Re:Beware Emissions Inspection
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Hack Your Ride
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· Score: 1
Maybe a CVCC can meet emissions requirements without a catalytic converter... when it's new, and when it's warm. The cat doesn't help much with the latter (they don't work cold either) but they're great at minimizing the effects of wear and tear on the engine, at least as far as hydrocarbons go. My little Toyota Celica with 215k miles on it runs reasonably well, but it definitely has a blow-by problem. Not that I would expect otherwise, the rings don't last forever. But when I had to get it smogged, it failed because the catalytic converter was empty -- not due to any sort of deliberate act, it had just all been used up. This caused it to fail massively (I think it exceeded allowable HC emissions by a factor of 7). I mail-ordered a generic catalytic converter with the proper size tubes welded onto it from Discount Auto Parts for $63. It arrived four days later, I paid a muffler shop $45 to install it, and whaddya know? My HC emissions were now a TENTH of the legal limit! One relatively cheap part cut HC in the exhaust by a factor of 70. The tester who first failed, and later passed the vehicle said that even with all the junk that engine is pumping out, I should need a new set of wheels before I need another catalytic converter. He also pointed out half a dozen other small things that I should probably fix when I have the money, knowing full well that I didn't have the money. But I sure went away feeling that what I did pay was completely justified.
And no, I have no idea how Discount Auto Parts can sell catalytic converters for half the price they are anywhere else, even if they are generic (platinum is platinum). But they do, I got mine, and it works beautifully.
A Knoppix or similar bootable CD that can remove Windows viruses would be very very nice. You could just give one to everyone you know and say "When the computer gets slow, toss this in the drive and reboot. It'll tell you what to do from there." It also would not be susceptible itself to those viruses, being (1) on a CD, and (2) not Windows.
Mal-2
Re:Beware Emissions Inspection
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If for some reason you don't have to get an actual emissions test, yet are required to have a catalytic converter, there's quite a simple answer -- install an empty one. Nobody is going to be able to tell visually from the outside if there's actually any platinum inside the chamber, and since the cat is wider than the main exhaust, you could easily just run a tube straight through so that the pseudo-cat has no impact whatsoever on the exhaust system.
I'm not advocating this of course. If you're required to have a catalytic converter in your area, there's probably a good reason why. Most of us like being able to breathe (relatively) hydrocarbon-free air.
Equally important, the Moon receives about the same intensity of sunlight as Earth + atmosphere, because it's in essentially the same orbit, so one cannot argue that it is the AMOUNT of sunlight alone that is critical either. The second law of thermodynamics means that energy must be coming from SOMEWHERE in order for life to form. It is reasonable to believe there exists a minimum amount of energy needed for life to grab a foothold, and another (lower) limit necessary for it to be sustained, but it is quite provable from life on Earth that it doesn't have to be direct absorbtion of solar radiation.
I had in mind something more than a temperature senso -- more like something that can not only check temperature but humidity, the temperature of the road itself, and even be watching for the conditions of the road itself that will lead to water pooling and freezing, rather than running off the road. A temperature sensor alone is useful, but the number of false alarms it generates lead to it being ignored in fairly short order. Drivers also usually know it's cold just by walking to the car, unless it's garaged. They need to be told more than "it's cold enough to be icy", because they already knew that. They need to be told (or have the computer automagically handle) that conditions indicate icing is not only likely, but likely in specific places. THAT will save lives.
I live in Los Angeles. We're TRYING to do public transit, but it's making the ground sink in places, and there's just nowhere left to build this stuff aboveground. Also, it would be of little use for someone who has to carry equipment to their job, as musicians do. The trains also don't typically run at the hours I'd need them to. Further, I live a good ways (and a big hill) from the nearest bus line, and light rail is completely out of the question without a bus or car. In other words, forget working in certain fields without your own car.
As for driving in difficult conditions -- having the computer observe an expert, then share the program with everyone else, is much more safe and efficient than having everyone learn to be an expert driver, with all the intervening mayhem. Also, not everyone is capable of being an expert all-weather driver. In bad weather, wouldn't you rather have a computer trained by someone like you at the wheel than some vacationer from El Paso who has never even seen snow?
The computer might not be better than you, but that doesn't mean it won't be better than 95% of the other drivers out there.
A human being can see the car running the red light at an intersection. The radar-based system wouldn't even know about the other car until right before it sideswiped you (if they even bothered to mount a lateral detector).
A fully autonomous system damn well better have a 360 degree field of vision. That said, it still could miss the car running the red light if that car is screened until it pops out a lane to pass the guy who DID stop... but a human would most likely fail to spot them as well.
Advantage: Computer, because it doesn't have to turn its head to look.
