There are a lot of unethical chiropractors, (doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, etc.) certainly, but that doesn't mean that the field itself is quackery. Some headaches, neck pains, pinched nerves, and such can be fixed by one visit.
Re:It's worse than that
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
And another point, you have to replace the batteries in a hybrid after five years. There goes all of your gas savings.....
Where do you get this #%$%@%& ??? Toyota warranties all the hybrid components in the Prius, including the battery, for 8 years or 100,000 miles, and they say they should last at least 10 years. Replacement cost for them is about $2,000 if/when it would need to be replaced. We got that much in a tax writeoff just for buing it!
Yup, I use Yahoo accounts. My wife and I each have our own real one, and then we have my wife's old one that started getting hit with some spam. Now we just use that old one as the shared junk account. Yahoo filtering is really good. I've even submitted my real address on some forms at some very respectable companies, and I only get about 1-2 spams a week. Our junk account gets maybe 5 a day, and most of those seem to be opt-in stuff because we are pretty free about throwing it out when we sign up for stuff.
I just reloaded a friend's old laptop last night that had been overrun by malware and spyware--toolbars, browser redirection, the whole bit. It's Win98SE, and he hadn't been very good keeping up on his Windows Update. I had gotten the CD of updates from Microsoft through February 2004, so I was able to keep his computer unplugged from the net for that. Then, I made a CD of some protection software--ZoneAlarm, Spybot, Firefox to load up before I connected him to the network. That was my first experience using Spybot S&D. It was really nice that is stays running and prompts you to accept or deny each registry change that is being attempted.
I know it's not a complete void, but there's certainly a lot missing. I'm not so much talking about the CG characters because they do have something there to at least look at (although it would be hard to be very interactive with a puppet or cardboard cutout.) I usually mean the surroundings. Before Ep II came out, I saw a spoiler film clip shot in the studio before the effects, and it was when Obi-Wan and Mace Windu are kneeling in arena holding off blaster fire and trying to talk about something in the middle of this battle. It was just those two crouching on a floor of sand with green around them and constantly jerking their lightsabers around to block blaster bolts.
They are supposed to be in the midst of their last stand, where they are pretty likely to be killed, and are surrounded by tons of droids shooting at them. They seemed to have a hard time faking any distress at it. Settings can have a strong impact on enabling an actor to have a much more realistic performance of emotions--something real to scare them, someplace dark and confining to make them feel moody or depressed, something genuinely statling to get that real look of surprise, etc. Don't make them completely fake everything; it's just not as good.
Here's a funny example of George Lucas' fixation on CGI. IMDB trivia for Gangs of New York has a funny item where George gave Martin Scorsese some advice.
It's way too late to save Star Wars, and I think this is one very big reason. People mention Lucas can't direct, and can't write good dialogue. Those are both pretty good points, but here is another significant one. I don't see how the actors could ever do a good performance in this new trilogy because almost every scene is acted in front of a green screen. How are they ever supposed to do any more than recite their lines when they have nothing more than the clothes they are wearing to give them any impression about what's "going on" around them. Even worse than that is that frequently the other characters they are supposed to be interacting with aren't even there because they're going to be computer generated later. AAAND, how are multiple actors in front of a green screen supposed to gel well and have good group dynamics in those scenes when they are each having to imagine what the scene looks like around them. When every actor is "seeing" the scene differently, of course they are going to look awkward.
Answer to the original question is no, because to save it, they would have to build real sets instead of using CGI all the time, and building sets takes years of prep. CGI shots are great for just animated action, but mixing too much CGI with actors' performances ruins them, as these prequels are a perfect example of.
Re:The only real answer is to reorganize society.
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
Yes I have. My dad was from a farming family too. A guy I work with told me about something his dad did, where there was a neighboring farm being sold off in an estate sale. The kids were selling off the land really cheaply because they didn't want to farm and just wanted to get the money out of it. So my friend's dad bought it and put it in the non-farming program, and it's going to pay for itself in less than 10 years.
You don't have to read up on the topic or do any research to just catch a suspicious quote that you can proclaim out of context to "prove" the agenda you already have in mind. So Brown doesn't really need to do any research for his purposes, but at the same time, it does reveal to his interviewees what he's really about.
Re:The only real answer is to reorganize society.
