Except don't most major companies now include a clause where they say they have the right to change the contract at any time with the canges being binding? Technically, you did not agree with the changes, but you did agree with the initial condition of giving up your rights of re-negotiating the contract. *wrinkles nose* That said, I'm not sure if this type of clause has ever been challenged and if so, what the end conditions were, but I suspect that anything beyond a very minor change would not go through. ^_^ So changing your company's address does not require a re-review of contract, but adding a $250 user fee does.
"bronchitis" ^_^ Sorry, as someone who contracted a case of this almost every year of elementary school (It started in first grade and the only exception was in fifth grade when I got pneumonia instead), I'm well familiar with the word.
As for the psychology angle, it actually worked the opposite way for my mother and her family. My grandmother's family had suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for years, but it wasn't until my mother did a case study of her family for a class that they realized that there actually was a problem there. *shrug* Neurosis is funny that way, as some degree of it is perfectly acceptable in society. And since it largely happened within the home, my mother and her siblings thought it was perfectly normal for some mothers to get up at 4AM to clean the house or to stop in the middle of a desolate highway so they could get out and check for the body of the pedestrian that my grandmother was sure she'd hit. Since the day my mother realized that, the family's remained aware of possible symptoms and can lead largely normal lives. (My grandmother still asks us if she just hit someone when we're out driving, but she's believes us when we tell her she didn't.)
*wry grin* Assuming it's not one of these guys who's created a "lorem ipsum" generator and is looking for work such as the person running the website mentioned above.
Oddly enough, I'm not so sure this is offtopic. Isn't there something to be said about signal to noise ratios? {ducks}
Speaking as someone who works on windows machines all day doing tech support for end users (on verticle market database frontends) I can honestly 90% of all bluescreens are caused by hardware problems or buggy device drivers.
Out of curiousity, is this based upon your own expert opinion or from the messages Windows gives after a crash? I personally find it mildly suspicious that every problem in Windows XP is definitely due to device drivers according to Microsoft, and yet they can't seem to tell us what device driver caused the problem...
There's a lot of discussion in this topic about the dangers of sensing the motion with your inner ear and having conflicts with the visual perception that you're moving. I remember about 5 years ago, there was mention in a video games magazine of a device that hooked to your forehead and transmitted vibrations that fooled your inner ear into believing you were moving. Did that ever go anywhere? Is it like Smell-O-Vision, just never caught on? Or were there too many testers with jellied brains?
^_^ Hermit crabs also, although you have to get one with a relatively low weight and generally with some degree of purchase on the inside. Also has the benefit that, unlike a hermit crab normally walking about, they find it very hard to scurry under beds and the like. Plus, less chance of accidentally stepping on them. (unlike most small mammals, the hermit crab response to a looming presence is to hide in their shell which generally offers no protection against a descending foot although shell fragments convinces you to never do it twice, at least with bare feet, I've heard.
Now what was always funny to me were the animals in the wheels who would bring the wheel to high speed, then grip the floor so that they spin around a couple times.
And, FYI, walking/running on a treadmill is a whole lot better for you than walking/running outside. Less impact on your knees from irregular terrain, no shin splints, etc..
I'm guessing you're referring to running on pavement. *shudder* Man's feet really are not built for running on that kind of unyielding surface. I much prefer running over dirt and grass. More yielding to the ankles and, in my uneducated opinion, gives you more variety of movement because you have to deal with the ground not being perfectly even. I only have the anecdotal evidence, but I've had friends who tried running to lose weight (Obviously they weren't that bad off if they started off with running rather than walking without difficulty) and they lost weight more readily when they started doing so on uneven ground rather than pounding the pavement.
More on subject for the topic, this unevenness of ground is not likely to be replicated, but that's probably all for the best. *wry grin* Could you imagine the lawsuits over sprained and broken ankles if they started tilting these floorboards? I do agree that motion-sickness could be a problem although thankfully, I'm one of those people who don't get motion sick. (Well, except for the first time I played Doom, but I think that was partly the fluidly swaying crotch-height weapons...)
That said, I always kind of like the look of the giant trackballs. Were those ever used outside of a movie? I seem to remember seeing examples in Ghost in the Machine and in some low-budget movie about a toy robot (built as a mobile adversary for "cops and robbers) who started accessing its earlier homicidal programming (seems the programmer used to work for the Army developing Killbots and re-used code).
