And what's to stop you from scanning just every other item, and walkign out with free stuff??
The systems I've seen in the UK request a "rescan" at random intervals. The first time you use the system, the cashier has to rescan all your items to check your scanned items match what's in your bags. This occurs every now and again. If your scans are accurate, the interval between rescans rises. If you keep "forgetting to scan" multiple items, you'll trigger rescans all the time. It won't stop all theft through the system but it generally keeps people honest.
"Well, Andy, as you can clearly see from the replay, the defender performed an illegal operation and the referee had no choice but to send an error report to Microsoft."
The major natural greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect on Earth (not including clouds); carbon dioxide, which causes between 9-26%; and ozone, which causes between 3-7% (note that it is not really possible to assert that such-and-such a gas causes a certain percentage of the GHE, because the influences of the various gases are not additive. The higher ends of the ranges quoted are for the gas alone; the lower end, for the gas counting overlaps).
What I don't understand is why people purchase ringtones at all when almost every phone I've dealt with accepts MIDI formatted music
"What I don't understand is why people purchase branded clothes when the stuff with no-name labels is less than half the price..."
"What I don't understand is why people spend money on porn when there's so much available on the Net for free..."
Some people think they need to have the latest tune to be 'with it'. Some people can't be bothered to look about for free stuff. That said, I can't believe how much money these companies actually make. The tones themselves are frequently cost more than the full song would be if bought.
Personally I blame the stupid teenagers for this mess, not a brain cell be... hey, get orrrrf my lawn! *waves stick*
Erm, that's the Research-TV site that does that, not the University of Warwick site (yes, I guess it's UofW's fault for letting them host the video). It works for me in Firefox despite the warnings it raises but then I'm running Win2k.
PS. I don't recall seeing any sheep in lectures, although I guess that's possibly because I didn't go to most of them:) When I left, IBM had just given our Computer Science department a room full of Linux boxes to sit opposite our Solaris room. The rest of the university was mostly WinNT though...
I'd expect the cost of buying the track would be lower if the bandwidth costs for the selling organisation are to be partly shared by the customers. Oh wait, I seem to have my mindless optimism chip turned on again...
but what incentives (I assume financial) are there to encourage the BBC to chase ratings?
If the BBC's ratings fall away, it becomes harder and harder to justify the license fee we pay them. Every few years, the government renews the charter that, amongst other things, gives the BBC authority to collect fees. If the BBC was unpopular, the government wouldn't find it hard to alter the charter at the next renewal. One major incentive is their continued existance!
Of course, they can't go too far. One of the other parts of the charter is their commitment to public service broadcasting. There's no point in us paying the fee if all we get for it is Simpsons repeats. A totally populist schedule might gain big ratings but would draw massive criticism. The BBC is often accused of dumbing down too much.
The key, as ever, is a balance between ratings-winners and 'worthwhile' programming.
Re: I have played HL 1, but still I don't understa
on
Review: Half-Life 2
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· Score: 1
I've just had a happy hour blasting gunships so here's some thoughts. I've not finished pt 2 so there may be more to learn, although other posters seem to indicate not much will get cleared up.
What good or bad does my killing of the big nastie in the end of pt. 1 accomplish?
You win the game, and get to stay alive. One of the scientists at the top of the Lambda Complex was quite adamant that you'd have to kill a powerful alien to save the world, but it doesn't seem to have worked. The world has still been invaded and subjugated.
Who are the poor losers in hazard suits scattered all over XEN?
Probably fellow MIT grads! They are the remains of survey teams sent into Xen to obtain samples (and leave useful packs of health and ammo:)
Is The Administrator a.k.a. G-man a human or an alien, a traitor or a spy?
The G-Man is not The Administrator (unless there is to be a massive twist - the Administrator is an old man with a white beard, the g-man appears to be younger). Other than that, we're not sure who or what he is. Perhaps we'll find out by Half-Life 5. Perhaps Valve don't know themselves. Gordon seems to be a pawn in his game of inter-dimensional politics, but we can't see most of the board!
What are the samples examined by Gordon in pt.1 and was resonance cascade phenomenon effect of an accident or a sabotage?
Some kind of alien material/mineral that can be used as a power source to rip holes between dimensions. Or something like that. My question: if they need samples to power the teleporters, how did they get to Xen in the first place to collect samples?!
