In this case it would be much funnier if the bored sound tech injected a sound after processing, such that it sounds (to everyone in the audience) as if the fart came from one seat to the left or right.:)
Have someone (or several someones) walking the convention hall floor with sniffers. Any machine found to be transmitting packets via WiFi gets the plug pulled on the wired network. Since every location in the hall is numbered, a simple call back to the network center can get them switched off without having to physically confront them. However, I just like the idea of a guy walking up with scissors and SNIPPING them.
Maybe they should hire Nigerian guards.
Signs would be posted all over -- "TURN OFF YOUR WIFI OR YOUR NETWORK CONNECTION WILL BE TURNED OFF. If you do not know how to do this, please call 1-900-xxx-xxxx ($3.95/minute) for assistance." Using the number of a phone sex line would not be funny. (OK, yes it would, but it's still not a very good idea.)
This is even more asinine when you consider that full U.S. ZIP codes are nine digits and a hyphen. Only the first five are required for most mail, but if you know all nine, you should use them. At the very least, it provides some sanity checking against the rest of the address.
It can take months to engineer a simple mutations and get a protein that's properly expressed.
But it's more like programming than building bombs. The first copy may take months or years to make, but the creation of additional copies will be several orders of magnitude easier. After all, DNA was DESIGNED to replicate itself, so unless you botch it so badly it can't, you shouldn't have to tell it how. It just will.
This means that while people may design one-off jobs for something they alone need (or at least believe they alone need), the vast majority of bio-hacks are going to be replicated heavily. That's the entire point of the exercise. It's a highly inefficient process if you just want one.
Its a motion sensor. (The idea is even if you are "standing still" you move very subtly, and the radar can pick it up.) It aint going to help you find studs.
Sure it can. You move IT across the walls. Motion is relative, it doesn't matter whether you move or the scanner does, as long is there is a change of relative position. Plain old drywall is flat and thin enough that it shouldn't show up if you slide the scanner across the wall, since it seems to be pretty much the same everywhere except the seams.
That said, it's a whole lot simpler to use ordinary ultrasound-based density finders, which are quite adequate for differentiating insulation from wood.
Actually I pretty well DO drain the tank every time. That's probably why I notice so much. Also it's not just the weight that makes it noticeable, but the location of that weight. People sit BETWEEN the axles, while the fuel tank usually sits near or behind the rear axle. This distinction doesn't matter much for raw acceleration or economy, but it sure does affect handling. Similarly, two hundred pounds in your back seat won't imbalance your car the way two hundred pounds in the trunk will.
So chances are my perception of the weight of fuel is out of proportion to its actual weight due to the location of that weight, and the fact that it decreases slowly over a few hundred miles but increases all at once. Maybe it's only 100 pounds, but it's in a bad place and also sloshes around while cornering. If you corner hard enough though, your passengers will likewise tend to drift around within the cabin, at least from the ribcage up.
First off, I think it's only fair to base mileage figures on full-to-near-empty consumption. After all, a car weighs more when it's full of fuel than it does empty. Haven't you ever taken on a load of fuel and suddenly noticed how "boaty" the car feels, or how the back end suddenly seems to have a mind of its own?
Personally I fuel up completely just because stopping for gas is an inconvenience I'd prefer to do as infrequently as possible. This also means I drive until the warning light comes on, then fill up as soon as it is practical to do so (which may be 50 miles later). The warning light comes on about 260 to 270 miles from the last fill-up, depending on whether I'm going uphill or downhill (the sensor seems to be mounted in the front). If I get significantly less than that, something is wrong, and I don't have to do any math whatsoever to figure this out. I had a blocked injector causing stalling, hesitation, and other issues, and that did knock 20 or 30 miles off the distance before the light came on.
I should also add that you have to consider what you did during that last tank before you jump to the conclusion that your car is ill. If you had to idle it for long periods of time, that is naturally going to impact economy, since idling achieves 0 mpg in any vehicle. But if you have two consecutive tanks where you come up short, that probably bears investigation.
