He's taken on some of the biggest players in the industry and come out with his hide intact and a large and thriving community embracing varying degrees of his philosophy.
More than this, his philosophy has actually co-opted some of those players--IBM and Novell, for example--making them his willing allies. Maybe that is what is really getting to him--it took Linux in order to really mainstream the GPL, and all cries of "It's GNU/Linux!" are pretty much universally ignored. In his position, I think that would depress me, too.
If you need any expectation at all of ACTUAL privacy (the kind that'll keep you out of prison), don't use Hushmail. Someone people actually trust, like maybe the people behind Wikileaks, should start a real anonymous mail network.
I don't trust Wikileaks--they have an agenda, and it isn't simply informing people about things which are unlawfully/immorally kept hidden. I will grant that they are serving an important function right now, and I am grateful for this... but trust? No way.
I love how everybody's got their own definition of "stupid" behavior. You seem to think that the dude in the lawsuit is an idiot, and then you boast about not using a blade-guard.
Blade guards aren't like training wheels. They're not something that you remove once you get good. In other words, working without them isn't an indicator of proficiency (as you seem to be implying with your comment). Tell me, when you got good at driving, did you disable the seatbelts and airbags in your car, too?
I doubt the OP was "boasting" about not-using a blade guard, or that he makes a habit of disabling the safety features of his power tools (he may well do so, but I don't think that's quite what he was getting at). "5th or 6th grade" implies a period far enough in the past where safety features were not as advanced today--for example, when I was in wood shop in middle school, over twenty years ago, we didn't disable the safety features on the tools... they just plain didn't have any! So our teachers taught us to respect the machinery, be aware of what we were doing, and to never, ever, violate safety rules. And, I think, this is what the GP was getting at: even with all the whiz-bang safety features in the world, if you treat the tool like it doesn't have any at all, you won't get hurt.
Yet people continue to disrespect the powerful machines in their control, cause the loss of life or limb, then immediately seek to blame someone else for their negligence. To go off on a tangent, how many news stories did we see a couple of years ago, where some moron pointed a gun at someone, pulled the trigger, and was apparently surprised when something horrible resulted? "I didn't know it was loaded," "I thought the safety was on," "I was only playing around," etc. By any reasonable definition, this is stupid behavior, and we shouldn't give the people making those stupid decisions a pass on their actions even when their stupid actions result in tragedy--especially when they result in tragedy!
This isn't clever at all. It destroys the blade and entire breaking mechanism. What the fuck is clever about that?
I don't see how they could achieve the results they do (5ms stopping time) in a non-destructive manner--and blades and braking mechanisms are infinitely cheaper than fingers and hands. Honestly, if faced with a situation where the alternate result is permanent disfigurement, a multi-thousand dollar commercial grade table saw could disappear into a swirling vortex like the house at the end of Poltergeist, never to be seen again, and I'd be OK with that.
Still, you do raise a good point--a consumer grade Ryobi table saw would probably double in price as a result of this technology, which is yet another reason why the jury verdict is stupid.
. However, if SawStop was asking for some reasonable amount (and I'd consider anything under $50 per saw to be "reasonable"), then I'd surely consider casting my vote for the plaintiff if I were on the jury.
A consumer grade table saw can go for as little as a couple of hundred bucks. You'd be marking a $500 saw up 10% just for the patent royalties, which would probably equal or exceed the manufacturer's profit on the saw... and for something like a sub-$100 Harbor Freight piece of junk, the markup would be absurd.
Note, I went to the website and watched the videos. This appears to be an extremely clever invention, certainly deserving of patent protection, and the world should beat a path to their door for building a better mousetrap. But I disagree that licensing their patent should be compulsory.
Sorry, the above should have said, "Shanghai to Paris," not, "Beijing to Paris." Beijing is only about 5,000 miles. Take about 5 hours off the travel time for the train, and an hour and change for the airplane. It's still a no brainer, IMHO.
