I think I heard it best on the CBC Podcast of Search Engine. Basically, what he said, is that computers are machines that copy information. When they are working properly, they copy information really quickly, and really accurately. Trying to stop a computer from copying information is like trying to stop gravity.
The OPP only counts if you live in Ontario. There's a QPP for Quebec. None of the other provinces AFAIK have provincial police forces. They all depend on the RCMP. In some places, such as the far north, and other sparsely populated areas, the RCMP are the only police. Also, looking at this from a different angle, what I think they are saying is that the RCMP has bigger fish to fry. People that are much more dangerous. It's not worth the resources to hunt down personal file sharers, because they aren't hurting anybody. I imagine that the OPP would probably feel the same way. The local police might care about catching people doing petty crimes like this, but probably don't have the resources or technical expertise.
I visit Google news often because I find that it's a good place to find a lot of news aggregated into one place. However, I find that a lot of the stories they link to are on terrible site, with tons of popups, and tooltips on every single word. I often wonder if google has any plans to try to get rid of links to sites with this crap. Google news would really be an amazing service, if it wasn't for the fact that most of the sites it links to are complete tripe.
Those sport aircraft are just that, for sport. They aren't really that practical for travel where you may want to transport your family around, or carry a bunch of luggage.
A helicopter is vastly more complicated to fly both for a computer and a human. They are also less efficient than a plane for transporting people and cargo from one place to another. They make up for their not so efficient part by being more maneuverable.
Also, you cannot optimize for both land and air. That's the whole point of optimizing. There are trade-offs to consider. Something perfect for land would have no wings, and no propeller. Something made to fly needs both.
Although flight could be completely automated, the person in the plane still needs to know what they are doing in case of malfunction. While automation would help a bit, you wouldn't want to rely on it 100% of the time. Just imagine the lawsuits when the flying car computer malfunctions, and the driver has no idea how to fly, or possibly doesn't even have the controls to fly. In a regular plane, the computer is there to help, but the pilot is still expected to know how to fly on their own.
When you crash a plane, you could end up going into the side of a building. We all know how well stuff like that has ended up in the past. Although people do crash cars into buildings, it does not do as much damage as a plane would. Planes travel much faster than cars, weigh much more, and do not have breaks (flaps don't count). If a plane crashes into something, it is more likely to be going at full cruising speed, and to cause much more damage. If 2 cars hit, they hit and then the stop. If 2 planes hit, they hit, and then they fall, and then they stop. Also, if your car engines break down, you pull over to the side of the road by coasting, or at worse, just coast to a stop and stay on the road. If the engine breaks down on your plane, it's very hard to land it, without causing some kind of damage.
The one that leaves any untranslated words untranslated. This is probably my biggest beef with babelfish. I think it would be better if it returned the translation with the words it couldn't understand in red or something, or offer a choice of possibilities, based on words that looked the same.
Most teachers I had didn't even do a roll call. They just scanned down the list and checked for missing people, anybody they didn't see they would call out their name. It probably took them about 30 seconds.
According to Wikipedia, Quake wasn't released until June 22, 1996. Descent was released February 28, 1995. Descent not only had vertical and horizontal aiming, but because you were in a spaceship, and not running around, it also had to deal with rotation. Although, because flight was involved, it was more common to use a joystick in Descent.
Ok, I mentioned Mario 2 in another post, but after that post I realized my understanding of this was a bit off. After your little explanation, A Boy and His Blob immediately popped into my head. Also, Megaman. While they were all technically the same Avatar, using the abilities you had won from beating boss characters to perform different actions seems to fit this catagory pretty well. Although, I don't think there was any ability to use 2 powers together.
Mario Party 6 and 7 use a microphone for some of the minigames. I think that they are pretty good at recognizing most people's voices, at least for the words they need to recognize. Although I've seen it screw up a few times, I think they did a pretty good job at it. Especially considering it's only a very small part of the game.
I've personally always thought that the WASD setup sucked. My personal setup is using the keypad with the left hand. + and enter as forward and back (using thumb and index), 8 as jump, 2 as duck, 4 and 6 for left and right. Rest of the buttons on the keypad can be used for other needed functions such as switching weapons. I've found that I can work pretty well with this, and it's nice to be able to switch from forward to backward without moving any fingers. I also find that I am much less likely to lose my position on the keyboard. I would often beat people with much more experience then myself, even though they said I'd never be any good if I used the setup I was using. I started to use this configuration in Descent, which was probably one of the first real 3D games, not just 2D with a little bit of vertical jumping.
