I graduated from High School in the early 1980s. For those of you that weren't
around at that time it will be hard to image how dangerous it was to be a young
man in the 80s. About 20% of the other guys in my graduating class are dead or
serving life sentences. In the years right after graduating from school I spent
a lot of time unemployed and getting into various types of trouble. Like most
guys that age I considered myself to be smarter than the cops and in my case it
was true. Eventually though, they got lucky and I was arrested on a
minor weapon's charge.
While I was waiting for my case to come up on the docket I bought a computer,
a commodore 64 and started playing Ultima. The long hours I spent playing that
game kept me off the street at night and got me interested in computer programming.
A friend of mine that was headed down the same self-destructive path started playing
Ultima with me. We were still spent far to much time intoxicated, but atleast we were doing it
while playing computer games in the crib and not while roaming around on the
town armed to the teeth looking for a fight.
The other guys we had been hanging out with decided we were boring and went on
with the usual business. They were all arrested and did varying amounts of
time in the state system. One of them is dead; one appears to be turning his life
around finally - 25 years later; I lost track of the others.
I have absolutely no doubt that my gamer friend and I would have ended up just
like our old school buds if not for that commodore64 and Ultima. Instead of us
being dangerous burdens on society, we now productive professionals paying lots of
taxes. We both work in IT related fields, work we became interested in because of
the time we spent hacking computer games.
Almost all violent crime is commited by young men. Ecomonics plays a part, but
the primary reason is because young men are bored, have lots of excess energy and have nothing better to do.
The murder rate in this country peaked in the late 1980's and then declined rapidly
and has stayed low compared to the 80s. I am convinced the reason that males in
their teens and twenties don't roam the street shooting at each like they did back
then is because game consoles and computers became widely available in the 1990s.
I would much rather some 19 year-old get his thrills playing Manhunt or GTA IV
in his parents living room than to be out on the streets smoking ice and
doing those simulated activities for real.
At least that is the way I have always understood it. IANANP or a physician, but every bit of information I have seen on the matter emphasizes not inhaling radioactive dust/gas or consuming something contaminated. The 4,000 thyroid cancer cases caused by Chernobyl was in children that consumed cow's milk contaminated by iodine 131 fallout on the grass the cattle ate. A very nasty business indeed. Clearly a high acute dose, about 1000 times background level, can be lethal in a small percentage of cases, but if short term low-level exposure was dangerous people would die all the time from flying on commercial airliners, where you get about 200x background exposure.
It's not nurture making the first-born smarter, it's the first born bullying and dominating the younger syblings to make them stupider and less sure of their intelligence.
The boxes they were using in Texas before the time warner buy out were bad. After Time Warner switched over to their software they became unusable. Pushing the fast forward button on the remote usually resulted in the system becoming stuck for 5 to 10 minutes as it zipped forward an hour or two through the program. We finally had to kick them to the curb, it was just unwatchable.
Spinal Tap was a real band in the late 70's and early 80s. Its been an inside and ongoing joke on the internet now for 20 years to pretend that Spinal Tap is really a parody of a rock band. After the joke had been going around for a while, the band made a movie thats a parody of a rock n' roll parody to capitalize on it.
To paraphrase the article, "We knew something really bad was gonna happen, but we didn't know when or where or what was going to happen. When we told them they didn't do anything."
Tenet could have used his buearcratic super powers to save us all if only the wicked witch and dumbo the flying elephant hadn't stopped him.
Maybe a souless multi-billion dollar corporation stole ideals from other companies and used slave labor in a totalitarian state to make Gigadollars from it. Nahhh, that never happens in the real world.
I am not talking street thugs, but former cops from the tough side of town with connections to local law enforcement, for some pro-active security. Coddling and hiding from these 'activist' will only make the situation worse for academic labs.
Cool. A good crafting systems goes a long way to keeping the game interesting.
"The really sad thing is, armor protection got to the point where you could make 90% damage reduction armor after you collected enough resources with the right stats, then the devs had the nerve to blame the crafters for unbalancing the system."
Now that sounds like Sony.
I suspect that Sony is so focused on the quick buck that they forced the devs to build on an existing engine that was already so ad-hoc that the possibility of understanding the future implications was next to impossible, but who know.
From all i ever heard about it, it sounded like it would be EQ with lightsabres and blasters intead of swords and bows - same game with differents models and labels.
The fewer GMs there are around the less likely stupid crap like this is to happen. In EQ, I had one tell me I might have to change my name, I had it for 3 years - nothing ever came of it.
I never had a positive experience with a GM on any MMO.
"It only requires a few billion USD to develop drug lines..."
I hear this all the time as the drug companies excuse for charging 10x more in the states as elsewhere, but where is the proof? Where are the numbers to prove it?