It's about 5800 miles straight line distance between Beijing and Paris. Assuming a best case scenario of a completely straight rail line (it wouldn't be... it would probably be at least 20% longer) and a constant velocity of 150 mph (it wouldn't be), you'd be on that train for about 39 hours. Air France can do it in 11.
Even being in cattle class, I can't imagine wanting to take the train over an airplane in such a scenario--and the reality would certainly be worse.
At 2:01 you can hear the mission controller (or at least the same voice who was calling the countdown, ignition, etc) in the background saying, "Vehicle is now supersonic."
Wouldn't that be "People's Liberation Navy"? "People's Liberation Army Navy" just sounds awkward...
They really do call it that... it's the naval arm of the People's Liberation Army, so I guess it makes some sense, but as you noted, it certainly is awkward.
Their voices are not true representatives of the state, but rather the people of the state.
I think the GP was making a reference to the 17th amendment--up until 1913, the senate was a body that represented the interests of the several states at the federal level.
It's a pity you've never played Operation Flashpoint... no bunny hopping, getting shot HURTS (whoops, sorry, you were shot in the legs, now you cant walk and have to drag your ass around the battlefield in a belly crawl), accurate weapons that do realistic damage and behave in a realistic manner (bullet drop, for example), etc.
Missions were not, "everybody spawn and kill the other team," but were scripted affairs that would, for example, have you getting off a helicopter in an LZ at the start of the mission, moving three miles through the woods avoiding enemy patrols, sneaking into an airbase, and blowing up a couple of A-10s on the ground. A player slotted into a defined role (on either team) with the remaining roles filled by AI (which usually followed pre-scripted actions... i.e. patrol routes, etc) if there weren't enough players. Also made for great co-op play (humans vs scripted bots).
Maps were huge--and by "huge" I mean "measured in square miles." You couldn't create your own maps, but you could plop down whatever you wanted on the existing ones ("this looks like a good place for a roadblock with a machine gun nest") using the mission editor. You could script EVERYTHING. Timed events, triggered events, movement patterns, whether or not something spawned at all (made playing through a mission a second time a lot of fun when patrols could take different routes, objectives might be in a different place, etc). I remember making one mission where you had to blow up a couple of helicopters on the ground. The pilots were sleeping in tents thirty yards or so away from the flight line. If you got detected on your approach, a klaxon would sound, the pilots would wake up, sprint for their helicopters, power up, take off, and start searching for you. If your own air support came within radar range of the base, the same thing would happen.
There was no respawning in the middle of the mission (unless there was a living bot on your team that you could take the place of). There was no joining a server in the middle of a match, either. There were some downsides--for example, the above mentioned respawn and joining limits were great for realism, but sucked ass if you were five minutes late getting to the match... or if you died early and needed to wait another two hours for the match to end so you could play again.
As far as realistic FPS games go, though, I think it takes the cake. It came out in 2001, and I haven't seen anything better yet (I had a lot of hope for BF2, but it doesn't even come close.)
Admittedly, it does not sound as if shooting the laptop (and the display, of all things)
It's rather hard to shoot a laptop without hitting the display... given, you know, how the display is parallel to the rest of the machine when in the closed position.
Indeed, they are showing their true colors here. They don't care about the artists income, they care about lining their own pockets. You think when they sue consumers for copyright infringement they divvy up that money among the artists whose copyrights were violated? Nope.
Actually, the money does go to the people who own the copyrights.
That's how bad the music industry is--the typical recording contract involves a record company giving a loan to the artist (an "advance") who then finances the recording (including advertising.) The loan is paid back from owed royalties before the artist sees a dime, and when all is said and done, the record companies come out owning the copyrights to the finished product. It's like getting a mortgage, paying on it for 30 years, and at the end of the term, instead of gaining clear title, the bank says, "Thanks for the house!"