A human being knows whether its safer to swerve into the lefthand lane or off the road.
Agreed, but not all humans pay attention closely enough, or at least not all the time. I know when I drive I always keep an eye out for which side has free space should I suddenly need it. Then if something DOES happen, I don't have to waste that fraction of a second looking around before making a move. Joe Cellphone probably isn't doing that.
Advantage: Human, under ideal circumstances. The best workaround for this is to not let the computer tailgate in the first place. It's probably a wash against real drivers in real conditions.
A human being can hear someone else honking his horn.
Computers can hear too, and parsing a honk is much simpler than parsing speech. Most of the car horns I hear on the road aren't directed at me, and the few that are have a variety of meanings. Could be a buddy in the next lane, could be someone telling me I left my turn signal on, could be someone is mortally offended by the bird shit on my car. If the computer can't figure it out, it could always ask the driver.
Advantage: none really. If the computer can't figure out how to respond, it will have made such a determination long before the human has had a chance to figure things out. At the very least, it'd be nice if the car automagically lowers the volume of the radio when people start honking.
A human being can see a "Deaf Child" sign.
ID tags or beacons can be placed under or near roads to serve as electronic signs for the car. They could even be mounted to the same poles as the human-readable signs just to keep things neat. Sure they don't exist now, but it's hardly a technology problem. Even simpler, we could just paint barcodes right on the street, which the car scans as it rolls by. Paint them in infrared and the humans don't even have to deal with them.
Advantage: none. Both human and computer should be able to figure out where they are and what they are supposed to be doing, if appropriate markings are in place.
A human being can tell whether the road is wet.
So can electronics. Detecting water is something they're reasonably good at. A diligent monitoring of ground and weather conditions could even keep the car watching out for black ice, which tends to sneak up on even the best drivers.
Advantage: Computer. A human in a heated cockpit simply will not know when they go from a road warm enough to maintain rain or slush to a road cold enough to sustain ice. Even without an autopilot, a friendly warning that icing conditions are present would help an awful lot of people.
Are you still considered to be in the care and control of the vehicle, or are you demoted to just another passenger? Will the worst consequence of driving drunk be to end up in the wrong place?
Mind you, that would be bad enough -- to punch in the wrong coordinates, and wake up in the truly seedy part of town to find dwarves stealing your wheels -- but it's certainly an order of magnitude less severe than killing someone unlucky enough to be sharing the road with you.
If you take a piece of a BB that is one hex ring and an adjacent penta ring, and attach simple radicals to the dangling bonds, you get all sorts of interesting molecules, most of which are biologically active.
Not just biologically, but psychotropically active. Much of this effect is due to the way they jam receptors designed for similar neurotransmitters, and how long it takes to clear them.
I didn't find it all that difficult to switch over either. I've always been somewhat ambidextrous, but I found I adjusted reasonably well to the switch of mouse hands in less time than I got comfortable with the switch to Dvorak. Also, having to switch back at someone else's machine is far less annoying than suddenly being confronted with a QWERTY keyboard.
I'd say the control is not up to snuff as yet, but that's only because I haven't brought my FPS aim skills into line yet. Aside from that, I'm pretty well set. Photoshop, no problem. I just find myself using the same deathgrip on the tiny motions that I did with the right hand. It seems the more finely I have to move it, the harder I squeeze. I'll also anchor one or two fingers to the mouse pad. This is the maneuver that really makes me tired, but it seems the only way I can get single pixel precision.
I learned to throw darts left handed when the right wrist got sprained. At first it was amusing and put many holes in the wall surrounding the backboard. Within a week I was back to playing against people (and losing, as usual). Unfortunately my left shoulder doesn't particularly like the throwing motion, so I can't play all night that way.
In any case, I'd switch back if it were necessary. I'm not a "convert" the same way I am to Dvorak. If I have to switch mouse hands every year or two, I won't have a problem with it.
This isn't how hotspots work. First off, understand that not every wheel has one. In fact, most of them don't. The more mechanically perfect the wheel, the less bias it will have toward any particular area. The bias comes from one side of the wheel being slightly lower than the other. The ball is less inclined to work its way uphill once it starts bouncing around.
What these people have done is not to find a wheel's hotspot, it is to attempt to roughly predict the outcome of a SINGLE spin. Yes, releasing the ball later will throw a wrench into the works for them, if they can't mechanically time it. But for those who simply sit down at a wheel with a bias, all the tweaking done by the dealer won't matter all that much. If the wheel is going fast enough, it will tend to cause a scatter effect as the ball is slapped around by the frets. Even then, it's still gonna want to work its way downhill more often than not. The trick is to determine if there IS a "downhill" on a given wheel, and if so, where it is. If a "skill player" loses money, it may be due to a run of bad luck, but more likely it's due to either betting too much (and therefore running out of money before they catch a break), or misinterpreting the wheel. There are two ways to misinterpret the wheel as well. The most obvious (and most common) is to use too small a set of sample data and sit down at a table that is merely exhibiting streaks (similar to quasar "pulse trains" -- there seems to be something there, then it's gone). The other would be to misinterpret the location of the bias, or neglect or miscalculate the effects of wheel speed and ball size.
