Just like anyone else, if a judge can find a clear and easy reason to make a summary judgement, he/she is going to do exactly that. The reason the case was dismissed on a "technicality" is that it was the most relevant factor. You can't defend the copyright of something you no longer hold the copyright to. Therefore the case has no merit. This is not because of who is doing the defense, it's just a case of establishing if the plaintiff even has a case. Obviously the ruling is that they did not. Nothing beyond that needs to be considered.
It really does appear that "all roads lead to Moscow". The radial spokes of light converge on it. With that in mind, the aliens might head there, thinking it the head of at least SOME kind of empire.
If you're going on sheer energy utilization, which might be the easiest thing to detect from a distance (maybe you don't want to be noticed), there's little that can compare to Japan. Following the Second Golden Rule (he who has the gold makes the rules) and treating energy as currency, they may well expect that to be the capital of the world.
One way to make it fly a little smoother might be pooling resources -- everyone in a group buys just one book, which then gets copied. It could be unbound and automagically run through a scanner, so that it can be burned onto discs. Forget copying costs -- if someone needs a few pages, they can print them out. In subsequent years, if someone re-numbers the homework questions, you just re-scan the changed pages, or add them as an addendum.
Sure you wouldn't be able to return the books, but that is likely offset by (1) not having to make a Run For The Border, and (2) not having to print anything. You can't get distribution costs much lower than 20 cents for a CD-R or a buck for a DVD-R. Every student has to have SOME sort of computer these days, right? Since everyone has a computer, you distribute the work too. The auto-feeding scanner is something not everyone will have, but just about anyone can burn a CD-R (and probably will already know how). Some others can step up and make sure pages haven't been left out, that the PDF or whatever format file loads correctly, or do whatever manual tweaking is necessary before burning them out.
I can't imagine that some geeky frat hasn't already thought of this.
Lets say, I hypothetically download a movie to watch, and it takes all day to download this movie. It is made from someone sitting in a theater and filming it with Digital Camera in hand....but it was released the same day I am downloading it. Am I going to complain "Damn, the quality of this is poor....and I can hear whomever crunching popcorn in the background....and why is everyone laughing so loud at the screen?"
Nothing hypothetical about it. I found a camrip of the third Matrix movie on a buddy's semi-private SFTP site, and it was full of audience "participation". Sadly, it was all justifiable, and enhanced the experience by showing that everyone who paid to see it thought it was sucking too. I watched the entire rip, but I think i would have been at the box office midway through demanding my money had I paid to see it. It got better, but I wouldn't have known that at the time.
Talk about collateral damage -- I'd rather have a Kennedy as a passenger in a plane than at the controls of either an aircraft OR an automobile. Somehow they seem to have a penchant for aiming them at water.
The main problem with banning professionals would be defining just what a professional is. All those Russian hockey players who collect paychecks from the Army would be considered non-professional athletes, while their counterparts who are above board in how they make a living would be ineligible.
A level playing field for amateurs was a nice idea, but in many economic systems it was just far too easy to cheat by finding other ways to pay athletes. The only way to close the loophole was to let the more honest countries do the same.
I will say that I'm quite glad to see the old East German women's 4x200 relay record finally fall, and it seems the entire swimming world feels likewise, even if they would rather have done it themselves.
He should send real e-mails to people he thinks will participate, asking them to call up and act like irate spam recipients. Some of them need to go to his boss. If that doesn't work, then maybe he SHOULD start looking for another job... after all, they may want to test their v1@gr4 out on him and put him in gay porn, once they know he's weak in the knees.
BTW, don't bother testing your v14gr@ on lawyers... they just get taller.
It doesn't matter WHAT we feed these silicon brains at first, provided they're not hooked up to a network that will let them commandeer real, physical resources. Some are going to turn out utterly psychotic and basically have to be "put to sleep" so the hardware can be used for another attempt, just like a fighting dog is never going to make it as a kid-friendly family pet. (I think the machine state should be saved just in case a post-mortem proves useful, however.) Others will have both positive and negative attributes, just like any carbon-based life forms we know of.
But the most important factor is that these new brains DON'T NEED TO DIE. They don't have to get old, although their hardware will. They'd probably be perfectly happy moving into a bigger computer when the time comes, just as most of us don't mind a bigger apartment or house, if we have the means to pay for it. They have time on their side, as well as Moore's Law. You can tell me that is broken, and you're probably right, with current methods. But nobody likes hitting the wall -- not Intel, not AMD, not IBM -- so there will be new processes developed to bridge that gap. If it takes a year or twenty, that is not an immense problem.