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
...though the real reason is generally some kind of environmental conservation type thing.
uh, no. It's actually supposed to be a support for crop prices. Basically, there is so much production capacity of farm land in this country that prices would be too low from oversupply if all the land were farmed. The subsidies keep crop prices high enough for farmers to make a living on it.
Re:It's worse than that
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
The point of my posting was that none of the hybrids currently offered equal the same mileage as the Ford Taurus hybrid V6 from 1997 that the UC Davis Engineering Department built with funds from the US Air Force.
Here is where I suspect they were getting the misleading numbers. I doubt they were achieving a stable, sustainable energy cycle. They would have charged up the battery at the beginning, but then did they check the level of energy in the battery at the end of their tests? It's pretty easy to get good gas mileage if you have an energy-losing system where you end up with a drained battery that needs to be recharged again.
I was a little too strong in not believing the 66mpg of the converted Taurus. Sorry for that because I had forgotten the "prototype effect." The major difference is production cost. The air force and UC had tons of research money to throw at this. I'll bet they could get better mileage in one prototype model than Honda or Toyota's mass-production vehicles. The problem is that not many people are willing to pay $50,000+ for a converted Taurus. The manufacturers have to balance a decent efficiency increase vs. the amount it's going to increase the price.
Thanks for the recommendation. I did some research into the open source stuff. The problem with many of them (well I shouldn't say problem--it's just a usage difference that won't do what I need) is that they are generally programs that need to be installed on a Linux system. I want this to use on a Windows machine that does not have Linux on it at all. That is the case with g4u. dd has the same issue, but even that is not a very good solution since it is also copying unused areas of the hard drive instead of the files. I think partimage will do what I want, and I found a way to run it without having Linux installed. This is a good bootable rescue CD that has GNU Parted, QtParted, Partimage, Sfdisk, and some other things on it. That should let me back up that Windows partition without having Linux there.
Re:It's worse than that
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I swear, you are making up most of those numbers out of your ass. I have owned a 3-cylinder Metro, and I currently own a 2002 Toyota Prius, so I have some real gas mileage numbers for you.
They took a V6 Ford Taurus and made it a hybrid. It averaged 66 MPG. Now compare that to the clam traps by Toyota and Honda with 3 cylinder engines and yet they barely get above 40 MPG.
You are mixing two different things that don't go together. There are three hybrid cars in common production right now--Honda Insight, Honda Civic hybrid, and the Toyota Prius. There are a few more to come out later this year and next year. You selected the 3-cylinder engine from one car and matched it with the lowest fuel economy from one of the other cars. The Insight has the 3 cyl and gets 60+mpg. My 2002 Prius is of the first generation of it before the large set of improvements they made for the 2004 model year. It routinely got 47-50mpg in actual gas mileage. The newer Prius gets in the 50-60 range. The Civic is a little less; I believe they are around 45mpg. I did have a 1991 Metro with the 3 cylinder. With mostly highway miles, I could get about 47mpg--generally mid 40's, and as someone pointed out, that was a tiny low-powered car. The Prius and Civic have 4 cylinders + electric motor power added to that when needed, so they have better power than a traditional 4-banger.
Your quote about the Metro getting 59mpg is a complete load of fertilizer. This claim sheds some light on your 66mpg hybrid Taurus mentioned earlier. (You hauled your Taurus up a mountain to start your gas mileage test, right?) I fear I have fed a troll, but at least the information is good for other people.
Re:The only real answer is to reorganize society.
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
I love that idea of running diesel engines on vegetable oil. I just read a lot on the greasecar.com website. There is lots of information out there about cars running with that. Here's the funny part. You have probably heard of farming subsidies--more commonly known as the "get paid not to farm program". You may not have heard it related to this, but if they farmed that land instead, we would be sitting on all the renewable fuel we want! Just plant soybeans to get the oil from, and you'd be most of the way there to getting the U.S. off foreign oil completely.
Re:Start by banning plastics for consumables
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
"left with plastic."...and Vasoline. Keep both hands on the keyboard please.
I was looking for an appropriate point in this discussion to post about this. I agree with his point and what you said. Here was his quote that pretty much reflects what I'm going through:
I truly wanted to use Linux on my best, fastest, newest PC. But I cannot--yet. It's not for any lack of diligence on my part, but because of a limitation in Linux.
