The wars happen when the impact location is published and couple hundred million people decide to change area code.
As for getting qualified personnel to sign up for suicide missions, I don't think it's as hard as you suggest. After all you are drawing from an extremely large pool of people with a significant motive for seeing the project successful (ie their families go poof if it doesn't come off). The added incentive of having your name lauded pretty much until the end of history if you get 'er done should not be underestimated. A lot of people with the qualifications needed will be technical people who I posit have a higher occurance of agnosticism/atheism than non-technical equivalents. For types like that posthumous rememberance is the only kind of immortality they can count on. Like many/.ers I have no dependants so if you said there was a 99.98% chance I'd die but that my family would get 10 million and a 10% take of the box-office gross I wouldn't kick you outside without thought.
You've never had any experience trying to get the government to actually do anything concrete, have you?
You want an example of the technological progress a government can make in 6 years? Compare a tank from 1939 with one from 1945 (or for a more extreme example, compare an atomic bomb from 1939 with one from 1945). The military technology used by the combatants in WW2 improved massivly over the 6 years of the war and this is while several of the countries were having the crap bombed out of them. When properly motivated by immediate national interest governments have an enormous capacity to get things going.
And don't give me any of this "Space travel is really hard and expensive" crap either. Most of the cost of the space shuttle is tied up in our desire to have the astronauts return alive to the ground with little risk of anybody on the ground getting killed. Once you throw those restrictions away (which I'm pretty sure you could count on with ~10^9 lives at stake) it gets a lot less impossible to put a lot of nukes on an intercept course with enough fuel to slow down near the offending rock..
I'm not saying it's a walk in the park but the major roadblocks will be technological not bureaucratic.
...this Dr. Evil hole is the greatest threat that mad-science presents to us.
What happens if when they finally penetrate the crust the whole planet pops like a balloon?
LIKE A BALLOON!!
Think of all that crazy magma spewing out all over the place and our beloved globe zooming randomly all over the solar system before finally falling flacid and empty to the floor somewhere near Mars.
When will these insane "geologists" learn not to poke holes in our Mother Earth.
This kid better learn to change her own diaper and prepare her own baby bottles quickly.
Nah, the parents will just need to type "/diaper" at the prompt and the closest diaper service will be automatically sent out to deal with little stinky. SOE already has the billing information so the process is easy enough for even the most addicted and feeble MMORPGer.
The human mind is a wonderous thing. Even though I am nigh on 30 years old I have no trouble at all interpreting your text in real time since I know that a "7" is a "t" and I can intuit that a "]\[" is probably an "N".
I think this is yet another example of the world not coming to an end just because something changed. It seems to me that complaining about people playing WoW typing in netspeak is akin to complaining that they type in french. Perhaps instead of being a bunch of linguistic prudes refusing to accept that any way other than our own is acceptable we should learn to revel in the beautiful variation that makes the english language so unique? After all by their logic if Dr Johnson woke up today he'd certainly have a good excuse to rip everyone a new a-hole.
And speaking of French...hasn't anyone considered that a large proportion of the "omg, u r such a n00b" crew might in fact be foreigners? It is quite possible that that is the only form of english they know. With such relaxed rules on sentance structure and grammar it must certainly be easier to learn than "real" english. So "gratz" to l33t-speak for allowing 14-year old griefers from all over the world to communicate openly and freely!
Matrix 2.0! An all-new level of wireless "augmented reality" overlays the real world, unleashing hackers to be mobile digital wizards.
When I first played Shadowrun back in the early nineties the way they concieved the Matrix was consistent with all the SF around. A really big, fancy VR network. This new version will be a nice change since the adoption of ubiquitous wireless functionality in everything under the sun really will turn Deckers into Real-Time digital mages (as opposed to the nasty game mechanics you used to have where the Decker player basically had to show up 4 hours before everybody else to get all his solo matrix shit out of the way).
For a Sci-Fi look at how it would be read the Man-Machine Interface graphic novel by Masamune Shirow. It's almost enough to make me want to play SR again.