Honestly, after they release a news story detailing a virus and how it spread, how long did they expect it to take for someone to attach a damaging payload? *wry grin* It's that dual problem that if you report details of the threat, someone's bound to use them, but if you don't list details, people may not know how to protect themselves. Still, you'd think they'd give the phone companies some lead time to plug holes before releasing it in public back when it was still a fairly innocent payload. If I were more paranoid, I might wonder if they didn't announce it knowing that it would create more news that way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, as I've only seen a few peripheral numpads (generally for laptops), but my impression is that they tend to be built the same way as the average computer keyboard. You know, where you can't press two keys at the same time if they're in the same row? If this device allows you to detect which keys are pressed as individual signals, then chording is much more feasible. And I would not be surprised if they indeed allow for multiple keys being pressed as this is one of the major problems with playing FPS games using a keyboard.
I believe they put one of those out. For FPS games, it was The Claw. Basic idea was that you rested your hand in a vaguely hand-shaped mold and pushed buttons at your fingertips along with some decently sophisticated macro changes so that the buttons could be easily modified.
For RTS games, there were a few devices out. Out the top of my head there was the N-50 Speedpad which involved a one-hand control with 10 buttons, a directional pad, and the usual ability to map macros and the like. There was at least one other I saw advertised... looked vaguely like the Atari Jaguar controller complete with 50+ buttons.
Honestly, I have never seen either of the devices in use, but the people who reviewed them always seemed to find them handy. I suspect it's like buying an X-Arcade stick for playing MAME games, something that you do if you're hardcore, but probably not worth the cost for a casual gamer.
As a parent poster noted, one of the purposes of seatbelts is to keep people from going through the windshield or, worse, the engine block. I think the best quote I saw for that was from 8-Bit Theatre where Black Mage comments on how his lack of a seatbelt will allow him to be "thrown free of the wreck to safety" with Red Mage retorting that indeed it will, except that it will also throw him "through the shattering window which would more closely resemble a cloud of high-veloity multi-faceted razor blades." Also, in a car crash, it is in one's best interest to be kept within the car during the crash because the car provides a protecting structure. In comparison, on a motorcycle, there's nothing really to get thrown through and there's no real protection in staying with your vehicle. (Perhaps it's even worse due to the likelihood of getting pinned between the bike and the pavement)
In actuality, I suspect the answer is more grounded in custom. Motorcyclists have never had seatbelts and often haven't even worn helmets or protective clothing, so they're not required to. Probably the same reason busses lack seatbelts. (Although some school busses are installing them, probably to forestall lawsuits.) Similarly, AFAIK, if your car was built before seat-belts were required to be installed, you're not obliged to wear them.
More along the the lines of the topic, I'm mildly leery of firewalls being required to be installed. If they were, I'd say that they should by default only block ports that a typical user wouldn't need. And there should be a nice error message as to why as well as a big help section in the back of the manual about what to do when such an error message occurs. Otherwise, we're bound to get a lot of users claiming "their machine is broken."
{narrows eyes} You're not a metrologist, are you? {shakes his head} I work in that field and some of the things you have to deal with at that level... for one, you're right in that weight and mass become somewhat less related. Gravity is not a constant, as convenient as it is to consider it such. In fact, in any area where they're doing precision calibration of standards, they will have recorded what the value of gravity is in that location, usually affected mostly by elevation. ^_^ Then there's that classic question of which weighs more, a kilogram of lead or a kilogram of magnesium. The first one weighs more. Yes, they're the same mass, but at high levels of precision, the buoyancy of the air makes a difference.