These companies know that American prosperity can only last so long, and they are going to bleed the golden goose for as much as they can, because Europe and Asia already have laws on the books making it illegal to extort money from sick people.
Unfortunately I have been disemboweled several times by my cat. Also I had my throat crushed once by my goldfish.
That's why this type of pseudo-science is so dangerous, it convinces people that exotic pets like Velociraptors, Pot-Belly Pigs, Marsupial Lions and Trolls are harmless. Sure, they are cute when they are little, but these animals are aggressive living things. Once they are grown - most people find they can't afford to buy the hundreds of pounds of meat these animals need to eat each day. So they drive out to the edge of town and dump the animals to fend for themselves.
The Florida everglades have been decimated by the Asian Pot-Belly Swine. During the height of the Pot-Belly craze in the 80's, millions of elderly couples purchased these cute piglets. When the animals grew to adulthood and their retired owners could no longer take care of them, they dumped them in the swamp. Now active living communities across the state are overrun with alligators, because the porcine infestation has destroyed the alligators native habitat.
Also software developers would need to be licensed and pass a standardized test like those given by other professional societies that self-regulate and self-license; perhaps even spend time apprenticed before becoming journeymen.
This could be used to make it illegal to buy certain types of software from sources outside the country. Foreign developers would have to be licensed by the American Association of Software Engineers or whatever it would be called, of course they would have to take the licensing tests in person and reside in the country before being allowed to practise.
Open Source Software would need to be reviewed in depth, audited and approved by the licensing society before it could be used business or technical projects, but I don't think it would kill off OSS.
There would have to be a lot more software developers, they would need to be paid a lot more and they would need to have more control over the product.
$60,000 doesn't get you much more than a cardboard box on the street in some places. In other areas it's enough to get a 5,000 sq foot house and a nice car.
I assume that IGN is talking about jobs in the silicon valley area. 60,000k isn't much there. I was offered half again as much to take a job in Cali 8 years ago fresh out of school - I declined and am still employeed living in a house that would cost $3M on the west coast. Of course, the weather isn't as nice...
If the department doesn't have the money to totally revamp the system, then they probably can't afford a port job over to another OS - which would cost far more in the commercial world than the cost of a new A/D board and a new PC.
If the vendor that supplied the board is now defunct, then you would have to reverse engineer the driver - which could take a lot of time and resources, depending on how much you know about the hardware and how complex the system is. The board is probably an ISA bus interface and you would be hard pressed to find a modern motherboard with ISA slots.
One of the posters above recommended National Instruments, their development suite is great for data acquisition - but it's gonna cost some bucks.
A lot of A/D hardware vendors offer good support for linux, writing drivers for linux is a lot easier than writing them for windows.
My suggestion would be to keep the system limping along until the A/D board dies. Money that "just isn't there" has a tendency to appear when a system someone needs goes to shit.
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While I was waiting for my case to come up on the docket I bought a computer, a commodore 64 and started playing Ultima. The long hours I spent playing that game kept me off the street at night and got me interested in computer programming. A friend of mine that was headed down the same self-destructive path started playing Ultima with me. We were still spent far to much time intoxicated, but atleast we were doing it while playing computer games in the crib and not while roaming around on the town armed to the teeth looking for a fight.
The other guys we had been hanging out with decided we were boring and went on with the usual business. They were all arrested and did varying amounts of time in the state system. One of them is dead; one appears to be turning his life around finally - 25 years later; I lost track of the others.
I have absolutely no doubt that my gamer friend and I would have ended up just like our old school buds if not for that commodore64 and Ultima. Instead of us being dangerous burdens on society, we now productive professionals paying lots of taxes. We both work in IT related fields, work we became interested in because of the time we spent hacking computer games.
Almost all violent crime is commited by young men. Ecomonics plays a part, but the primary reason is because young men are bored, have lots of excess energy and have nothing better to do.
The murder rate in this country peaked in the late 1980's and then declined rapidly and has stayed low compared to the 80s. I am convinced the reason that males in their teens and twenties don't roam the street shooting at each like they did back then is because game consoles and computers became widely available in the 1990s.
I would much rather some 19 year-old get his thrills playing Manhunt or GTA IV in his parents living room than to be out on the streets smoking ice and doing those simulated activities for real.
At least that is the way I have always understood it. IANANP or a physician, but every bit of information I have seen on the matter emphasizes not inhaling radioactive dust/gas or consuming something contaminated. The 4,000 thyroid cancer cases caused by Chernobyl was in children that consumed cow's milk contaminated by iodine 131 fallout on the grass the cattle ate. A very nasty business indeed. Clearly a high acute dose, about 1000 times background level, can be lethal in a small percentage of cases, but if short term low-level exposure was dangerous people would die all the time from flying on commercial airliners, where you get about 200x background exposure.