What a popularity contest. I do not see any signs that this was anything other than an exercise in people voting for the game they were playing at the time they took the poll. The clincher for me was the comparison between the results for "Best Overall MMORPG" and "Biggest Dissapointment". It would seem that while EQ2 is the second best MMORPG of the year it is also the biggest dissapointment and WoW while being the best was the runner-up for biggest dissapointment...hmmm.
Possibilities:
-Voters have absurdly high expectations and even awesomeness is not good enough for them.
-Voters are die-hard partisans and vote against the enemy for the negative award.
-Voters have never heard of any MMORPG other than EQ2, WoW or CoH
I think it's the last option. The hype machines for those three games pwn all and in a popularity competition it isn't even about popularity anymore, just hype.
Anywho, there are other MMORPGs out there. If you are interested in a well developed, balanced, mostly bug-free game with a superb market-driven economy and the kind of meaningful PvP that WoW and EQ2 only dream about then I suggest you give EVE a look-see.
Good idea...I think they tried the same thing with booze a while back.
And we all know how well this policy is working with illegal drugs.
Making stuff illegal is not the solution. The solution is figuring out how to make people less dumb-assed and more humane. I personally believe this starts with better education in the humanities but YMMV.
Add to that the fact that, in competitions, the paint job on your army counts more towards winning the tournament than winning a battle, and it's obvious why many are leery of the whole thing.
The reason why sportsmanship and painting count as much as winning is to limit the number of smacktards whose only interest is in wtfpwning everybody they meet. Warhammer is a hobby not an olymic sport and Games Workshop is very careful to keep it that way. Fun is more important than winning in a hobby and people who feel the other way are welcome to aim-hack in counterstrike.
Lumens are a way to measure the light which is isotropically radiated from a given source
Not to nit-pick (that's a pun...get it?) but what you are thinking of is referred to as "mean spherical candela". Lumens are simply the photometric equivilent of Watts (that is to say they are watts normalised to take into account the photopic curve which describes the spectral responsivity of the human eye) and are thus an excellent means of describing the optical output of a source or system.
...LEDs, as highly directional light sources, are measured in Candles (abbreviated "cd" or millicandles as "mcd") and not measured in Lumens.
Again I must disagree. As an illumination engineer I rely heavily on the Lumen ratings for the LEDs with which I design since that value is the integrated amount of light available from the source and is not related to the distribution of the emission. LEDs are indeed more directional than conventional sources but there is a wide range of emission patterns available.
Getting back to the matter at hand, I can't read the article but I agree that this device probably uses Luxeon emitters since they are the most concentrated sources available right now. The technology Lumileds is developing is advancing in leaps and bounds so it is unquestionably the case that these projectors are going to get a lot brighter quite soon. I wouldn't rush out and get this one since you will be able to get one about 50% brighter within a year for no more money (or at least no more cost to the manufacturuer, not always the same thing).
They should impliment some sort of bit-torrent style system for all the people downloading the patches and environments from the server. With so many people all creating accounts at once and downloading a ton of stuff their servers must be fire-starters by now. When EVE-Online launched their Exodus Expansion on Tuesday/Wednesday they set up some.torrent seeds for people to use instead of killing off their servers. It's a 500 meg or so download and with so many people all doing it at once the torrent was not only a lot easier on their system but way faster too. And that's only with about 50k people...with 200k it would be even more efficient.
I'm interested to know the cross-sectional area of the wedge. It's tough to injection mould plastic more than a cm thick without getting sinks or other defects which would seriously mess up their system.
That being said 500k sounds about right for the tool if it is a large lens (the 50" screen mentioned perhaps). The cycle times would I think be longish...perhaps 2 or 3 minutes if it is thin, much longer if it is thick. That means that in a given day you can make less than 500 of these even if everything goes perfectly. They should plan on cutting more tools.