I'll keep trying. Eventually, someone will release something that will work on my system. More generally, someday, Linux will probably catch up with Microsoft's broad support for mainstream hardware.
I tried several distros on my secondary computer, and it didn't like my sound card or video card (even though ALSA listed my sound card as supported and wouldn't--Debian had an X server package for my S3 video card but couldn't detect the card and install it). Instead of quitting and bitching about Linux sucking, I acknowledged the point from the first responder Fred quoted. Linux should be considered a different environment, and there are sometimes things that aren't really meant to work on both sides.
I did a couple of upgrades, conceding that my video card and sound card were cheap-o stuff. I got a used ATI Rage 128 video card and a Sound Blaster Live!. OK, things install pretty well and generally work--I can configure the display how I want with YaST and I can get sound. The first basic thing I tried to do though, was to make a copy of an audio CD onto CD-R. I just have the single CD-RW drive, though, so it would have to understand reading an image file and then letting me put in a blank CD-R to write to. I opened K3B and then put in the audio CD. KSCD automatically started up and hung. It would not respond to KILL commands, either. K3B, of course, would not respond either because KSCD seemed to have control of the system/drive. The only way out was to eject the CD, which would let me kill KSCD. I tried closing both programs and then putting in the CD with nothing running--KSCD would still load and hang, preventing me from even starting K3B. I just can't believe this is the state of things in the current version of SuSE, which is considered one of the more polished, for pay, distros. Something as basic as putting an audio CD into the computer shouldn't hang a program.
I would really like to start using Linux, but basic stuff like this just make me want to wait another year or so to see if it will become more functional. Meanwhile, I am trying to learn and use more open source apps on Windows to begin the move (Firefox, Filezilla,...).
I use ZonaAlarm and like it a lot. It's true I have been foiled a time or two when trying to get some connectivity on my home network for sharing a directory or shared printer, but I figured out it was the firewall and fixed it. I really like that it blocks outgoing connections by default, and that's the way it should be. Hacking in is only half the battle. The phone home programs are also problems that I don't want them connecting to anything unless I know about it.
I can't be as locked down as I would like because my wife also uses this computer, so we still use IE (I just installed Firefox for me to use) and I just did a scan with AdAware and found a bunch of crap that it removed. I don't do much serious work on this computer at home, so I don't really care too much. ZoneAlarm works great for preventing virus problems, so I'm doing fine there.
I've been thinking about getting Ghost or something like it for the next time I have to re-install. Do you know of any other free drive imaging programs? In particular, I would prefer not to pay $80 or whatever for Ghost.
There are some great rebates on tax software every year that might make it worthwhile. It's like a late Christmas present or something. Buy TurboTax and a $60GB hard drive, get full rebates for both! We use TurboTax, and always just print out the forms and mail them(and a hardcopy to keep). Why the heck should I pay that horrible amount for e-filing?
telling him to shut his mouth? With the way he started to say something and then changed it to nothing, he seemed like Charlie McCarthy with Baystar's hand up his ass.
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There are a lot of unethical chiropractors, (doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, etc.) certainly, but that doesn't mean that the field itself is quackery.
Some headaches, neck pains, pinched nerves, and such can be fixed by one visit.
Yup, I use Yahoo accounts. My wife and I each have our own real one, and then we have my wife's old one that started getting hit with some spam. Now we just use that old one as the shared junk account. Yahoo filtering is really good. I've even submitted my real address on some forms at some very respectable companies, and I only get about 1-2 spams a week. Our junk account gets maybe 5 a day, and most of those seem to be opt-in stuff because we are pretty free about throwing it out when we sign up for stuff.
I just reloaded a friend's old laptop last night that had been overrun by malware and spyware--toolbars, browser redirection, the whole bit. It's Win98SE, and he hadn't been very good keeping up on his Windows Update. I had gotten the CD of updates from Microsoft through February 2004, so I was able to keep his computer unplugged from the net for that. Then, I made a CD of some protection software--ZoneAlarm, Spybot, Firefox to load up before I connected him to the network. That was my first experience using Spybot S&D. It was really nice that is stays running and prompts you to accept or deny each registry change that is being attempted.
That's a rather appropriate place for "exotic" filetypes.