*wry grin* And yes, I'm getting off-topic here in a lot of ways. As for the difference in prefixes, I'm all for standardization. Honestly, how often have you seen computer manufacturers label a hard drive as being 100 GB, but when you look at the drive, you find out it's listed as 93 GB? Because standardization of the prefixes is still not, well, standard, they're technically not lying. In actuality... *grumble*
Bleh. I know better than that IE was the first browser. I apologize for stating things in a manner that suggested otherwise. I had Firefox on my mind because I was trying to convert some friends to it recently after I'd already converted myself. And while Firefox is based on earlier Netscape browsers as far as I understand, I tend to see it as its own product. IE has had its chance to worm its way into peoples' minds. And, for better or worse, it proved itself as a browser for years. I liked Netscape Navigator, but IE worked better, at least for me. And, well, which one stuck around? Since Netscape kind of dropped out, Microsoft hasn't bothered updating IE, so it's been passed up by Firefox and Opera (and probably a dozen others I barely know) which I feel have become serious competitors. However, at the core of it, we're dealing with the fact that people are used to how IE works, wrong as it is. And I don't think we're going to have much luck converting them within existing formats.
IE makes some bad bad mistakes in the way it renders and handles pages. Unfortunately people have built their websites around that IE functionality.
*wry grin* Bingo. People are designing their webpages according to IE because it was there first and was the better browser for years. I've tried converting people to FireFox, particularly after all this publicity about browser exploits, but the fact is it doesn't always work the same and even if that's the result of Microsoft not properly handling HTML, that's what people are used to. I think it was Brinks in The Mythical Man Month who noted that when you tried to replace a system, you had to not only have it make all the correct responses, but also have it create the incorrect ones that people were used to. In that case, he was talking about people using the "garbage" in the registers when the OS started because it had some predictable properties.
At one time, completing high school was necessary or else you'd be stuck with a menial labor job. Then, getting a bachelor's degree was necessary or else you'd get stuck doing fast food. Honestly, I don't know how much longer it will be before a bachelor's degree isn't enough and people will only hire those with a Master's degree or higher... *shrug* In a sense, a college education is becoming worth less. Still, I'd say that it's necessary. Having skills will enable you to keep your job. Having that piece of sheepskin gets you in.
And yes, there are scattered cases of people who eschewed college and did very well. I'd wager there are even more people who didn't attend college and wound up in fast food. A degree gets your foot in the door.
I didn't learn to touch type for years. It wasn't required in High School (Ok, we had one teacher who tried to get us to do it, but I only did touch-typing when she was watching. Otherwise, I'd use my usual methods and easily reach the typing speeds she was suggesting. *wry grin* And that using only my index fingers...) and I knew enough from working with computers to be able to type at a reasonable speed, enough to keep up with my thoughts most of the time. (Copying text, as people have mentioned, tends to be different.) It was only in the last year that I started learning proper touch typing. (I'd been assimilating some parts of it, using my thumb for the space key and utilizing all the fingers but my little finger for something on the keyboard) The reason? It's a little game called Typing of the Dead. ^_^ For those not familiar with the game, they basically took House of the Dead 2 and changed your method of taking down zombies from using a light gun to typing in the words and phrases above their heads. After a few goes at playing the game with my usual typing led to repeated deaths (the in-game animation during the tutorial of the guy getting whacked by zombies because he keeps glancing away from them to his keyboard is pretty accurate...), so I took their tutorials and started learning touch-typing. ^_^ And it's actually pretty fun. Personally, I think every school should include this game in their curriculum if they want to teach typing.
Unsolicited advertising aside, when I first learned to type (back as a little kid, probably somewhere around 1st grade), I remember learning the keyboard as a series of word-pictures. I knew that "print" involved kind of a lasso picture on the keyboard as you hit the keys. Ditto with things like "goto" or "input." (Yes, I made my start with BASIC. Please, look away from my shame...) Anyone else find themselves learning this way? You know, seeing the words as chunks to type rather than parsing it as letters initially?
While the near-cessation of credit card ads has been a godsend, the election messages seem to be getting worse. *wry grin* My tax dollars going to work so that my time can be wasted with a pre-recorded advertisement for a candidate I've no interest in voting for.
And is it me or have the people who used to do credit card calls all switched over to doing "non-profit" debt consolidation services. Heck, for all I know, the actual debt consolidation service is really non-profit, but I suspect the telemarketers are still making a bundle making calls for them.
Sadly, the filters here at work prevent me from reading the list, as it has "xxx" in the title. Meh, probably all the better for keeping me from wasting company time, right? 'Course they'd be better off filtering Slashdot for doing that...