But the company needs the 50 bucks from the sale of the game to stay solvent. Maybe not Sony or Blizzard who have deep deep pockets and the ability to carry a bunch of debt but a lot of MMORPGs are done by smaller companies who don't have anything else. Think of Anarchy Online...ever heard of Funcom in any other application? I sure hadn't. Or EVE Online...that's run by a company out of Reykjavik in Iceland. If they don't get the initial infusion of cash to cover the development expenses and pay a few months salary the game is over before it begins.
I'm not in the software industry but I am in Product Development and I know it takes a crap-ton of money to get a project off the ground. If you don't have deep pockets that means debt and the only way to get out from under it before it crushes you is to get a good chunk of money. That's why the $50 up front. Once a game is established that price usually goes away. To go back to the EVE Online example, you can now just download the client and start up a new account for $19 IIRC. They are established and have a stable cashflow so they don't need the $50 "entry barrier" any more.
Kindbud the game you are looking for is called EVE. There is nowhere in the game where you cannot shoot at another player but if you do it in civilised areas you draw an NPC police response. If you have an inter-corp war going on you can PvP with your enemies anywhere. Player vs Player politics are one of the main activity drivers in the game with major battles being covered on the main news-page of the log-in screen. There isn't perma-death in the sense you refer to but the death penalty is very steep. Since all skill training occurs in real-time there is no "level-grind" except what is needed to make money to buy stuff. I could go on for hours about all the great features of the game but then my co-workers would get suspicious of what I was typing.
I can't wait to start busting up some complexes in my Enyo. With this expansion my desire to try WoW is almost zero. Only if most of my buddies decided to start a crew in WoW would I be even tempted away from what is IMO the deepest and most rewarding MMORPG ever
I know you're trying to be funny but I'll take your commetns as straight. If you only have 3 hours a month to play games then why the hell would you play any MMORPG even if was free/free? There's no point. Just play some solitare and go about your obviously full life.
The vast majority of people who play MMORPGs spend at least a few hours a week on them. Even a weekend-only player would spend 5 hours total playing. Any less than that and there is no point as you'll have forgotten what the hell was going on in between sessions!. At 5 hours a week you get 20 hours a month and that makes the monthly fee less than a buck an hour (Grandparent's mom aside). Tell me what entertainment you can get at a buck an hour these days. And for that trifling fee you get access to a continually evolving game as many MMORPGs have free expansions (EVE launches a huge one today...w00t). Frankly I just can't understand the "I don't wanna pay a monthly fee" argument coming from any but the most light-weight players.
MMORPGs cost money to develop that's the money that you spend to buy the game. MMORPGs cost money to run (server farms, routers, bandwidth bills and such) which is part of the monthly fee and they cost money to evolve which is the other part. Unless of course you'd rather have the software developers be payed in cheese-doodles and AOL CDs and the game run on hard-ware looted from abandoned Nortel facilities.
I've played Air Bucaneers quite a bit and I'd have to say that it's my favorite mod for UT2004. The ballon to ballon combat is really quite fun and once you get a crew of four or five buddies together it's an absolute blast with everybody working feverishly away at their assigned task and the captain yelling "YAAARRR" into the teamspeak server as loud as possible.
Add to that the humerously non-english (finnish maybe?) names and grammer and the comical hideousness of some of the character models and you've got a game that will absolutely leave you in stitches. I've died on many occasions because I have been laughing too hard to properly control my guy.
This starts from the bottom end with a 'They're cute, and I can help them' feeling, combined with a realisation of the lack of any real work involved
Wow...that's a pretty ignorant, trollish statement even for slashdot. All the teachers I know work really really hard at it (to the point where I even have to work hard to help them out). Maybe it's different in the UK but I suspect it's not.
I would like to thank the author of that paper for making it abundantly clear to me that I am not smart enough to operate independently in today's technological environment. I would like to take this opportunity to bow down before my compsci-savvy overlords swear to just mindlessly accept whatever code they produce.
What I am doing is having an election party. Am I the only one who finds this stuff more exciting than a superbowl? Hell, with this election not only do you get a guaranteed suspensful nailbiter that goes into overtime and an event whose outcome has long-lasting implications but you still get a lot of funny advertisements too! This election's got it all!
