The logical conclusion I come to is that we should start focusing all of our efforts to extend and improve the lives of anyone 45 or older. If we work hard and dedicate ourselves, I expect this effort to start paying high divedends in the next 10 years.
What's that? What age am I? Well, that has nothing to do with my suggestions... *mutter*
Oh, but then if the planes actully could be flown, and landed without pilot intervention, we might think we really didn't need 2 guys making $100,000 a year sitting in the cockpit all the time. The pilot unions can't allow that!
1. There is an antenna placement conflict between GPS being line-of-sight and the covert need for police to keep the unit hidden. It is likely that there is a small, thin antenna that can be run up a seam betweeen body panels, or a thin black tape that can be run along glass next to a rubber window gasket. Point is, these things will be visible.
Wrong. Plastic and rubber do not interfere with the GPS frequency. Placing a small (less than 2"x2") patch antenna under the plastic on your bumper or just behind your grill is not a problem.
2. It has to transmit to the police or it's useless. No way you're going to get a satellite uplink from under a car so it probably just broadcasts locally on a "tweener" frequency somewhere in the police or public bands. Drive your car over to a ham radio guy's house and within 20 seconds he'll have equipment out to scan for the frequency.
Wrong. From the article it sounds like they placed the device, let it record for several weeks, then removed it and retrieved the record of his travels. Makes the device much simpler and easier to self power.
I basically agree with your other points, though, FWIW. But since I'm far more likely to fall into the "small time cheater" catagory than the "mobster" catagory, this really bothers me.
Actually reading the article, indicates that this was a recording device, not a transmitter. From the description, it was placed on his vehicle, left for several weeks, then retrieved and his travels documented. This allowed the Police to figure out where the drugs were being kept and allowed them to raid the location later.
Actually it makes a lot more sense. Once you get rid of the requirement for real-time tracking, you can remove the requirement for a transmitter. You also don't need, or really want, any sort of display on the device, not even the hollywood ubiquitous red LED. With these restrictions, I would think you could build a GPS receiver/recorder with battery power that would last 30 days, store the data in non-volatile flash, that would be cheap, smaller than a VHS tape, and magnetically mountable. Mount it to the back of the front bumber, or the front frame, run the patch antenna under the rubber on the bumper, or just behind the front grill.
Except that, in my personal case, I certainly do not want under any circumstances my email to become available to anyone after I am dead. If I wanted someone to have access to my email, I would make sure that the password was written down to be found as part of my estate. The fact that I wont do so, and the fact that the deceased in this case didn't do so, is prima facie evidence that the account should not be given over.
To continue your analogy, if I get a private safety deposit box, and tell no one about it, and leave no instruction in my will about it, while I probably can not expect to forcibly keep my heirs out of it if they find out about it, it is the best that can be done in our society addicted to personal identification. I understand that in Switzerland you actually can purchase a totally anonymous deposit box, and have anonymous bank accounts, I know that this is impossible in the U.S., having tried to do so. The only way to do so in the U.S. would be to use false identification, which brings its own legal troubles and scrutiny. Unfortunately, in meatspace there is almost no way to insure privacy, your own or that of those you correspond with, after death. One of the great boons of the online world is that you can get extremely good privacy, that will continue after death. So, if you have secrets that you want to die with you, you now actually have a way to accomplish that, and still be able to keep a record to remind yourself of it, or discuss it with others who are also in on the secret.
Personally, I insure this by hosting my own email server for any address that I use for personal correspondence. The only thing that sits on my ISP email server are garbage collecting accounts, like my slashdot addy. And yes, my personal server is as secure as I can make it, including auto-overwrite of sensitive files and logs if not disabled every insert time here.
I think the problem with all multiplayer online games is thier inherently static nature. The best non-multiplayer games are those that lead you througha story with varying abilities and tasks to accomplish, but even these, after you've played all the way through, get set aside. Sure you may go back and play the story missions of Warcraft III or Starcraft or GTA again, just to recapture a bit of the excitement you got first playing it, but if the disk dissolved after you completed the final mission, you wouldn't go drop another $50 just to replay it again.
With all of the MMOs so far it just playing the same mission over and over. Occasionally a GM will have a special quest or adventure, but if you're not able to logon at that time you are SOL. Also, sometimes the world will get an expansion, with a few new quests, but once you've accomplished those it's boring again.
Until we can get adaptive code that continually creates new adventures, with unique rewards, I think everything is going to go stale after a short while. What would be really interesting would be a game that could generate unique items/skills that were only offered to a limited number of players at any one time. Everyone would have something unique to work towards, but when you had yours, no one else could get it without trading for it from you.
That would rock. Especially if there were no way to distinguish between PC and NPC characters. You wouldn't be able to tell if the guy who's car you were jacking was which, or if the Columbian on the corner shooting at you was a rival gang member, or just a PC nut. Imagine driving down the road on a mission and all of a sudden someone on top of a building with a rocket launcher starts blowing up the traffic around you, on his own mission...