I've made all of these mistakes. I'm sure I will make them again. However, I've also had nights where I had it absolutely dead on. There's something immensely gratifying about asking my g/f if she needs chips, then handing her a stack of black ($100) chips and watching her eyes go big. We're usually the $5 and $25 chip sort.
I've pulled this stunt off successfully four straight times (once a week) in the Bahamas. The fourth time, I was the biggest better at the table, which finally got me (and the biased wheel) noticed and shut down. I've had less success with it in Las Vegas, but it's not impossible. Try it out with the table at the Lady Luck (there is just one) when they're running it at 50 cents a chip. It's a cheap way to get a feel for it, and that wheel does indeed have a bias. I can't tell you exactly what it is; I don't remember, and it moves according to the wheel speed and ball size.
I do know that when you find that magic table and get it sussed out, you will still have long stretches of treading water. It's just that the normal bouts of losing will be replaced by bouts of winning. It's all about negating and exceeding the house advantage with your own knowledge of physics.
Re-compute? That's a bit excessive, considering what your speedups will do (for the most part) is move the hotspot on the wheel over a couple of spots. The player need only adjust the one or two slots due to your speed change (of the wheel, the ball speed is irrelevant). A faster wheel will tend to have the hotspot wander "downrange", while a slower one does the opposite. Anyone attempting this prediction (with or without assistance) is going to play a fairly long (5 to 7 numbers) spread of consecutive numbers on the wheel anyhow, plus the (speed-related) number at one end of that spread.
The ball speed is irrelevant because the speed necessary to hold it up to the inner rim is a constant. No matter how hard you snap it, it will eventually drop to that same rate, after going around the rim a few extra times.
Different dealers use different balls too -- usually a larger ball for someone with bigger hands. This has an effect on the hotspot as well, but this likely is of the same nature as the speed factor and will just slide the hotspot down or back a number. It seems to me that the smaller, lighter ball takes more odd hops and tends to end up further downrange, similar to a fast wheel.
The obstacle to doing this without assistance is, of course, the mathematics. I have no doubt some people can pull it off, but they're going to be a very small group in relation to the thousands of suckers who sit down at the table every day. These people got busted because they used technological assistance, and (probably more importantly) played it huge and made it rise above the background noise. Had they won 10,000 pounds, I doubt it would have aroused nearly so much suspicion.
Will the product be used in connection with weapons of mass destruction, i.e. nuclear applications, missile technology, or chemical or biological weapons purposes?
Yes
No
Why am I reminded of Frank Zappa's "Welcome to the United States"? Why is anyone stupid enough to think anyone making WMDs would answer this question honestly? In short, why ask the question?
Valid point. Maybe we aren't using a station wagon full of backup tapes any more, but a spindle of DVD-Rs sent through the mail accomplishes much the same thing. It's definitely my means of choice for exchanging entire hard drives' worth of data with people. I generally won't attempt to transfer anything over a gigabyte over the 'net, in either direction. FTP just really isn't robust enough for that, and it still seems to be the standard of choice.
Agreed (I think I have the same drive), but I have noticed that this particular drive is twitchy on a few counts. First, I purchased no-name -R media rated at 4x, and they will burn at 4x in my employer's Emprex drive. They will only burn at 2x in mine. I'll still end up using them all, and they'll get read far more than they get written, so it's not all that bad, but it is annoying.
Second, that DVD-RAM works nicely as a big floppy disc, doesn't it? But what other drives out there are going to read it? I just use it to store less than one full DVD's worth of whatever (not just porn but also music, movie rips, etc.). When it fills up, I copy the files to a -R, erase the -RAM, and start over. I do this because packet writing to a -RAM is MUCH faster than to a +RW (haven't tried -RW).
Third, I've noticed some older CD-ROMs don't like the CD-Rs burned in the LG drive. This is odd, because my car stereo (which must have the cheapest CD reading mechanism ever) reads them just fine. I don't understand it, so I just work around it and keep the 8x SCSI CD-RW installed.
Fourth and finally, the LG drive seems to change its mind about liking DVD+RW on a daily basis. It'll read written ones just fine, but it often barfs trying to write one. Then I have to do a Full Erase before it'll accept the disc again, otherwise it declares it "defective".
