True, but imagine what the world would be like today if there was, right now, a section of London that was abandoned and fenced off, and anyone who went in there would die.
One of the problems with a nuclear battery is that the energy it produces is constant regardless of whether or not the device is operating. That means something has to be done with the energy when it's not being consumed, and that means it gets emitted as heat. That is a problem, to say the least, for anything meant to go inside a container (such as a pocket).
If you use webmail, checking involves a good bit of effort and attention on your part. But if you use a normal client, you have it running in the background checking on your behalf periodically and notifying you when mail arrives. Does the fact that my computer checks mail several hundred times a day make me an addict, or does it mean that whoever designed this survey thinks that "everyone uses webmail these days"?
Nobody is thinking long-term because you can't do anything useful with half of an asteroid mining operation. Either you build the whole thing in one shot (how much did Apollo cost again?) or you build small things that are actually feasible.
And don't forget the field you're working in. If you bring a nickel-iron asteroid into orbit and start dropping chunks of it on the market, the price of iron goes through the floor and there go your profits (and investors).
Then I suggest that you get off your ass and sue Comcast. Apparently television and Internet service is less valuable to the population than phones and putting up with downtime.
7. Loading...
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
I think you missed the point of this complaint. Modern consoles and PCs are more than capable of loading content in the background while the game remains fully interactive, so that the player is never forced to wait for the machine to catch up. Metroid Prime, Halo 2, Prince of Persia (but strangely not Warrior Within), and others already do this- why don't more A-list games? "Seamless" is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but it hasn't been really accomplished unless the player *never* feels like control has been taken away from him- even running down a zigzag hallway in PoP or waiting for a door to finish spinning and open in MP is better than putting the controller down and staring at a static image.
Metroid Prime has much more responsive air control than most FPSes; you are as maneuverable in the air as on the ground. Also, the Space Jump boots gives you a second chance at most jumps, and the ones that require their use are just a little bit more than you can handle without them, so hitting the button a second time lets you clear them by a huge margin. Samus will also look down a bit while airborne, which makes it easier to aim landings. Lots of subtle things like that.
And on top of all that, there are no bottomless pits to land in and force you to load a save when you miss a jump. MP1 has no bottomless pits at all, and in MP2 falling off a cliff will only move you instantly back to where you fell from and deduct a small amount of health.
Every single thing we do in the process of living, from power generation to the functioning of our own bodies, comes at the expense of the life or potential life of another organism. That's how nature works. If you don't like it, join VHEMT.
No. BitTorrent's strength has always been that it's not centralized. Napster had a single central point through which all Napster traffic passed; when that was shut down Napster was useless for illegal and legal content alike. The same thing happened (or could happen) to Kazaa. But with BitTorrent, every tracker is completely independent of every other tracker. When SuprNova got shut down, it had absolutely no effect on the tracker operated by a game fansite I work on. If every single BT tracker or search site on the net was shut down, it would still have no effect on our tracker, which serves only legitimate content. The trackers run by those large corporations are likewise completely independent from trackers serving illegal content.
BT isn't going to be a shining, piracy free star because there is no "the BitTorrent" like there was "the Napster". There's just a lot of BT users like there are a lot of FTP users, and every use is different and independent.
Optical drives used to *all* do that. Remember caddy-loading CD-ROMs? It wasn't a major gain in protection, though, because most people owned far fewer caddies than CDs and were forced to constantly swap them, thus propelling drives to tray- and slot-loading designs. Also, most proprietary formats used some sort of container, like MiniDisc or the "magneto-optical" drives that used to be popular before the age of cheap CD burners. The Blu-Ray spec also used caddies until they were dropped in favor of an improved disc material more resistant to scratching than current DVDs.
It's not that simple. Consider the following situations:
You receive a phone call. The caller ID says it is from a firm you do business with frequently. The caller informs you that there is a problem with the credit information for your most recent order, and that you must provide it again. Maybe you really do have a most recent order with that company, and it's plausible that human error somewhere in the process resulted in your CC info getting damaged (the order was placed over the phone, or in person). Maybe this is for a pretty important item that you can't spend extra days waiting for if there really is a problem with your order.
You receive a letter on what appears to be official government letterhead, with a return address that could plausibly be a government office in the state capitol. The letter informs you that you are in danger of noncompliance with obscure regulations, and includes a form to fill out so that the agency will, for a small fee, send you materials you need to remain in the clear and avoid harsh penalties.
You are standing in line at a bank waiting to see a clerk. A person approaches you wearing the uniform of a bank employee and carrying papers that look like bank documents and offers to help you. He leads you to an empty desk and walks you through the task you would like to have performed, and tells you the process will be completed in a day or two. You leave without noting his name.
All of these situations could easily occur in real life and all of them could easily be scams. Unless you are automatically paranoid at all times or willing to go out of your way to spend time on verification, chances are you'd fall for at least one of them. We got one of the second type at work the other day- it was very convincing, and in all honesty if it was my responsibility to handle it I would have been taken in.
