I agree, but I would add that for flight sims, you actually have to get close enough to the enemy to see the plane/target. Which is just more fun to me than launching a missile a mile or more away.
And on the ground you have automatic and semi-automatic weapons. I would think any historic realistic game that makes you draw a rifle bolt after every shot or any other such time spent, would be far more boring than a semi-automatic melee.
I like the WWII genre, but I'm glad there are alternatives.
And without a doubt the game developers are creating them because they have been selling. Flight Sims were heading in the opposite direction, although I don't know if Il-Sturmovik and SWOTLII turned that around or not.
"It doesn't benifit the consumer at all except to decrease their average wage."
I think you have jumped too far to reach that conclusion. It might be that only a company will benefit from outsourcing intellectual jobs (IT in particular) and not pass on any of the savings to consumers. But I can just as easily think of an example where the company might pass on the savings.
Say Amazon or another online retailer has market research that indicates that lowering their prices a little bit would earn them a healthy increase in market share. They can't get their distributors to reduce prices, so they outsource the IT work of keeping the site running and updated. They then might lower their prices across the board by the saved amount. Thereby benefitting consumers. And increasing their market share.
Now, I'm not saying companies would pass savings to consumers to be nice. That ain't gonna happen. It would have to be in their interest somehow, but it is not impossible that it might still benefit consumers.
Just the same, it is worrying to see how difficult it might be for the American workforce to find decent and stable jobs in the future. When I heard that Wal-Mart was the number one employer in the country, I remember thinking, "If we all end up working at Wal-Mart? How will we be able to afford to keep buying things at Wal-Mart?"
Absolutely. Lately, the only CDs I have bought were blues CDs from fatpossum records. Because their prices are reasonable and the music is just what I'm looking for. You can even listen to MP3s on their site before buying. I mean I'm still willing to spend money on CDs. But $20 for a CD? I've got to be pretty sure its good before I spend that much.
Plus, there is something endearing about the underdog look of the fatpossum website. fatpossum.com
Or its like that story about the circus horse who could do math. When someone asked the horse any kind of math problem the horse would tap out the answer with it's hoof. But if the person asking the horse didn't know the answer to the question, the horse was often wrong. It turned out, he was reading the subtle body language and emotion on the face of the person asking and would stop stomping when he read the reaction that he had reached the right answer.
Dogs could be doing something similar with epilepsy or strokes, by picking up on hidden body language cues that the person isn't even aware of.
It has always seemed to me that dogs are much more in tune to emotions than anything rational, anyway. Our physical health undoubtedly has an affect on our emotional state.
I found your post quite interesting and was puzzled as to why you would post it anonymously. But in any case, I have a philosophy degree and see this discussion as echoing a larger (or perhaps just similar) issue in philosophy as a whole. In my studies it seemed no single philosophy could really take you from the primacy of your thoughts and your existence to the day to day reality of practical things. Studying each philosophical viewpoint was interesting in that it showed connections and made observations that were illuminating in some respect. But when criticized, none could withstand relentlessly applied logic.
You referenced Kuhn and his philosophy of science. While widely paraphrased (and to my understanding, bastardized) his work regarding paradigms of scientific viewpoint were irreconcilable with each other. The Copernican paradigm completely replaces the "Sun revolves around the earth" paradigm. But as I recall, he didn't really have an answer for how incremental scientific progress is made. How has medicine has improved to give us longer and healthier lifespans, if every preceding theory is thrown out when a new one is adopted.
This seems to me to be a metaphor for the disconnect of philosophy and (for lack of a better term) the practicalities of daily life. You suggest that science is at a crisis point. But it seems to me that this crisis of science floundering for practical answers to deeper questions and philosophy floundering to explain fully even the most obvious practical facts, has been going on for some time. It does seem to me that science is making inexorable progress. I don't know if the same could be said of philosophy, but either way I don't know that I can agree with your conclusion that a "grand unified theory" is not possible.
I can certainly understand why you would be skeptical of its being achieved anytime soon, but I would submit that we just don't know enough about our unsolved problems to know whether we will ever solve them.
It's easy to use deconstructionism to tear down every thought and expression, but I think there is tangible evidence of increasing knowledge. I can not deny that I am sitting here having a heady discussion virtually with someone who could be anywhere in the world, in a way that was impossible just a few years ago. I can think of a number of similar examples. Good discussion. I apologize in advance if I put words in anyone's mouth that they didn't want there.