To add insult to injury, the record companies do whatever they can to screw the artist out of whatever small percentage they're due (breakage fees for 78RPM vinyl records, for example. No, I'm not kidding.)
RPG-7 is still good enough to deal with an Abrams (or any other modern tank), you just need a lot of them if it has reactive armor on it, but the later is still not impenetrable
With a modern main battle tank, I think the best you can hope to accomplish with something as small as an RPG is to disable it by attacking the weak points (like the treads) and then figure out a way to set it on fire. Reactive armor is NOT the primary protection against the shaped charge, things like composite armor and depleted uranium are, and this stuff can (and has) stood up to kinetic penetrators and real anti-tank missiles at close range.
Another lie in the article, which is a common political lie used by certain anti-nuclear energy interests is "The government has put up $18.5 billion in subsidies to build atomic plants." That is simply not true. The only thing the government put up is what are called loan guarantees, which basically is to say that the government has agreed to underwrite loans on nuclear plants, a common practice in many private public works projects. It's a means of assuring that the plant can get financing at a reasonable interest rate. The government is not handing out 18.5 billion dollars.
IIRC, there were direct subsidies to operators written into the 2005 energy bill for the first half dozen or so new nukes to go into operation (a couple of cents per KWH generated.) Certainly not eighteen billion dollars worth, though.
Is your insurance company one of the ones who decided to screw their (paying!) customers who had bought flood protection because it was determined that the damage to their homes was caused by wind and rain, and not flooding?
IIRC, you have this backward... homeowners without flood insurance were claiming that their properties--completely washed away by the flooding--were still covered by their policies, because of the wind and rain damage sustained before the flood caused a total loss. In this instance, IMHO, the insurance companies were correct in not paying out. A little googling reveals this story about settlements in the various cases.
There are other variants, but every case I remember was specifically about people without flood insurance, trying to claim against water damage. (If you're still remembering a different set of facts, I would ask: who the heck has flood insurance without a conventional homeowner's policy?)
Now, I suspect if you surveyed a lot of people, most of them know of the Zombies - Brains connection, but most of those think it's something from original myths and legends, not George Romero.
IIRC, both they, and you, would be wrong.:) The "Brains" connection comes not from Romero's zombie movies, but from the "Return of the Living Dead" series, which is unrelated.
Online security with encryption and properly-designed systems can be faster, more tamper-proof, and has better fraud-prevention than traditional security practices (such as checks).
I think by "security" the GP meant, "not being the subject of genocide," more than "not being the subject of identity theft."
Selection bias. First, no one here is posting saying "I have an extremely fair employer who works closely with me in a very just way to ensure that I do my job well, and in turn I work very hard to please my employer so that my employment is safe and full of opportunity."
I've been with my current employer (relatively small (<1000 employees worldwide), German owned, privately held) for seven and a half years now, and the quote above is a fair approximation of the way I think about my job.
What exactly would these people do on a daily basis?
I would imagine they're normally responsible for minimizing road noise, engine noise heard inside the cabin, making the stereo sound good in the aurally hostile environment that is an automobile, etc.
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More than this, his philosophy has actually co-opted some of those players--IBM and Novell, for example--making them his willing allies. Maybe that is what is really getting to him--it took Linux in order to really mainstream the GPL, and all cries of "It's GNU/Linux!" are pretty much universally ignored. In his position, I think that would depress me, too.
I don't trust Wikileaks--they have an agenda, and it isn't simply informing people about things which are unlawfully/immorally kept hidden. I will grant that they are serving an important function right now, and I am grateful for this... but trust? No way.
Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. McBride, and ideas are bulletproof.
Actually, there are four:
Rule #2 is a good one, but it's not the only one that matters.
I think you read that wrong... they have been working for him "from" (i.e. since) 1990 and 1991, not "during 1990 and 1991."