Actually, you may remember that in War Games, Broderick did change his grade, and the girl's grade. She asked him to change it back, but then later he went back and changed it again.
The real question is, where is the $2000 car? While it's great that all these amenities are being added to cars, some of us don't really care about all these extra features, and just want a cheap car that gets them from point A to point B. Even the cheaper cars seem to come with a lot of extras that aren't really needed. While I realize there are a lot of costs such as materials, labor, and design that go into designing cars, I wish that some company would just try to make a car that was really cheap.
For me it's always been more to worry about. Mostly stuff like:
When was the last time I charged the battery, and is it going to be dead when I go to use the tool next.
How much drilling am I going to have to do today, and is the battery going to last long enough
If I do some really tough drilling, is the battery going to die really fast making it impossible to finish the job.
For corded tools, the only thing I have to worry about is whether or not I can find the extension cord, and whether or not the power will be out. But if the power is out, there will probably be some other problem that will prevent me from getting the work done, such as the lack of lighting.
Personally, I never understood the appeal of cordless tools. While I'm not a professional carpenter, I've had enough experience with cordless tools to know how terrible they can be. I'll take a $30 corded drill over a $400 cordless drill any day.
As far as I'm concerned, if the battery loses the ability to store the same amount of power as it did when you first bought it, then it has a problem with battery memory. I don't care if it's not the same thing as the old battery memory thing with the Ni-Cads, it's still a huge problem. I have an 2 year old cell phone that doesn't hold a charge at all and it has a lithium battery. If ultracapacitors solve this problem, along with the problem of depleting charge even when the device is not in use, then it will be a great step for portable electricity.
I guess it depends on where you live. In Canada, the Walmart food section seems to be pretty well kept up. My only problem with it is that with such low prices, you'll often go there and find that they are completely out of almost all the items worth going there for. Granted I've never been to a Walmart with fresh produce and meats. So maybe things are different in that aspect. But prepacked lunchmeat, milk products, bread, and frozen food are always the same quality as what I find at my local grocery store. What I find interesting is that Walmart with such low prices is able to keep stuff long enough for it to go bad. My local Food Basics store sells food for really cheap, and they always have some of the best produce and meats of the large supermarket chains. The more turnover a store gets, the better quality the food seems to be. Unless Walmart is buying their food already rotten, which is a possibility, then I don't understand why they would have a problem selling food before its expiry date.
I'll agree that all those digital cameras helped get the word out. But I don't really think it changed much. Terrible things still happened, and nobody stopped them. The UN (or anybody else) didn't send in any troops, and there were no trade sanctions induced to make them think twice about what they were doing. It's interesting that we can all now watch the atrocities that happen around the world, but it would be a lot better if we did something about it.
There's always other video rental stores. It seems like blockbuster has drive the majority of them out of town, but it would be nice to go back to when I was a kid, and you could get the 7,7,7 deal. 7 movies, 7 nights $7. or 3 movies for $5, or just the $2.50 per movie. I'm not sure when or why renting movies got so expensive. VHS tapes were way more expensive than DVD, and they wore out, and they took up more storage space. It shouldn't be a question of whether or not to rent or buy. You can often go to Walmart or some DVD/Music store and buy movies for the price it costs to rent them, maybe with a small premium, but then you own them, and never have to return them.
If you ask me, what blockbuster needs to do is to bring their prices way down. $3 for a rental is about right, And sell off the used copies of movies for something around $7. Right now the seem to be around $15 for the used copy. They should realize that they can make up the difference in volume.
Although technically, Metroid Prime wasn't an FPS, although I'm not sure why not, it's first person perspective, and I'm shooting, apparently it's some action adventure that happens to be from the first person point of view, I enjoyed it a lot. My major problem with it, (and the reason I never beat it) was the save system. There was one point that was really far between save points, and I could never make it to the next one. Playing for 1/2 an hour, only to be killed and having to replay that section over again is extremely frustrating. Especially the 15th time you do it.
How modern are we talking here when comparing. If you go out and buy a new car with an IC engine, it's going to have 2008 levels of technology for making low emissions. If you got electric, depending on where you live, you could have a very old coal power plant powering that car.
But Newfoundland doesn't have any computers, so we can ignore them.