I read a great article that explained all of this wonderfully, because I always wondered about the human eye only seeing 30 frames a second issue. Unfortunately, the article is gone, so I can't give a link. But the article explained these two details.
1. the human eye can pick up on many subtle details at higer frame rates than 60+, but it is like subliminal advertising. You wouldn't know what you are seeing, but you could probably see two demos of frame rate examples and tell there was a difference.
2. When you are talking about online gaming you need to discuss continuous frame rate. Sitting still you might clock over 100 frames, but moving around your machine renders things that drop that frame rate relatively. So your real frame rate is going up and down, sometimes wildly. The article (which I'm not sufficiently technical enough to back up with more facts) said the goal was to reach 72 frames a second (or higher) continuously, and that would be video like quality.
It was an interesting read, and I would always link to it in gaming forums whenever people started having this frame rate argument.
I thought the ending where Neo can control the machines was an indication that the "real world" was just another Matrix. So, if that was the case, then Bane wasn't in a real world at all and could be taken over by Smith just like anybody else in the "Matrix". But since no one who has seen the new movie is talking about this, I'm guessing there is no Matrix in a Matrix angle in the new film.
Just to clarify, I heard that this kid did this in the privacy of his own room. Then put the tape away somewhere and some "friends" from school stole it without his knowledge and put it on the school website or something.
I am as sick of litigation as the next person, but I can understand this kid being upset, if that is how this all went down. I mean did you see how many videos have been spun off of his almost all of them making fun of him in some way? Sure, I know... we don't dislike the kid, we think its great because we were all like that at some point. But he's what fourteen years old. Do you remember how sensitive you were at fourteen years old??!? Remember, how it seemed like every time you did something embarrassing the whole world seemed to be looking at you? Well for this kid, it is really true.
Well, I hope he finds peace with it and can enjoy his fame a little. I think a lot of people are laughing with him and not at him. A lot of us geeks anyway.
Is there a way to reactivate "undo" in a saved.doc ??? !
Yeah, I just tried this. I typed a message with "sensitive info" in it and saved it. Then deleted that part and saved the file again. Reopen that word doc in even something as crappy as notepad and you can look for "sensitive" and find it. After copying and pasting this into a different word file, I can't find it in Notepad. (Not that notepad is so terribly sophisticated that it rules out "sensitive info" still being around.)
My wife works at a law firm and they had major problems with this, since the features were turned on by default for their install. That may have been a choice of their IT dept., or Microsoft, I don't know. I thought they said that even copy and paste to a new doc wasn't secure enough, but I'm not sure of the details on that.
I don't think it is Microsoft being so crappy that they coded this feature in, like it was a bug. I think it is an incredible feature... that they didn't clearly inform the users about or give nearly enough control over.
I don't know if anyone reads the Sci-Fi author Elizabeth Moon, but she brings up these issues in her "universe" of books. In her books, it is the older generations refusing to turn over the reins to the younger that cause unrest.
Unfortunately, while it is an interesting dynamic tension in her stories, she doesn't seem to have come up with any great solutions. In every book it comes up and its like, "Yeah... that's still a problem." Hehe
But I'm probably being too harsh, I don't have any solutions for this either.
As for the achievement before 30 issue, I would submit that a great portion of this has to do with the increasing brain development up to the age of (someone knowledgeable correct me if I am wrong or out of date on this) about 25. After that you either don't get new neural pathways created or they are created much slower or more inefficiently. Something like that. I can't remember exactly 'cause I'm pushing 40. But it would make sense why if people didn't crack their big idea yet, they would be fighting an uphill battle after 30. But presumably, if they are extending our lives to 240 freakin years, they can also help us to keep our brains young and alive with freshness. If so, that 30 year figure would lose at least some of its meaning.
There might still be an issue of laziness. If someone hasn't gotten off their ass in 30 years, they aren't going to. But my money is on brain development as the major reason that breakthroughs occur most often before 30 or not at all.
Actual application...
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Well, all the Matrix jokes aside, this does have some potentially excellent applications. I remember the first time I heard someone talking about pacemakers and how the batteries in them wear out. I asked the obvious question, "How do they replace them?"
It involves surgery. YIKES! Granted, it is probably minor surgery compared to getting the thing put in there to begin with, but knowing it was powered by your own blood would surely be a welcome change to these folks.
I mean if you think replacing the battery on your motherboard is a pain, think of doing it on an outpatient basis.
