a bit more seriously - I saw a very large guy screaming at someone for photographing him on the street years ago. It looked like it was going to devolve into a fistfight pretty rapidly.
I'm sure the apparent intent of the photographer makes a difference as well. I try not to get in the FOV of peoples' cameras when they're shooting street scenes, but I don't *really* care if I'm visible in the background. But if someone goes out of their way to photograph me in particular, that makes me uneasy.
The Coffee table uses infra-red sensors. What happens you place a a cup of hot coffee on the coffee table? what happens when you spill some? Will the coffee flowing over the table set off a touch sensor?
MS' interactive displays use near IR, not thermal IR. Probably because:
1 - NIR gear is incredibly cheap, whereas thermal IR gear is still very pricey.
2 - There are lots of materials that are transparent to NIR but translucent to visible light. Their displays have a NIR camera and an NIR LED array in addition to the video projector behind the projection surface, which the NIR light passes through in both directions. The user sees the visible light on the projection surface, and the system sees the user. AFAIK material that would work like that for thermal IR is more exotic.
Anyway, coffee would probably look transparent enough to the camera to not register a hit. But even if it did, the video shows little CGI bubbles moving away from the cup set on the table, so I'm sure they've thought of this kind of thing.
single-player, non-linear RPGs, however, do not. Elder Scrolls, I'm looking at YOU!
That's an interesting statement, given how successful Oblivion was.
I liked Oblivion, but I hate online games. I can't be the only one. I like having a sandbox to play in that has no connection to anyone else. I don't want to have to worry about people cheating, or bad behaviour from other people. Conversely, I want to be able to cheat and use the world editor to change or screw things up as much as I like without causing problems for other people. I also want to be able to install the game at some date in the indeterminate future and have it still work.
What disturbs me is the unknown idea in your head as to what you'd be using the spagetti for.
Maybe inside the jar, behind the plastic wrap, to simulate the muscles of the vaginal walls?
I've put more thought into this than I really should have.
You're telling me. Ew.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you wrote, but it sounds like the same basic argument Einstein made against "spooky action at a distance". If I'm right, then you should read up about particle entanglement to see why it doesn't allow information to be transmitted FTL.
Still no appreciable terrain, just two non-deformable levels flat as a griddle.
Watch the artwork video. There is some in-game footage of a planet that is much more varied. The gameplay video is on a space platform, which makes sense as a blocky environment.
Any idea how much this costs?
It's several multiples of a thousand dollars. The exact price depends on where you go. The average when I researched it seemed to be about US$4000. However, IMO the results are pretty poor - most of the "after" pictures I saw looked like the guy still had noticeably thinning hair instead of a completely bald spot. For an actor or model, I guess it would make sense to get something like that done that can be fudged by the makeup department to look passable on film, but it didn't seem worth it for regular people.
(Again IMO) there is currently no truly worthwhile way to get around baldness, so I started shaving my head a little over a year ago. If one of the various sci-fi treatments ends up working better I would consider having it done, but in the meantime it's no big deal. Having no hair is a lot easier to take care of.
I'm rockin some old 7900GT's
Don't feel too badly. When you upgrade, you can pop off the heatsinks like opening a vintage wine and smell the air that was actually trapped there in 2006. Let your nose travel back in time to those heady days of yesteryear!
I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did.
I think they'd have an easier time of it now in some respects. As many computer nerd points as it may earn you to be able to code in assembly, it's a lot easier to write software when you have access to things like arrays and for/next loops instead of building them yourself out of e.g. register checks and jump commands.
Is it an artifact of ancient religion or superstition maybe?
I think it's human nature - when something bad happens, most people's first assumption is that it's related to something that changed recently. This is usually at least a good place to start, although obviously jumping to conclusions based on it is the wrong thing to do.
In this case, the cell phone argument at first seemed hokey to me, but then I thought of a way that it might not be completely ridiculous. Maybe some people with more than an amateur understanding of the topic can correct one or both of them.
The first thing I thought of was that bees probably aren't even big enough to pick up a 1.6GHz (highest cellphone frequency mentioned in the article I read) radio wave. IIRC, the wavelength is something like 6 inches, so even a quarter wave is longer than most bees.
Then I remembered reading somewhere that wax acts as a microwave lens. So I thought maybe it wasn't the bees, but their hives that were "picking up" the cell tower waves and maybe heating up parts of the hive to the point that the bees were compelled to leave?
Of course, a parasite or other biological cause makes much more sense.
On the bright side, I can do roller blading and ice skating with this knee.
That's really impressive. Can you describe how it's controlled? The manufacturer's website is a little vague in that regard.
You can create new servers on the fly,
Really high performance
Easily scalable,
and virtual worlds will never go down for any reason outside the code.
