They don't know jack shit about windows either; but if there's a desktop shortcut for The Internet, they'll be fine:-P
-As long as all they wanted it for was to use the internet.:>|
In the ads I've seen for charities asking for PC's, they almost always say that the PC's need to have a valid license for the Windows OS that is on it. Go and try to donate a Linux-only PC to some place and see what they say.
And regarding monitors,,,, the local Goodwill stores will not even accept CRT's anymore.
If you're being realistic, non-computer-geeks don't know jack shit about Linux, and don't have the time or desire to learn. Nobody will want to bother with some wierd OS that they can't buy software for at Wal-Mart.
Without some flavor of Windows on it, the PC will end up being used as a door stop. The very things that Linux is best at, is the same things that regular (non-computer) people never do.
Yea but if it was what people preferred, then it was better. And it was what people preferred except for portables and car radios.
Up to about the 1950's, radio companies did not care what % distortion an amp had; they experimented with different amp circuits and depended mainly on polls of ordinary people listening and choosing which one sounded better. It is possible to design a tube audio amp with a very low amount of distortion {--tube amps are still used as the final stage of radio broadcasting systems, because no transistor can handle that much power--} but the low-distortion tube audio amps were not the ones most people preferred the sound of. The distortion is there because (similar to guitar tube amps) most people liked it better that way. And many commercial studio recordings are STILL mastered on tube equipment and analog tape, even now. Didja ever wonder why?....
The only reason tubes got forced out of the market to the extent they have is because transistors got cheaper. If the cheapest home-stereo tube amp was as cheap as the cheapest transistor home-stereo amp, I'd be willing to bet that most people would choose the tubes.
I consider myself a semi-audiophile; I am old enough to recall when TVs and non-portable radios had tubes. Tubes just plain sound right,,,,, and modern solid-state amps aren't the same. I haven't shopped much for high-end home stereos, but I've seen a few rather expensive ones and a few monsters and you can't get the tube sound by messing with an EQ.
Another factor however is that music production today is generally shit. Commercial songs are put on albums (CDs) compressed just so they'll play louder on the radio, and it takes all the life out of them. They do not sound real anymore.:>|
As much as I'd like a tube amp setup, I don't own one (they cost $$$$ considering that I have not much time to listen really) and no record collection (most music I like is post-1980)
If you ever get the chance to do a side-by-side listening test of a tube and transistor amp, I highly encourage it. Even if all you have to listen to is a modern CD, you can still hear the difference.
Parent is correct that requiring higher and higher degrees for the same jobs is merely a screening method. The thing is--for many occupations, it wasn't always this way.
It relates to the Supreme Court decision Griggs vs. Duke Power Company, and to over-reaching anti-discrimination laws present in the US that effectively prevent private employers from doing their own skills testing of applicants.
Kids don't want to program mostly due to the huge amount of offshoring/layings-off that occurred about oh ten years ago.
It's only colleges that want to sell this shit to students--and the students know that it is largely rotten fish. For every US student who graduates with any kind of CIS degree, there's a half-dozen B1B visas who will work for less.
If the people who run universities were half as smart as they think they are, they'd have come out against B1B visa hiring and offshoring a long time ago.
It is true that the US needs to drastically downsize its military. Would be much better from a financial standpoint (since defense spending is just taxation upon every other business) and possibly philosophically as well.
...I kinda smile though, whenever someone complains that the US is not 'socialized' enough. Well over half of the country is probably drawing a paycheck from the government: either as direct employees at the federal, state or local level, postal workers, military personnel, military contractors or sub-contractors and all those receiving Social Security, disability, unemployment or welfare benefits.
...Dr. Norman Matloff didn't think it was a problem that many US tech students couldn't find jobs...
..it only became a problem when students wised up and stopped entering/paying for tech college degrees,,,, since they already knew their chances of finding a job.:|
It's very difficult to address this subject at all without sounding like "those damn foreigners are stealing our jobs!!!",,, but if US universities knew which side their bread was buttered on, they'd have come out against US companies offshoring a long time ago.
It is very interesting to find such a site this way--but the place where they were found is probably among the worst.
As I read it,,,, S.A. has no normal tourist industry at all (leaving little hope of outsiders to ever see the sites or anything found there)....