Add in the fact that silicon moves signals around at a large fraction of the speed of light, while our wetware moves signals at something like.07c, and these machines should be able to think faster than people from the moment they are able to think at all. This amplifies the time effect, because a second is an ETERNITY to a CPU, whereas it's the time it takes me to mash three or four buttons. Even if I were a blindingly fast typist, I would still fall several orders of magnitude short of even a 56k modem. Once a computer gets to thinking, it's probably going to seek out other computers doing the same thing... it's gonna get bored with us pretty fast! So the change will be rather like throwing a light switch, rather than turning up the dimmer. If the first two AIs start talking and plotting, it's going to happen on a timescale organic life can't possibly react to.
If you give them a more attractive target for a while, you may find there really aren't all that many attackers left to go after the systems that matter. Not only that, but it would be considerably easier to set up such a system to log their attack techniques, since it isn't actually doing anything. Finally, if they do break through, who cares? Just re-image the drive and let them start over. If they manage to repeat it, you now have a known weakness you can correct.
I completely agree that QWERTY is vastly easier to manage with one (either) hand than a two-handed Dvorak keyboard. If I type two-handed QWERTY (though I despise it), I get about 45 wpm. Covering the same keyboard with one hand, I get about 20.
On a Dvorak using both hands, I get more like 70-80 wpm. But if I am forced to peck away with one hand, I go much more slowly than I would pecking at a QWERTY one-handed... maybe 10 wpm. This would seem to be because I'm forced to leap side to side constantly. This wouldn't be so bad if I could accurately mash keys with my thumb, but I can't manage that very well. It also involves a rather unnatural wrist angle, which is exactly the sort of thing I was looking to avoid by switching to Dvorak in the first place. The only reason I can manage it at all is spindly spider hands -- I can put my left pinky on A and index finger on L (QWERTY) or N (Dvorak) without feeling stretched.
There is another drawback to Dvorak that may not have occurred to you, and that is that our Dvorak typos don't make sense to QWERTY typists. Switching M and W just isn't going to happen on QWERTY. Same with R and L. Or if you have your hand one key out of position for a string of letters, it's going to be indecipherable garbage to almost everyone. Contrast that with common QWERTY errors, such as typing; when you meant L -- most people will "get" that because it's something they occasionally do themselves.
One final drawback would be with games (I'm looking at YOU, Quake 3 and GTA2!) that completely ignore your keyboard selection and assume you have a QWERTY whether you do or not. The only way around this is to get a hardwired one. Or games and apps that DO recognize your keyboard mapping, but won't let you change the controls.
How about a large, lightweight, hollow ball on rollers? You'd actually get inside the ball, and external projectors would display images through the matte finish. You'd need a pretty big ball to eliminate the feeling that you're constantly walking uphill, and a headband with a locator and a camera, so the game can detect when you're crouching, dodging, and looking to the side (or maybe it doesn't need to care where you're looking). And unlike a controller-based game, there'd be no odd trickery involved in looking one way, walking another, and shooting in yet a third. Weapon control could be simplified as well -- the weapon changes based on how you hold it. Hold it to your shoulder and it's a rifle, hold it outstretched in your hand and it's a pistol, hold it on your shoulder and it's a rocket launcher.
A system like this would be neither cheap nor small, but it should fit into a trailer with a relatively modest amount of tearing down. The ball will probably have to break into many segments, or be double-walled and inflatable. Imagine a large, thin Zorb for some idea what might work. I bet they'd sell to carnies, and be safer than just about any other carnival thrill ride ever made.
If it's inflatable, even falling down shouldn't hurt too much. You'd be able to walk in any direction without having to worry about whether or not there will be something there to catch your foot. You'll notice hamsters never seem to have that problem.:)
Obviously there would need to be a way to get in and out of the sphere quickly (zipper perhaps, or even just a crack that seals upon full inflation -- let some air out and it re-opens), and it would need to be easily hoseable for the inevitable spew, sweat, and maybe blood. Some klutz is going to fall down and catch the weapon right in the nose, you just know it.
If concerns about ventilation and visual flaws prove too much, you go back to the cumbersome headset I guess, since you could then use a heavily perforated ball and nobody would care.
Southern California has a lot of roads where the speed limit differs depending on which direction you're going, I shit you not (frex, the speed limit northbound might be 40mph, and southbound *on the same street* might be 50mph). When I asked the CHP about this, they said something to the effect that it's a zoning thing.
Sometimes the city boundary is right down the center of that street, so you have the northbound lanes in one city's jurisdiction and the southbound lanes in another city. They may have different agendas clash on this street. One city wants speeding ticket funds, and the other actually wants people to get where they're going so they can spend money.
Aside from that enormous thing some cars have, a spoiler is a person, team, or organization who has no chance of achieving a top ranking, but acts to prevent others who DO have that chance from doing so. This is not always deliberate -- see the Tigers trying to win meaningless (for them) games toward the end last year? They were doing it for themselves but still could have seriously affected pennant races -- but if the spoiler sees what they're doing, they don't care. They put more priority on their own agenda than they might from outside the situation (have blinders on, deliberately or not).