So join me on Tuesday night as I crack open a few cans of that weak American beer and join my southern neighbours in celebrating the funnest holiday since October 31st.
The vast majority of lamps which cause disability glare are doing so becuase they are:
a) Misaimed either intentionally to get better visibility or by accident because the driver or mechanic don't know what they are doing. You don't have to mis-aim a lamp by much to throw a lot of light at oncoming drivers...one degree too high is more than enough to do it.
b) Retrofitted with pumped-up aftermarket bulbs which the lamp was not designed to use. Even if you use a kit which claims that it's designed for the vehicle in question if you drill out a hole in your lamp to put in an aftermarket HID system you WILL screw it up. Get that sucker out of position by half a millimeter and you're going to blind everybody who looks at you.
Sueing the OEMs won't change the behaviour of the vehicle users.
In response to the article itself, the thing I most miss that the Euros have while we NAers tend not to is the mighty Rear Fog Lamp. Since certain states *cough*Virginia*cough* do not allow their use, most foreign OEMs disable the rear fog functionality on the cars the export to NA. I drive a Mini Cooper and it has a rear fog cavity in the tail-lights but the damn thing is turned off in the CAN-bus and there's a plug in my dash where the switch should be! Anybody who has ever driven behind a car that does have these in the rain knows how much we need to update the FMVSS code to explicitly allow them here.
Slashdot Mirror
The wars happen when the impact location is published and couple hundred million people decide to change area code.
/.ers I have no dependants so if you said there was a 99.98% chance I'd die but that my family would get 10 million and a 10% take of the box-office gross I wouldn't kick you outside without thought.
As for getting qualified personnel to sign up for suicide missions, I don't think it's as hard as you suggest. After all you are drawing from an extremely large pool of people with a significant motive for seeing the project successful (ie their families go poof if it doesn't come off). The added incentive of having your name lauded pretty much until the end of history if you get 'er done should not be underestimated. A lot of people with the qualifications needed will be technical people who I posit have a higher occurance of agnosticism/atheism than non-technical equivalents. For types like that posthumous rememberance is the only kind of immortality they can count on. Like many
-Pinkoir
You've never had any experience trying to get the government to actually do anything concrete, have you?
You want an example of the technological progress a government can make in 6 years? Compare a tank from 1939 with one from 1945 (or for a more extreme example, compare an atomic bomb from 1939 with one from 1945). The military technology used by the combatants in WW2 improved massivly over the 6 years of the war and this is while several of the countries were having the crap bombed out of them. When properly motivated by immediate national interest governments have an enormous capacity to get things going.
And don't give me any of this "Space travel is really hard and expensive" crap either. Most of the cost of the space shuttle is tied up in our desire to have the astronauts return alive to the ground with little risk of anybody on the ground getting killed. Once you throw those restrictions away (which I'm pretty sure you could count on with ~10^9 lives at stake) it gets a lot less impossible to put a lot of nukes on an intercept course with enough fuel to slow down near the offending rock..
I'm not saying it's a walk in the park but the major roadblocks will be technological not bureaucratic.
-Pinkoir
...this Dr. Evil hole is the greatest threat that mad-science presents to us.
What happens if when they finally penetrate the crust the whole planet pops like a balloon?
LIKE A BALLOON!!
Think of all that crazy magma spewing out all over the place and our beloved globe zooming randomly all over the solar system before finally falling flacid and empty to the floor somewhere near Mars.
When will these insane "geologists" learn not to poke holes in our Mother Earth.
-Pinkoir
We don't even have 50 cent pieces up here... :p
Actually we do...they just happen to be as uncommon up here as they are in the States
-Pinkoir
This kid better learn to change her own diaper and prepare her own baby bottles quickly.
Nah, the parents will just need to type "/diaper" at the prompt and the closest diaper service will be automatically sent out to deal with little stinky. SOE already has the billing information so the process is easy enough for even the most addicted and feeble MMORPGer.