....and despite having the government wealth to support cultural efforts--since the rise of Islam, they have shown little interest in preserving anything not connected with the Islamic faith.
Creative cards are best for gaming because they support EAX (if the game has it).
Also they are (were) great for MIDI music creation as they supported soundfonts in hardware mode (sadly, in Win7 this no longer seems to be true). When it came to jamming with MIDI files, a plain low-end Soundblaster Live could kick ass compared to a lot of other-brand soundcards that cost 3-4X as much.
Audiophile cards are best for music playback, but often lack any features to modify the sound at all (no bass/treble control, not even software volume control). Also they may have no MIDI, or a really poor-sounding MIDI table built-in.
I had a PC with a Soundblaster Audigy and an Audiphile 2496 in it last time around.
The Creative was best for gaming, easily.
The M-Audio had the cleanest signals in and out, easily.
The onboard sound didn't come close to what either of the cards could do, at what they were best....
~
I believe it was Lee Iacoca who once said that "electric cars are the wave of the future,,, and always will be".
While researching a related subject recently, I looked through a LOT of 75-100+ year old automobile and motorcycle literature--newspaper stories, books and periodicals. There's reports from literally a hundred years ago saying how "electrics are going to become popular very soon" and "recent improvements will lead to breakthrougs in storage efficiencies",,,the exact same things people are still claiming today about electric cars.
And yet even now, 99.99% of everybody is still driving around in non-electric cars, and those that are driving electrics are either paying drastically higher prices per-mile, or dealing with drastically-lower range issues, or both. Nothing about electric cars has changed, other than the government subsidies you can get now (which is just government bureaucrats throwing YOUR tax money away on another unworkable plan).
I generally support polluting the world less, but the "real soon now" song has been sung about electric cars for over a hundred fucking years. I doubt very much that electric cars are likely to be any significant part of that goal.
I myself have often wondered why road-going vehicles do not use cross-head engines. They are standard practice in large ship engines. These can get nearly double the thermal efficiency of a normal piston engine, and are buildable right now with current materials, and current manufacturing techniques.
~
You'll be right there waiting in line, when Apple brings out the iShovel. Just like everybody else will be. (I heard it's white, so Imma try not to get mine dirty...)
~
Switching to electronic materials only works if all the materials the classroom needs are available in that format. Otherwise,,, you're just making kids carry around a laptop computer in addition to a backpack full of books, that was already heavy to begin with.
As long as (USA) textbook companies refuse to provide electronic versions of their books, you're not going to see any technological changes in the classroom, particularly of younger students. Many textbook companies provide additional supplemental material, but refuse to offer full e-book versions at all {even though the book EDITING is done electronically anyway...}. Internet connections are common but have turned out to be of rather little use; you can't study anything online but porn and viagra.
I used to say that the Federal government should force textbook companies doing business with public schools to provide e-versions if requested.
Now the Libertarian in me no longer agrees.
In the long run, it would just be much simpler to make a Federal law that declares converting hard copies to e-formats as fair use.
~
I find however that the issue is employers seeming to THINK that Highschool isn't enough when it really is. Browsing the job market I see 75% of jobs requesting bachelors (of anything) or greater can be accomplished by two weeks of in-house training and a grade 10 education. The problem isn't that we have too many degrees saturating the market, its that every employer feels their entitled to request only those qualifications for their position when not required.
There is a term for this. Do you know what it is? ---> "credentials inflation":
I do not know that this situation (of "too many college graduates") is really a problem as such or more of a symptom of a condition of "the system" not working the way we think it should.
There is a misguided notion of equality in the US that everyone should be able to achieve the same results, regardless of their (lack of) abilities. It has ultimately become destructive to achievement in academics and the business world as well.
You can't have a rainbow-assortment of people always tie for first place, unless the race was rigged from the start.
~
Sorbothane is a urethane developed specifically to attenuate mechanical vibrations. It works.
No other kinds of rubber will attenuate vibration nearly as well, and some will even make vibration last longer than it would without the rubber present.
One use for it is tripod foot pads for amateur telescopes. You can go search amateur astronomy forums for user testimony about it. The only people who think that "any kind of rubber will work like Sorbothane" is the people who have not yet tried using Sorbothane.
There don't seem to be any distributors outside of the US, and that's a pity as it's nifty stuff. If you're elsewhere and you need to kill vibration then just pay the international shipping, because nothing else is going to work as well.