If it really matters, I drive a somewhat beat-up 1991 Toyota Celica GT. Everything still works though, except for the air conditioning, and I really can't complain about it. It's been remarkably reliable for an $800 car. Brakes, tires, some vacuum tubing, and the voltage regulator and battery are all that have needed replacement in a year and a half, and all of those were old when I got the car. The battery probably wouldn't have died if I'd been more attentive and replaced the regulator sooner.
My personal favorite is NL Hold'em. In tournament play, you sit at a table for a certain amount of time, or until a certain number of players remain at a table. Only then do you get re-seated, and that's usually when the blind bets go up too. Sometimes you will send attentive players signals just by your betting pattern, but you're not doing it to help them win, and of course it's perfectly legal if they can pick up on it.
Personally I think casinos would be reluctant to shut down suspicious players, because they take exactly the same rake % no matter who is winning, and the more those players bet, the bigger the rake. Tournaments have no rake (you cover that with your entry fee), but the style of play is also quite different from cash play -- generally more aggressive, since you can't put it back in your pocket.
I wouldn't want to be randomly seated at a cash game. The ability to browse the room quickly and pick the table with the most suckers is an important part of winning.
Online gambling doesn't involve micropayments, it involves amounts essentially the same as you'd use in daily transactions -- $25 here, $50 there. That said, I won't throw money at any of them even if I trust the host's servers implicitly, because there is no effective way to prevent people from communicating outside their channels to share information they shouldn't be sharing. Collusion is awfully hard to stop.
How can you keep players from yapping at each other on cell phones? You can't. That doesn't mean they're cheating, but it sure makes it possible. It could be as simple as saying "dude, I have pocket aces, get out of this hand"... how would the behaviour this causes be detectable? Maybe Dude just didn't think his Q-10 offsuit merited a bet, who's to say? And of course there are other channels -- IM, IRC, or even the chat functions of P2P clients.
"We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn! Burn motherfucker, burn!" is probably what did it, though it is absolutely necessary to show this in order to show how soldiers are psyching themselves up for the battle. Personally I believe it helped the soldiers far more than it hurt them, but it does merit raising an eyebrow.
It's relevant and it's not obscene. Vulgar, certainly, but not obscene. The R rating probably does have some political element to it, but it's hard to say how much. Rating aside, I still think American youth would benefit far more from seeing THIS in history class rather than some grainy videotapes of WWII footage.
I thought the simplest defense against this device was to wear wet clothing, though it would obviously have to cover all exposed skin. I can see one immediate side benefit of this... butterface wet T-shirt contests! If she has a mug only a Clydesdale could love, she'll be wearing a wet veil along with that wet T-shirt.
Seriously though, if it's a millimeter wave, it shouldn't be that difficult these days to construct clothing out of conductive materials, providing your friendly neighborhood rioter with his own personal Faraday cage. It's not like every fiber has to conduct, only enough of them that no hole is larger than a quarter wave.
On Last Comic Standing last night, the old guy had a joke that went something like this:
"We had five children. We were a little concerned about this because we heard that every fifth child born is Chinese. This didn't stop my son though. He and his wife have ten children... two Chinese."
He didn't get picked to go on to Vegas, but this probably has more to do with the fact that he wouldn't be a particularly interesting member of the LCS household, rather than not being funny. Anyhow the point is that the public DOES in fact have an idea of how to lie with statistics, even if they don't always recognize when it is happening.
Imagine a government agency receives backlash for proposing to database everyone, and is "forced" to drop this proposal. Instead, they make it financially attractive for private companies to do the data collection for them, by buying the database.
It seems to me that old knowledge you don't use kinda goes into swap space of some kind, and the brain needs a good reason to swap it back in. The file system is kinda broken too, you need some of the content to retrieve the rest. But it's still there, in some form.