Some of the scientists seemed to think the resonance cascade was a possible consequence of [whatever the heck they were doing with the large sample], but it could easily have been due to sabotage by the g-man or the Administrator (who seems to have gained a lot of power as a result of the Black Mesa incident).
Why did Lambda team need an extra satellite in orbit?
That's a good question. There must be something on the satellite that the scientists needed. Something that couldn't be provided by any other satellites. Whether that was to do with the teleportation, tracking the aliens that had come across to Earth or something else entirely, I'm not sure.
And what did Gordon actually do after accepting the [g-man's] offer?
Went into suspended animation until revived at the start of pt. 2. Several years seem to have passed, but I don't know how many. Still, it's a better deal than the one for the soldier you control in Opposing Force, whom the g-man decides is too dangerous to release.
Chances are, a lot of these issues will remain forever open for fans to argue about:)
I got iTunes for my laptop to buy the odd track from the Music Store, and it has this habit of grabbing the.m3u extension off Winamp whenever I use it. It'd be nice if it could play my.ogg.m3u streams.
As I use my linux box as a LAN radio station, it no longer matters so much how pretty or well-organised the client software is. All I really want is one player that plays all the audio formats. *Sigh* I currently have WMP, Winamp 5, Foobar2000 and iTunes all fighting over extensions...
(I have the same question as the grandparent poster) my version of iTunes doesn't play the ogg streams generated by my Linux server (running Icecast). Is there a plug-in I need or something? Winamp 5 just works when I give it a link to the stream (as does xmms...)
I think I need to check this out, then. I have huge piles of paper on my desk, and it takes ages for me to find anything I need. It's usually scribbled on the back of something totally unimportant...
Yes. I remember installing Telewest's dial-up package a few years back. It helpfully (without any prompting) overwrote my Netscape 4.7x installation with Netscape 4.5 (I presume these days everyone will be offering IE). I can't remember if my bookmarks survived or not, but I was not impressed. It also loaded some irritating helper application that made connecting to the Net even slower. Fortunately my uncle explained to me that all I needed was the dial-up connection details, so I could get rid of the software.
I guess for most users these auto-installs would be a god-send, but they annoyed the crap out of me.
Re:Unfortunate...
on
How to Podcast
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My first reaction is to wonder how much of this is illegal.
How could making copies of your own talk show and distributing them over the Net be illegal (except in places like China)? How could listening to someone else's be?
Okay, maybe if your 'talk show' features long clips of copyrighted music... but that's not what the article discusses.
If people keep doing undesireable things, it's only going to lead to undesirable features being built into the iPos and iTunes. It's really only.001% that want to do something like this; why ruin it for everybody else?
1. Make sure you only use that iPod in the approved manner, citizen!
2. I'm not an expert in anyway, but did you just use a semi-colon in the proper manner? Pity that was the highlight of your post for me.
Sorry for the jibes, but I think you've grabbed the wrong stick.
Re:Possible uses?
on
How to Podcast
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe a college professor can make his lecture available in this format?
I don't know what you mean by "the Internet is a service", as it's more of a network over which services can be provided. Similarly, the UN provides a framework over which certain services can be provided.
The way I understand it (disclaimer! I am not a rocket scientist:) is:
The satellites are moving quickly relative to a GPS receiver on the surface of the earth. This means the clocks onboard the satellites tick ever so slightly slower than those on the receivers on the ground. If not corrected, this would throw the positioning calculations out. If you know how fast the satellites are going, you can use relativity to work out how often and how much you need to adjust the clocks on the satellites by.
If you wish to discuss issues with non-Americans, you will have to learn to detect sarcasm.
Judging by the username 'easter1916' (and posting history), the grandparent poster is probably Irish. Not sure what caused the sarcasm-detection failure, mind.
The English civil war finished in 1651, giving 353 years of stable democracy.
Ooops. You forgot the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Although it was a bloodless revolution, having the king overthrown isn't exactly a good example of stability (or democracy)! From that point on England itself has been pretty stable - although the composition of Great Britain/the UK has seen quite a few changes (the last big one being independence for most of Ireland in 1922).
Of course, there's the question of how democratic you have to be to count - few people had the vote in 1688. With each set of legislation from the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the last major overhaul of the franchise in 1928, England/Britain/the UK became more and more democratic, but I'm not sure whereabouts the line would be drawn saying "properly democratic from this point on."
Anyway, England definitely beats the US in terms of long-term stability, but the rest is up for discussion.
Happened in WWII when the rest of the world proved that it couldn't keep from trying to destroy itself.