And yes I've flashed the firmware. It didn't seem to make any difference whatsoever.
On the bright side, it does read just about every disc I've ever stuffed into it that isn't physically trashed. I guess that's a pretty important point.
Enhancements are forbidden. Prosthetics are not. For example, you cannot wear a thimble on your pitching hand (or anywhere else you could use it to scuff the ball), but you CAN wear glued-on fingernails. This is particularly common with players who have a history of splitting their fingernails (Hideo Nomo comes to mind), who do it preventatively, but it is an option available to ALL players. Most of them don't find it particularly useful.
When does that bionic eye cross the line from prosthesis to enhancement? I think that is where the argument will be waged.
We're not dissing the printer (most of us DON'T read Japanese), we're dissing the marketing campaign. It actually does look like a functional and well-designed product. As for actual build quality -- well it IS an Epson.
A liter of ink costs me about as much as a kilo of gold
This is corporate alchemy -- selling something as literally worth its weight in gold by eliminating all other options, thereby converting your product into actual gold. Unlike medieval alchemy, this one works most of the time.
Lexmark didn't always suck. I had one of the 300 dpi inkjets, and never had any problems with it, even when (in desperation) I put fountain pen ink in a cartridge because I had to finish the print job right away. That printer got dropped down a flight of stairs and I had it working in half an hour (something jammed but nothing broke). Once it had a severe paper feed problem that turned out to be due to a coin in the paper path. Took me an hour to find that quarter, but once again the printer returned to service. In fact it's STILL in service, the main problem being that when my mother runs out of cartridges to use and refill, there won't be any more to replace it because the printer is THAT old.
However I was also in a production environment where we were forced into retiring our two gigantic (but fairly reliable) Xerox high-speed laser printers because Xerox refused to renew the service contract. Only once in my experience did we have BOTH printers inoperable at once, and in that case the repairman was there in 45 minutes and had one of the two back up within 30 more minutes. They did 40 ppm, which meant that unless things were really, really crazy, one printer was enough for the job.
The powers that be opted to replace these with four Lexmark laser printers rated at 25 ppm. In theory this would have worked great, but there was a major catch. All we printed was labels (we were a warehouse) and the Lexmarks managed to eat them with alarming regularity. It was almost always sucked into the toner cartridge too, meaning we were burning through about 10 cartridges a WEEK, most of which were less than half-used. (Not surprisingly, my suggestion to start buying the lower-capacity cartridges because we were throwing out half-full ones did not go over well. Neither did my statement that the printers SUCKED. Even my boss agreed with me fully.)
Ultimately, we ended up having to press the Xerox printers back into service without a service contract -- but this time someone was smart enough to buy a couple pallets of spare parts, so all we had to pay for was labor. (It was pretty easy to guess which parts would die, and with what frequency, after 8 years of using them.) Ironically, after the first two calls, when Xerox got wind that we had our OWN stash of parts, they changed their minds and granted a two-year extension to the service contract. I think they just wanted to be able to borrow parts from us (which they did) for the contracts that were still open.
I came on toward the end of the service life of those printers -- they were about 6 years old when I arrived. They were still moderately reliable, but I was told they were practically flawless after the first few months, when they finally figured out what kind of label stock the printer liked (a custom order from Avery, with no glue within 1/4" of the cut edge), and remained that way for another four years. Then, just like an old car, they started falling apart at an ever-accelerating rate. Still, they'd turned out hundreds of thousands of pages apiece by then. They also could print 11 x 17" sheets, which the Lexmarks could not, though the Lexmarks weren't chosen with this requirement in mind. The only time we actually had to run 11 x 17 was when the customer support team's main printer was down, which wasn't all that often. We had to run a lot of their labels though, as their Lexmarks were just as bad as ours would turn out to be.
So our experience was: both stock units from Xerox and Lexmark were flawed for our purposes. However, the Xerox units could be tweaked to handle slightly customized label stock reliably, and the Lexmarks could not. Also, the Xerox team worked tirelessly to solve the problems -- they didn't duck them as the Lexmark team would do many years later. Even years down the line, they still sent us spec sheets explaining how to tweak the new and slightly different paper trays to behave like the tweaked parts they were replacing. Sometimes they sent new custom springs, sometimes they said "take the springs off the broken
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Maybe a CVCC can meet emissions requirements without a catalytic converter... when it's new, and when it's warm. The cat doesn't help much with the latter (they don't work cold either) but they're great at minimizing the effects of wear and tear on the engine, at least as far as hydrocarbons go. My little Toyota Celica with 215k miles on it runs reasonably well, but it definitely has a blow-by problem. Not that I would expect otherwise, the rings don't last forever. But when I had to get it smogged, it failed because the catalytic converter was empty -- not due to any sort of deliberate act, it had just all been used up. This caused it to fail massively (I think it exceeded allowable HC emissions by a factor of 7). I mail-ordered a generic catalytic converter with the proper size tubes welded onto it from Discount Auto Parts for $63. It arrived four days later, I paid a muffler shop $45 to install it, and whaddya know? My HC emissions were now a TENTH of the legal limit! One relatively cheap part cut HC in the exhaust by a factor of 70. The tester who first failed, and later passed the vehicle said that even with all the junk that engine is pumping out, I should need a new set of wheels before I need another catalytic converter. He also pointed out half a dozen other small things that I should probably fix when I have the money, knowing full well that I didn't have the money. But I sure went away feeling that what I did pay was completely justified.