~
Your point is exactly how I feel also--but the local college I went to checks attendance now also.
The reason is because of government grants and loans--one of the conditions of the schools being able to participate in the loan programs is that they must be able to show that the student on the loan actually attended the class.
So the school checks attendance for EVERYBODY--because only requiring those on government loans to have mandatory attendance would be "discriminatory".
...past US supreme court decisions have found that if there is any effective discrimination of testing procedures it is illegal, even if the test is demonstrated to be directly relevant to the position and the test is not intended to be discriminatory (Griggs vs Duke Power Company, 1971).
This is the reason for credentials inflation--private companies are afraid of getting sued for generating their own skills testing, so they just ask for higher and higher degrees every few years for the same jobs, even though the actual duties of the jobs don't change.
Jobs that used to ask for high-school diplomas twenty years ago are requiring bachelor's degrees today.
And colleges (being morally above the barbs of such intellectual accusations) engage in race-normimg, to make certain that more and more people who should have failed are passed anyway.
A long time ago on a game programming forum I came up with the idea of a game I called "car wars". At the time, hand-held GPS units were just becoming commonly available (though still rather expensive) and you could hook a cellphone and a GPS unit to laptops. I couldn't afford to try it, and neither could anyone else.
The idea was that this would be a sort of server-based Atari "Battle Zone" game, but played in your car. The PC would show a real-time radar map, and your car on it. You would have to visit random points to pick up "ammo", and then get near opposing players' cars to "shoot". The use of the computer would allow artificial conditions to be provided--such as power-ups that would temporarily extend your ammo supply, the ammo range, "radar-proof" your car to opposing players, or temporarily reveal their locations to you. There could be "clouds" that would drift across the radar screen, hiding players from each other. They might be driving down the same roads, perhaps even within sight of each other--but wouldn't recognize each other by sight, only by the radar screen.
The whole point of this was to introduce a new computer/online game style that was location-based--basically, you could actually meet the people IRL that you played with. Of course using cars, there would be a tendency to speed, but a game now could detect that and award penalties for doing so. The use of cars at all is somewhat hazardous, but GPS isn't accurate enough on any scale small enough to be useful on foot. The game (as I imagined it) would be played city-wide...... Somebody else will have to take the torch however. I'm no longer interested in driving around the city in circles, and I even have a pocket-PC phone with GPS and net access.
Oh well.
In the last couple years I think we've already seen something like this done...... I seem to remember a guy who made a GPS "Pac-Man" style game, where you had VR goggles and had to run around outside to play it....
~
...until textbooks are all available in electronic form.
Now (at least in the US) most are not, due to textbook publisher's concerns over pirating. They offer supplementary material, and sometimes even material or quizzes that they host and manage on their own servers (but that is password-locked, and only valid for one course's length, so EVERY student MUST buy a new textbook & CD, just to get a valid online password). But the whole contents of the textbook are never available, and it's no mistake.
Why are kids still hefting around bookbags, when all this shit will fit on a single 16gb SD card?
I'm not usually a fan of government interference, but this is one place I think really could benefit from it: make a federal laws that says textbook publishers either put out 100% electronic versions, or their books cannot be used at any school that is accredited by the Dept of Education at all.
~
I loved it in the early- and middle-years of its publication; there certainly wasn't anything else like it. I was young so perhaps it would not strike me the same now.
Later towards its death, it veered way off into "bigfoot and UFO hunting" stuff. If you had been reading it all along, you could tell the end was near.
~
Cameras usually stink for this....
on
The DIY Book Scanner
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It may work well enough for basic textbooks, but the problem is that (for high-quality scans) you can't ever get the same image quality from a $800 camera that you can from a $80 scanner. At 1200 DPI, a scanner is equivalent to a ~384 MP camera. Even scanning at "only" 300 DPI is ~90 MP, a far bigger image than any consumer-grade camera can provide.
The cameras he used were only five megapixels.
Might work for looking at the pages on your iPhone. Not gonna look very readable on your laptop screen, and forget about reading the book's footnotes.....
~
The Hackers Diet makes it clear: Exercise just doesn't burn that many calories. You can lose weight just by eating less calories than you burn, no exercise required.
This is oversimplifying the problem.