By that reasoning Switzerland should be running the world!
Bear in mind that it was the US who refused to join the League Of Nations (despite President Wilson being the driving force behind it's inception) and sat back from world affairs between the world wars (as well as prior to 1917). With the European nations afraid of another 'war to end all wars', the influence of the US, the most powerful nation untouched by the Great War, was sorely missed.
Our then ally (Russia) then immediately did an about face and became a cold war enemy. They chose to begin taking over the various countries through use of their "Communist ideals".
Then? Immediately? The Soviet Union was an ally of convenience. The massacre of Polish officers at Katyn was covered up in order to keep the focus on defeating the Axis powers, for example. Pretty much everyone in Eastern Europe knew that once in place, the Soviets would be hard to get rid of. Ask those who were deported to Siberia in 1939/40 after the Soviet invasion... To suggest that the Soviet Union did some kind of about-face in 1945 is rather silly.
...so it was left up to the US to be the "good guys". Don't like it? Too bad. Build your own damn supercarriers, neutron bombs...
The limeys and the cheese-eating surrender monkies did, remember? Not that the US actually gave anyone much help in creating nuclear weapons (despite the assistance given to the US in terms of radar, aeronautical & code-breaking technology...) Either way, the immediate problem was that the Soviets had six million troops in Eastern Europe compared to approximately three million Allied troops.
As for countries like Iran, Hussein's Iraq, Pakistan, etc, they were broken up for a reason.
I assume you mean created, not broken up. Heck, Iran was the West's main ally in the region prior to the fall of the Shah (they were sold American Tomcat fighters, and the British ended up with a bunch of Challenger tanks they were about to sell them). Of course, this was because the Iraqis had already fallen out of favour after their own revolution (both were revolts against Western-supported rulers who weren't very popular), and only came into favour again because they weren't as 'bad' as Iran. See how there's a lot of 'lesser of two evils' diplomacy involved in all this, as opposed to 'we are good, you are bad, prepare to be liberated'? I hate it when international relations is presented as being black and white.
British India was partitioned into India, Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) because the country as ruled by the British was a great amalgamation of small kingdoms, many of whom had severe differences with eachother - it was what the people wanted. Perhaps if the line had been better drawn in the Kashmir region there might be less contention between India and Pakistan, but I doubt it.
I particularly liked: Windows XP stops responding (hangs) when you log off the computer if more than one user is logged on. WTF?
Aha! I think that must be what happened to me. I was swapping between my own account and the Guest account (we were having a barbeque so I thought other people might want to use it - then I realised I'd only got Putty under my own account) and when I tried to log one of them off, it hung. I ended up having to take out the laptop's battery to turn the machine off*...
...I've not used user-swapping since. You'd expect that one to have been picked up during testing. Glad it's been fixed.
* - thinking about it, there must be a hard reset button somewhere, probably one of those tiny paperclip-activated ones. But the main power button wasn't doing anything.
Slashdot Mirror
The systems I've seen in the UK request a "rescan" at random intervals. The first time you use the system, the cashier has to rescan all your items to check your scanned items match what's in your bags. This occurs every now and again. If your scans are accurate, the interval between rescans rises. If you keep "forgetting to scan" multiple items, you'll trigger rescans all the time. It won't stop all theft through the system but it generally keeps people honest.
"Well, Andy, as you can clearly see from the replay, the defender performed an illegal operation and the referee had no choice but to send an error report to Microsoft."
See here and here.
From the latter:
Due to Peace On Earth? Purity Of Essence? Parade Of Elephants?
You might have Plain Old Economics in mind, but it took me five minutes to come up with that. Prevention Of Eavesdropping is another possibility...
"What I don't understand is why people purchase branded clothes when the stuff with no-name labels is less than half the price..."
"What I don't understand is why people spend money on porn when there's so much available on the Net for free..."
Some people think they need to have the latest tune to be 'with it'. Some people can't be bothered to look about for free stuff. That said, I can't believe how much money these companies actually make. The tones themselves are frequently cost more than the full song would be if bought.
Personally I blame the stupid teenagers for this mess, not a brain cell be... hey, get orrrrf my lawn! *waves stick*
Mine's level 4-1 from Super Mario Land on the Gameboy. Nobody ever recognises it, although the ringer's off most of the time anyway.
I like the fact that I didn't have to pay for it...
Erm, that's the Research-TV site that does that, not the University of Warwick site (yes, I guess it's UofW's fault for letting them host the video). It works for me in Firefox despite the warnings it raises but then I'm running Win2k.