To be honest most of the comments made by players of the MMO's I've played have tended to sound an awful lot like the comments of the crowd in GTA...
and the terrain was a little flat and featureless.
Ummm... You did read the Title, right?
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
As the father of a 12 y.o. boy, I'll say you are partially right.
It is the fault of the parents, but buying or not buying the game has nothing to do with it. My son is a straight A student in a Magnet school, well on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout, and does volunteer projects all the time.
He and I both also happen to share GTA tips with each other. I have no fear that he is going to start jacking cars and beating up whores any time soon, or ever. On the other hand, I took away his Tony Hawks game the other day because he was trying to do stunts he saw in the game along the curb with traffic driving down the street.
He knows very well the difference between right and wrong, and fantasy and reality. He can easily tell that jacking a car or shooting someone is something totally unacceptable in real life, however, he is right at that age when seeing "cool stunts" in a video game makes him think he can do it in real life. I think Tony Hawks and other T and E games can lead to much more harm than something like GTA, for kids that are raised well. As a parent, if you spend any time with your kids at all, it is easy to teach them that stealing and aggressive behavior is wrong. It is a much harder line to draw between encouraging your kids to do well at something they enjoy, and protecting them from going too far.
And don't even get me started on the bad dancing DDR is teaching he and his friends....
The only current "direct" route is IH-35. They recently widened a 20 mile or so section just south of DFW. It took about 5 years, and during that entire time, you could expect those 20 miles of 65 mph freeway to take you 2-3 hours to drive. This is also a section that is basically in the middle of no where. Going through the DFW area, where for 5 hours per day traffic crawls at 10-20 mph, widening would require buying out and bulldozing major hotels, convention centers, and hospitals, not to mention the countless neighborhoods you would destroy. Widening one 10 mile stretch of IH-635 is projected to cost over $310 million in the next few years, and to do it they are going to have to put the new lanes in tunnels under the old ones, because adjacent right-of-way, even at eminent domain prices, is far too expensive.
The point of building a new, severly limited access interstate is to move the approximately 45% of traffic coming to-from Mexico that only stops in Texas for gas and lodging out of the major travel ways for intra-state traffic.
Actually it all depends on the initial planning. The whole point to the current design is to drastically limit the number of connecting ramps. The current design calls for designated rest-gas stops that only have access on and off the freeway lanes, no connections for local traffic, and ramps leading to other, existing freeways for access into the current commercial and industrial centers. Basically it would come up on the west side of say, DFW and to actually go into the metroplex, you would have to exit onto IH-20 or IH-30 to then get into town.
No way do those areas account for 30% of the world's GDP. In fact, doing a little research reveals that if you assume that the wave would totally destroy the economies of all of Great Britian, France, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Spain, New York, Florida, South Africa, New Jersey, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Portugal, Connecticut, Morocco, South Carolina, Ireland, Washington DC, Delaware, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island, it only accounts for 23% of the world GDP. That's the top 25 jurisdictions that would be affected, and the smallest of those is 0.07% of world GDP.
Once again, that is if all production in all of those areas were totally destroyed, not just the 1-10 miles nearest the coast. In addition, if everyone in all of those areas were killed, it would still only be 10% of the world population.
Admittedly were talking about just over 661 million people, but once again that covers all of Brazil, all of Mexico, all of New York, etc., not just those within whatever arbitrary distance of the coast you want to assign.
So as I said in my first post,
Would it be bad? Yeah. But not a world or humanity ending event.
Not armageddon. The east coast of the Americas, and the european/african west coast are still a tiny portion of the globe, and an even tinier portion of living humanity, let alone living beings.
Would it be bad? Yeah. But not a world or humanity ending event.
Amen to that. I firmly support mandatory, reversible sterilization for everyone at the onset of puberty. Then when, and if, a couple wants to have children and can prove the resources, and go through the training to have children, the sterility would be reveresed.
You see that is exactly the problem. You don't care that you violate the intended use of the distributor. But in answer to your question, yes I am saying that the distributor has explicit say in how you use his intellectual property. You have no rights codified in law at all, except those that the distributor chooses to allow to you. You may choose to violate the civil contract which you agree to by opening the package, (region encoding information readable on the outside of the package is sufficient notification of that portion of the "contract" you are agreeing to) however in the eyes of the court, importing a region encoded player, or a region free player, into a non-approved region is exactly as bad of a violation of civil law as your ripping and sharing that intellectual property on a P2P network.
Slashdot Mirror
The logical conclusion I come to is that we should start focusing all of our efforts to extend and improve the lives of anyone 45 or older. If we work hard and dedicate ourselves, I expect this effort to start paying high divedends in the next 10 years.