-Pinkoir
The human mind is a wonderous thing. Even though I am nigh on 30 years old I have no trouble at all interpreting your text in real time since I know that a "7" is a "t" and I can intuit that a "]\[" is probably an "N".
I think this is yet another example of the world not coming to an end just because something changed. It seems to me that complaining about people playing WoW typing in netspeak is akin to complaining that they type in french. Perhaps instead of being a bunch of linguistic prudes refusing to accept that any way other than our own is acceptable we should learn to revel in the beautiful variation that makes the english language so unique? After all by their logic if Dr Johnson woke up today he'd certainly have a good excuse to rip everyone a new a-hole.
And speaking of French...hasn't anyone considered that a large proportion of the "omg, u r such a n00b" crew might in fact be foreigners? It is quite possible that that is the only form of english they know. With such relaxed rules on sentance structure and grammar it must certainly be easier to learn than "real" english. So "gratz" to l33t-speak for allowing 14-year old griefers from all over the world to communicate openly and freely!
-Pinkoir
Matrix 2.0! An all-new level of wireless "augmented reality" overlays the real world, unleashing hackers to be mobile digital wizards.
When I first played Shadowrun back in the early nineties the way they concieved the Matrix was consistent with all the SF around. A really big, fancy VR network. This new version will be a nice change since the adoption of ubiquitous wireless functionality in everything under the sun really will turn Deckers into Real-Time digital mages (as opposed to the nasty game mechanics you used to have where the Decker player basically had to show up 4 hours before everybody else to get all his solo matrix shit out of the way).
For a Sci-Fi look at how it would be read the Man-Machine Interface graphic novel by Masamune Shirow. It's almost enough to make me want to play SR again.
-Pinkoir
And you thought the Oscars were bad...
What a popularity contest. I do not see any signs that this was anything other than an exercise in people voting for the game they were playing at the time they took the poll. The clincher for me was the comparison between the results for "Best Overall MMORPG" and "Biggest Dissapointment". It would seem that while EQ2 is the second best MMORPG of the year it is also the biggest dissapointment and WoW while being the best was the runner-up for biggest dissapointment...hmmm.
Possibilities:
-Voters have absurdly high expectations and even awesomeness is not good enough for them.
-Voters are die-hard partisans and vote against the enemy for the negative award.
-Voters have never heard of any MMORPG other than EQ2, WoW or CoH
I think it's the last option. The hype machines for those three games pwn all and in a popularity competition it isn't even about popularity anymore, just hype.
Anywho, there are other MMORPGs out there. If you are interested in a well developed, balanced, mostly bug-free game with a superb market-driven economy and the kind of meaningful PvP that WoW and EQ2 only dream about then I suggest you give EVE a look-see.
-Pinkoir
Good idea...I think they tried the same thing with booze a while back.
And we all know how well this policy is working with illegal drugs.
Making stuff illegal is not the solution. The solution is figuring out how to make people less dumb-assed and more humane. I personally believe this starts with better education in the humanities but YMMV.
-Pinkoir
Add to that the fact that, in competitions, the paint job on your army counts more towards winning the tournament than winning a battle, and it's obvious why many are leery of the whole thing.
The reason why sportsmanship and painting count as much as winning is to limit the number of smacktards whose only interest is in wtfpwning everybody they meet. Warhammer is a hobby not an olymic sport and Games Workshop is very careful to keep it that way. Fun is more important than winning in a hobby and people who feel the other way are welcome to aim-hack in counterstrike.
-Pinkoir
Lumens are a way to measure the light which is isotropically radiated from a given source
...LEDs, as highly directional light sources, are measured in Candles (abbreviated "cd" or millicandles as "mcd") and not measured in Lumens.
Not to nit-pick (that's a pun...get it?) but what you are thinking of is referred to as "mean spherical candela". Lumens are simply the photometric equivilent of Watts (that is to say they are watts normalised to take into account the photopic curve which describes the spectral responsivity of the human eye) and are thus an excellent means of describing the optical output of a source or system.