I think the Empire's problem is more one of physical security. I mean, does anyone ever actually watch the tapes from the holographic cameras all over the Jedi temple or Palpatine's office? Does anyone besides Obi-Wan even know they're there?
There is no "good" solution here. You are responsible for what passes through your system, end of story. That's what responsibility is- where the shit splatters after it hits the fan. And that's why I'm not going to let anyone I don't already trust touch my systems in a million years.
I have one of these recalled Powerbook batteries, and right now it's running at home unsupervised. Great.
I have one of these recalled batteries, and right now it's running on my lap, working normally, at a sane temperature, just as it has done for the past 6 months. The news of this recall will not make your battery explode.
Appletalk is a legacy technology that should only be used to talk to really old Macs and printers. If you can switch everything on your network to Appleshare over TCP, do so as soon as possible.
Firstly, the game market has grown well beyond 13-year-olds (and IIRC Ninja Gaiden is rated M anyway). Where you get your games and who pays for them is your problem; adults get to make their own decision as to whether they will buy special editions of games they already own, based solely on if they feel the additional content is worth the cost.
Secondly, it's not really a sequel, it's more like an expansion pack that comes with a copy of the original game. The three huge dudes are from the Hurricane Packs that are already available over Xbox Live and will be included in this new version. They only appear if you play on the extra-hard difficulty that the Hurricane Pack adds.
A critical part that your explanation is missing is that the difference between a potential flying snake and its children would be very, very small. Some snakes would have bodies in a slightly different shape than others, so they would be slightly more successful at making jumps to capture tree lizards and therefore would be on average slightly more well-fed and slightly less likely to die before reproducing. Over thousands of years, this disparity creates a trend that results in more and more of the snake population being better and better at gliding. Dawkins explains it much better than I can.
Also, in response to the other subthread here, small animals can survive falls from far greater heights than humans can. If they're robust enough to survive impact at their own terminal velocity, then they *can't* die from falls (unless they land at a funny angle or on something very bad). Cats can survive falling off a 10-story building because they reflexively spread out, increase drag, and hit the ground at a lower velocity. A snake that's good at jumping and gliding would have no problem falling out of a tree.
I know you were joking, but this is seriously the best word ever. We can use it for the entire vocabulary of horribly abused words on the Internet and cell phones.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but imagine what the world would be like today if there was, right now, a section of London that was abandoned and fenced off, and anyone who went in there would die.
One of the problems with a nuclear battery is that the energy it produces is constant regardless of whether or not the device is operating. That means something has to be done with the energy when it's not being consumed, and that means it gets emitted as heat. That is a problem, to say the least, for anything meant to go inside a container (such as a pocket).
Yeah, but don't try playing any games over there. There are campers everywhere!
If you use webmail, checking involves a good bit of effort and attention on your part. But if you use a normal client, you have it running in the background checking on your behalf periodically and notifying you when mail arrives. Does the fact that my computer checks mail several hundred times a day make me an addict, or does it mean that whoever designed this survey thinks that "everyone uses webmail these days"?
Nobody is thinking long-term because you can't do anything useful with half of an asteroid mining operation. Either you build the whole thing in one shot (how much did Apollo cost again?) or you build small things that are actually feasible.
And don't forget the field you're working in. If you bring a nickel-iron asteroid into orbit and start dropping chunks of it on the market, the price of iron goes through the floor and there go your profits (and investors).
Then I suggest that you get off your ass and sue Comcast. Apparently television and Internet service is less valuable to the population than phones and putting up with downtime.
I don't think you'd be too happy if your daughter wanted to dress like Blood Rayne or Rachael from Ninja Gaiden.
7. Loading... As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
I think you missed the point of this complaint. Modern consoles and PCs are more than capable of loading content in the background while the game remains fully interactive, so that the player is never forced to wait for the machine to catch up. Metroid Prime, Halo 2, Prince of Persia (but strangely not Warrior Within), and others already do this- why don't more A-list games? "Seamless" is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but it hasn't been really accomplished unless the player *never* feels like control has been taken away from him- even running down a zigzag hallway in PoP or waiting for a door to finish spinning and open in MP is better than putting the controller down and staring at a static image.
Metroid Prime has much more responsive air control than most FPSes; you are as maneuverable in the air as on the ground. Also, the Space Jump boots gives you a second chance at most jumps, and the ones that require their use are just a little bit more than you can handle without them, so hitting the button a second time lets you clear them by a huge margin. Samus will also look down a bit while airborne, which makes it easier to aim landings. Lots of subtle things like that.
And on top of all that, there are no bottomless pits to land in and force you to load a save when you miss a jump. MP1 has no bottomless pits at all, and in MP2 falling off a cliff will only move you instantly back to where you fell from and deduct a small amount of health.
Yeah, his answer to the next question is much better.
Every single thing we do in the process of living, from power generation to the functioning of our own bodies, comes at the expense of the life or potential life of another organism. That's how nature works. If you don't like it, join VHEMT.