I won't argue your data on lethality. But I know a guy who wound up in the hospital with heart palpitations from a much lower dose... like we're talking 4 or 5 cups of coffee. The same guy said he had more than that on prior occasions without any trouble, so it might have different effects depending on the varying state of your body (like maybe this guy had a heart murmur or something). I later read that caffeine "overdose" accounts for a sizable percentage of emergency room visits. I can't back that up, but it seemed interesting.
As for the original poster, I think you have to have a "come to Jesus" moment with yourself and decide if you are avoiding work because you would rather be doing something else. I originally picked a very practical major in college and only did average work in it. Once I realized that I hated that area of study and changed my major to what I was truly interested in, my grades improved considerably. Those are tough realizations to come to. Good luck with it.
I think some folks in this thread are reading way too much into the guy's off the cuff remark about being "Hackproof". I think all he meant is that it is not a remote system controlling the plane from the ground. So, you'd have to hack the system as it is installed/updated or while you are on the plane. That clearly is more secure than a "fly it from the ground" override system as far as hacking is concerned. I mean even a "white hat" hacker would be sorely tempted to take over a big jet and fly it around a little via remote control before letting it go land safely.
But yeah, the planned implementation is not immune to security threats or corruptions. The biggest likely problem I could see is just the system mislabelling an airport as off limits and all the passengers getting diverted to another city. No danger, but what a major travel hassle! Of course, if all airports were marked off limits, it would be more than just a hassle.
Still though, at least the guy is trying to come up with something that would help make things safer. Even if it turns out to be a bad idea, you got to give the guy some credit for trying.
From the article's description it sounded like at 4 minutes out the plane would start to pull away... pulling harder and harder as you got closer. Thus effectively steering you away from the no-fly zone. Not saying its foolproof, but that's what the article indicated as far as I could tell.
Actually, I think it fits this definition from the article you so cleverly, anonymously linked to.
Irony is a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.
The New Oxford English Dictionary
I think people concerned with protecting personal liberty and the free market coming up with a law that is viewed as such a challenge to personal freedom or even the ability for some people to do business, is in fact, ironic. Literally. Ironic. You may disagree either anonymously or not... it is a free country. Well the one I'm sitting in is free anyway.
And going back to the word misuse topic for a second, how about people saying "literally" all the time. "I was literally tearing my own head off!" I guess it just doesn't sound as good to say, "I was figuratively flying down the highway."
I learned from some friends going through law school that it doesn't always matter where you live when you break a law of another place. You can still have them pursue you legally and the governments of the respective nations work out how that happens, a lot of it is already in treaty agreements. So, these Aussies might very well get dragged into a U.S. court if they have violated a law.
A reasonable example might be if you caused a panic, where folks were hurt, by calling in a bogus bomb threat somewhere in the U.S. or Europe while you were in Thailand, you wouldn't necessarily get off Scot free just because there were no bomb threat laws in Thailand.
As for the gun/bank/X-box analogy of earlier posts, I think the DMCA argument is taking the perspective that if your bank gave you an ATM card with a smart chip on it and you reprogrammed it to access other people's accounts to take their money... it would be wrong. I think most would agree with the wrongness of that. However, once you start talking software changes that don't cause that kind of direct harm the whole issue gets much fuzzier.
What cracks me up is that the most conservative types that are always screaming about keeping the government out of their business are the ones who come up with laws like DMCA that so many people feel infringe their rights in both their personal and professional lives. Ironic, huh?
Hmmmm... I don't know, I think a lot of you are missing one very key component of kid "accessibility" that exists now that didn't when I was a kid. The internet itself. There was nobody to ask about programming my Timex Sinclair. I had to find books. If I couldn't get a book on a subject or find someone else who knew about it. I either had to figure it out myself or suffer in ignorance. Nowadays, kids can just go to Google and get all kinds of answers and find in depth tutorials or forums with loads of good information. Maybe they don't have DOS or BASIC, but just being pointed in a direction for learning to program and having the Internet for expert help if they get stuck, puts them in a position that I think is at least as good as when I was a kid.
I'm probably revealing too much about my age with that Timex Sinclair comment.:-)
It might be difficult to setup, but with the advent of water based cooling systems for highly overclocked, high-performance systems, this seems like the coolest combination of problem solving/engineering to make an impressive looking case.
Tropical fish swimming in your case, in water that on its way to being filtered swings by your processor to allow you to run it at a higher FSB or whatever. Don't try to tell me that doesn't sound pretty cool.