What's that? What age am I? Well, that has nothing to do with my suggestions... *mutter*
So now the crazy guy on the subway waving his arms around and talking to himself, is only just trying out his new phone?
Oh, but then if the planes actully could be flown, and landed without pilot intervention, we might think we really didn't need 2 guys making $100,000 a year sitting in the cockpit all the time. The pilot unions can't allow that!
Wrong. Plastic and rubber do not interfere with the GPS frequency. Placing a small (less than 2"x2") patch antenna under the plastic on your bumper or just behind your grill is not a problem.
Wrong. From the article it sounds like they placed the device, let it record for several weeks, then removed it and retrieved the record of his travels. Makes the device much simpler and easier to self power.
I basically agree with your other points, though, FWIW. But since I'm far more likely to fall into the "small time cheater" catagory than the "mobster" catagory, this really bothers me.
Actually reading the article, indicates that this was a recording device, not a transmitter. From the description, it was placed on his vehicle, left for several weeks, then retrieved and his travels documented. This allowed the Police to figure out where the drugs were being kept and allowed them to raid the location later.
Actually it makes a lot more sense. Once you get rid of the requirement for real-time tracking, you can remove the requirement for a transmitter. You also don't need, or really want, any sort of display on the device, not even the hollywood ubiquitous red LED. With these restrictions, I would think you could build a GPS receiver/recorder with battery power that would last 30 days, store the data in non-volatile flash, that would be cheap, smaller than a VHS tape, and magnetically mountable. Mount it to the back of the front bumber, or the front frame, run the patch antenna under the rubber on the bumper, or just behind the front grill.
Except that, in my personal case, I certainly do not want under any circumstances my email to become available to anyone after I am dead. If I wanted someone to have access to my email, I would make sure that the password was written down to be found as part of my estate. The fact that I wont do so, and the fact that the deceased in this case didn't do so, is prima facie evidence that the account should not be given over.
To continue your analogy, if I get a private safety deposit box, and tell no one about it, and leave no instruction in my will about it, while I probably can not expect to forcibly keep my heirs out of it if they find out about it, it is the best that can be done in our society addicted to personal identification. I understand that in Switzerland you actually can purchase a totally anonymous deposit box, and have anonymous bank accounts, I know that this is impossible in the U.S., having tried to do so. The only way to do so in the U.S. would be to use false identification, which brings its own legal troubles and scrutiny. Unfortunately, in meatspace there is almost no way to insure privacy, your own or that of those you correspond with, after death. One of the great boons of the online world is that you can get extremely good privacy, that will continue after death. So, if you have secrets that you want to die with you, you now actually have a way to accomplish that, and still be able to keep a record to remind yourself of it, or discuss it with others who are also in on the secret.
Personally, I insure this by hosting my own email server for any address that I use for personal correspondence. The only thing that sits on my ISP email server are garbage collecting accounts, like my slashdot addy. And yes, my personal server is as secure as I can make it, including auto-overwrite of sensitive files and logs if not disabled every insert time here.
Those are all possible uses.
What the GP was asking was, can you point to any actual, commercially available titles that utilize muliple camera angles, that are non-porn?
Bet you can't.
Yeah, I just loved the irony of someone named nomadic complaining about the flatness and lack of features in the desert.*grin*
One of those posts that goes into my list of classic slashdot comments.
Maybe saying the same thing...
I think the problem with all multiplayer online games is thier inherently static nature. The best non-multiplayer games are those that lead you througha story with varying abilities and tasks to accomplish, but even these, after you've played all the way through, get set aside. Sure you may go back and play the story missions of Warcraft III or Starcraft or GTA again, just to recapture a bit of the excitement you got first playing it, but if the disk dissolved after you completed the final mission, you wouldn't go drop another $50 just to replay it again.
With all of the MMOs so far it just playing the same mission over and over. Occasionally a GM will have a special quest or adventure, but if you're not able to logon at that time you are SOL. Also, sometimes the world will get an expansion, with a few new quests, but once you've accomplished those it's boring again.
Until we can get adaptive code that continually creates new adventures, with unique rewards, I think everything is going to go stale after a short while. What would be really interesting would be a game that could generate unique items/skills that were only offered to a limited number of players at any one time. Everyone would have something unique to work towards, but when you had yours, no one else could get it without trading for it from you.
That would rock. Especially if there were no way to distinguish between PC and NPC characters. You wouldn't be able to tell if the guy who's car you were jacking was which, or if the Columbian on the corner shooting at you was a rival gang member, or just a PC nut. Imagine driving down the road on a mission and all of a sudden someone on top of a building with a rocket launcher starts blowing up the traffic around you, on his own mission...
To be honest most of the comments made by players of the MMO's I've played have tended to sound an awful lot like the comments of the crowd in GTA...
Not according to my divorce lawyer.