I doubt the OP was "boasting" about not-using a blade guard, or that he makes a habit of disabling the safety features of his power tools (he may well do so, but I don't think that's quite what he was getting at). "5th or 6th grade" implies a period far enough in the past where safety features were not as advanced today--for example, when I was in wood shop in middle school, over twenty years ago, we didn't disable the safety features on the tools... they just plain didn't have any! So our teachers taught us to respect the machinery, be aware of what we were doing, and to never, ever, violate safety rules. And, I think, this is what the GP was getting at: even with all the whiz-bang safety features in the world, if you treat the tool like it doesn't have any at all, you won't get hurt.
Yet people continue to disrespect the powerful machines in their control, cause the loss of life or limb, then immediately seek to blame someone else for their negligence. To go off on a tangent, how many news stories did we see a couple of years ago, where some moron pointed a gun at someone, pulled the trigger, and was apparently surprised when something horrible resulted? "I didn't know it was loaded," "I thought the safety was on," "I was only playing around," etc. By any reasonable definition, this is stupid behavior, and we shouldn't give the people making those stupid decisions a pass on their actions even when their stupid actions result in tragedy--especially when they result in tragedy!
I don't see how they could achieve the results they do (5ms stopping time) in a non-destructive manner--and blades and braking mechanisms are infinitely cheaper than fingers and hands. Honestly, if faced with a situation where the alternate result is permanent disfigurement, a multi-thousand dollar commercial grade table saw could disappear into a swirling vortex like the house at the end of Poltergeist, never to be seen again, and I'd be OK with that.
Still, you do raise a good point--a consumer grade Ryobi table saw would probably double in price as a result of this technology, which is yet another reason why the jury verdict is stupid.
A consumer grade table saw can go for as little as a couple of hundred bucks. You'd be marking a $500 saw up 10% just for the patent royalties, which would probably equal or exceed the manufacturer's profit on the saw... and for something like a sub-$100 Harbor Freight piece of junk, the markup would be absurd.
Note, I went to the website and watched the videos. This appears to be an extremely clever invention, certainly deserving of patent protection, and the world should beat a path to their door for building a better mousetrap. But I disagree that licensing their patent should be compulsory.
Sorry, the above should have said, "Shanghai to Paris," not, "Beijing to Paris." Beijing is only about 5,000 miles. Take about 5 hours off the travel time for the train, and an hour and change for the airplane. It's still a no brainer, IMHO.
It's about 5800 miles straight line distance between Beijing and Paris. Assuming a best case scenario of a completely straight rail line (it wouldn't be... it would probably be at least 20% longer) and a constant velocity of 150 mph (it wouldn't be), you'd be on that train for about 39 hours. Air France can do it in 11.
Even being in cattle class, I can't imagine wanting to take the train over an airplane in such a scenario--and the reality would certainly be worse.
At 2:01 you can hear the mission controller (or at least the same voice who was calling the countdown, ignition, etc) in the background saying, "Vehicle is now supersonic."
They really do call it that... it's the naval arm of the People's Liberation Army, so I guess it makes some sense, but as you noted, it certainly is awkward.
I think the GP was making a reference to the 17th amendment--up until 1913, the senate was a body that represented the interests of the several states at the federal level.
I'd say that it works especially well on iocane powder, but that would be a joke so bad it would be inconceivable...
It's a pity you've never played Operation Flashpoint... no bunny hopping, getting shot HURTS (whoops, sorry, you were shot in the legs, now you cant walk and have to drag your ass around the battlefield in a belly crawl), accurate weapons that do realistic damage and behave in a realistic manner (bullet drop, for example), etc.
Missions were not, "everybody spawn and kill the other team," but were scripted affairs that would, for example, have you getting off a helicopter in an LZ at the start of the mission, moving three miles through the woods avoiding enemy patrols, sneaking into an airbase, and blowing up a couple of A-10s on the ground. A player slotted into a defined role (on either team) with the remaining roles filled by AI (which usually followed pre-scripted actions... i.e. patrol routes, etc) if there weren't enough players. Also made for great co-op play (humans vs scripted bots).