Of course if you accidentally boiled them everytime you played Unreal Tournament, I guess it would also fall under the header of inhumane.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, but I would add that for flight sims, you actually have to get close enough to the enemy to see the plane/target. Which is just more fun to me than launching a missile a mile or more away.
And on the ground you have automatic and semi-automatic weapons. I would think any historic realistic game that makes you draw a rifle bolt after every shot or any other such time spent, would be far more boring than a semi-automatic melee.
I like the WWII genre, but I'm glad there are alternatives.
And without a doubt the game developers are creating them because they have been selling. Flight Sims were heading in the opposite direction, although I don't know if Il-Sturmovik and SWOTLII turned that around or not.
"It doesn't benifit the consumer at all except to decrease their average wage."
I think you have jumped too far to reach that conclusion. It might be that only a company will benefit from outsourcing intellectual jobs (IT in particular) and not pass on any of the savings to consumers. But I can just as easily think of an example where the company might pass on the savings.
Say Amazon or another online retailer has market research that indicates that lowering their prices a little bit would earn them a healthy increase in market share. They can't get their distributors to reduce prices, so they outsource the IT work of keeping the site running and updated. They then might lower their prices across the board by the saved amount. Thereby benefitting consumers. And increasing their market share.
Now, I'm not saying companies would pass savings to consumers to be nice. That ain't gonna happen. It would have to be in their interest somehow, but it is not impossible that it might still benefit consumers.
Just the same, it is worrying to see how difficult it might be for the American workforce to find decent and stable jobs in the future. When I heard that Wal-Mart was the number one employer in the country, I remember thinking, "If we all end up working at Wal-Mart? How will we be able to afford to keep buying things at Wal-Mart?"
Absolutely. Lately, the only CDs I have bought were blues CDs from fatpossum records. Because their prices are reasonable and the music is just what I'm looking for. You can even listen to MP3s on their site before buying. I mean I'm still willing to spend money on CDs. But $20 for a CD? I've got to be pretty sure its good before I spend that much.
Plus, there is something endearing about the underdog look of the fatpossum website. fatpossum.com
I don't know but this commentator on CNN/Money seemed to think it would be a good idea. CNN/Money Netflix commentary
Or its like that story about the circus horse who could do math. When someone asked the horse any kind of math problem the horse would tap out the answer with it's hoof. But if the person asking the horse didn't know the answer to the question, the horse was often wrong. It turned out, he was reading the subtle body language and emotion on the face of the person asking and would stop stomping when he read the reaction that he had reached the right answer.
Dogs could be doing something similar with epilepsy or strokes, by picking up on hidden body language cues that the person isn't even aware of.
It has always seemed to me that dogs are much more in tune to emotions than anything rational, anyway. Our physical health undoubtedly has an affect on our emotional state.
I found your post quite interesting and was puzzled as to why you would post it anonymously. But in any case, I have a philosophy degree and see this discussion as echoing a larger (or perhaps just similar) issue in philosophy as a whole. In my studies it seemed no single philosophy could really take you from the primacy of your thoughts and your existence to the day to day reality of practical things. Studying each philosophical viewpoint was interesting in that it showed connections and made observations that were illuminating in some respect. But when criticized, none could withstand relentlessly applied logic.
You referenced Kuhn and his philosophy of science. While widely paraphrased (and to my understanding, bastardized) his work regarding paradigms of scientific viewpoint were irreconcilable with each other. The Copernican paradigm completely replaces the "Sun revolves around the earth" paradigm. But as I recall, he didn't really have an answer for how incremental scientific progress is made. How has medicine has improved to give us longer and healthier lifespans, if every preceding theory is thrown out when a new one is adopted.
This seems to me to be a metaphor for the disconnect of philosophy and (for lack of a better term) the practicalities of daily life. You suggest that science is at a crisis point. But it seems to me that this crisis of science floundering for practical answers to deeper questions and philosophy floundering to explain fully even the most obvious practical facts, has been going on for some time. It does seem to me that science is making inexorable progress. I don't know if the same could be said of philosophy, but either way I don't know that I can agree with your conclusion that a "grand unified theory" is not possible.
I can certainly understand why you would be skeptical of its being achieved anytime soon, but I would submit that we just don't know enough about our unsolved problems to know whether we will ever solve them.
It's easy to use deconstructionism to tear down every thought and expression, but I think there is tangible evidence of increasing knowledge. I can not deny that I am sitting here having a heady discussion virtually with someone who could be anywhere in the world, in a way that was impossible just a few years ago. I can think of a number of similar examples.