I think I heard it best on the CBC Podcast of Search Engine. Basically, what he said, is that computers are machines that copy information. When they are working properly, they copy information really quickly, and really accurately. Trying to stop a computer from copying information is like trying to stop gravity.
The OPP only counts if you live in Ontario. There's a QPP for Quebec. None of the other provinces AFAIK have provincial police forces. They all depend on the RCMP. In some places, such as the far north, and other sparsely populated areas, the RCMP are the only police. Also, looking at this from a different angle, what I think they are saying is that the RCMP has bigger fish to fry. People that are much more dangerous. It's not worth the resources to hunt down personal file sharers, because they aren't hurting anybody. I imagine that the OPP would probably feel the same way. The local police might care about catching people doing petty crimes like this, but probably don't have the resources or technical expertise.
I visit Google news often because I find that it's a good place to find a lot of news aggregated into one place. However, I find that a lot of the stories they link to are on terrible site, with tons of popups, and tooltips on every single word. I often wonder if google has any plans to try to get rid of links to sites with this crap. Google news would really be an amazing service, if it wasn't for the fact that most of the sites it links to are complete tripe.
Those sport aircraft are just that, for sport. They aren't really that practical for travel where you may want to transport your family around, or carry a bunch of luggage.
A helicopter is vastly more complicated to fly both for a computer and a human. They are also less efficient than a plane for transporting people and cargo from one place to another. They make up for their not so efficient part by being more maneuverable.
Also, you cannot optimize for both land and air. That's the whole point of optimizing. There are trade-offs to consider. Something perfect for land would have no wings, and no propeller. Something made to fly needs both.
Although flight could be completely automated, the person in the plane still needs to know what they are doing in case of malfunction. While automation would help a bit, you wouldn't want to rely on it 100% of the time. Just imagine the lawsuits when the flying car computer malfunctions, and the driver has no idea how to fly, or possibly doesn't even have the controls to fly. In a regular plane, the computer is there to help, but the pilot is still expected to know how to fly on their own.
When you crash a plane, you could end up going into the side of a building. We all know how well stuff like that has ended up in the past. Although people do crash cars into buildings, it does not do as much damage as a plane would. Planes travel much faster than cars, weigh much more, and do not have breaks (flaps don't count). If a plane crashes into something, it is more likely to be going at full cruising speed, and to cause much more damage. If 2 cars hit, they hit and then the stop. If 2 planes hit, they hit, and then they fall, and then they stop. Also, if your car engines break down, you pull over to the side of the road by coasting, or at worse, just coast to a stop and stay on the road. If the engine breaks down on your plane, it's very hard to land it, without causing some kind of damage.
The one that leaves any untranslated words untranslated. This is probably my biggest beef with babelfish. I think it would be better if it returned the translation with the words it couldn't understand in red or something, or offer a choice of possibilities, based on words that looked the same.
Since when do monitors have power bricks? I've never seen a monitor with a power brick.
That cricket match should be ending some time in 2012.
Most teachers I had didn't even do a roll call. They just scanned down the list and checked for missing people, anybody they didn't see they would call out their name. It probably took them about 30 seconds.
According to Wikipedia, Quake wasn't released until June 22, 1996. Descent was released February 28, 1995. Descent not only had vertical and horizontal aiming, but because you were in a spaceship, and not running around, it also had to deal with rotation. Although, because flight was involved, it was more common to use a joystick in Descent.
Ok, I mentioned Mario 2 in another post, but after that post I realized my understanding of this was a bit off. After your little explanation, A Boy and His Blob immediately popped into my head. Also, Megaman. While they were all technically the same Avatar, using the abilities you had won from beating boss characters to perform different actions seems to fit this catagory pretty well. Although, I don't think there was any ability to use 2 powers together.
What about Super Mario Bros. 2?
Mario Party 6 and 7 use a microphone for some of the minigames. I think that they are pretty good at recognizing most people's voices, at least for the words they need to recognize. Although I've seen it screw up a few times, I think they did a pretty good job at it. Especially considering it's only a very small part of the game.
I've personally always thought that the WASD setup sucked. My personal setup is using the keypad with the left hand. + and enter as forward and back (using thumb and index), 8 as jump, 2 as duck, 4 and 6 for left and right. Rest of the buttons on the keypad can be used for other needed functions such as switching weapons. I've found that I can work pretty well with this, and it's nice to be able to switch from forward to backward without moving any fingers. I also find that I am much less likely to lose my position on the keyboard. I would often beat people with much more experience then myself, even though they said I'd never be any good if I used the setup I was using. I started to use this configuration in Descent, which was probably one of the first real 3D games, not just 2D with a little bit of vertical jumping.