And no, I have no idea how Discount Auto Parts can sell catalytic converters for half the price they are anywhere else, even if they are generic (platinum is platinum). But they do, I got mine, and it works beautifully.
Mal-2
A Knoppix or similar bootable CD that can remove Windows viruses would be very very nice. You could just give one to everyone you know and say "When the computer gets slow, toss this in the drive and reboot. It'll tell you what to do from there." It also would not be susceptible itself to those viruses, being (1) on a CD, and (2) not Windows.
Mal-2
If for some reason you don't have to get an actual emissions test, yet are required to have a catalytic converter, there's quite a simple answer -- install an empty one. Nobody is going to be able to tell visually from the outside if there's actually any platinum inside the chamber, and since the cat is wider than the main exhaust, you could easily just run a tube straight through so that the pseudo-cat has no impact whatsoever on the exhaust system.
I'm not advocating this of course. If you're required to have a catalytic converter in your area, there's probably a good reason why. Most of us like being able to breathe (relatively) hydrocarbon-free air.
Mal-2
Equally important, the Moon receives about the same intensity of sunlight as Earth + atmosphere, because it's in essentially the same orbit, so one cannot argue that it is the AMOUNT of sunlight alone that is critical either. The second law of thermodynamics means that energy must be coming from SOMEWHERE in order for life to form. It is reasonable to believe there exists a minimum amount of energy needed for life to grab a foothold, and another (lower) limit necessary for it to be sustained, but it is quite provable from life on Earth that it doesn't have to be direct absorbtion of solar radiation.
Mal-2
I had in mind something more than a temperature senso -- more like something that can not only check temperature but humidity, the temperature of the road itself, and even be watching for the conditions of the road itself that will lead to water pooling and freezing, rather than running off the road. A temperature sensor alone is useful, but the number of false alarms it generates lead to it being ignored in fairly short order. Drivers also usually know it's cold just by walking to the car, unless it's garaged. They need to be told more than "it's cold enough to be icy", because they already knew that. They need to be told (or have the computer automagically handle) that conditions indicate icing is not only likely, but likely in specific places. THAT will save lives.
Mal-2
I live in Los Angeles. We're TRYING to do public transit, but it's making the ground sink in places, and there's just nowhere left to build this stuff aboveground. Also, it would be of little use for someone who has to carry equipment to their job, as musicians do. The trains also don't typically run at the hours I'd need them to. Further, I live a good ways (and a big hill) from the nearest bus line, and light rail is completely out of the question without a bus or car. In other words, forget working in certain fields without your own car.
As for driving in difficult conditions -- having the computer observe an expert, then share the program with everyone else, is much more safe and efficient than having everyone learn to be an expert driver, with all the intervening mayhem. Also, not everyone is capable of being an expert all-weather driver. In bad weather, wouldn't you rather have a computer trained by someone like you at the wheel than some vacationer from El Paso who has never even seen snow?
The computer might not be better than you, but that doesn't mean it won't be better than 95% of the other drivers out there.
Mal-2
A human being can see the car running the red light at an intersection. The radar-based system wouldn't even know about the other car until right before it sideswiped you (if they even bothered to mount a lateral detector).
A fully autonomous system damn well better have a 360 degree field of vision. That said, it still could miss the car running the red light if that car is screened until it pops out a lane to pass the guy who DID stop... but a human would most likely fail to spot them as well.
Advantage: Computer, because it doesn't have to turn its head to look.
A human being knows whether its safer to swerve into the lefthand lane or off the road.
Agreed, but not all humans pay attention closely enough, or at least not all the time. I know when I drive I always keep an eye out for which side has free space should I suddenly need it. Then if something DOES happen, I don't have to waste that fraction of a second looking around before making a move. Joe Cellphone probably isn't doing that.