Good discussion. I apologize in advance if I put words in anyone's mouth that they didn't want there.
I read a great article that explained all of this wonderfully, because I always wondered about the human eye only seeing 30 frames a second issue. Unfortunately, the article is gone, so I can't give a link. But the article explained these two details.
1. the human eye can pick up on many subtle details at higer frame rates than 60+, but it is like subliminal advertising. You wouldn't know what you are seeing, but you could probably see two demos of frame rate examples and tell there was a difference.
2. When you are talking about online gaming you need to discuss continuous frame rate. Sitting still you might clock over 100 frames, but moving around your machine renders things that drop that frame rate relatively. So your real frame rate is going up and down, sometimes wildly. The article (which I'm not sufficiently technical enough to back up with more facts) said the goal was to reach 72 frames a second (or higher) continuously, and that would be video like quality.
It was an interesting read, and I would always link to it in gaming forums whenever people started having this frame rate argument.
I thought the ending where Neo can control the machines was an indication that the "real world" was just another Matrix. So, if that was the case, then Bane wasn't in a real world at all and could be taken over by Smith just like anybody else in the "Matrix". But since no one who has seen the new movie is talking about this, I'm guessing there is no Matrix in a Matrix angle in the new film.
Holy crap! This thread got so far off topic that it wound up getting back on topic.
Just to clarify, I heard that this kid did this in the privacy of his own room. Then put the tape away somewhere and some "friends" from school stole it without his knowledge and put it on the school website or something.
I am as sick of litigation as the next person, but I can understand this kid being upset, if that is how this all went down. I mean did you see how many videos have been spun off of his almost all of them making fun of him in some way? Sure, I know... we don't dislike the kid, we think its great because we were all like that at some point. But he's what fourteen years old. Do you remember how sensitive you were at fourteen years old??!? Remember, how it seemed like every time you did something embarrassing the whole world seemed to be looking at you? Well for this kid, it is really true.
Well, I hope he finds peace with it and can enjoy his fame a little. I think a lot of people are laughing with him and not at him. A lot of us geeks anyway.
Curse you for making me remember that hideous disco version of the Star Wars theme!
I can only respond in kind... Meow mix song.
There. Take that!
My wife works at a law firm and they had major problems with this, since the features were turned on by default for their install. That may have been a choice of their IT dept., or Microsoft, I don't know. I thought they said that even copy and paste to a new doc wasn't secure enough, but I'm not sure of the details on that.
I don't think it is Microsoft being so crappy that they coded this feature in, like it was a bug. I think it is an incredible feature... that they didn't clearly inform the users about or give nearly enough control over.
I don't know if anyone reads the Sci-Fi author Elizabeth Moon, but she brings up these issues in her "universe" of books. In her books, it is the older generations refusing to turn over the reins to the younger that cause unrest.
Unfortunately, while it is an interesting dynamic tension in her stories, she doesn't seem to have come up with any great solutions. In every book it comes up and its like, "Yeah... that's still a problem." Hehe
But I'm probably being too harsh, I don't have any solutions for this either.
As for the achievement before 30 issue, I would submit that a great portion of this has to do with the increasing brain development up to the age of (someone knowledgeable correct me if I am wrong or out of date on this) about 25. After that you either don't get new neural pathways created or they are created much slower or more inefficiently. Something like that. I can't remember exactly 'cause I'm pushing 40. But it would make sense why if people didn't crack their big idea yet, they would be fighting an uphill battle after 30. But presumably, if they are extending our lives to 240 freakin years, they can also help us to keep our brains young and alive with freshness. If so, that 30 year figure would lose at least some of its meaning.
There might still be an issue of laziness. If someone hasn't gotten off their ass in 30 years, they aren't going to. But my money is on brain development as the major reason that breakthroughs occur most often before 30 or not at all.
Well, all the Matrix jokes aside, this does have some potentially excellent applications. I remember the first time I heard someone talking about pacemakers and how the batteries in them wear out. I asked the obvious question, "How do they replace them?"
It involves surgery. YIKES! Granted, it is probably minor surgery compared to getting the thing put in there to begin with, but knowing it was powered by your own blood would surely be a welcome change to these folks.
I mean if you think replacing the battery on your motherboard is a pain, think of doing it on an outpatient basis.