It's not nurture making the first-born smarter, it's the first born bullying and dominating the younger syblings to make them stupider and less sure of their intelligence.
Hey we extend immunity to Russel Crowe, he just has to pay a small fee to beat hotel workers about the head with a phone.
Haha! Mod parent funny.
Actually it's cool to see someone cares. I think I saw one in a museum once.
The boxes they were using in Texas before the time warner buy out were bad. After Time Warner switched over to their software they became unusable. Pushing the fast forward button on the remote usually resulted in the system becoming stuck for 5 to 10 minutes as it zipped forward an hour or two through the program. We finally had to kick them to the curb, it was just unwatchable.
Spinal Tap was a real band in the late 70's and early 80s. Its been an inside and ongoing joke on the internet now for 20 years to pretend that Spinal Tap is really a parody of a rock band. After the joke had been going around for a while, the band made a movie thats a parody of a rock n' roll parody to capitalize on it.
Tenet could have used his buearcratic super powers to save us all if only the wicked witch and dumbo the flying elephant hadn't stopped him.
Maybe a souless multi-billion dollar corporation stole ideals from other companies and used slave labor in a totalitarian state to make Gigadollars from it. Nahhh, that never happens in the real world.
I am not talking street thugs, but former cops from the tough side of town with connections to local law enforcement, for some pro-active security. Coddling and hiding from these 'activist' will only make the situation worse for academic labs.
Now that sounds like Sony.
I suspect that Sony is so focused on the quick buck that they forced the devs to build on an existing engine that was already so ad-hoc that the possibility of understanding the future implications was next to impossible, but who know.
One of the things I like best about DAOC and WoW is how stylistic they are. Have you ever considered putting style and class above polygon count?
From all i ever heard about it, it sounded like it would be EQ with lightsabres and blasters intead of swords and bows - same game with differents models and labels.
I never had a positive experience with a GM on any MMO.
I hear this all the time as the drug companies excuse for charging 10x more in the states as elsewhere, but where is the proof? Where are the numbers to prove it?
These companies know that American prosperity can only last so long, and they are going to bleed the golden goose for as much as they can, because Europe and Asia already have laws on the books making it illegal to extort money from sick people.
That's why this type of pseudo-science is so dangerous, it convinces people that exotic pets like Velociraptors, Pot-Belly Pigs, Marsupial Lions and Trolls are harmless. Sure, they are cute when they are little, but these animals are aggressive living things. Once they are grown - most people find they can't afford to buy the hundreds of pounds of meat these animals need to eat each day. So they drive out to the edge of town and dump the animals to fend for themselves.
The Florida everglades have been decimated by the Asian Pot-Belly Swine. During the height of the Pot-Belly craze in the 80's, millions of elderly couples purchased these cute piglets. When the animals grew to adulthood and their retired owners could no longer take care of them, they dumped them in the swamp. Now active living communities across the state are overrun with alligators, because the porcine infestation has destroyed the alligators native habitat.
This could be used to make it illegal to buy certain types of software from sources outside the country. Foreign developers would have to be licensed by the American Association of Software Engineers or whatever it would be called, of course they would have to take the licensing tests in person and reside in the country before being allowed to practise.
Open Source Software would need to be reviewed in depth, audited and approved by the licensing society before it could be used business or technical projects, but I don't think it would kill off OSS.
There would have to be a lot more software developers, they would need to be paid a lot more and they would need to have more control over the product.
This device was used to determine longitude, not latitude.
I assume that IGN is talking about jobs in the silicon valley area. 60,000k isn't much there. I was offered half again as much to take a job in Cali 8 years ago fresh out of school - I declined and am still employeed living in a house that would cost $3M on the west coast. Of course, the weather isn't as nice...
If you have an accurate model of what the sky looks like, you where you are and what time it is.
There are a lot more theorticians than there are observing astronomers.
If the vendor that supplied the board is now defunct, then you would have to reverse engineer the driver - which could take a lot of time and resources, depending on how much you know about the hardware and how complex the system is. The board is probably an ISA bus interface and you would be hard pressed to find a modern motherboard with ISA slots.
One of the posters above recommended National Instruments, their development suite is great for data acquisition - but it's gonna cost some bucks.
A lot of A/D hardware vendors offer good support for linux, writing drivers for linux is a lot easier than writing them for windows.
My suggestion would be to keep the system limping along until the A/D board dies. Money that "just isn't there" has a tendency to appear when a system someone needs goes to shit.
Maybe in the UK they don't differentiate between an Engineering type curriculm and a Business based one.
Good reason not to go to Cameroon.