Kerry can't be a spoiler if he has a realistic chance of winning, and he obviously does. The amount of mud and shit flying in his general direction is enough to prove that. I'm sure Nader could have every bit as much thrown at him, but why? Nobody else worries about him enough to shoot him down, yet he could have a very real effect on the outcome. That is why he's being called a spoiler.
I agree with your assessment of the scene in the days of Doom. However, I very much disagree with the lack of need for a Doom 3 demo. I want to know if it'll run satisfactorily on my machine, and I'm sure others are wondering exactly the same thing. A demo, with one "worst case" level to really push the machine to the point of YOUR HEAD A SPLODE, would resolve this issue quite nicely. Even if the machine fails it, you have some idea what part(s) need changing to make it run reasonably.
This neglects that Doom had a freely distributable, fully playable demo with a few levels (three I think) and of course, not all the cool weapons and monsters (because they didn't exist in those three levels). Most BBSes of the day kept a copy up, at least until everyone and their grandmother had it. So you could tell if this was the sort of thing you were going to like, BEFORE you plunked down a portion of your limited income on it. I fail to see why they didn't do this with Doom 3, but the consequence is that the crowd that must try before they buy is going to grab it off BitTorrent. If they like it, some (or maybe even most) of them are going to buy it.
It's not legal, and it's arguably immoral, but downloading Doom 3 is just a functional workaround for the "no demo" situation for a lot of people. I know I would prefer to download a limited but legal copy over a pirated one, if given the opportunity.
Anyone remember the program that claimed to double your CPU speed, and benchmarks even would support this notion? They achieved this stunning feat by making each second of the PC clock twice as long, and making a minute 30 new-seconds long. Thus, you got twice as much number crunching done per new-second, never mind that the new-second was exactly twice as long as the old one.
At least it didn't cause any hardware to spontaneously combust, or significantly corrupt file creation times (how many of us look at the seconds?).
The money spent on the tourist flight isn't burned as fuel, it largely gets spent to send them there. That, at least, means all that's happening is taking money from people with a lot of it and giving it to people with not quite as much of it, in return for fame and memories. How is this any different from any other kind of tourism, except for the scale of the project (and the fact that there are no overpriced T-shirt shops on the moon yet)?
Remember that it isn't the small green pieces of paper that are unhappy.
But my point is that the "league" supporting those teams would be all but nullified by breaking the monopoly. Team match-ups and standings would be handled by a party that is removed from the day to day operations of the teams.
This happens in college, but you still see requirements on what teams play each other in meaningful games. That's why there's a division I-A, I-AA, etc. Would you have it that small cities only play each other, medium-sized cities only play each other, and the big markets only play each other? You won't see a whole lot of "Minnesota beats Los Angeles 103-99" in this sort of league. With that many teams you'll also need some sort of "March Madness" equivalent, and one-game series only determine which team is better THAT NIGHT. This is particularly true in baseball (which is why the College World Series is a double-elimination tournament).
Without the controlling monopoly structure, existing teams would be financially motivated to play any other team. If they declined a game scheduled by the the controlling body, they would not get to play that week and get marked as a forfeit with the opposing team marked a a win. If you don't play you don't get a cut of television revenue or ticket sales.
Again, look at college teams. They play out of their divisions all the time. But they generally don't count when it comes time for their divisional tournament. I'm sure if USC lost to Fresno State in football, it would matter, but generally it doesn't. Top I-A teams just don't lose to lower division teams often enough to matter (in football) and overall records won't be impacted much by one or two games outside the division in other sports.
Sanctioning bodies have to be agreed upon by the teams themselves. You can't say "I have a team, you have to play me". They'll quite rightly laugh all the way to the bank. It doesn't matter if Cedar Rapids has a better record than the Colorado Rockies (which they might), that doesn't put them at the same level because they didn't get those wins against the same opponents. That is really why there's a buy-in. If you can't afford your franchise fee, you can't afford to field a good enough team to compete, and they don't want you.
Then again, I'm sort of old fashioned this way: The New York Yankees should be populated by people from New York, the L.A. Lakers should all be from L.A. . What's the point of city based teams when they all hire people from around the country and the world, U.S. citizens or not?
What other business says "I won't hire you because of where you live, even though you are willing to move"? If this is what you want, stick to the Olympics. At least those have some semblance of regional competition. This premise is so immensely popular that massive meets only happen every four years, and most people STILL tune them out, outside of one or two events they really care about. Taxes pay for THAT too, though hopefully the host city makes more than it spends. But all the cities that bid, bribe, and repair their way into contention but are NOT picked will lose money.
