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User: zippthorne

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  1. Re: Something Else on The NFL Wants You To Think These Things Are Illegal · · Score: 1

    What I always find amazing year after year in this game is the technology. I don't think there are many spy agencies, let alone games that have this level of advanced tech. They got drawing plays on your screen before the weatherman got green screens. They got automated wire cameras before traffic cams.

    They did however do bullet-time wrong. Tried to cheap out with far too few cameras, using "interpolated" frames to pad out the motion.

  2. Re:To boldly go where no . . . on NASA Launches Satellite To Observe Soil Moisture · · Score: 1

    Perhaps recorded history only starts now.. you know, with the satellite...

  3. Re:Why even use a webcam? on Ask Slashdot: Is There a Modern IP Webcam That Lets the User Control the Output? · · Score: 1

    Surely the best idea is to continue to use the marker board, and type the freaking menu into the website. That way it will be easy to read for everyone, especially those with poor vision (through larger fonts), no vision (through screen readers), or using mobile devices (probably the most likely device someone would use for finding a restaurant, actually. Definitely the most likely device someone would use from within the restaurant if they don't have a good view of the board).

  4. Re:Double Irish? TAX ALL FOREIGNERS!!! on Obama Proposes One-Time Tax On $2 Trillion US Companies Hold Overseas · · Score: 1

    So, you want them to stop "leaching [education, etc.] off society" by.. discontinuing hiring people here?

  5. Re:Anyone know how Zotac cards hold up? on GeForce GTX 980 and 970 Cards From MSI, EVGA, and Zotac Reviewed · · Score: 1

    ...their caps on their average boards now are military grade.

    I was surprised that this is part of the marketing for gaming graphics cards. I'm curious as to what specification or certification qualifies them for this classification. I'm also curious as to whether this means that they're better than "consumer" grade, and if so, if that means they're better for consumer uses.

    I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to go to a restaurant offering "military grade" cuisine...

  6. Re:I doubt it on Inside the Largest Virtual Psychology Lab In the World · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A/B testing is using feedback from your users to determine how to configure your product so that it is most useful to them. What LoL seems to be doing is using feedback from their product to change the users to be more useful...

  7. The real problem on Doxing -- Something To Expect More of In 2015 · · Score: 1

    The ones who get elected will be the the ones that the holders of the information choose - they simply won't reveal their video rental habits or out-of-context emails.

    So, if, hypothetically, some agency were logging all of the internet activity of everyone, they'd have a lot of power over anyone who wanted to do something that required public approval. At a minimum they'd probably be able to make sure that their agency survived despite scandal after scandal, including those which reveal the existence of this very plan, and even documented nefarious use of the collected information, whether for manipulating politicians, or more mundane extortion, or stalking ex's, etc.

    A world in which people look past the weird habits of their neighbors instead of looking for a reason to feel superior to them is a pretty lofty idea to hope for. Possibly the only remaining option is to have enough competing organizations using this tactic that it affects everyone, eventually inoculating society from the tactic.

  8. Re:Copyright reform. on Happy Public Domain Day: Works That Copyright Extension Stole From Us In 2015 · · Score: 1

    It seems ridiculous that copyright can be used to quash the existence of a version of a work that was once published, but that the creator decided he didn't like.

  9. Re:They all suck on Know Your Type: Five Mechanical Keyboards Compared · · Score: 1

    This. 1000x this. Laptop keyboards are often much better than regular keyboards in terms of minimizing the amount of effort required to get a word from your head into the machine. The only thing missing is for them to be full-size and ergonomic. (My preference would be a split keyboard where both units are separate bluetooth modules, or at have at least 6' of cord connecting them.)

  10. Re:What the fuck is this pretentious bullshit? on Know Your Type: Five Mechanical Keyboards Compared · · Score: 1

    membrane switches are like analog vinyl. Mechanical switches are the digital metaphor in this analogy.

  11. Re:Monkeys deserve more respect on N. Korea Blames US For Internet Outage, Compares Obama to "a Monkey" · · Score: 1

    Does parsing words so people will come to the wrong conclusions count as lying?

  12. Re:Edison won the 24 gps standard on Human Eye's Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate · · Score: 1

    If 16 fps was acceptable to audiences, then it would have won. Edison wasn't some kind of irresistible force - he couldn't keep the country from using AC, for instance, and where he was able to establish DC, DC actually made sense.

  13. Re:Bogus algorithm on The World of YouTube Bubble Sort Algorithm Dancing · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hang on..

    Are you seriously suggesting that bubble sort is useful for N in the millions?

  14. Re:It's in the image on Human Eye's Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate · · Score: 2

    Movies don't look smooth. They look like a staccato of motion-blurred still frames. 24fps was simply the minimum (read: cheapest) frame rate at which most of the population would perceive as mostly motion-like. Motion blur helps, but it hardly makes up for the deficiency.