Don't forget these added bonuses:
So expensive you could buy an entire data center's worth of x86 servers instead of leasing a single mainframe for a year.
Requires members of the dwindling cult of mainframe experts to administer.
There should be plenty of OSS image-viewing programs available for you to use as a reference for the GIF spec. If I can find example code for something strange and proprietary like Hitachi/Sega's VQ texture format (and I have), GIF should be a cakewalk.
Self-horntoot warning - I am also very proud of the game I did before King of Chicago - ChipWits - which I am reviving at http://chipwits.com/
Wow, that is old school. I remember when the family of a friend of mine in elementary school got a first-generation Mac and ChipWits was the one game they had for it. It seemed impossibly complex at the time, and every once in awhile I've wondered what it would be like now. I'm glad you're reviving it.
Off-topic, no karma bonus.
You could even carry your characters over to the sequel title!
The Bard's Tale games on my Apple IIe when I was a kid let you do the same thing. In fact, at least one of them (III) let you carry over your characters from other series entirely - e.g. Wizardry.
The obscure and unfinished Star Saga trilogy let you migrate your characters from the first game to the second.
I believe Might & Magic II let you bring your characters from the first game over as well.
Nothing against the Amiga - it was an awesome platform years ahead of its time - but it wasn't the first to allow that kind of thing.
Great point. I knew that a few months ago, but had forgotten because I hadn't needed to make use of it.
Ah, very interesting, thanks. I'm happy that the warnings it reports are minor and easy to fix. I actually hadn't bothered with any validation yet, just made the code look the way I'd want it to if I were reading it for the first time =).
The bottom line is expensive special effects don't make good movies. Never have. Ever heard of Citizen Kane? Casablanca? The Graduate? On the Waterfront? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Not a single explosion in any of those movies.
But imagine how much *better* a few... hundred... explosions could make those films. Imagine a Citizen Kane where Orson Welles screams "Roooooosssebuuuuuuudddd!", his hair poofs up Dragonball Z style, and he emits a shockwave of grief which levels Neo-Tokyo.
Seriously though, I don't think special effects are the problem. Movies like Sky Captain and Once Upon a Time in Mexico actually used special effects to save a great deal of money on production. It's more like blockbuster films involve spending a ton of money on everything - actors, vast crews, giant sets, location shooting, orchestras, etc. And really, given that they rake in a considerable amount of money, can you *blame* all of those people for insisting on relatively generous salaries? Would it somehow be more fair if the profit stayed the same, but the studio execs kept even more of it and everyone who actually made the movie got less?
Funny, that's how I feel about people who don't use CSS. Seriously, if you are that concerned with the size of pages and bandwidth, like you say in your other comment, then why are you transmitting your style information on every single page load?
Agreed.
To the GP: I recently redesigned my main website after running it for five years with a design very much like the one you describe - all coded by hand, HTML 3.2, no CSS (although I had some equally old Javascript for highlighting the navigation buttons).
The new version uses CSS, and since I designed it using the "strict" mode of newfangled HTML, it renders more or less identically on different browsers. I also built a batch build content management system, so that I don't have to manually edit a bunch of HTML when I change the design or whatever. I made sure the output is basically what I would have done if I did it all by hand though.
I was very skeptical about it before I started, but it really is a much better way to build websites. It saves time, it makes redesigns and multi-platform stuff easier (like theoretically I could swap out CSS files to make a version formatted for PDAs if I were running a website that would be at all useful on them), and it's *much* easier to get relatively consistent rendering across platforms. The only visible difference I'm aware of between Firefox and IE6/7 is related to tables without a fixed width. Neither one looks superior, they're just different.
Future revisions could allow for a pool of blacklisted keys. Any key in the blacklist will be ignored, regardless of whether or not it's in the list of acceptable keys. Every entry in the blacklist is write-once. Sure, you'll only be able to store a limited number of keys in this blacklist, but you don't need to store an unlimited number - just enough to be inconvenient.
Spam the blacklist with enough entries to fill it to capacity as the first thing you do when you buy a player. Or am I missing something?
It breaks the movie industries business model. A lot of their revenue comes from selling old titles on new formats.
Does it? I seem to recall a period of almost two decades where there was only one format, and the movie industry seemed to do just fine.
I've known people that bought all their equipment -- cable modem or DSL modem and line filters -- and still got hit with the "early termination" fee. It's not about the equipment.
Yes, I am one of those people. And Speakeasy's ridiculous $300 termination fee is about three times the price of the modem that I bought from them.
you don't have to sign a contract if you don't want to
Unless you are not told of a contract when you sign up for service and your "acceptance" of one is allegedly implied by your not cancelling your service within 25 days.
I would *never* have actually signed a contract with an ISP, because the lack of flexibility isn't worth the savings IMO.