Fertility technology is far enough along already that I wouldn't imagine this to be much of a problem. If it is possible to let 60-something age women have children now, it isn't much of a stretch to see 600-something (but healthier than today's 60+) women having children as well. Certainly it would make the choice of career or family less acute, as she wouldn't be concerned with a small 20 year window in her life where all the hard choices have to be made. For those who want a lot of children (such as planet colonizers!), it will be healthier for both mother and children alike if she doesn't have to pump them out every year or year and a half.
Considering that at 25 feet I can put EVERY shot into a grouping the size of your fist, clip after clip (9mm Browning), I will never trust my life to someone else's marksmanship or lack thereof. If I have to run from someone with a gun, I won't go in a straight line for any length of time, unless I know there's cover (or a crowd) at the other end of that line. It's far too easy to lead something that is not accellerating, and is not making any effort at concealment.
The size of the weapon would factor into it as well. Someone carrying a.22 with a barrel two and a half inches long is probably not going to hit you from more than 10 feet away, and even if they do, it is rather likely not to kill you any time soon. Also they probably don't have very many shots at their disposal. Someone holding their pistol sideways gangsta-style also is unlikely to hit anything smaller or faster than a parked car. But regardless of what they're packing, cover is safer than distance. You're far better off on the other side of a vehicle than you would be 25 feet away in plain sight, running directly away from the shooter.
Finally, remember that gunshots generally draw a great deal of attention, so if the person confronting you can't get you with the first one or two, it's probably not in their best interests to fire at all. It's your job to make this the case.
My girlfriend tells me about the "crazy harmonica guy" who rides the same train as she does coming back from work. (She's not really sure where he's going or why, but SHE is returning from work at least.) He sits down, or stands, as circumstances dictate, but as soon as he is settled in, he pulls out a harmonica...
and plays ONE NOTE. Polishes it, puts it away. Fifteen seconds later, he pulls it back out, plays two or three notes, looks thoughtful, and puts it away again. Repeat ad infinitum. At no point does he actually play a recognizable melody, or even more than a handful of notes, nor does he sound like he's practicing a particular technique, such as draw bends.
Nobody ever speaks to this guy, let alone gives him any trouble. If anyone looks him straight in the eyes, out comes the harmonica, and he plays his few notes as if he were laying a curse on the one looking at him.
Until you get yourself a digital brain that can accept all those bits directly, sound and pictures will always have to go through an analog phase at some point, even if this is the very last step in reproduction of the work. Amplifiers still need speakers, and it's fairly trivial to tap these speaker outputs if necessary. If it truly is impossible to tap a digital TV broadcast because the D/A converter is inside the television itself, then people will resort to doing what they've been doing in theaters, and what they did before the advent of the VCR -- they'll put a camera in front of the TV and accept the quality losses.
Compare that with, say, the foot. 12 inches - easily divisible by 3, 4, and 6. Makes building that shit a lot easier:)
There are also rulers marked in 1/10 inch increments, which at least places equally with metric for scaling things down. There are also 1/12 inch increment rulers, but those are mostly for 1 inch = 1 foot type floorplans. And of course there are those rulers that look like gigantic elongated Risk pieces that are very entertaining to hit people with.
The only thing that I still find VERY confusing is the way fuel consumption is reported. Gone is the familiar Miles/Gallon where bigger is better only to be replaced by Liters/100Km where smaller is better!
This is because you guys were still mostly driving big Detroit iron hulks that looked much better if expressed in gallons per mile rather than miles per gallon.:)
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In this case it would be much funnier if the bored sound tech injected a sound after processing, such that it sounds (to everyone in the audience) as if the fart came from one seat to the left or right. :)
Mal-2
It's hard to be a complete asshole when your wife can steal your wheelchair batteries and leave you in the back yard.
Only half-kidding.
Mal-2
Have someone (or several someones) walking the convention hall floor with sniffers. Any machine found to be transmitting packets via WiFi gets the plug pulled on the wired network. Since every location in the hall is numbered, a simple call back to the network center can get them switched off without having to physically confront them. However, I just like the idea of a guy walking up with scissors and SNIPPING them.