Again I must disagree. As an illumination engineer I rely heavily on the Lumen ratings for the LEDs with which I design since that value is the integrated amount of light available from the source and is not related to the distribution of the emission. LEDs are indeed more directional than conventional sources but there is a wide range of emission patterns available.
Getting back to the matter at hand, I can't read the article but I agree that this device probably uses Luxeon emitters since they are the most concentrated sources available right now. The technology Lumileds is developing is advancing in leaps and bounds so it is unquestionably the case that these projectors are going to get a lot brighter quite soon. I wouldn't rush out and get this one since you will be able to get one about 50% brighter within a year for no more money (or at least no more cost to the manufacturuer, not always the same thing).
-Pinkoir
Big ups to Judy Dench for Outstanding Character Performance - Female in "Golden Eye: Rouge Agent".
Is that the one where you get all pissed off and decide to apply makeup to world leaders?
Why is it that nobody on the planet can spell the word "rogue"?
-Pinkoir
They should impliment some sort of bit-torrent style system for all the people downloading the patches and environments from the server. With so many people all creating accounts at once and downloading a ton of stuff their servers must be fire-starters by now. When EVE-Online launched their Exodus Expansion on Tuesday/Wednesday they set up some .torrent seeds for people to use instead of killing off their servers. It's a 500 meg or so download and with so many people all doing it at once the torrent was not only a lot easier on their system but way faster too. And that's only with about 50k people...with 200k it would be even more efficient.
-Pinkoir
I'm interested to know the cross-sectional area of the wedge. It's tough to injection mould plastic more than a cm thick without getting sinks or other defects which would seriously mess up their system.
That being said 500k sounds about right for the tool if it is a large lens (the 50" screen mentioned perhaps). The cycle times would I think be longish...perhaps 2 or 3 minutes if it is thin, much longer if it is thick. That means that in a given day you can make less than 500 of these even if everything goes perfectly. They should plan on cutting more tools.
-Pinkoir
So if the Drug Czar runs the War on Drugs and the Intelligence Czars wage the War on Terror what does the IP Czar run? The War on Freedom?
I sure hope not.
-Pinkoir
But the company needs the 50 bucks from the sale of the game to stay solvent. Maybe not Sony or Blizzard who have deep deep pockets and the ability to carry a bunch of debt but a lot of MMORPGs are done by smaller companies who don't have anything else. Think of Anarchy Online...ever heard of Funcom in any other application? I sure hadn't. Or EVE Online...that's run by a company out of Reykjavik in Iceland. If they don't get the initial infusion of cash to cover the development expenses and pay a few months salary the game is over before it begins.
I'm not in the software industry but I am in Product Development and I know it takes a crap-ton of money to get a project off the ground. If you don't have deep pockets that means debt and the only way to get out from under it before it crushes you is to get a good chunk of money. That's why the $50 up front. Once a game is established that price usually goes away. To go back to the EVE Online example, you can now just download the client and start up a new account for $19 IIRC. They are established and have a stable cashflow so they don't need the $50 "entry barrier" any more.
-Pinkoir
Kindbud the game you are looking for is called EVE. There is nowhere in the game where you cannot shoot at another player but if you do it in civilised areas you draw an NPC police response. If you have an inter-corp war going on you can PvP with your enemies anywhere. Player vs Player politics are one of the main activity drivers in the game with major battles being covered on the main news-page of the log-in screen. There isn't perma-death in the sense you refer to but the death penalty is very steep. Since all skill training occurs in real-time there is no "level-grind" except what is needed to make money to buy stuff. I could go on for hours about all the great features of the game but then my co-workers would get suspicious of what I was typing.
-Pinkoir
Yes w00t for Exodus....
I can't wait to start busting up some complexes in my Enyo. With this expansion my desire to try WoW is almost zero. Only if most of my buddies decided to start a crew in WoW would I be even tempted away from what is IMO the deepest and most rewarding MMORPG ever
-Pinkoir
I know you're trying to be funny but I'll take your commetns as straight. If you only have 3 hours a month to play games then why the hell would you play any MMORPG even if was free/free? There's no point. Just play some solitare and go about your obviously full life.