No. BitTorrent's strength has always been that it's not centralized. Napster had a single central point through which all Napster traffic passed; when that was shut down Napster was useless for illegal and legal content alike. The same thing happened (or could happen) to Kazaa. But with BitTorrent, every tracker is completely independent of every other tracker. When SuprNova got shut down, it had absolutely no effect on the tracker operated by a game fansite I work on. If every single BT tracker or search site on the net was shut down, it would still have no effect on our tracker, which serves only legitimate content. The trackers run by those large corporations are likewise completely independent from trackers serving illegal content.
BT isn't going to be a shining, piracy free star because there is no "the BitTorrent" like there was "the Napster". There's just a lot of BT users like there are a lot of FTP users, and every use is different and independent.
Optical drives used to *all* do that. Remember caddy-loading CD-ROMs? It wasn't a major gain in protection, though, because most people owned far fewer caddies than CDs and were forced to constantly swap them, thus propelling drives to tray- and slot-loading designs. Also, most proprietary formats used some sort of container, like MiniDisc or the "magneto-optical" drives that used to be popular before the age of cheap CD burners. The Blu-Ray spec also used caddies until they were dropped in favor of an improved disc material more resistant to scratching than current DVDs.
- You receive a phone call. The caller ID says it is from a firm you do business with frequently. The caller informs you that there is a problem with the credit information for your most recent order, and that you must provide it again. Maybe you really do have a most recent order with that company, and it's plausible that human error somewhere in the process resulted in your CC info getting damaged (the order was placed over the phone, or in person). Maybe this is for a pretty important item that you can't spend extra days waiting for if there really is a problem with your order.
- You receive a letter on what appears to be official government letterhead, with a return address that could plausibly be a government office in the state capitol. The letter informs you that you are in danger of noncompliance with obscure regulations, and includes a form to fill out so that the agency will, for a small fee, send you materials you need to remain in the clear and avoid harsh penalties.
- You are standing in line at a bank waiting to see a clerk. A person approaches you wearing the uniform of a bank employee and carrying papers that look like bank documents and offers to help you. He leads you to an empty desk and walks you through the task you would like to have performed, and tells you the process will be completed in a day or two. You leave without noting his name.
All of these situations could easily occur in real life and all of them could easily be scams. Unless you are automatically paranoid at all times or willing to go out of your way to spend time on verification, chances are you'd fall for at least one of them. We got one of the second type at work the other day- it was very convincing, and in all honesty if it was my responsibility to handle it I would have been taken in.I think the Empire's problem is more one of physical security. I mean, does anyone ever actually watch the tapes from the holographic cameras all over the Jedi temple or Palpatine's office? Does anyone besides Obi-Wan even know they're there?
this story isn't even a dupe-- it's a TRUPE!!!
The accepted term here is "tripe". Of course, that can apply to the first and second run of the story as well...
There is no "good" solution here. You are responsible for what passes through your system, end of story. That's what responsibility is- where the shit splatters after it hits the fan. And that's why I'm not going to let anyone I don't already trust touch my systems in a million years.
This attitude rarely survives having one's favorite online hangout attacked. Just wait, it will happen to you sooner or later.
I have one of these recalled Powerbook batteries, and right now it's running at home unsupervised. Great.
I have one of these recalled batteries, and right now it's running on my lap, working normally, at a sane temperature, just as it has done for the past 6 months. The news of this recall will not make your battery explode.
It's not possible to ever be absolutely sure what the computer is doing.
Appletalk is a legacy technology that should only be used to talk to really old Macs and printers. If you can switch everything on your network to Appleshare over TCP, do so as soon as possible.
Firstly, the game market has grown well beyond 13-year-olds (and IIRC Ninja Gaiden is rated M anyway). Where you get your games and who pays for them is your problem; adults get to make their own decision as to whether they will buy special editions of games they already own, based solely on if they feel the additional content is worth the cost.
Secondly, it's not really a sequel, it's more like an expansion pack that comes with a copy of the original game. The three huge dudes are from the Hurricane Packs that are already available over Xbox Live and will be included in this new version. They only appear if you play on the extra-hard difficulty that the Hurricane Pack adds.
A critical part that your explanation is missing is that the difference between a potential flying snake and its children would be very, very small. Some snakes would have bodies in a slightly different shape than others, so they would be slightly more successful at making jumps to capture tree lizards and therefore would be on average slightly more well-fed and slightly less likely to die before reproducing. Over thousands of years, this disparity creates a trend that results in more and more of the snake population being better and better at gliding. Dawkins explains it much better than I can.
Also, in response to the other subthread here, small animals can survive falls from far greater heights than humans can. If they're robust enough to survive impact at their own terminal velocity, then they *can't* die from falls (unless they land at a funny angle or on something very bad). Cats can survive falling off a 10-story building because they reflexively spread out, increase drag, and hit the ground at a lower velocity. A snake that's good at jumping and gliding would have no problem falling out of a tree.
lexicolon
I know you were joking, but this is seriously the best word ever. We can use it for the entire vocabulary of horribly abused words on the Internet and cell phones.
True, but I've never heard of a jelly donut exploding when it was stabbed with a screwdriver (jelly going all over the table does not count).