PS. I don't recall seeing any sheep in lectures, although I guess that's possibly because I didn't go to most of them :) When I left, IBM had just given our Computer Science department a room full of Linux boxes to sit opposite our Solaris room. The rest of the university was mostly WinNT though...
As for idiots, they're ten a penny these days.
I'd expect the cost of buying the track would be lower if the bandwidth costs for the selling organisation are to be partly shared by the customers. Oh wait, I seem to have my mindless optimism chip turned on again...
If the BBC's ratings fall away, it becomes harder and harder to justify the license fee we pay them. Every few years, the government renews the charter that, amongst other things, gives the BBC authority to collect fees. If the BBC was unpopular, the government wouldn't find it hard to alter the charter at the next renewal. One major incentive is their continued existance!
Of course, they can't go too far. One of the other parts of the charter is their commitment to public service broadcasting. There's no point in us paying the fee if all we get for it is Simpsons repeats. A totally populist schedule might gain big ratings but would draw massive criticism. The BBC is often accused of dumbing down too much.
The key, as ever, is a balance between ratings-winners and 'worthwhile' programming.
I've just had a happy hour blasting gunships so here's some thoughts. I've not finished pt 2 so there may be more to learn, although other posters seem to indicate not much will get cleared up.
You win the game, and get to stay alive. One of the scientists at the top of the Lambda Complex was quite adamant that you'd have to kill a powerful alien to save the world, but it doesn't seem to have worked. The world has still been invaded and subjugated.
Probably fellow MIT grads! They are the remains of survey teams sent into Xen to obtain samples (and leave useful packs of health and ammo :)
The G-Man is not The Administrator (unless there is to be a massive twist - the Administrator is an old man with a white beard, the g-man appears to be younger). Other than that, we're not sure who or what he is. Perhaps we'll find out by Half-Life 5. Perhaps Valve don't know themselves. Gordon seems to be a pawn in his game of inter-dimensional politics, but we can't see most of the board!
Some kind of alien material/mineral that can be used as a power source to rip holes between dimensions. Or something like that. My question: if they need samples to power the teleporters, how did they get to Xen in the first place to collect samples?!
Some of the scientists seemed to think the resonance cascade was a possible consequence of [whatever the heck they were doing with the large sample], but it could easily have been due to sabotage by the g-man or the Administrator (who seems to have gained a lot of power as a result of the Black Mesa incident).
That's a good question. There must be something on the satellite that the scientists needed. Something that couldn't be provided by any other satellites. Whether that was to do with the teleportation, tracking the aliens that had come across to Earth or something else entirely, I'm not sure.
Went into suspended animation until revived at the start of pt. 2. Several years seem to have passed, but I don't know how many. Still, it's a better deal than the one for the soldier you control in Opposing Force, whom the g-man decides is too dangerous to release.
Chances are, a lot of these issues will remain forever open for fans to argue about :)
I got iTunes for my laptop to buy the odd track from the Music Store, and it has this habit of grabbing the .m3u extension off Winamp whenever I use it. It'd be nice if it could play my .ogg.m3u streams.
As I use my linux box as a LAN radio station, it no longer matters so much how pretty or well-organised the client software is. All I really want is one player that plays all the audio formats. *Sigh* I currently have WMP, Winamp 5, Foobar2000 and iTunes all fighting over extensions...
(I have the same question as the grandparent poster) my version of iTunes doesn't play the ogg streams generated by my Linux server (running Icecast). Is there a plug-in I need or something? Winamp 5 just works when I give it a link to the stream (as does xmms...)
I think I need to check this out, then. I have huge piles of paper on my desk, and it takes ages for me to find anything I need. It's usually scribbled on the back of something totally unimportant...
Yes. I remember installing Telewest's dial-up package a few years back. It helpfully (without any prompting) overwrote my Netscape 4.7x installation with Netscape 4.5 (I presume these days everyone will be offering IE). I can't remember if my bookmarks survived or not, but I was not impressed. It also loaded some irritating helper application that made connecting to the Net even slower. Fortunately my uncle explained to me that all I needed was the dial-up connection details, so I could get rid of the software.
I guess for most users these auto-installs would be a god-send, but they annoyed the crap out of me.
How could making copies of your own talk show and distributing them over the Net be illegal (except in places like China)? How could listening to someone else's be?
Okay, maybe if your 'talk show' features long clips of copyrighted music... but that's not what the article discusses.