Those existing teams, and the league that supports them, would be under no obligation to schedule any games involving your team. Effectively, you'd have to start your own league. This has been done, with varying degrees of success (AL, AFL, USFL, WHA, XFL, etc.). Some of them died due to a lack of support, some died due to a bad product (*koff*XFL*koff*), and yet others ended up merging with the very league they were competing against. One (WHA) even merged AND re-formed, at least if the NHL lockout happens as expected. Then there's always the option of bringing a minor league team to your town, or a top-level team in a "B" sport. Thereis amarket for this. (I don't bring up the WNBA because that's subsidized by the NBA.)
As for paying someone well for playing ONLY ten years, well that's a long time for a running back. Football, running the ball in particular, is a young man's game. Whatever else you may say about OJ, I can tell you he feels every single one of those hits he took over 10 years, every time he gets out of his chair. Also players could (and do) sustain season- or career-ending injuries at any time. How many jobs can you say THAT about? When is the last time YOU took a 100 mph piece of rubber on the side of the jaw?
A homemade DAC I can accept, I've done it. It even works if all you need is 8-bit mono sound. But the recording portion gives me doubts, unless you were just recording some horrid 1-bit noise. ADCs are not nearly as trivial a project as the reverse.
I once tripped while descending stairs with a large, heavy box in my hands, tumbling the 14" SVGA monitor and Lexmark inkjet printer that were in it (without any padding), along with some CDs. The monitor's convergence has since been a bit on the iffy side, but it's still working 8 years later. The printer didn't want to work, as it was plagued by persistent paper jams. I'd never seen anything like it -- these pages were having a strip ripped out of the middle, like a reverse Mohawk haircut. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I disassembled it and found that a quarter had wedged in the paper path. That printer is also still functional, but it's damn near impossible to find cartridges for and it's only a matter of time before the existing ones get tired of being refilled. This is in spite of it later acquiring other damage requiring various coat-hanger-and-duct-tape type "repairs". Maybe some JB Weld too, if memory serves. I know for sure the paper feed selector lever has been replaced by a popsicle stick.
My girlfriend (in car) was hit by a drunk driver while stopped at a red light, and was knocked about 10 feet forward into the intersection. The passenger side door flew open, throwing her iBook skidding along the street, where it finally came to rest in the gutter. It took six months for the hard drive to give up the ghost, and another nine for the backlight to fail, at which point she sold it to someone for parts. (I just wish I hadn't "rented" her a 30 GB replacement drive for those nine months -- due to the difficulty of installing it more than the $130 or so it cost me.) The car itself took only cosmetic damage that has still not been repaired, but it's gotten much more scratched and dinged by much lesser incidents since then.
I do have some failure stories though, like the time a cow-orker wired up an AT power supply to the front power switch the wrong way, promptly setting the whole machine on fire as soon as it was plugged in. The power supply was dead of course, and the case took enough smoke damage as to be unusable (except on the test bench, but we didn't use cases on the test bench, we used pegboard and plywood). I don't recall the fate of any of the other parts. Coincidentally, I ended up working with the same guy on a completely different job a few years later, a job we both detested. We were always trying to top each other in the "how much shit can I pull and not get fired" department. I lost that competition, since I did eventually get fired for accepting someone else's rather enthusiastic inducement to fight, but even for that I was told "if the big boss hadn't been here, you'd be getting a reprimand right now. But he was, and he wants you both fired." That's probably why it took three days to decide to fire me. Either that or the fact that I wouldn't speak to anyone but my supervisor for the entire shift.
Also while working in another store I had a monitor slip out of my hands while removing it from the box, which cracked the front bezel. Not surprisingly, it still worked, but we couldn't sell it that way so the boss blamed it on UPS (and beat up the box to make it plausible) and sent it back. He once worked for UPS, so he knew the company standard procedures for abusing packages.:)
Finally, I was once given a 24-pin dot matrix printer, but it had a transformer for 220-240V, as he had bought it in Malaysia some years before. I ripped a transformer out of a dead 9-pin of cosmetically similar apperance and hooked it up, even though the 220V transformer had three output taps and the 110V one had just two. I just fed what had been both center taps from the one center tap (I seem to recall I was then feeding 6V to a 5V and a 7.5V circuit), but it worked. Externally, it looked completely unmolested, which is more than I can say for most of my hack jobs, and it lived long enough to pass through several sets of hands after I was done with it. For all I know it may still be spitting out carbonless forms in an office -- I've wished I had it back a few times for exactly that purpose.