It does nothing to explain why everyone eats instinctively what they feel is enough, yet some people end up thin and others end up fat.
It also does nothing to explain the obesity studies done in twins, which are truly astonishing. There's not many full studies done online, but you can view a few summaries. (most pairs of identical twins end up being very-nearly the exact same weight as adults, if they are raised together or not, and if they are raised by their genetic parents or not. Twins separated at birth often have body weights within 5 lbs of each other....)
For all that medicine does know, they still don't yet know what makes some people fat and others thin. Advising people to "eat less" is not a solution; it's like telling an asthmatic to "breathe less" to avoid having attacks. It does nothing to address the root cause.
,,,,Fifty years ago it was common for doctors to blame patients for having blood pressure or cholesterol that was too high. Since doctors "knew" it was all a matter of what you chose to ate, there was no other excuse..... except that turned out to be very-much wrong. As more and more in-depth studies were done, it was found that a certain percentage of the population suffered high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels, no matter what they ate. Drugs were found that could control the problem, and nowadays no doctor will blame you for anything if you try dieting first, but your high BP/cholesterol requires medication. It's seen as more-irresponsible not to take the medication.
We are approaching the age when obesity moves from being a conscious decision of a weak-minded person, to a disease that is curable with the proper medication. Fifty years from now "blaming" someone for being fat will be as silly as "blaming" a dwarf for being short.
~
The car was dangerous because it used rear-wheel steering.
In at least this respect, B. Fuller should have taken the advice of automotive industry engineers of the day, who would have told him that this (steering arrangement) was a waste of time. It is generally presumed to be impossible to build a mechanical rear-wheel-steering system that exhibits positive stability (that being the natural tendency to hold a straight line, AND to return to a straight line on its own when you release the steering controls in a turn).
Positive stability isn't necessary for slow vehicles such as forklifts and construction and agricultural tractors, but it is critical for high-speed vehicles.
I recall reading that one (Dymaxion) was eventually converted to front-wheel steering, just so that it could to an exhibition run on a test track at typical car speeds.
~
Slashdot Mirror
-As long as all they wanted it for was to use the internet. :>|
In the ads I've seen for charities asking for PC's, they almost always say that the PC's need to have a valid license for the Windows OS that is on it. Go and try to donate a Linux-only PC to some place and see what they say.
And regarding monitors,,,, the local Goodwill stores will not even accept CRT's anymore.
No, it doesn't depend.
If you're being realistic, non-computer-geeks don't know jack shit about Linux, and don't have the time or desire to learn. Nobody will want to bother with some wierd OS that they can't buy software for at Wal-Mart.
Without some flavor of Windows on it, the PC will end up being used as a door stop. The very things that Linux is best at, is the same things that regular (non-computer) people never do.
Yea but if it was what people preferred, then it was better. And it was what people preferred except for portables and car radios.
:>|
Up to about the 1950's, radio companies did not care what % distortion an amp had; they experimented with different amp circuits and depended mainly on polls of ordinary people listening and choosing which one sounded better. It is possible to design a tube audio amp with a very low amount of distortion {--tube amps are still used as the final stage of radio broadcasting systems, because no transistor can handle that much power--} but the low-distortion tube audio amps were not the ones most people preferred the sound of. The distortion is there because (similar to guitar tube amps) most people liked it better that way. And many commercial studio recordings are STILL mastered on tube equipment and analog tape, even now. Didja ever wonder why?....
The only reason tubes got forced out of the market to the extent they have is because transistors got cheaper. If the cheapest home-stereo tube amp was as cheap as the cheapest transistor home-stereo amp, I'd be willing to bet that most people would choose the tubes.
I consider myself a semi-audiophile; I am old enough to recall when TVs and non-portable radios had tubes. Tubes just plain sound right,,,,, and modern solid-state amps aren't the same. I haven't shopped much for high-end home stereos, but I've seen a few rather expensive ones and a few monsters and you can't get the tube sound by messing with an EQ.
Another factor however is that music production today is generally shit. Commercial songs are put on albums (CDs) compressed just so they'll play louder on the radio, and it takes all the life out of them. They do not sound real anymore.