Advantage: Human, under ideal circumstances. The best workaround for this is to not let the computer tailgate in the first place. It's probably a wash against real drivers in real conditions.
A human being can hear someone else honking his horn.
Computers can hear too, and parsing a honk is much simpler than parsing speech. Most of the car horns I hear on the road aren't directed at me, and the few that are have a variety of meanings. Could be a buddy in the next lane, could be someone telling me I left my turn signal on, could be someone is mortally offended by the bird shit on my car. If the computer can't figure it out, it could always ask the driver.
Advantage: none really. If the computer can't figure out how to respond, it will have made such a determination long before the human has had a chance to figure things out. At the very least, it'd be nice if the car automagically lowers the volume of the radio when people start honking.
A human being can see a "Deaf Child" sign.
ID tags or beacons can be placed under or near roads to serve as electronic signs for the car. They could even be mounted to the same poles as the human-readable signs just to keep things neat. Sure they don't exist now, but it's hardly a technology problem. Even simpler, we could just paint barcodes right on the street, which the car scans as it rolls by. Paint them in infrared and the humans don't even have to deal with them.
Advantage: none. Both human and computer should be able to figure out where they are and what they are supposed to be doing, if appropriate markings are in place.
A human being can tell whether the road is wet.
So can electronics. Detecting water is something they're reasonably good at. A diligent monitoring of ground and weather conditions could even keep the car watching out for black ice, which tends to sneak up on even the best drivers.
Advantage: Computer. A human in a heated cockpit simply will not know when they go from a road warm enough to maintain rain or slush to a road cold enough to sustain ice. Even without an autopilot, a friendly warning that icing conditions are present would help an awful lot of people.
Mal-2
Are you still considered to be in the care and control of the vehicle, or are you demoted to just another passenger? Will the worst consequence of driving drunk be to end up in the wrong place?
Mind you, that would be bad enough -- to punch in the wrong coordinates, and wake up in the truly seedy part of town to find dwarves stealing your wheels -- but it's certainly an order of magnitude less severe than killing someone unlucky enough to be sharing the road with you.
Mal-2
Sounds like you need a round tuit.
There are a lot of things we all would do, if we only got a round tuit.
Mal-2
If you take a piece of a BB that is one hex ring and an adjacent penta ring, and attach simple radicals to the dangling bonds, you get all sorts of interesting molecules, most of which are biologically active.
Not just biologically, but psychotropically active. Much of this effect is due to the way they jam receptors designed for similar neurotransmitters, and how long it takes to clear them.
Mal-2
http://www.sagradafamilia.org/
Not sure if they'll ever finish.
Mal-2
I didn't find it all that difficult to switch over either. I've always been somewhat ambidextrous, but I found I adjusted reasonably well to the switch of mouse hands in less time than I got comfortable with the switch to Dvorak. Also, having to switch back at someone else's machine is far less annoying than suddenly being confronted with a QWERTY keyboard.
I'd say the control is not up to snuff as yet, but that's only because I haven't brought my FPS aim skills into line yet. Aside from that, I'm pretty well set. Photoshop, no problem. I just find myself using the same deathgrip on the tiny motions that I did with the right hand. It seems the more finely I have to move it, the harder I squeeze. I'll also anchor one or two fingers to the mouse pad. This is the maneuver that really makes me tired, but it seems the only way I can get single pixel precision.
I learned to throw darts left handed when the right wrist got sprained. At first it was amusing and put many holes in the wall surrounding the backboard. Within a week I was back to playing against people (and losing, as usual). Unfortunately my left shoulder doesn't particularly like the throwing motion, so I can't play all night that way.
In any case, I'd switch back if it were necessary. I'm not a "convert" the same way I am to Dvorak. If I have to switch mouse hands every year or two, I won't have a problem with it.
Mal-2
This isn't how hotspots work. First off, understand that not every wheel has one. In fact, most of them don't. The more mechanically perfect the wheel, the less bias it will have toward any particular area. The bias comes from one side of the wheel being slightly lower than the other. The ball is less inclined to work its way uphill once it starts bouncing around.
What these people have done is not to find a wheel's hotspot, it is to attempt to roughly predict the outcome of a SINGLE spin. Yes, releasing the ball later will throw a wrench into the works for them, if they can't mechanically time it. But for those who simply sit down at a wheel with a bias, all the tweaking done by the dealer won't matter all that much. If the wheel is going fast enough, it will tend to cause a scatter effect as the ball is slapped around by the frets. Even then, it's still gonna want to work its way downhill more often than not. The trick is to determine if there IS a "downhill" on a given wheel, and if so, where it is. If a "skill player" loses money, it may be due to a run of bad luck, but more likely it's due to either betting too much (and therefore running out of money before they catch a break), or misinterpreting the wheel. There are two ways to misinterpret the wheel as well. The most obvious (and most common) is to use too small a set of sample data and sit down at a table that is merely exhibiting streaks (similar to quasar "pulse trains" -- there seems to be something there, then it's gone). The other would be to misinterpret the location of the bias, or neglect or miscalculate the effects of wheel speed and ball size.