Eh... I would assume your eye doctor has already ruled out the possibility, but the latter condition sounds like a classic case of lazy eye except that that generally originates only in children. As you describe, one of the eyes does not see as well, so the brain learns to shut off input from that eye. If not corrected (generally with eyepatches on the "good" eye to force the other eye to process information), permanent loss of vision in the right eye can occur.
*wry grin* I wonder how often someone's had no heartbeat and people have applied the device but were convinced it was malfunctioning "because it didn't start their heart back up." Blame Hollywood for its depiction of defibrillators being used to start back up hearts, I guess.
^_^ Sadly, it took me several seconds to realize that you were checking for the tatoo when ripping off the shirt to see if they should be saved. {shakes head} Horomonal teenagers these days...
I believe that continuously throttling would add more moving parts to wear out. *shrug* Maybe pulses aren't necessary. After all, we don't see propellors (other than hippopotami with their excrement...) or wheels in nature, yet it's much easier for us to design those than planes with flapping wings or vehicles with legs.
You forgot 3) All involved have to be emotionally mature.
Great, there goes the world population... most people never reach that point. Personally, I feel that people shouldn't have sex unless they're prepared to be a parent. Because honestly, that's what sex does and every form of contraception short of removal of ovaries and testes is just gambling that nature won't find a way. At that, not only wanting to be a parent, but to actually be capable of it. *sigh* Weird though, our children are becoming sexually mature earlier and yet actual maturity seems to come later and later...
Actually, there are a few perfect methods. Total removal of the ovaries for the female, or removal of the entire testicles for men. (Well, for the men, you have to wait a few days to be sure it's entirely out of the system) Next effective are the less dramatic methods of sterilization such as tube-tying and vasectomies where the failure rate is pretty much insignificant. If someone gets pregnant in those cases, I figure someone's trying to tell them something. *wry grin* Those methods are also highly effective because they basically have identical rates for perfect usage and practical usage. Next up would be a tie between the Natural Family Planning (symptothermal) method (no, it's not the rhythmm method *sigh*) and use of birth control pills, both of which have have a rate of 99.99% or so for proper usage and a rate closer to 80% for the average user. And abortion as birth control... *shudder* I'm not going to even comment on that.
Personally, I feel that sex should be possible for anyone who is physically mature (which is about 12 and up these days AFAIK) and mentally mature (which seems to not happen before age 30 for msot people, if it ever does) enough for it.
I will assume that he's not a connosieur of brains of any sort? In Kentucky, supposedly the danger comes from eating squirrel brains. I know I've seen sheep's brains on menus before, so I guess that couldn't be so far-fetched.
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Except don't most major companies now include a clause where they say they have the right to change the contract at any time with the canges being binding? Technically, you did not agree with the changes, but you did agree with the initial condition of giving up your rights of re-negotiating the contract. *wrinkles nose* That said, I'm not sure if this type of clause has ever been challenged and if so, what the end conditions were, but I suspect that anything beyond a very minor change would not go through. ^_^ So changing your company's address does not require a re-review of contract, but adding a $250 user fee does.
As for the psychology angle, it actually worked the opposite way for my mother and her family. My grandmother's family had suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for years, but it wasn't until my mother did a case study of her family for a class that they realized that there actually was a problem there. *shrug* Neurosis is funny that way, as some degree of it is perfectly acceptable in society. And since it largely happened within the home, my mother and her siblings thought it was perfectly normal for some mothers to get up at 4AM to clean the house or to stop in the middle of a desolate highway so they could get out and check for the body of the pedestrian that my grandmother was sure she'd hit. Since the day my mother realized that, the family's remained aware of possible symptoms and can lead largely normal lives. (My grandmother still asks us if she just hit someone when we're out driving, but she's believes us when we tell her she didn't.)
Oddly enough, I'm not so sure this is offtopic. Isn't there something to be said about signal to noise ratios? {ducks}
Speaking as someone who works on windows machines all day doing tech support for end users (on verticle market database frontends) I can honestly 90% of all bluescreens are caused by hardware problems or buggy device drivers.
Out of curiousity, is this based upon your own expert opinion or from the messages Windows gives after a crash? I personally find it mildly suspicious that every problem in Windows XP is definitely due to device drivers according to Microsoft, and yet they can't seem to tell us what device driver caused the problem...