Maps were huge--and by "huge" I mean "measured in square miles." You couldn't create your own maps, but you could plop down whatever you wanted on the existing ones ("this looks like a good place for a roadblock with a machine gun nest") using the mission editor. You could script EVERYTHING. Timed events, triggered events, movement patterns, whether or not something spawned at all (made playing through a mission a second time a lot of fun when patrols could take different routes, objectives might be in a different place, etc). I remember making one mission where you had to blow up a couple of helicopters on the ground. The pilots were sleeping in tents thirty yards or so away from the flight line. If you got detected on your approach, a klaxon would sound, the pilots would wake up, sprint for their helicopters, power up, take off, and start searching for you. If your own air support came within radar range of the base, the same thing would happen.
There was no respawning in the middle of the mission (unless there was a living bot on your team that you could take the place of). There was no joining a server in the middle of a match, either. There were some downsides--for example, the above mentioned respawn and joining limits were great for realism, but sucked ass if you were five minutes late getting to the match... or if you died early and needed to wait another two hours for the match to end so you could play again.
As far as realistic FPS games go, though, I think it takes the cake. It came out in 2001, and I haven't seen anything better yet (I had a lot of hope for BF2, but it doesn't even come close.)
It's rather hard to shoot a laptop without hitting the display... given, you know, how the display is parallel to the rest of the machine when in the closed position.
Actually, the money does go to the people who own the copyrights.
That's how bad the music industry is--the typical recording contract involves a record company giving a loan to the artist (an "advance") who then finances the recording (including advertising.) The loan is paid back from owed royalties before the artist sees a dime, and when all is said and done, the record companies come out owning the copyrights to the finished product. It's like getting a mortgage, paying on it for 30 years, and at the end of the term, instead of gaining clear title, the bank says, "Thanks for the house!"
To add insult to injury, the record companies do whatever they can to screw the artist out of whatever small percentage they're due (breakage fees for 78RPM vinyl records, for example. No, I'm not kidding.)
With a modern main battle tank, I think the best you can hope to accomplish with something as small as an RPG is to disable it by attacking the weak points (like the treads) and then figure out a way to set it on fire. Reactive armor is NOT the primary protection against the shaped charge, things like composite armor and depleted uranium are, and this stuff can (and has) stood up to kinetic penetrators and real anti-tank missiles at close range.
IIRC, there were direct subsidies to operators written into the 2005 energy bill for the first half dozen or so new nukes to go into operation (a couple of cents per KWH generated.) Certainly not eighteen billion dollars worth, though.
IIRC, you have this backward... homeowners without flood insurance were claiming that their properties--completely washed away by the flooding--were still covered by their policies, because of the wind and rain damage sustained before the flood caused a total loss. In this instance, IMHO, the insurance companies were correct in not paying out. A little googling reveals this story about settlements in the various cases.
There are other variants, but every case I remember was specifically about people without flood insurance, trying to claim against water damage. (If you're still remembering a different set of facts, I would ask: who the heck has flood insurance without a conventional homeowner's policy?)
Lights... Camera... Action!!
Man, that brings back memories. AQ2 was awesome, and likely the inspiration for many of the things we take for granted in current FPS games.
I can't help but agree with this completely.
IIRC, both they, and you, would be wrong. :) The "Brains" connection comes not from Romero's zombie movies, but from the "Return of the Living Dead" series, which is unrelated.
I think by "security" the GP meant, "not being the subject of genocide," more than "not being the subject of identity theft."
I've been with my current employer (relatively small (<1000 employees worldwide), German owned, privately held) for seven and a half years now, and the quote above is a fair approximation of the way I think about my job.
I would imagine they're normally responsible for minimizing road noise, engine noise heard inside the cabin, making the stereo sound good in the aurally hostile environment that is an automobile, etc.