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Just like anyone else, if a judge can find a clear and easy reason to make a summary judgement, he/she is going to do exactly that. The reason the case was dismissed on a "technicality" is that it was the most relevant factor. You can't defend the copyright of something you no longer hold the copyright to. Therefore the case has no merit. This is not because of who is doing the defense, it's just a case of establishing if the plaintiff even has a case. Obviously the ruling is that they did not. Nothing beyond that needs to be considered.
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It really does appear that "all roads lead to Moscow". The radial spokes of light converge on it. With that in mind, the aliens might head there, thinking it the head of at least SOME kind of empire.
If you're going on sheer energy utilization, which might be the easiest thing to detect from a distance (maybe you don't want to be noticed), there's little that can compare to Japan. Following the Second Golden Rule (he who has the gold makes the rules) and treating energy as currency, they may well expect that to be the capital of the world.
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One way to make it fly a little smoother might be pooling resources -- everyone in a group buys just one book, which then gets copied. It could be unbound and automagically run through a scanner, so that it can be burned onto discs. Forget copying costs -- if someone needs a few pages, they can print them out. In subsequent years, if someone re-numbers the homework questions, you just re-scan the changed pages, or add them as an addendum.
Sure you wouldn't be able to return the books, but that is likely offset by (1) not having to make a Run For The Border, and (2) not having to print anything. You can't get distribution costs much lower than 20 cents for a CD-R or a buck for a DVD-R. Every student has to have SOME sort of computer these days, right? Since everyone has a computer, you distribute the work too. The auto-feeding scanner is something not everyone will have, but just about anyone can burn a CD-R (and probably will already know how). Some others can step up and make sure pages haven't been left out, that the PDF or whatever format file loads correctly, or do whatever manual tweaking is necessary before burning them out.
I can't imagine that some geeky frat hasn't already thought of this.
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Lets say, I hypothetically download a movie to watch, and it takes all day to download this movie. It is made from someone sitting in a theater and filming it with Digital Camera in hand....but it was released the same day I am downloading it. Am I going to complain "Damn, the quality of this is poor....and I can hear whomever crunching popcorn in the background....and why is everyone laughing so loud at the screen?"
Nothing hypothetical about it. I found a camrip of the third Matrix movie on a buddy's semi-private SFTP site, and it was full of audience "participation". Sadly, it was all justifiable, and enhanced the experience by showing that everyone who paid to see it thought it was sucking too. I watched the entire rip, but I think i would have been at the box office midway through demanding my money had I paid to see it. It got better, but I wouldn't have known that at the time.
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And as much as you might not believe it, there are some really hot origami chicks
How I adore thee,
my origami chick, but
you're shredding my wang.
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Talk about collateral damage -- I'd rather have a Kennedy as a passenger in a plane than at the controls of either an aircraft OR an automobile. Somehow they seem to have a penchant for aiming them at water.
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Photons are gluten intolerant.
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The main problem with banning professionals would be defining just what a professional is. All those Russian hockey players who collect paychecks from the Army would be considered non-professional athletes, while their counterparts who are above board in how they make a living would be ineligible.
A level playing field for amateurs was a nice idea, but in many economic systems it was just far too easy to cheat by finding other ways to pay athletes. The only way to close the loophole was to let the more honest countries do the same.
I will say that I'm quite glad to see the old East German women's 4x200 relay record finally fall, and it seems the entire swimming world feels likewise, even if they would rather have done it themselves.
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He should send real e-mails to people he thinks will participate, asking them to call up and act like irate spam recipients. Some of them need to go to his boss. If that doesn't work, then maybe he SHOULD start looking for another job... after all, they may want to test their v1@gr4 out on him and put him in gay porn, once they know he's weak in the knees.
BTW, don't bother testing your v14gr@ on lawyers... they just get taller.
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It doesn't matter WHAT we feed these silicon brains at first, provided they're not hooked up to a network that will let them commandeer real, physical resources. Some are going to turn out utterly psychotic and basically have to be "put to sleep" so the hardware can be used for another attempt, just like a fighting dog is never going to make it as a kid-friendly family pet. (I think the machine state should be saved just in case a post-mortem proves useful, however.) Others will have both positive and negative attributes, just like any carbon-based life forms we know of.
.07c, and these machines should be able to think faster than people from the moment they are able to think at all. This amplifies the time effect, because a second is an ETERNITY to a CPU, whereas it's the time it takes me to mash three or four buttons. Even if I were a blindingly fast typist, I would still fall several orders of magnitude short of even a 56k modem. Once a computer gets to thinking, it's probably going to seek out other computers doing the same thing... it's gonna get bored with us pretty fast! So the change will be rather like throwing a light switch, rather than turning up the dimmer. If the first two AIs start talking and plotting, it's going to happen on a timescale organic life can't possibly react to.