I won't argue your data on lethality. But I know a guy who wound up in the hospital with heart palpitations from a much lower dose... like we're talking 4 or 5 cups of coffee. The same guy said he had more than that on prior occasions without any trouble, so it might have different effects depending on the varying state of your body (like maybe this guy had a heart murmur or something). I later read that caffeine "overdose" accounts for a sizable percentage of emergency room visits. I can't back that up, but it seemed interesting.
As for the original poster, I think you have to have a "come to Jesus" moment with yourself and decide if you are avoiding work because you would rather be doing something else. I originally picked a very practical major in college and only did average work in it. Once I realized that I hated that area of study and changed my major to what I was truly interested in, my grades improved considerably. Those are tough realizations to come to. Good luck with it.
I think some folks in this thread are reading way too much into the guy's off the cuff remark about being "Hackproof". I think all he meant is that it is not a remote system controlling the plane from the ground. So, you'd have to hack the system as it is installed/updated or while you are on the plane. That clearly is more secure than a "fly it from the ground" override system as far as hacking is concerned. I mean even a "white hat" hacker would be sorely tempted to take over a big jet and fly it around a little via remote control before letting it go land safely.
But yeah, the planned implementation is not immune to security threats or corruptions. The biggest likely problem I could see is just the system mislabelling an airport as off limits and all the passengers getting diverted to another city. No danger, but what a major travel hassle! Of course, if all airports were marked off limits, it would be more than just a hassle.
Still though, at least the guy is trying to come up with something that would help make things safer. Even if it turns out to be a bad idea, you got to give the guy some credit for trying.
From the article's description it sounded like at 4 minutes out the plane would start to pull away...
pulling harder and harder as you got closer. Thus effectively steering you away from the no-fly zone. Not saying its foolproof, but that's what the article indicated as far as I could tell.
I think people concerned with protecting personal liberty and the free market coming up with a law that is viewed as such a challenge to personal freedom or even the ability for some people to do business, is in fact, ironic. Literally. Ironic. You may disagree either anonymously or not... it is a free country. Well the one I'm sitting in is free anyway.
And going back to the word misuse topic for a second, how about people saying "literally" all the time. "I was literally tearing my own head off!" I guess it just doesn't sound as good to say, "I was figuratively flying down the highway."
FingerDemon
I learned from some friends going through law school that it doesn't always matter where you live when you break a law of another place. You can still have them pursue you legally and the governments of the respective nations work out how that happens, a lot of it is already in treaty agreements. So, these Aussies might very well get dragged into a U.S. court if they have violated a law.
A reasonable example might be if you caused a panic, where folks were hurt, by calling in a bogus bomb threat somewhere in the U.S. or Europe while you were in Thailand, you wouldn't necessarily get off Scot free just because there were no bomb threat laws in Thailand.
As for the gun/bank/X-box analogy of earlier posts, I think the DMCA argument is taking the perspective that if your bank gave you an ATM card with a smart chip on it and you reprogrammed it to access other people's accounts to take their money... it would be wrong. I think most would agree with the wrongness of that. However, once you start talking software changes that don't cause that kind of direct harm the whole issue gets much fuzzier.
What cracks me up is that the most conservative types that are always screaming about keeping the government out of their business are the ones who come up with laws like DMCA that so many people feel infringe their rights in both their personal and professional lives. Ironic, huh?
FingerDemon
Hmmmm... I don't know, I think a lot of you are missing one very key component of kid "accessibility" that exists now that didn't when I was a kid. The internet itself. There was nobody to ask about programming my Timex Sinclair. I had to find books. If I couldn't get a book on a subject or find someone else who knew about it. I either had to figure it out myself or suffer in ignorance.
:-)
Nowadays, kids can just go to Google and get all kinds of answers and find in depth tutorials or forums with loads of good information. Maybe they don't have DOS or BASIC, but just being pointed in a direction for learning to program and having the Internet for expert help if they get stuck, puts them in a position that I think is at least as good as when I was a kid.
I'm probably revealing too much about my age with that Timex Sinclair comment.
FingerDemon
That's easy... virusey. Of course that rhyme doesn't help the defense much. But it does rhyme.
It might be difficult to setup, but with the advent of water based cooling systems for highly overclocked, high-performance systems, this seems like the coolest combination of problem solving/engineering to make an impressive looking case.
Tropical fish swimming in your case, in water that on its way to being filtered swings by your processor to allow you to run it at a higher FSB or whatever. Don't try to tell me that doesn't sound pretty cool.
Of course if you accidentally boiled them everytime you played Unreal Tournament, I guess it would also fall under the header of inhumane.