There's a lot of discussion in this topic about the dangers of sensing the motion with your inner ear and having conflicts with the visual perception that you're moving. I remember about 5 years ago, there was mention in a video games magazine of a device that hooked to your forehead and transmitted vibrations that fooled your inner ear into believing you were moving. Did that ever go anywhere? Is it like Smell-O-Vision, just never caught on? Or were there too many testers with jellied brains?
Now what was always funny to me were the animals in the wheels who would bring the wheel to high speed, then grip the floor so that they spin around a couple times.
I'm guessing you're referring to running on pavement. *shudder* Man's feet really are not built for running on that kind of unyielding surface. I much prefer running over dirt and grass. More yielding to the ankles and, in my uneducated opinion, gives you more variety of movement because you have to deal with the ground not being perfectly even. I only have the anecdotal evidence, but I've had friends who tried running to lose weight (Obviously they weren't that bad off if they started off with running rather than walking without difficulty) and they lost weight more readily when they started doing so on uneven ground rather than pounding the pavement.
More on subject for the topic, this unevenness of ground is not likely to be replicated, but that's probably all for the best. *wry grin* Could you imagine the lawsuits over sprained and broken ankles if they started tilting these floorboards? I do agree that motion-sickness could be a problem although thankfully, I'm one of those people who don't get motion sick. (Well, except for the first time I played Doom, but I think that was partly the fluidly swaying crotch-height weapons...)
That said, I always kind of like the look of the giant trackballs. Were those ever used outside of a movie? I seem to remember seeing examples in Ghost in the Machine and in some low-budget movie about a toy robot (built as a mobile adversary for "cops and robbers) who started accessing its earlier homicidal programming (seems the programmer used to work for the Army developing Killbots and re-used code).
Honestly, after they release a news story detailing a virus and how it spread, how long did they expect it to take for someone to attach a damaging payload? *wry grin* It's that dual problem that if you report details of the threat, someone's bound to use them, but if you don't list details, people may not know how to protect themselves. Still, you'd think they'd give the phone companies some lead time to plug holes before releasing it in public back when it was still a fairly innocent payload. If I were more paranoid, I might wonder if they didn't announce it knowing that it would create more news that way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, as I've only seen a few peripheral numpads (generally for laptops), but my impression is that they tend to be built the same way as the average computer keyboard. You know, where you can't press two keys at the same time if they're in the same row? If this device allows you to detect which keys are pressed as individual signals, then chording is much more feasible. And I would not be surprised if they indeed allow for multiple keys being pressed as this is one of the major problems with playing FPS games using a keyboard.
For RTS games, there were a few devices out. Out the top of my head there was the N-50 Speedpad which involved a one-hand control with 10 buttons, a directional pad, and the usual ability to map macros and the like. There was at least one other I saw advertised... looked vaguely like the Atari Jaguar controller complete with 50+ buttons.
Honestly, I have never seen either of the devices in use, but the people who reviewed them always seemed to find them handy. I suspect it's like buying an X-Arcade stick for playing MAME games, something that you do if you're hardcore, but probably not worth the cost for a casual gamer.
In actuality, I suspect the answer is more grounded in custom. Motorcyclists have never had seatbelts and often haven't even worn helmets or protective clothing, so they're not required to. Probably the same reason busses lack seatbelts. (Although some school busses are installing them, probably to forestall lawsuits.) Similarly, AFAIK, if your car was built before seat-belts were required to be installed, you're not obliged to wear them.
More along the the lines of the topic, I'm mildly leery of firewalls being required to be installed. If they were, I'd say that they should by default only block ports that a typical user wouldn't need. And there should be a nice error message as to why as well as a big help section in the back of the manual about what to do when such an error message occurs. Otherwise, we're bound to get a lot of users claiming "their machine is broken."