Maybe they should hire Nigerian guards.
Signs would be posted all over -- "TURN OFF YOUR WIFI OR YOUR NETWORK CONNECTION WILL BE TURNED OFF. If you do not know how to do this, please call 1-900-xxx-xxxx ($3.95/minute) for assistance." Using the number of a phone sex line would not be funny. (OK, yes it would, but it's still not a very good idea.)
Mal-2
This is even more asinine when you consider that full U.S. ZIP codes are nine digits and a hyphen. Only the first five are required for most mail, but if you know all nine, you should use them. At the very least, it provides some sanity checking against the rest of the address.
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Wouldn't EFF just let this one go? I mean the conflict of interest is obvious, they should just stay away from it entirely.
Mal-2
Every time you pick the damn thing up it reboots (all the beads fall to 0).
Mal-2
It can take months to engineer a simple mutations and get a protein that's properly expressed.
But it's more like programming than building bombs. The first copy may take months or years to make, but the creation of additional copies will be several orders of magnitude easier. After all, DNA was DESIGNED to replicate itself, so unless you botch it so badly it can't, you shouldn't have to tell it how. It just will.
This means that while people may design one-off jobs for something they alone need (or at least believe they alone need), the vast majority of bio-hacks are going to be replicated heavily. That's the entire point of the exercise. It's a highly inefficient process if you just want one.
Mal-2
Its a motion sensor. (The idea is even if you are "standing still" you move very subtly, and the radar can pick it up.) It aint going to help you find studs.
Sure it can. You move IT across the walls. Motion is relative, it doesn't matter whether you move or the scanner does, as long is there is a change of relative position. Plain old drywall is flat and thin enough that it shouldn't show up if you slide the scanner across the wall, since it seems to be pretty much the same everywhere except the seams.
That said, it's a whole lot simpler to use ordinary ultrasound-based density finders, which are quite adequate for differentiating insulation from wood.
Mal-2
They already have plans ready, why NOT Google? :)
Mal-2
Actually I pretty well DO drain the tank every time. That's probably why I notice so much. Also it's not just the weight that makes it noticeable, but the location of that weight. People sit BETWEEN the axles, while the fuel tank usually sits near or behind the rear axle. This distinction doesn't matter much for raw acceleration or economy, but it sure does affect handling. Similarly, two hundred pounds in your back seat won't imbalance your car the way two hundred pounds in the trunk will.
So chances are my perception of the weight of fuel is out of proportion to its actual weight due to the location of that weight, and the fact that it decreases slowly over a few hundred miles but increases all at once. Maybe it's only 100 pounds, but it's in a bad place and also sloshes around while cornering. If you corner hard enough though, your passengers will likewise tend to drift around within the cabin, at least from the ribcage up.
Mal-2
First off, I think it's only fair to base mileage figures on full-to-near-empty consumption. After all, a car weighs more when it's full of fuel than it does empty. Haven't you ever taken on a load of fuel and suddenly noticed how "boaty" the car feels, or how the back end suddenly seems to have a mind of its own?
Personally I fuel up completely just because stopping for gas is an inconvenience I'd prefer to do as infrequently as possible. This also means I drive until the warning light comes on, then fill up as soon as it is practical to do so (which may be 50 miles later). The warning light comes on about 260 to 270 miles from the last fill-up, depending on whether I'm going uphill or downhill (the sensor seems to be mounted in the front). If I get significantly less than that, something is wrong, and I don't have to do any math whatsoever to figure this out. I had a blocked injector causing stalling, hesitation, and other issues, and that did knock 20 or 30 miles off the distance before the light came on.
I should also add that you have to consider what you did during that last tank before you jump to the conclusion that your car is ill. If you had to idle it for long periods of time, that is naturally going to impact economy, since idling achieves 0 mpg in any vehicle. But if you have two consecutive tanks where you come up short, that probably bears investigation.