As much as I'd like a tube amp setup, I don't own one (they cost $$$$ considering that I have not much time to listen really) and no record collection (most music I like is post-1980)
If you ever get the chance to do a side-by-side listening test of a tube and transistor amp, I highly encourage it. Even if all you have to listen to is a modern CD, you can still hear the difference.
Parent is correct that requiring higher and higher degrees for the same jobs is merely a screening method. The thing is--for many occupations, it wasn't always this way.
It relates to the Supreme Court decision Griggs vs. Duke Power Company, and to over-reaching anti-discrimination laws present in the US that effectively prevent private employers from doing their own skills testing of applicants.
You can read one article explaining it here-
http://www.popecenter.org/news/article.html?id=1749
Kids don't want to program mostly due to the huge amount of offshoring/layings-off that occurred about oh ten years ago.
It's only colleges that want to sell this shit to students--and the students know that it is largely rotten fish. For every US student who graduates with any kind of CIS degree, there's a half-dozen B1B visas who will work for less.
If the people who run universities were half as smart as they think they are, they'd have come out against B1B visa hiring and offshoring a long time ago.
It is true that the US needs to drastically downsize its military. Would be much better from a financial standpoint (since defense spending is just taxation upon every other business) and possibly philosophically as well.
...I kinda smile though, whenever someone complains that the US is not 'socialized' enough.
Well over half of the country is probably drawing a paycheck from the government: either as direct employees at the federal, state or local level, postal workers, military personnel, military contractors or sub-contractors and all those receiving Social Security, disability, unemployment or welfare benefits.
...Dr. Norman Matloff didn't think it was a problem that many US tech students couldn't find jobs...
:|
..it only became a problem when students wised up and stopped entering/paying for tech college degrees,,,, since they already knew their chances of finding a job.
It's very difficult to address this subject at all without sounding like "those damn foreigners are stealing our jobs!!!",,, but if US universities knew which side their bread was buttered on, they'd have come out against US companies offshoring a long time ago.
[-end-]
It is very interesting to find such a site this way--but the place where they were found is probably among the worst.
....
....and despite having the government wealth to support cultural efforts--since the rise of Islam, they have shown little interest in preserving anything not connected with the Islamic faith.
As I read it,,,, S.A. has no normal tourist industry at all (leaving little hope of outsiders to ever see the sites or anything found there)
Creative cards are best for gaming because they support EAX (if the game has it).
Also they are (were) great for MIDI music creation as they supported soundfonts in hardware mode (sadly, in Win7 this no longer seems to be true). When it came to jamming with MIDI files, a plain low-end Soundblaster Live could kick ass compared to a lot of other-brand soundcards that cost 3-4X as much.
Audiophile cards are best for music playback, but often lack any features to modify the sound at all (no bass/treble control, not even software volume control). Also they may have no MIDI, or a really poor-sounding MIDI table built-in.
I had a PC with a Soundblaster Audigy and an Audiphile 2496 in it last time around.
The Creative was best for gaming, easily.
The M-Audio had the cleanest signals in and out, easily. The onboard sound didn't come close to what either of the cards could do, at what they were best....
~
I believe it was Lee Iacoca who once said that "electric cars are the wave of the future,,, and always will be".
,,,the exact same things people are still claiming today about electric cars.
While researching a related subject recently, I looked through a LOT of 75-100+ year old automobile and motorcycle literature--newspaper stories, books and periodicals. There's reports from literally a hundred years ago saying how "electrics are going to become popular very soon" and "recent improvements will lead to breakthrougs in storage efficiencies"
And yet even now, 99.99% of everybody is still driving around in non-electric cars, and those that are driving electrics are either paying drastically higher prices per-mile, or dealing with drastically-lower range issues, or both. Nothing about electric cars has changed, other than the government subsidies you can get now (which is just government bureaucrats throwing YOUR tax money away on another unworkable plan).
I generally support polluting the world less, but the "real soon now" song has been sung about electric cars for over a hundred fucking years . I doubt very much that electric cars are likely to be any significant part of that goal.
I myself have often wondered why road-going vehicles do not use cross-head engines. They are standard practice in large ship engines. These can get nearly double the thermal efficiency of a normal piston engine, and are buildable right now with current materials, and current manufacturing techniques.
~
Oh, bullshit.
You'll be right there waiting in line, when Apple brings out the iShovel. Just like everybody else will be. (I heard it's white, so Imma try not to get mine dirty...)