The vast majority of people who play MMORPGs spend at least a few hours a week on them. Even a weekend-only player would spend 5 hours total playing. Any less than that and there is no point as you'll have forgotten what the hell was going on in between sessions!. At 5 hours a week you get 20 hours a month and that makes the monthly fee less than a buck an hour (Grandparent's mom aside). Tell me what entertainment you can get at a buck an hour these days. And for that trifling fee you get access to a continually evolving game as many MMORPGs have free expansions (EVE launches a huge one today...w00t). Frankly I just can't understand the "I don't wanna pay a monthly fee" argument coming from any but the most light-weight players.
MMORPGs cost money to develop that's the money that you spend to buy the game. MMORPGs cost money to run (server farms, routers, bandwidth bills and such) which is part of the monthly fee and they cost money to evolve which is the other part. Unless of course you'd rather have the software developers be payed in cheese-doodles and AOL CDs and the game run on hard-ware looted from abandoned Nortel facilities.
-Pinkoir
I've played Air Bucaneers quite a bit and I'd have to say that it's my favorite mod for UT2004. The ballon to ballon combat is really quite fun and once you get a crew of four or five buddies together it's an absolute blast with everybody working feverishly away at their assigned task and the captain yelling "YAAARRR" into the teamspeak server as loud as possible.
Add to that the humerously non-english (finnish maybe?) names and grammer and the comical hideousness of some of the character models and you've got a game that will absolutely leave you in stitches. I've died on many occasions because I have been laughing too hard to properly control my guy.
Can't wait to play the new version.
-Pinkoir
This starts from the bottom end with a 'They're cute, and I can help them' feeling, combined with a realisation of the lack of any real work involved
Wow...that's a pretty ignorant, trollish statement even for slashdot. All the teachers I know work really really hard at it (to the point where I even have to work hard to help them out). Maybe it's different in the UK but I suspect it's not.
-Pinkoir
I would like to thank the author of that paper for making it abundantly clear to me that I am not smart enough to operate independently in today's technological environment. I would like to take this opportunity to bow down before my compsci-savvy overlords swear to just mindlessly accept whatever code they produce.
-Pinkoir
...I wouldn't want to be that computer when the military decides to read slashdot.
-Pinkoir
...since I'm a Canadian and they won't let me :(
What I am doing is having an election party. Am I the only one who finds this stuff more exciting than a superbowl? Hell, with this election not only do you get a guaranteed suspensful nailbiter that goes into overtime and an event whose outcome has long-lasting implications but you still get a lot of funny advertisements too! This election's got it all!
So join me on Tuesday night as I crack open a few cans of that weak American beer and join my southern neighbours in celebrating the funnest holiday since October 31st.
-Pinkoir
The vast majority of lamps which cause disability glare are doing so becuase they are:
a) Misaimed either intentionally to get better visibility or by accident because the driver or mechanic don't know what they are doing. You don't have to mis-aim a lamp by much to throw a lot of light at oncoming drivers...one degree too high is more than enough to do it.
b) Retrofitted with pumped-up aftermarket bulbs which the lamp was not designed to use. Even if you use a kit which claims that it's designed for the vehicle in question if you drill out a hole in your lamp to put in an aftermarket HID system you WILL screw it up. Get that sucker out of position by half a millimeter and you're going to blind everybody who looks at you.
Sueing the OEMs won't change the behaviour of the vehicle users.
In response to the article itself, the thing I most miss that the Euros have while we NAers tend not to is the mighty Rear Fog Lamp. Since certain states *cough*Virginia*cough* do not allow their use, most foreign OEMs disable the rear fog functionality on the cars the export to NA. I drive a Mini Cooper and it has a rear fog cavity in the tail-lights but the damn thing is turned off in the CAN-bus and there's a plug in my dash where the switch should be! Anybody who has ever driven behind a car that does have these in the rain knows how much we need to update the FMVSS code to explicitly allow them here.
-Pinkoir