I've made all of these mistakes. I'm sure I will make them again. However, I've also had nights where I had it absolutely dead on. There's something immensely gratifying about asking my g/f if she needs chips, then handing her a stack of black ($100) chips and watching her eyes go big. We're usually the $5 and $25 chip sort.
I've pulled this stunt off successfully four straight times (once a week) in the Bahamas. The fourth time, I was the biggest better at the table, which finally got me (and the biased wheel) noticed and shut down. I've had less success with it in Las Vegas, but it's not impossible. Try it out with the table at the Lady Luck (there is just one) when they're running it at 50 cents a chip. It's a cheap way to get a feel for it, and that wheel does indeed have a bias. I can't tell you exactly what it is; I don't remember, and it moves according to the wheel speed and ball size.
I do know that when you find that magic table and get it sussed out, you will still have long stretches of treading water. It's just that the normal bouts of losing will be replaced by bouts of winning. It's all about negating and exceeding the house advantage with your own knowledge of physics.
Mal-2
Re-compute? That's a bit excessive, considering what your speedups will do (for the most part) is move the hotspot on the wheel over a couple of spots. The player need only adjust the one or two slots due to your speed change (of the wheel, the ball speed is irrelevant). A faster wheel will tend to have the hotspot wander "downrange", while a slower one does the opposite. Anyone attempting this prediction (with or without assistance) is going to play a fairly long (5 to 7 numbers) spread of consecutive numbers on the wheel anyhow, plus the (speed-related) number at one end of that spread.
The ball speed is irrelevant because the speed necessary to hold it up to the inner rim is a constant. No matter how hard you snap it, it will eventually drop to that same rate, after going around the rim a few extra times.
Different dealers use different balls too -- usually a larger ball for someone with bigger hands. This has an effect on the hotspot as well, but this likely is of the same nature as the speed factor and will just slide the hotspot down or back a number. It seems to me that the smaller, lighter ball takes more odd hops and tends to end up further downrange, similar to a fast wheel.
The obstacle to doing this without assistance is, of course, the mathematics. I have no doubt some people can pull it off, but they're going to be a very small group in relation to the thousands of suckers who sit down at the table every day. These people got busted because they used technological assistance, and (probably more importantly) played it huge and made it rise above the background noise. Had they won 10,000 pounds, I doubt it would have aroused nearly so much suspicion.
Mal-2
Will the product be used in connection with weapons of mass destruction, i.e. nuclear applications, missile technology, or chemical or biological weapons purposes?
Yes
No
Why am I reminded of Frank Zappa's "Welcome to the United States"? Why is anyone stupid enough to think anyone making WMDs would answer this question honestly? In short, why ask the question?
Mal-2
but sure as hell, I don't want my kids mooning the teacher, or a football stadium.
I suppose you won't be sending them to college then...
Mal-2
Valid point. Maybe we aren't using a station wagon full of backup tapes any more, but a spindle of DVD-Rs sent through the mail accomplishes much the same thing. It's definitely my means of choice for exchanging entire hard drives' worth of data with people. I generally won't attempt to transfer anything over a gigabyte over the 'net, in either direction. FTP just really isn't robust enough for that, and it still seems to be the standard of choice.
Mal-2
Agreed (I think I have the same drive), but I have noticed that this particular drive is twitchy on a few counts. First, I purchased no-name -R media rated at 4x, and they will burn at 4x in my employer's Emprex drive. They will only burn at 2x in mine. I'll still end up using them all, and they'll get read far more than they get written, so it's not all that bad, but it is annoying.
Second, that DVD-RAM works nicely as a big floppy disc, doesn't it? But what other drives out there are going to read it? I just use it to store less than one full DVD's worth of whatever (not just porn but also music, movie rips, etc.). When it fills up, I copy the files to a -R, erase the -RAM, and start over. I do this because packet writing to a -RAM is MUCH faster than to a +RW (haven't tried -RW).
Third, I've noticed some older CD-ROMs don't like the CD-Rs burned in the LG drive. This is odd, because my car stereo (which must have the cheapest CD reading mechanism ever) reads them just fine. I don't understand it, so I just work around it and keep the 8x SCSI CD-RW installed.
Fourth and finally, the LG drive seems to change its mind about liking DVD+RW on a daily basis. It'll read written ones just fine, but it often barfs trying to write one. Then I have to do a Full Erase before it'll accept the disc again, otherwise it declares it "defective".