Actually, you may remember that in War Games, Broderick did change his grade, and the girl's grade. She asked him to change it back, but then later he went back and changed it again.
The real question is, where is the $2000 car? While it's great that all these amenities are being added to cars, some of us don't really care about all these extra features, and just want a cheap car that gets them from point A to point B. Even the cheaper cars seem to come with a lot of extras that aren't really needed. While I realize there are a lot of costs such as materials, labor, and design that go into designing cars, I wish that some company would just try to make a car that was really cheap.
- When was the last time I charged the battery, and is it going to be dead when I go to use the tool next.
- How much drilling am I going to have to do today, and is the battery going to last long enough
- If I do some really tough drilling, is the battery going to die really fast making it impossible to finish the job.
For corded tools, the only thing I have to worry about is whether or not I can find the extension cord, and whether or not the power will be out. But if the power is out, there will probably be some other problem that will prevent me from getting the work done, such as the lack of lighting.Personally, I never understood the appeal of cordless tools. While I'm not a professional carpenter, I've had enough experience with cordless tools to know how terrible they can be. I'll take a $30 corded drill over a $400 cordless drill any day.
As far as I'm concerned, if the battery loses the ability to store the same amount of power as it did when you first bought it, then it has a problem with battery memory. I don't care if it's not the same thing as the old battery memory thing with the Ni-Cads, it's still a huge problem. I have an 2 year old cell phone that doesn't hold a charge at all and it has a lithium battery. If ultracapacitors solve this problem, along with the problem of depleting charge even when the device is not in use, then it will be a great step for portable electricity.
I guess it depends on where you live. In Canada, the Walmart food section seems to be pretty well kept up. My only problem with it is that with such low prices, you'll often go there and find that they are completely out of almost all the items worth going there for. Granted I've never been to a Walmart with fresh produce and meats. So maybe things are different in that aspect. But prepacked lunchmeat, milk products, bread, and frozen food are always the same quality as what I find at my local grocery store. What I find interesting is that Walmart with such low prices is able to keep stuff long enough for it to go bad. My local Food Basics store sells food for really cheap, and they always have some of the best produce and meats of the large supermarket chains. The more turnover a store gets, the better quality the food seems to be. Unless Walmart is buying their food already rotten, which is a possibility, then I don't understand why they would have a problem selling food before its expiry date.
I'll agree that all those digital cameras helped get the word out. But I don't really think it changed much. Terrible things still happened, and nobody stopped them. The UN (or anybody else) didn't send in any troops, and there were no trade sanctions induced to make them think twice about what they were doing. It's interesting that we can all now watch the atrocities that happen around the world, but it would be a lot better if we did something about it.
There's always other video rental stores. It seems like blockbuster has drive the majority of them out of town, but it would be nice to go back to when I was a kid, and you could get the 7,7,7 deal. 7 movies, 7 nights $7. or 3 movies for $5, or just the $2.50 per movie. I'm not sure when or why renting movies got so expensive. VHS tapes were way more expensive than DVD, and they wore out, and they took up more storage space. It shouldn't be a question of whether or not to rent or buy. You can often go to Walmart or some DVD/Music store and buy movies for the price it costs to rent them, maybe with a small premium, but then you own them, and never have to return them.
If you ask me, what blockbuster needs to do is to bring their prices way down. $3 for a rental is about right, And sell off the used copies of movies for something around $7. Right now the seem to be around $15 for the used copy. They should realize that they can make up the difference in volume.
Although technically, Metroid Prime wasn't an FPS, although I'm not sure why not, it's first person perspective, and I'm shooting, apparently it's some action adventure that happens to be from the first person point of view, I enjoyed it a lot. My major problem with it, (and the reason I never beat it) was the save system. There was one point that was really far between save points, and I could never make it to the next one. Playing for 1/2 an hour, only to be killed and having to replay that section over again is extremely frustrating. Especially the 15th time you do it.
How modern are we talking here when comparing. If you go out and buy a new car with an IC engine, it's going to have 2008 levels of technology for making low emissions. If you got electric, depending on where you live, you could have a very old coal power plant powering that car.