*wry grin* And yes, I'm getting off-topic here in a lot of ways. As for the difference in prefixes, I'm all for standardization. Honestly, how often have you seen computer manufacturers label a hard drive as being 100 GB, but when you look at the drive, you find out it's listed as 93 GB? Because standardization of the prefixes is still not, well, standard, they're technically not lying. In actuality... *grumble*
Bleh. I know better than that IE was the first browser. I apologize for stating things in a manner that suggested otherwise. I had Firefox on my mind because I was trying to convert some friends to it recently after I'd already converted myself. And while Firefox is based on earlier Netscape browsers as far as I understand, I tend to see it as its own product. IE has had its chance to worm its way into peoples' minds. And, for better or worse, it proved itself as a browser for years. I liked Netscape Navigator, but IE worked better, at least for me. And, well, which one stuck around? Since Netscape kind of dropped out, Microsoft hasn't bothered updating IE, so it's been passed up by Firefox and Opera (and probably a dozen others I barely know) which I feel have become serious competitors. However, at the core of it, we're dealing with the fact that people are used to how IE works, wrong as it is. And I don't think we're going to have much luck converting them within existing formats.
IE makes some bad bad mistakes in the way it renders and handles pages. Unfortunately people have built their websites around that IE functionality.
*wry grin* Bingo. People are designing their webpages according to IE because it was there first and was the better browser for years. I've tried converting people to FireFox, particularly after all this publicity about browser exploits, but the fact is it doesn't always work the same and even if that's the result of Microsoft not properly handling HTML, that's what people are used to. I think it was Brinks in The Mythical Man Month who noted that when you tried to replace a system, you had to not only have it make all the correct responses, but also have it create the incorrect ones that people were used to. In that case, he was talking about people using the "garbage" in the registers when the OS started because it had some predictable properties.
And yes, there are scattered cases of people who eschewed college and did very well. I'd wager there are even more people who didn't attend college and wound up in fast food. A degree gets your foot in the door.
Unsolicited advertising aside, when I first learned to type (back as a little kid, probably somewhere around 1st grade), I remember learning the keyboard as a series of word-pictures. I knew that "print" involved kind of a lasso picture on the keyboard as you hit the keys. Ditto with things like "goto" or "input." (Yes, I made my start with BASIC. Please, look away from my shame...) Anyone else find themselves learning this way? You know, seeing the words as chunks to type rather than parsing it as letters initially?
And is it me or have the people who used to do credit card calls all switched over to doing "non-profit" debt consolidation services. Heck, for all I know, the actual debt consolidation service is really non-profit, but I suspect the telemarketers are still making a bundle making calls for them.
Sadly, the filters here at work prevent me from reading the list, as it has "xxx" in the title. Meh, probably all the better for keeping me from wasting company time, right? 'Course they'd be better off filtering Slashdot for doing that...
Eh... I would assume your eye doctor has already ruled out the possibility, but the latter condition sounds like a classic case of lazy eye except that that generally originates only in children. As you describe, one of the eyes does not see as well, so the brain learns to shut off input from that eye. If not corrected (generally with eyepatches on the "good" eye to force the other eye to process information), permanent loss of vision in the right eye can occur.
*wry grin* I wonder how often someone's had no heartbeat and people have applied the device but were convinced it was malfunctioning "because it didn't start their heart back up." Blame Hollywood for its depiction of defibrillators being used to start back up hearts, I guess.
^_^ Sadly, it took me several seconds to realize that you were checking for the tatoo when ripping off the shirt to see if they should be saved. {shakes head} Horomonal teenagers these days...
I believe that continuously throttling would add more moving parts to wear out. *shrug* Maybe pulses aren't necessary. After all, we don't see propellors (other than hippopotami with their excrement...) or wheels in nature, yet it's much easier for us to design those than planes with flapping wings or vehicles with legs.
You forgot 3) All involved have to be emotionally mature.
Great, there goes the world population... most people never reach that point. Personally, I feel that people shouldn't have sex unless they're prepared to be a parent. Because honestly, that's what sex does and every form of contraception short of removal of ovaries and testes is just gambling that nature won't find a way. At that, not only wanting to be a parent, but to actually be capable of it. *sigh* Weird though, our children are becoming sexually mature earlier and yet actual maturity seems to come later and later...
Personally, I feel that sex should be possible for anyone who is physically mature (which is about 12 and up these days AFAIK) and mentally mature (which seems to not happen before age 30 for msot people, if it ever does) enough for it.
I will assume that he's not a connosieur of brains of any sort? In Kentucky, supposedly the danger comes from eating squirrel brains. I know I've seen sheep's brains on menus before, so I guess that couldn't be so far-fetched.