1. Make sure you only use that iPod in the approved manner, citizen! 2. I'm not an expert in anyway, but did you just use a semi-colon in the proper manner? Pity that was the highlight of your post for me.
Sorry for the jibes, but I think you've grabbed the wrong stick.
Wasn't that the reasoning behind Duke University giving 1650 students iPods?
"Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at." - President Wilson
Would be brilliant but I doubt it would happen that way!
Do you mean like this?
I don't know what you mean by "the Internet is a service", as it's more of a network over which services can be provided. Similarly, the UN provides a framework over which certain services can be provided.
The way I understand it (disclaimer! I am not a rocket scientist :) is:
The satellites are moving quickly relative to a GPS receiver on the surface of the earth. This means the clocks onboard the satellites tick ever so slightly slower than those on the receivers on the ground. If not corrected, this would throw the positioning calculations out. If you know how fast the satellites are going, you can use relativity to work out how often and how much you need to adjust the clocks on the satellites by.
Guns. Lots of gnus.
Judging by the username 'easter1916' (and posting history), the grandparent poster is probably Irish. Not sure what caused the sarcasm-detection failure, mind.
Ooops. You forgot the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Although it was a bloodless revolution, having the king overthrown isn't exactly a good example of stability (or democracy)! From that point on England itself has been pretty stable - although the composition of Great Britain/the UK has seen quite a few changes (the last big one being independence for most of Ireland in 1922).
Of course, there's the question of how democratic you have to be to count - few people had the vote in 1688. With each set of legislation from the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the last major overhaul of the franchise in 1928, England/Britain/the UK became more and more democratic, but I'm not sure whereabouts the line would be drawn saying "properly democratic from this point on."
Anyway, England definitely beats the US in terms of long-term stability, but the rest is up for discussion.
<VOICE SRC='Keanu'>Whoa</VOICE>
By that reasoning Switzerland should be running the world!
Bear in mind that it was the US who refused to join the League Of Nations (despite President Wilson being the driving force behind it's inception) and sat back from world affairs between the world wars (as well as prior to 1917). With the European nations afraid of another 'war to end all wars', the influence of the US, the most powerful nation untouched by the Great War, was sorely missed.
Then? Immediately? The Soviet Union was an ally of convenience. The massacre of Polish officers at Katyn was covered up in order to keep the focus on defeating the Axis powers, for example. Pretty much everyone in Eastern Europe knew that once in place, the Soviets would be hard to get rid of. Ask those who were deported to Siberia in 1939/40 after the Soviet invasion... To suggest that the Soviet Union did some kind of about-face in 1945 is rather silly.
The limeys and the cheese-eating surrender monkies did, remember? Not that the US actually gave anyone much help in creating nuclear weapons (despite the assistance given to the US in terms of radar, aeronautical & code-breaking technology...) Either way, the immediate problem was that the Soviets had six million troops in Eastern Europe compared to approximately three million Allied troops.
I assume you mean created, not broken up. Heck, Iran was the West's main ally in the region prior to the fall of the Shah (they were sold American Tomcat fighters, and the British ended up with a bunch of Challenger tanks they were about to sell them). Of course, this was because the Iraqis had already fallen out of favour after their own revolution (both were revolts against Western-supported rulers who weren't very popular), and only came into favour again because they weren't as 'bad' as Iran. See how there's a lot of 'lesser of two evils' diplomacy involved in all this, as opposed to 'we are good, you are bad, prepare to be liberated'? I hate it when international relations is presented as being black and white.
British India was partitioned into India, Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) because the country as ruled by the British was a great amalgamation of small kingdoms, many of whom had severe differences with eachother - it was what the people wanted. Perhaps if the line had been better drawn in the Kashmir region there might be less contention between India and Pakistan, but I doubt it.
I think that's enough for now!
Aye. I'm sure I tried that. Naturally, I'm now worried I might not have - which would be embarrassing.
Aha! I think that must be what happened to me. I was swapping between my own account and the Guest account (we were having a barbeque so I thought other people might want to use it - then I realised I'd only got Putty under my own account) and when I tried to log one of them off, it hung. I ended up having to take out the laptop's battery to turn the machine off*...
...I've not used user-swapping since. You'd expect that one to have been picked up during testing. Glad it's been fixed.
* - thinking about it, there must be a hard reset button somewhere, probably one of those tiny paperclip-activated ones. But the main power button wasn't doing anything.