If it really matters, I drive a somewhat beat-up 1991 Toyota Celica GT. Everything still works though, except for the air conditioning, and I really can't complain about it. It's been remarkably reliable for an $800 car. Brakes, tires, some vacuum tubing, and the voltage regulator and battery are all that have needed replacement in a year and a half, and all of those were old when I got the car. The battery probably wouldn't have died if I'd been more attentive and replaced the regulator sooner.
Mal-2
My personal favorite is NL Hold'em. In tournament play, you sit at a table for a certain amount of time, or until a certain number of players remain at a table. Only then do you get re-seated, and that's usually when the blind bets go up too. Sometimes you will send attentive players signals just by your betting pattern, but you're not doing it to help them win, and of course it's perfectly legal if they can pick up on it.
Personally I think casinos would be reluctant to shut down suspicious players, because they take exactly the same rake % no matter who is winning, and the more those players bet, the bigger the rake. Tournaments have no rake (you cover that with your entry fee), but the style of play is also quite different from cash play -- generally more aggressive, since you can't put it back in your pocket.
I wouldn't want to be randomly seated at a cash game. The ability to browse the room quickly and pick the table with the most suckers is an important part of winning.
Mal-2
Online gambling doesn't involve micropayments, it involves amounts essentially the same as you'd use in daily transactions -- $25 here, $50 there. That said, I won't throw money at any of them even if I trust the host's servers implicitly, because there is no effective way to prevent people from communicating outside their channels to share information they shouldn't be sharing. Collusion is awfully hard to stop.
How can you keep players from yapping at each other on cell phones? You can't. That doesn't mean they're cheating, but it sure makes it possible. It could be as simple as saying "dude, I have pocket aces, get out of this hand"... how would the behaviour this causes be detectable? Maybe Dude just didn't think his Q-10 offsuit merited a bet, who's to say? And of course there are other channels -- IM, IRC, or even the chat functions of P2P clients.
Mal-2
"We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn! Burn motherfucker, burn!" is probably what did it, though it is absolutely necessary to show this in order to show how soldiers are psyching themselves up for the battle. Personally I believe it helped the soldiers far more than it hurt them, but it does merit raising an eyebrow.
It's relevant and it's not obscene. Vulgar, certainly, but not obscene. The R rating probably does have some political element to it, but it's hard to say how much. Rating aside, I still think American youth would benefit far more from seeing THIS in history class rather than some grainy videotapes of WWII footage.
Mal-2
I thought the simplest defense against this device was to wear wet clothing, though it would obviously have to cover all exposed skin. I can see one immediate side benefit of this... butterface wet T-shirt contests! If she has a mug only a Clydesdale could love, she'll be wearing a wet veil along with that wet T-shirt.
Seriously though, if it's a millimeter wave, it shouldn't be that difficult these days to construct clothing out of conductive materials, providing your friendly neighborhood rioter with his own personal Faraday cage. It's not like every fiber has to conduct, only enough of them that no hole is larger than a quarter wave.
Mal-2
On Last Comic Standing last night, the old guy had a joke that went something like this:
"We had five children. We were a little concerned about this because we heard that every fifth child born is Chinese. This didn't stop my son though. He and his wife have ten children... two Chinese."
He didn't get picked to go on to Vegas, but this probably has more to do with the fact that he wouldn't be a particularly interesting member of the LCS household, rather than not being funny. Anyhow the point is that the public DOES in fact have an idea of how to lie with statistics, even if they don't always recognize when it is happening.
Mal-2
Imagine a government agency receives backlash for proposing to database everyone, and is "forced" to drop this proposal. Instead, they make it financially attractive for private companies to do the data collection for them, by buying the database.
Not so hard to imagine, is it?