And yes I've flashed the firmware. It didn't seem to make any difference whatsoever.
On the bright side, it does read just about every disc I've ever stuffed into it that isn't physically trashed. I guess that's a pretty important point.
Mal-2
Enhancements are forbidden. Prosthetics are not. For example, you cannot wear a thimble on your pitching hand (or anywhere else you could use it to scuff the ball), but you CAN wear glued-on fingernails. This is particularly common with players who have a history of splitting their fingernails (Hideo Nomo comes to mind), who do it preventatively, but it is an option available to ALL players. Most of them don't find it particularly useful.
When does that bionic eye cross the line from prosthesis to enhancement? I think that is where the argument will be waged.
Mal-2
We're not dissing the printer (most of us DON'T read Japanese), we're dissing the marketing campaign. It actually does look like a functional and well-designed product. As for actual build quality -- well it IS an Epson.
Mal-2
Does this mean the printer is werded shut and must be taken to a genuine Epson dealership to have the toner changed?
Mal-2
Is it here to protect you?
Is it here to push grandma down the stairs?
Mal-2
This sounds an awful lot like South Africa to me.
Mal-2
A liter of ink costs me about as much as a kilo of gold
This is corporate alchemy -- selling something as literally worth its weight in gold by eliminating all other options, thereby converting your product into actual gold. Unlike medieval alchemy, this one works most of the time.
Mal-2
Lexmark didn't always suck. I had one of the 300 dpi inkjets, and never had any problems with it, even when (in desperation) I put fountain pen ink in a cartridge because I had to finish the print job right away. That printer got dropped down a flight of stairs and I had it working in half an hour (something jammed but nothing broke). Once it had a severe paper feed problem that turned out to be due to a coin in the paper path. Took me an hour to find that quarter, but once again the printer returned to service. In fact it's STILL in service, the main problem being that when my mother runs out of cartridges to use and refill, there won't be any more to replace it because the printer is THAT old.
However I was also in a production environment where we were forced into retiring our two gigantic (but fairly reliable) Xerox high-speed laser printers because Xerox refused to renew the service contract. Only once in my experience did we have BOTH printers inoperable at once, and in that case the repairman was there in 45 minutes and had one of the two back up within 30 more minutes. They did 40 ppm, which meant that unless things were really, really crazy, one printer was enough for the job.
The powers that be opted to replace these with four Lexmark laser printers rated at 25 ppm. In theory this would have worked great, but there was a major catch. All we printed was labels (we were a warehouse) and the Lexmarks managed to eat them with alarming regularity. It was almost always sucked into the toner cartridge too, meaning we were burning through about 10 cartridges a WEEK, most of which were less than half-used. (Not surprisingly, my suggestion to start buying the lower-capacity cartridges because we were throwing out half-full ones did not go over well. Neither did my statement that the printers SUCKED. Even my boss agreed with me fully.)
Ultimately, we ended up having to press the Xerox printers back into service without a service contract -- but this time someone was smart enough to buy a couple pallets of spare parts, so all we had to pay for was labor. (It was pretty easy to guess which parts would die, and with what frequency, after 8 years of using them.) Ironically, after the first two calls, when Xerox got wind that we had our OWN stash of parts, they changed their minds and granted a two-year extension to the service contract. I think they just wanted to be able to borrow parts from us (which they did) for the contracts that were still open.
I came on toward the end of the service life of those printers -- they were about 6 years old when I arrived. They were still moderately reliable, but I was told they were practically flawless after the first few months, when they finally figured out what kind of label stock the printer liked (a custom order from Avery, with no glue within 1/4" of the cut edge), and remained that way for another four years. Then, just like an old car, they started falling apart at an ever-accelerating rate. Still, they'd turned out hundreds of thousands of pages apiece by then. They also could print 11 x 17" sheets, which the Lexmarks could not, though the Lexmarks weren't chosen with this requirement in mind. The only time we actually had to run 11 x 17 was when the customer support team's main printer was down, which wasn't all that often. We had to run a lot of their labels though, as their Lexmarks were just as bad as ours would turn out to be.
So our experience was: both stock units from Xerox and Lexmark were flawed for our purposes. However, the Xerox units could be tweaked to handle slightly customized label stock reliably, and the Lexmarks could not. Also, the Xerox team worked tirelessly to solve the problems -- they didn't duck them as the Lexmark team would do many years later. Even years down the line, they still sent us spec sheets explaining how to tweak the new and slightly different paper trays to behave like the tweaked parts they were replacing. Sometimes they sent new custom springs, sometimes they said "take the springs off the broken