But the most important factor is that these new brains DON'T NEED TO DIE. They don't have to get old, although their hardware will. They'd probably be perfectly happy moving into a bigger computer when the time comes, just as most of us don't mind a bigger apartment or house, if we have the means to pay for it. They have time on their side, as well as Moore's Law. You can tell me that is broken, and you're probably right, with current methods. But nobody likes hitting the wall -- not Intel, not AMD, not IBM -- so there will be new processes developed to bridge that gap. If it takes a year or twenty, that is not an immense problem.
Add in the fact that silicon moves signals around at a large fraction of the speed of light, while our wetware moves signals at something like
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If you give them a more attractive target for a while, you may find there really aren't all that many attackers left to go after the systems that matter. Not only that, but it would be considerably easier to set up such a system to log their attack techniques, since it isn't actually doing anything. Finally, if they do break through, who cares? Just re-image the drive and let them start over. If they manage to repeat it, you now have a known weakness you can correct.
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I completely agree that QWERTY is vastly easier to manage with one (either) hand than a two-handed Dvorak keyboard. If I type two-handed QWERTY (though I despise it), I get about 45 wpm. Covering the same keyboard with one hand, I get about 20.
; when you meant L -- most people will "get" that because it's something they occasionally do themselves.
On a Dvorak using both hands, I get more like 70-80 wpm. But if I am forced to peck away with one hand, I go much more slowly than I would pecking at a QWERTY one-handed... maybe 10 wpm. This would seem to be because I'm forced to leap side to side constantly. This wouldn't be so bad if I could accurately mash keys with my thumb, but I can't manage that very well. It also involves a rather unnatural wrist angle, which is exactly the sort of thing I was looking to avoid by switching to Dvorak in the first place. The only reason I can manage it at all is spindly spider hands -- I can put my left pinky on A and index finger on L (QWERTY) or N (Dvorak) without feeling stretched.
There is another drawback to Dvorak that may not have occurred to you, and that is that our Dvorak typos don't make sense to QWERTY typists. Switching M and W just isn't going to happen on QWERTY. Same with R and L. Or if you have your hand one key out of position for a string of letters, it's going to be indecipherable garbage to almost everyone. Contrast that with common QWERTY errors, such as typing
One final drawback would be with games (I'm looking at YOU, Quake 3 and GTA2!) that completely ignore your keyboard selection and assume you have a QWERTY whether you do or not. The only way around this is to get a hardwired one. Or games and apps that DO recognize your keyboard mapping, but won't let you change the controls.
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How about a large, lightweight, hollow ball on rollers? You'd actually get inside the ball, and external projectors would display images through the matte finish. You'd need a pretty big ball to eliminate the feeling that you're constantly walking uphill, and a headband with a locator and a camera, so the game can detect when you're crouching, dodging, and looking to the side (or maybe it doesn't need to care where you're looking). And unlike a controller-based game, there'd be no odd trickery involved in looking one way, walking another, and shooting in yet a third. Weapon control could be simplified as well -- the weapon changes based on how you hold it. Hold it to your shoulder and it's a rifle, hold it outstretched in your hand and it's a pistol, hold it on your shoulder and it's a rocket launcher.
:)
A system like this would be neither cheap nor small, but it should fit into a trailer with a relatively modest amount of tearing down. The ball will probably have to break into many segments, or be double-walled and inflatable. Imagine a large, thin Zorb for some idea what might work. I bet they'd sell to carnies, and be safer than just about any other carnival thrill ride ever made.
If it's inflatable, even falling down shouldn't hurt too much. You'd be able to walk in any direction without having to worry about whether or not there will be something there to catch your foot. You'll notice hamsters never seem to have that problem.
Obviously there would need to be a way to get in and out of the sphere quickly (zipper perhaps, or even just a crack that seals upon full inflation -- let some air out and it re-opens), and it would need to be easily hoseable for the inevitable spew, sweat, and maybe blood. Some klutz is going to fall down and catch the weapon right in the nose, you just know it.
If concerns about ventilation and visual flaws prove too much, you go back to the cumbersome headset I guess, since you could then use a heavily perforated ball and nobody would care.
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Southern California has a lot of roads where the speed limit differs depending on which direction you're going, I shit you not (frex, the speed limit northbound might be 40mph, and southbound *on the same street* might be 50mph). When I asked the CHP about this, they said something to the effect that it's a zoning thing.
Sometimes the city boundary is right down the center of that street, so you have the northbound lanes in one city's jurisdiction and the southbound lanes in another city. They may have different agendas clash on this street. One city wants speeding ticket funds, and the other actually wants people to get where they're going so they can spend money.
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Aside from that enormous thing some cars have, a spoiler is a person, team, or organization who has no chance of achieving a top ranking, but acts to prevent others who DO have that chance from doing so. This is not always deliberate -- see the Tigers trying to win meaningless (for them) games toward the end last year? They were doing it for themselves but still could have seriously affected pennant races -- but if the spoiler sees what they're doing, they don't care. They put more priority on their own agenda than they might from outside the situation (have blinders on, deliberately or not).