Mal-2
It seems to me that old knowledge you don't use kinda goes into swap space of some kind, and the brain needs a good reason to swap it back in. The file system is kinda broken too, you need some of the content to retrieve the rest. But it's still there, in some form.
Mal-2
Fertility technology is far enough along already that I wouldn't imagine this to be much of a problem. If it is possible to let 60-something age women have children now, it isn't much of a stretch to see 600-something (but healthier than today's 60+) women having children as well. Certainly it would make the choice of career or family less acute, as she wouldn't be concerned with a small 20 year window in her life where all the hard choices have to be made. For those who want a lot of children (such as planet colonizers!), it will be healthier for both mother and children alike if she doesn't have to pump them out every year or year and a half.
Mal-2
Considering that at 25 feet I can put EVERY shot into a grouping the size of your fist, clip after clip (9mm Browning), I will never trust my life to someone else's marksmanship or lack thereof. If I have to run from someone with a gun, I won't go in a straight line for any length of time, unless I know there's cover (or a crowd) at the other end of that line. It's far too easy to lead something that is not accellerating, and is not making any effort at concealment.
.22 with a barrel two and a half inches long is probably not going to hit you from more than 10 feet away, and even if they do, it is rather likely not to kill you any time soon. Also they probably don't have very many shots at their disposal. Someone holding their pistol sideways gangsta-style also is unlikely to hit anything smaller or faster than a parked car. But regardless of what they're packing, cover is safer than distance. You're far better off on the other side of a vehicle than you would be 25 feet away in plain sight, running directly away from the shooter.
The size of the weapon would factor into it as well. Someone carrying a
Finally, remember that gunshots generally draw a great deal of attention, so if the person confronting you can't get you with the first one or two, it's probably not in their best interests to fire at all. It's your job to make this the case.
Mal-2
My girlfriend tells me about the "crazy harmonica guy" who rides the same train as she does coming back from work. (She's not really sure where he's going or why, but SHE is returning from work at least.) He sits down, or stands, as circumstances dictate, but as soon as he is settled in, he pulls out a harmonica...
and plays ONE NOTE. Polishes it, puts it away. Fifteen seconds later, he pulls it back out, plays two or three notes, looks thoughtful, and puts it away again. Repeat ad infinitum. At no point does he actually play a recognizable melody, or even more than a handful of notes, nor does he sound like he's practicing a particular technique, such as draw bends.
Nobody ever speaks to this guy, let alone gives him any trouble. If anyone looks him straight in the eyes, out comes the harmonica, and he plays his few notes as if he were laying a curse on the one looking at him.
Mal-2
Until you get yourself a digital brain that can accept all those bits directly, sound and pictures will always have to go through an analog phase at some point, even if this is the very last step in reproduction of the work. Amplifiers still need speakers, and it's fairly trivial to tap these speaker outputs if necessary. If it truly is impossible to tap a digital TV broadcast because the D/A converter is inside the television itself, then people will resort to doing what they've been doing in theaters, and what they did before the advent of the VCR -- they'll put a camera in front of the TV and accept the quality losses.
Mal-2
Shouldn't your unit be the centiSCO, so that 100 centiSCOs (or 1 SCO) equals SCO's FUD the same way one AU is one average earth-sun distance?
Just a thought.
Mal-2
Compare that with, say, the foot. 12 inches - easily divisible by 3, 4, and 6. Makes building that shit a lot easier :)
There are also rulers marked in 1/10 inch increments, which at least places equally with metric for scaling things down. There are also 1/12 inch increment rulers, but those are mostly for 1 inch = 1 foot type floorplans. And of course there are those rulers that look like gigantic elongated Risk pieces that are very entertaining to hit people with.
Mal-2
The only thing that I still find VERY confusing is the way fuel consumption is reported. Gone is the familiar Miles/Gallon where bigger is better only to be replaced by Liters/100Km where smaller is better!
:)
This is because you guys were still mostly driving big Detroit iron hulks that looked much better if expressed in gallons per mile rather than miles per gallon.
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