Alimony sucks.
Ummm... You did read the Title, right?
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
We miss you DNA
You haven't read the Bible much have you? That's actually a pretty good description of God in his own words according the old testament.
But then, as my pastor used to say, I'm only human and so not fit to judge the morality of the supreme being, or the reasons for his actions.
As the father of a 12 y.o. boy, I'll say you are partially right.
It is the fault of the parents, but buying or not buying the game has nothing to do with it. My son is a straight A student in a Magnet school, well on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout, and does volunteer projects all the time.
He and I both also happen to share GTA tips with each other. I have no fear that he is going to start jacking cars and beating up whores any time soon, or ever. On the other hand, I took away his Tony Hawks game the other day because he was trying to do stunts he saw in the game along the curb with traffic driving down the street.
He knows very well the difference between right and wrong, and fantasy and reality. He can easily tell that jacking a car or shooting someone is something totally unacceptable in real life, however, he is right at that age when seeing "cool stunts" in a video game makes him think he can do it in real life. I think Tony Hawks and other T and E games can lead to much more harm than something like GTA, for kids that are raised well. As a parent, if you spend any time with your kids at all, it is easy to teach them that stealing and aggressive behavior is wrong. It is a much harder line to draw between encouraging your kids to do well at something they enjoy, and protecting them from going too far.
And don't even get me started on the bad dancing DDR is teaching he and his friends....
No, no, no... this is after all night frag session "warming up" for the big event. I just want the bawls concession.
Well... to put this in perspective.
The only current "direct" route is IH-35. They recently widened a 20 mile or so section just south of DFW. It took about 5 years, and during that entire time, you could expect those 20 miles of 65 mph freeway to take you 2-3 hours to drive. This is also a section that is basically in the middle of no where. Going through the DFW area, where for 5 hours per day traffic crawls at 10-20 mph, widening would require buying out and bulldozing major hotels, convention centers, and hospitals, not to mention the countless neighborhoods you would destroy. Widening one 10 mile stretch of IH-635 is projected to cost over $310 million in the next few years, and to do it they are going to have to put the new lanes in tunnels under the old ones, because adjacent right-of-way, even at eminent domain prices, is far too expensive.
The point of building a new, severly limited access interstate is to move the approximately 45% of traffic coming to-from Mexico that only stops in Texas for gas and lodging out of the major travel ways for intra-state traffic.
Actually it all depends on the initial planning. The whole point to the current design is to drastically limit the number of connecting ramps. The current design calls for designated rest-gas stops that only have access on and off the freeway lanes, no connections for local traffic, and ramps leading to other, existing freeways for access into the current commercial and industrial centers. Basically it would come up on the west side of say, DFW and to actually go into the metroplex, you would have to exit onto IH-20 or IH-30 to then get into town.
No way do those areas account for 30% of the world's GDP. In fact, doing a little research reveals that if you assume that the wave would totally destroy the economies of all of Great Britian, France, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Spain, New York, Florida, South Africa, New Jersey, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Portugal, Connecticut, Morocco, South Carolina, Ireland, Washington DC, Delaware, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island, it only accounts for 23% of the world GDP. That's the top 25 jurisdictions that would be affected, and the smallest of those is 0.07% of world GDP.
Once again, that is if all production in all of those areas were totally destroyed, not just the 1-10 miles nearest the coast. In addition, if everyone in all of those areas were killed, it would still only be 10% of the world population.
Admittedly were talking about just over 661 million people, but once again that covers all of Brazil, all of Mexico, all of New York, etc., not just those within whatever arbitrary distance of the coast you want to assign.
So as I said in my first post,
Would it be bad? Yeah. But not a world or humanity ending event.
Not armageddon. The east coast of the Americas, and the european/african west coast are still a tiny portion of the globe, and an even tinier portion of living humanity, let alone living beings.
Would it be bad? Yeah. But not a world or humanity ending event.
Amen to that. I firmly support mandatory, reversible sterilization for everyone at the onset of puberty. Then when, and if, a couple wants to have children and can prove the resources, and go through the training to have children, the sterility would be reveresed.
Good thing that before this eeeevil laser was invented, the world was safe from stupid kids
Ob: You're new here, aren't you?
I hear Taco Bell has been working on that for years. Still minimal success.
You see that is exactly the problem. You don't care that you violate the intended use of the distributor. But in answer to your question, yes I am saying that the distributor has explicit say in how you use his intellectual property. You have no rights codified in law at all, except those that the distributor chooses to allow to you. You may choose to violate the civil contract which you agree to by opening the package, (region encoding information readable on the outside of the package is sufficient notification of that portion of the "contract" you are agreeing to) however in the eyes of the court, importing a region encoded player, or a region free player, into a non-approved region is exactly as bad of a violation of civil law as your ripping and sharing that intellectual property on a P2P network.