~
Switching to electronic materials only works if all the materials the classroom needs are available in that format. Otherwise,,, you're just making kids carry around a laptop computer in addition to a backpack full of books, that was already heavy to begin with.
As long as (USA) textbook companies refuse to provide electronic versions of their books, you're not going to see any technological changes in the classroom, particularly of younger students. Many textbook companies provide additional supplemental material, but refuse to offer full e-book versions at all {even though the book EDITING is done electronically anyway...}. Internet connections are common but have turned out to be of rather little use; you can't study anything online but porn and viagra.
I used to say that the Federal government should force textbook companies doing business with public schools to provide e-versions if requested.
Now the Libertarian in me no longer agrees.
In the long run, it would just be much simpler to make a Federal law that declares converting hard copies to e-formats as fair use.
~
I dunno, is this even a problem?
I mean, has the government tried threatening to send sorcerers to steal their genitals if they don't comply?
~
In the USA, child pornography laws have become the nirvana of the tyrant. (the anti sex-tourism law is blatantly un-Constitutional as well)
~
There is a term for this. Do you know what it is? ---> "credentials inflation":
http://www.popecenter.org/news/article.html?id=1749
-----
I do not know that this situation (of "too many college graduates") is really a problem as such or more of a symptom of a condition of "the system" not working the way we think it should.
There is a misguided notion of equality in the US that everyone should be able to achieve the same results, regardless of their (lack of) abilities. It has ultimately become destructive to achievement in academics and the business world as well.
You can't have a rainbow-assortment of people always tie for first place, unless the race was rigged from the start.
~
Sorbothane is a urethane developed specifically to attenuate mechanical vibrations.
It works.
No other kinds of rubber will attenuate vibration nearly as well, and some will even make vibration last longer than it would without the rubber present.
One use for it is tripod foot pads for amateur telescopes. You can go search amateur astronomy forums for user testimony about it. The only people who think that "any kind of rubber will work like Sorbothane" is the people who have not yet tried using Sorbothane.
There don't seem to be any distributors outside of the US, and that's a pity as it's nifty stuff. If you're elsewhere and you need to kill vibration then just pay the international shipping, because nothing else is going to work as well.
~
Your point is exactly how I feel also--but the local college I went to checks attendance now also.
:/
The reason is because of government grants and loans--one of the conditions of the schools being able to participate in the loan programs is that they must be able to show that the student on the loan actually attended the class.
So the school checks attendance for EVERYBODY--because only requiring those on government loans to have mandatory attendance would be "discriminatory".
~
...past US supreme court decisions have found that if there is any effective discrimination of testing procedures it is illegal, even if the test is demonstrated to be directly relevant to the position and the test is not intended to be discriminatory (Griggs vs Duke Power Company, 1971).
This is the reason for credentials inflation--private companies are afraid of getting sued for generating their own skills testing, so they just ask for higher and higher degrees every few years for the same jobs, even though the actual duties of the jobs don't change.
Jobs that used to ask for high-school diplomas twenty years ago are requiring bachelor's degrees today.
And colleges (being morally above the barbs of such intellectual accusations) engage in race-normimg, to make certain that more and more people who should have failed are passed anyway.
http://www.popecenter.org/news/article.html?id=1749
Good luck!
~
A long time ago on a game programming forum I came up with the idea of a game I called "car wars". At the time, hand-held GPS units were just becoming commonly available (though still rather expensive) and you could hook a cellphone and a GPS unit to laptops. I couldn't afford to try it, and neither could anyone else.
The idea was that this would be a sort of server-based Atari "Battle Zone" game, but played in your car. The PC would show a real-time radar map, and your car on it. You would have to visit random points to pick up "ammo", and then get near opposing players' cars to "shoot". The use of the computer would allow artificial conditions to be provided--such as power-ups that would temporarily extend your ammo supply, the ammo range, "radar-proof" your car to opposing players, or temporarily reveal their locations to you. There could be "clouds" that would drift across the radar screen, hiding players from each other. They might be driving down the same roads, perhaps even within sight of each other--but wouldn't recognize each other by sight, only by the radar screen.