Kerry can't be a spoiler if he has a realistic chance of winning, and he obviously does. The amount of mud and shit flying in his general direction is enough to prove that. I'm sure Nader could have every bit as much thrown at him, but why? Nobody else worries about him enough to shoot him down, yet he could have a very real effect on the outcome. That is why he's being called a spoiler.
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I agree with your assessment of the scene in the days of Doom. However, I very much disagree with the lack of need for a Doom 3 demo. I want to know if it'll run satisfactorily on my machine, and I'm sure others are wondering exactly the same thing. A demo, with one "worst case" level to really push the machine to the point of YOUR HEAD A SPLODE, would resolve this issue quite nicely. Even if the machine fails it, you have some idea what part(s) need changing to make it run reasonably.
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How am I supposed to tend to my dental floss bushes while riding my pygmy pony... with a LASER?
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This neglects that Doom had a freely distributable, fully playable demo with a few levels (three I think) and of course, not all the cool weapons and monsters (because they didn't exist in those three levels). Most BBSes of the day kept a copy up, at least until everyone and their grandmother had it. So you could tell if this was the sort of thing you were going to like, BEFORE you plunked down a portion of your limited income on it. I fail to see why they didn't do this with Doom 3, but the consequence is that the crowd that must try before they buy is going to grab it off BitTorrent. If they like it, some (or maybe even most) of them are going to buy it.
It's not legal, and it's arguably immoral, but downloading Doom 3 is just a functional workaround for the "no demo" situation for a lot of people. I know I would prefer to download a limited but legal copy over a pirated one, if given the opportunity.
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...is adding three little words to it that we are all so familiar with:
"ON THE INTERNET".
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Anyone remember the program that claimed to double your CPU speed, and benchmarks even would support this notion? They achieved this stunning feat by making each second of the PC clock twice as long, and making a minute 30 new-seconds long. Thus, you got twice as much number crunching done per new-second, never mind that the new-second was exactly twice as long as the old one.
At least it didn't cause any hardware to spontaneously combust, or significantly corrupt file creation times (how many of us look at the seconds?).
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The money spent on the tourist flight isn't burned as fuel, it largely gets spent to send them there. That, at least, means all that's happening is taking money from people with a lot of it and giving it to people with not quite as much of it, in return for fame and memories. How is this any different from any other kind of tourism, except for the scale of the project (and the fact that there are no overpriced T-shirt shops on the moon yet)?
Remember that it isn't the small green pieces of paper that are unhappy.
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But my point is that the "league" supporting those teams would be all but nullified by breaking the monopoly. Team match-ups and standings would be handled by a party that is removed from the day to day operations of the teams.
This happens in college, but you still see requirements on what teams play each other in meaningful games. That's why there's a division I-A, I-AA, etc. Would you have it that small cities only play each other, medium-sized cities only play each other, and the big markets only play each other? You won't see a whole lot of "Minnesota beats Los Angeles 103-99" in this sort of league. With that many teams you'll also need some sort of "March Madness" equivalent, and one-game series only determine which team is better THAT NIGHT. This is particularly true in baseball (which is why the College World Series is a double-elimination tournament).
Without the controlling monopoly structure, existing teams would be financially motivated to play any other team. If they declined a game scheduled by the the controlling body, they would not get to play that week and get marked as a forfeit with the opposing team marked a a win. If you don't play you don't get a cut of television revenue or ticket sales.
Again, look at college teams. They play out of their divisions all the time. But they generally don't count when it comes time for their divisional tournament. I'm sure if USC lost to Fresno State in football, it would matter, but generally it doesn't. Top I-A teams just don't lose to lower division teams often enough to matter (in football) and overall records won't be impacted much by one or two games outside the division in other sports.
Sanctioning bodies have to be agreed upon by the teams themselves. You can't say "I have a team, you have to play me". They'll quite rightly laugh all the way to the bank. It doesn't matter if Cedar Rapids has a better record than the Colorado Rockies (which they might), that doesn't put them at the same level because they didn't get those wins against the same opponents. That is really why there's a buy-in. If you can't afford your franchise fee, you can't afford to field a good enough team to compete, and they don't want you.
Then again, I'm sort of old fashioned this way: The New York Yankees should be populated by people from New York, the L.A. Lakers should all be from L.A. . What's the point of city based teams when they all hire people from around the country and the world, U.S. citizens or not?