I know it's not a complete void, but there's certainly a lot missing. I'm not so much talking about the CG characters because they do have something there to at least look at (although it would be hard to be very interactive with a puppet or cardboard cutout.) I usually mean the surroundings. Before Ep II came out, I saw a spoiler film clip shot in the studio before the effects, and it was when Obi-Wan and Mace Windu are kneeling in arena holding off blaster fire and trying to talk about something in the middle of this battle. It was just those two crouching on a floor of sand with green around them and constantly jerking their lightsabers around to block blaster bolts.
They are supposed to be in the midst of their last stand, where they are pretty likely to be killed, and are surrounded by tons of droids shooting at them. They seemed to have a hard time faking any distress at it. Settings can have a strong impact on enabling an actor to have a much more realistic performance of emotions--something real to scare them, someplace dark and confining to make them feel moody or depressed, something genuinely statling to get that real look of surprise, etc. Don't make them completely fake everything; it's just not as good.
Exactly. The campiness was what made it fun. It's the taking itself too seriously and trying to make it high drama that's killing it.
Instead of dumb stuff like:
Amidala: I have to tell you I truly, deeply love you.
We had:
Leia: I happen to like nice men.
Han: I'm nice men.
SCO: Oh yeah? All your recollections are belong to us!...at $699 a pop.
Here's a funny example of George Lucas' fixation on CGI. IMDB trivia for Gangs of New York has a funny item where George gave Martin Scorsese some advice.
It's way too late to save Star Wars, and I think this is one very big reason. People mention Lucas can't direct, and can't write good dialogue. Those are both pretty good points, but here is another significant one. I don't see how the actors could ever do a good performance in this new trilogy because almost every scene is acted in front of a green screen. How are they ever supposed to do any more than recite their lines when they have nothing more than the clothes they are wearing to give them any impression about what's "going on" around them. Even worse than that is that frequently the other characters they are supposed to be interacting with aren't even there because they're going to be computer generated later. AAAND, how are multiple actors in front of a green screen supposed to gel well and have good group dynamics in those scenes when they are each having to imagine what the scene looks like around them. When every actor is "seeing" the scene differently, of course they are going to look awkward.
Answer to the original question is no, because to save it, they would have to build real sets instead of using CGI all the time, and building sets takes years of prep. CGI shots are great for just animated action, but mixing too much CGI with actors' performances ruins them, as these prequels are a perfect example of.
Yes I have. My dad was from a farming family too. A guy I work with told me about something his dad did, where there was a neighboring farm being sold off in an estate sale. The kids were selling off the land really cheaply because they didn't want to farm and just wanted to get the money out of it. So my friend's dad bought it and put it in the non-farming program, and it's going to pay for itself in less than 10 years.
You don't have to read up on the topic or do any research to just catch a suspicious quote that you can proclaim out of context to "prove" the agenda you already have in mind. So Brown doesn't really need to do any research for his purposes, but at the same time, it does reveal to his interviewees what he's really about.
I was a little too strong in not believing the 66mpg of the converted Taurus. Sorry for that because I had forgotten the "prototype effect." The major difference is production cost. The air force and UC had tons of research money to throw at this. I'll bet they could get better mileage in one prototype model than Honda or Toyota's mass-production vehicles. The problem is that not many people are willing to pay $50,000+ for a converted Taurus. The manufacturers have to balance a decent efficiency increase vs. the amount it's going to increase the price.
Thanks for the recommendation. I did some research into the open source stuff. The problem with many of them (well I shouldn't say problem--it's just a usage difference that won't do what I need) is that they are generally programs that need to be installed on a Linux system. I want this to use on a Windows machine that does not have Linux on it at all. That is the case with g4u. dd has the same issue, but even that is not a very good solution since it is also copying unused areas of the hard drive instead of the files. I think partimage will do what I want, and I found a way to run it without having Linux installed. This is a good bootable rescue CD that has GNU Parted, QtParted, Partimage, Sfdisk, and some other things on it. That should let me back up that Windows partition without having Linux there.