The whole point of this was to introduce a new computer/online game style that was location-based--basically, you could actually meet the people IRL that you played with. Of course using cars, there would be a tendency to speed, but a game now could detect that and award penalties for doing so. The use of cars at all is somewhat hazardous, but GPS isn't accurate enough on any scale small enough to be useful on foot. The game (as I imagined it) would be played city-wide...... Somebody else will have to take the torch however. I'm no longer interested in driving around the city in circles, and I even have a pocket-PC phone with GPS and net access.
Oh well.
In the last couple years I think we've already seen something like this done...... I seem to remember a guy who made a GPS "Pac-Man" style game, where you had VR goggles and had to run around outside to play it....
~
...until textbooks are all available in electronic form.
Now (at least in the US) most are not, due to textbook publisher's concerns over pirating. They offer supplementary material, and sometimes even material or quizzes that they host and manage on their own servers (but that is password-locked, and only valid for one course's length, so EVERY student MUST buy a new textbook & CD, just to get a valid online password). But the whole contents of the textbook are never available, and it's no mistake.
Why are kids still hefting around bookbags, when all this shit will fit on a single 16gb SD card?
I'm not usually a fan of government interference, but this is one place I think really could benefit from it: make a federal laws that says textbook publishers either put out 100% electronic versions, or their books cannot be used at any school that is accredited by the Dept of Education at all.
~
I loved it in the early- and middle-years of its publication; there certainly wasn't anything else like it. I was young so perhaps it would not strike me the same now.
Later towards its death, it veered way off into "bigfoot and UFO hunting" stuff. If you had been reading it all along, you could tell the end was near.
~
It may work well enough for basic textbooks, but the problem is that (for high-quality scans) you can't ever get the same image quality from a $800 camera that you can from a $80 scanner. At 1200 DPI, a scanner is equivalent to a ~384 MP camera. Even scanning at "only" 300 DPI is ~90 MP, a far bigger image than any consumer-grade camera can provide.
The cameras he used were only five megapixels.
Might work for looking at the pages on your iPhone. Not gonna look very readable on your laptop screen, and forget about reading the book's footnotes.....
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This is oversimplifying the problem.
,,,,Fifty years ago it was common for doctors to blame patients for having blood pressure or cholesterol that was too high. Since doctors "knew" it was all a matter of what you chose to ate, there was no other excuse..... except that turned out to be very-much wrong. As more and more in-depth studies were done, it was found that a certain percentage of the population suffered high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels, no matter what they ate. Drugs were found that could control the problem, and nowadays no doctor will blame you for anything if you try dieting first, but your high BP/cholesterol requires medication. It's seen as more-irresponsible not to take the medication.
It does nothing to explain why everyone eats instinctively what they feel is enough, yet some people end up thin and others end up fat.
It also does nothing to explain the obesity studies done in twins, which are truly astonishing. There's not many full studies done online, but you can view a few summaries. (most pairs of identical twins end up being very-nearly the exact same weight as adults, if they are raised together or not, and if they are raised by their genetic parents or not. Twins separated at birth often have body weights within 5 lbs of each other....)
For all that medicine does know, they still don't yet know what makes some people fat and others thin. Advising people to "eat less" is not a solution; it's like telling an asthmatic to "breathe less" to avoid having attacks. It does nothing to address the root cause.
We are approaching the age when obesity moves from being a conscious decision of a weak-minded person, to a disease that is curable with the proper medication. Fifty years from now "blaming" someone for being fat will be as silly as "blaming" a dwarf for being short.
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Al Gore, saviour of Gaia, is going to pocket huge amounts of money in a Us government-funded foreign-business deal to build a hybrid Camaro?
Well, color me a retarded limp-dicked tofu-eating socialist.
I never would have guessed this would happen...
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The car was dangerous because it used rear-wheel steering.
In at least this respect, B. Fuller should have taken the advice of automotive industry engineers of the day, who would have told him that this (steering arrangement) was a waste of time. It is generally presumed to be impossible to build a mechanical rear-wheel-steering system that exhibits positive stability (that being the natural tendency to hold a straight line, AND to return to a straight line on its own when you release the steering controls in a turn).
Positive stability isn't necessary for slow vehicles such as forklifts and construction and agricultural tractors, but it is critical for high-speed vehicles.
I recall reading that one (Dymaxion) was eventually converted to front-wheel steering, just so that it could to an exhibition run on a test track at typical car speeds.
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