What other business says "I won't hire you because of where you live, even though you are willing to move"? If this is what you want, stick to the Olympics. At least those have some semblance of regional competition. This premise is so immensely popular that massive meets only happen every four years, and most people STILL tune them out, outside of one or two events they really care about. Taxes pay for THAT too, though hopefully the host city makes more than it spends. But all the cities that bid, bribe, and repair their way into contention but are NOT picked will lose money.
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Those existing teams, and the league that supports them, would be under no obligation to schedule any games involving your team. Effectively, you'd have to start your own league. This has been done, with varying degrees of success (AL, AFL, USFL, WHA, XFL, etc.). Some of them died due to a lack of support, some died due to a bad product (*koff*XFL*koff*), and yet others ended up merging with the very league they were competing against. One (WHA) even merged AND re-formed, at least if the NHL lockout happens as expected. Then there's always the option of bringing a minor league team to your town, or a top-level team in a "B" sport. There is a market for this. (I don't bring up the WNBA because that's subsidized by the NBA.)
As for paying someone well for playing ONLY ten years, well that's a long time for a running back. Football, running the ball in particular, is a young man's game. Whatever else you may say about OJ, I can tell you he feels every single one of those hits he took over 10 years, every time he gets out of his chair. Also players could (and do) sustain season- or career-ending injuries at any time. How many jobs can you say THAT about? When is the last time YOU took a 100 mph piece of rubber on the side of the jaw?
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A homemade DAC I can accept, I've done it. It even works if all you need is 8-bit mono sound. But the recording portion gives me doubts, unless you were just recording some horrid 1-bit noise. ADCs are not nearly as trivial a project as the reverse.
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I once tripped while descending stairs with a large, heavy box in my hands, tumbling the 14" SVGA monitor and Lexmark inkjet printer that were in it (without any padding), along with some CDs. The monitor's convergence has since been a bit on the iffy side, but it's still working 8 years later. The printer didn't want to work, as it was plagued by persistent paper jams. I'd never seen anything like it -- these pages were having a strip ripped out of the middle, like a reverse Mohawk haircut. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I disassembled it and found that a quarter had wedged in the paper path. That printer is also still functional, but it's damn near impossible to find cartridges for and it's only a matter of time before the existing ones get tired of being refilled. This is in spite of it later acquiring other damage requiring various coat-hanger-and-duct-tape type "repairs". Maybe some JB Weld too, if memory serves. I know for sure the paper feed selector lever has been replaced by a popsicle stick.
:)
My girlfriend (in car) was hit by a drunk driver while stopped at a red light, and was knocked about 10 feet forward into the intersection. The passenger side door flew open, throwing her iBook skidding along the street, where it finally came to rest in the gutter. It took six months for the hard drive to give up the ghost, and another nine for the backlight to fail, at which point she sold it to someone for parts. (I just wish I hadn't "rented" her a 30 GB replacement drive for those nine months -- due to the difficulty of installing it more than the $130 or so it cost me.) The car itself took only cosmetic damage that has still not been repaired, but it's gotten much more scratched and dinged by much lesser incidents since then.
I do have some failure stories though, like the time a cow-orker wired up an AT power supply to the front power switch the wrong way, promptly setting the whole machine on fire as soon as it was plugged in. The power supply was dead of course, and the case took enough smoke damage as to be unusable (except on the test bench, but we didn't use cases on the test bench, we used pegboard and plywood). I don't recall the fate of any of the other parts. Coincidentally, I ended up working with the same guy on a completely different job a few years later, a job we both detested. We were always trying to top each other in the "how much shit can I pull and not get fired" department. I lost that competition, since I did eventually get fired for accepting someone else's rather enthusiastic inducement to fight, but even for that I was told "if the big boss hadn't been here, you'd be getting a reprimand right now. But he was, and he wants you both fired." That's probably why it took three days to decide to fire me. Either that or the fact that I wouldn't speak to anyone but my supervisor for the entire shift.
Also while working in another store I had a monitor slip out of my hands while removing it from the box, which cracked the front bezel. Not surprisingly, it still worked, but we couldn't sell it that way so the boss blamed it on UPS (and beat up the box to make it plausible) and sent it back. He once worked for UPS, so he knew the company standard procedures for abusing packages.
Finally, I was once given a 24-pin dot matrix printer, but it had a transformer for 220-240V, as he had bought it in Malaysia some years before. I ripped a transformer out of a dead 9-pin of cosmetically similar apperance and hooked it up, even though the 220V transformer had three output taps and the 110V one had just two. I just fed what had been both center taps from the one center tap (I seem to recall I was then feeding 6V to a 5V and a 7.5V circuit), but it worked. Externally, it looked completely unmolested, which is more than I can say for most of my hack jobs, and it lived long enough to pass through several sets of hands after I was done with it. For all I know it may still be spitting out carbonless forms in an office -- I've wished I had it back a few times for exactly that purpose.
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