You are mixing two different things that don't go together. There are three hybrid cars in common production right now--Honda Insight, Honda Civic hybrid, and the Toyota Prius. There are a few more to come out later this year and next year. You selected the 3-cylinder engine from one car and matched it with the lowest fuel economy from one of the other cars. The Insight has the 3 cyl and gets 60+mpg. My 2002 Prius is of the first generation of it before the large set of improvements they made for the 2004 model year. It routinely got 47-50mpg in actual gas mileage. The newer Prius gets in the 50-60 range. The Civic is a little less; I believe they are around 45mpg. I did have a 1991 Metro with the 3 cylinder. With mostly highway miles, I could get about 47mpg--generally mid 40's, and as someone pointed out, that was a tiny low-powered car. The Prius and Civic have 4 cylinders + electric motor power added to that when needed, so they have better power than a traditional 4-banger.
Your quote about the Metro getting 59mpg is a complete load of fertilizer. This claim sheds some light on your 66mpg hybrid Taurus mentioned earlier. (You hauled your Taurus up a mountain to start your gas mileage test, right?) I fear I have fed a troll, but at least the information is good for other people.
I love that idea of running diesel engines on vegetable oil. I just read a lot on the greasecar.com website. There is lots of information out there about cars running with that. Here's the funny part. You have probably heard of farming subsidies--more commonly known as the "get paid not to farm program". You may not have heard it related to this, but if they farmed that land instead, we would be sitting on all the renewable fuel we want! Just plant soybeans to get the oil from, and you'd be most of the way there to getting the U.S. off foreign oil completely.
"left with plastic." ...and Vasoline.
Keep both hands on the keyboard please.
I tried several distros on my secondary computer, and it didn't like my sound card or video card (even though ALSA listed my sound card as supported and wouldn't--Debian had an X server package for my S3 video card but couldn't detect the card and install it). Instead of quitting and bitching about Linux sucking, I acknowledged the point from the first responder Fred quoted. Linux should be considered a different environment, and there are sometimes things that aren't really meant to work on both sides.
I did a couple of upgrades, conceding that my video card and sound card were cheap-o stuff. I got a used ATI Rage 128 video card and a Sound Blaster Live!. OK, things install pretty well and generally work--I can configure the display how I want with YaST and I can get sound. The first basic thing I tried to do though, was to make a copy of an audio CD onto CD-R. I just have the single CD-RW drive, though, so it would have to understand reading an image file and then letting me put in a blank CD-R to write to. I opened K3B and then put in the audio CD. KSCD automatically started up and hung. It would not respond to KILL commands, either. K3B, of course, would not respond either because KSCD seemed to have control of the system/drive. The only way out was to eject the CD, which would let me kill KSCD. I tried closing both programs and then putting in the CD with nothing running--KSCD would still load and hang, preventing me from even starting K3B. I just can't believe this is the state of things in the current version of SuSE, which is considered one of the more polished, for pay, distros. Something as basic as putting an audio CD into the computer shouldn't hang a program.
I would really like to start using Linux, but basic stuff like this just make me want to wait another year or so to see if it will become more functional. Meanwhile, I am trying to learn and use more open source apps on Windows to begin the move (Firefox, Filezilla,...).
I use ZonaAlarm and like it a lot. It's true I have been foiled a time or two when trying to get some connectivity on my home network for sharing a directory or shared printer, but I figured out it was the firewall and fixed it. I really like that it blocks outgoing connections by default, and that's the way it should be. Hacking in is only half the battle. The phone home programs are also problems that I don't want them connecting to anything unless I know about it.
I can't be as locked down as I would like because my wife also uses this computer, so we still use IE (I just installed Firefox for me to use) and I just did a scan with AdAware and found a bunch of crap that it removed. I don't do much serious work on this computer at home, so I don't really care too much. ZoneAlarm works great for preventing virus problems, so I'm doing fine there.
I've been thinking about getting Ghost or something like it for the next time I have to re-install. Do you know of any other free drive imaging programs? In particular, I would prefer not to pay $80 or whatever for Ghost.
Uh, yeah...me too.
There are some great rebates on tax software every year that might make it worthwhile. It's like a late Christmas present or something. Buy TurboTax and a $60GB hard drive, get full rebates for both! We use TurboTax, and always just print out the forms and mail them(and a hardcopy to keep). Why the heck should I pay that horrible amount for e-filing?
telling him to shut his mouth? With the way he started to say something and then changed it to nothing, he seemed like Charlie McCarthy with Baystar's hand up his ass.
or...
"Darl M for Murder"