    Technology has advanced quite a bit since the advent of motion picture cameras, to the point that the "film" is pretty far from the most expensive line item in the budget. Why not record at a more natural frame rate?

    The conceit of the movie industry is conditioning he movie watching public to believe that 24fps looks "more cinematic." How convenient for them that it is also "less expensive." But how disappointing, too, when those hard to-obtain establishing shots from high over the countryside don't really show any of the beautiful detail to the viewers?

  15. Re:Start with copyright on How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us To Greater Harm · · Score: 1

    3/5ths was about proportionment of representation among the states, not the treatment of individuals. The problem was the existence of states where non-free persons were not eligible to vote, so any proportionment of representation made on their behalf was exercised by the free, land-owning male citizens.

    If you think disenfranchisement is unfair, how do you feel about disenfranchisement that grants your own deserved electoral power to the very parties that are oppressing you?

    3/5ths was a compromise, but its fundamental unfairness was not that it was too low, but too high. States with non-free populations should never have been rewarded with the ability to exercise electoral power of the people they oppressed.

  16. Re:No on Should Video Games Be In the Olympics? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Except that Sailing and Curling are both current olympic sports, Chess is apparently under occasional consideration, and according to wikipedia, even ballooning was once an olympic sport....

  17. Re:What a nightmare on "Star Trek 3" To Be Helmed By "Fast & Furious" Franchise Director Justin Lin · · Score: 1

    Instead we have a "Star Trek" universe that JJ has TOTALLY F*&*ed up where people can use the transporter to get anywhere in the galaxy, super-magically powerful "Red Matter", lame plots and passable acting etc. etc.

    and magic blood that cures any disease or ailment including death from extreme radiation exposure, yet the episode wasn't about the ethics of a systematic rare-blood harvesting operation or the distribution of its products.

  18. Re:more NOS and less lense flare on "Star Trek 3" To Be Helmed By "Fast & Furious" Franchise Director Justin Lin · · Score: 1

    Uhh...
    Wrath of Khan?
    First Contact?
    Into Wrath of Khan?

    Fixed that for you.

  19. Re:One reason: Annoyance on The Slow Death of Voice Mail · · Score: 1

    You don't have to wait through all that crap. Most voicemail systems have a key assigned to skip the header and jump straight to the message. It's always a different one, though, as far as I can tell. Next time you're at the main menu of your voice system, try listening through to the end of the options and choose the help one if it exists.

  20. Re:Interesting on Hotel Group Asks FCC For Permission To Block Some Outside Wi-Fi · · Score: 2

    They compete on price because that's all the information the aggregation networks have. I'm not in the industry, so I don't know if it's the aggregation networks' fault for not having more detail in the spec, or the airlines' fault for not releasing enough information, or what, but the problem is that when using one of the aggregators, you can typically only sort on price or time. Comfort details aren't part of the sorting metric, so the system doesn't optimize for them.

  21. Re:Waste on Minecraft Creator Notch's $70 Million Mansion Recreated In Minecraft · · Score: 2

    The money goes into the economy, but the resources and labor to build the thing do not. Still, it's his money to spend once people give it to him. If you think there was a waste, then you should be upset about Microsoft for spending as much as they did to buy a somewhat polished, but still fairly shallow indie game. Assuming they do nothing with it other than pass the cost on to you through higher costs for windows licenses.

  22. Re:LOL ... w00t? on Amazon "Suppresses" Book With Too Many Hyphens · · Score: 2

    In his blog, there are a number of comments about the HTML entity he used instead of the hyphen character. There is speculation that text-to-speech accessibility features were mis-interpreting things as a result.

    On the TTS note, It seems like HTML (or at least the dialect used for ebooks, but why not everywhere?) should have a tag for providing pronunciation overrides, which would improve accessibility and finally allow us to know how the authors intended the pronunciation of all those apostrophe'd names.

  23. Re:Not seeing the issue here on Judge: It's OK For Cops To Create Fake Instagram Accounts · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think the OP was expressing a desire that misleading people ought to have the same or similar check as search and seizure, and for similar reasons, and undercover operations are the kind of activity that would be sanctioned for limited periods.

  24. Re:Dont worry, they will just take it from somewhe on 11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed To End California Drought · · Score: 1

    Therefore the cities are completely independent and self-suficient and rely on neither the crops themselves nor the resources obtained in trade for the crops.

  25. Re:When nearly all of your readers block ads... on Dr. Dobb's 38-Year Run Comes To an End · · Score: 1

    I would even be willing to put up with all of those things, sometimes, if they would only serve the ads from the same servers as the website. It's the mid-tens. Navigating the web shouldn't be slower and more frustrating than it was in mid-nineties.