Bah. I can still remember the first time I dropped my laptop. It was in an airport security line.
I had one of those foam laptop protector thingies with the Velcro flap (on the short side. this is important), but it didn't have a strap, so I put it in my carry-on, a messenger bag with the opening on the long side. (so you can see the bag opening mismatch error already developing.)
For some reason, the group I was traveling with (a bunch of people I had no business believing had had more travel experience than myself...) convinced me to use my small suitcase as an additional carry-on so we wouldn't have to wait for bag claim.
The final piece was that it was November of 2001. Right after the rules requiring you to take the laptop out and turn it on rather than just putting it through the Xray without too much stuff in the same bag, but a number of months before someone had the bright idea of putting out tables for people to do that.
Which is why moving forward while trying to remove a laptop from nested bags with opening axis mismatch and a suitcase at the same time is not a good idea if you're also a bit of a butterfingers. At least I have an exceedingly boring story to tell about confluences of ineptness, not all of which was my own.
Anyway, the point is: the HDD was fine after that. Don't talk to me about the dvd/cd+R combo drive or the keyboard, though.
Another problem is that they're not even unique. They get reused all the time.
AND, there aren't even the full billion possible numbers because some of the digits encode location information. And our estimated population is 1/3 of that billion. Identity thieves could just pick numbers at random to research and ruin.
The salts have a high melting point (but not so high as to cause problems for other materials involved) and decent heats of fusion.
It lets you design your plant around a constant T_hot. Although your peak efficiency is lower than the theoretical maximum, you can run at the design efficiency for much longer. In short, the salts smooth out the heat spikes, and as a bonus, if you have some way of measuring the ratio of still-solid salts to molten salts, provide a way to determine just how long you can run before loss of efficiency.
I suppose it's the difference between an organizational structure based on the premise that "people are evil, let's soak them with fines" and, "Let's minimize the number of opportunities for people to do things that result in fines."
Billing is an issue, though. You have to be in some kind of electronic payment system for that to work. If they have to spend $.42 to send you a $2 bill, they're not saving much over the fancy system.
But you're still right, though. Why not just register your tag with an electronic billing firm, that has permission to deduct the tolls from an account you fill for the purpose?
You can avoid them there if you aren't afraid of a few traffic lights, too. The toll roads are much nicer, though paradoxically, speed is more strictly enforced.
You are proposing to put a rocket engine.. right next to the hottest part of the car.. a part which also happens to contain stoichiometric quantities of liquid hydrogen and oxygen?
But you have to decide what you're buying. The problem comes when politicians are controlling the purse strings. Typically the thing they think they're buying is "jobs."
I don't see how the principles of the Boy Scouts would be incompatible with the goals of open source software. They even have a "computers" merit badge.
It's not working for me. I don't get an error message. All I get is a bunch of links to videos. When I click on the links, all I get is some videos of things and people talking about how great Democrats are in the background.
OS: Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron"
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1
Yes, we all like to assume that hospice workers aren't creepy homicidal psychopaths and are fulfilled by the "aiding and comforting" side of the business instead of the "watching people die" side.
Further, do they mean, the size of the *text* of the books when ascii-encoded, or do they mean images of every page in the books, and all the media encoded appropriately and "losslessly?"
Even further: RGB filters only? What about reflective inks/bindings, embossed covers? lenticular "hologram" covers?
If they could manufacture them cheaply enough for people to buy them for that purpose, they would be very well distributed, indeed.
Further, if there are millions of "worthless shiny coasters" cluttering up the archives, eventually someone's going to be curious enough to look at one of them in more detail.
I think some of the classic mythologies were much more fun. Some pantheons had all the drama of a weekly TV show.
Sometimes I think they maybe WERE the weekly "tv drama" and that we've imputed a little too much significance to them because the records happened to survive.
You do know that the "number of guesses you need to keep in your head" is the primary criterion for judging the difficulty rating for computer generated puzzles, don't you?
Yeah, and? Those articles will typically have the letters "AP" or "Reuters" or "Dave Barry is a syndicated columnest for the Miami Herald" either at the end of the article or right after the headline.
America's Army is a FPS game. You are given tasks like "kill terrorists at outpost A and defend outpost B from terrorists." No one ever plays as a terrorist, so where do you think they come from?;)
As pointed out below, that model would be difficult to apply to a MMORPG, but I would argue that it's not impossible.
Defend town/attack town maps pretty well, and is little different than battlegrounds, really, except in the proper game world rather than an instance. Very little additional problems need to be addressed there.
As for random characters being PCs instead, that's a bit trickier. But it might be solved by some kind of level-appropriate mage-drafting system: if one group of players are going into some dungeon, other players can be drafted into their character's equivalent roles in the dungeon under whatever pretext would be appropriate for their faction, and the dungeon itself masked to match up with the same trick as before.
Of course, it would be tricky to code, and require a lot of extra effort for content: some caves might need to have window dressing as forts or something for the "defenders" benefit.
Which is why it's not being done NOW. The only people in the MMORPG business with enough money to do so are already making more money than they know what to do with with a game without that extra complexity.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah. I can still remember the first time I dropped my laptop. It was in an airport security line.
I had one of those foam laptop protector thingies with the Velcro flap (on the short side. this is important), but it didn't have a strap, so I put it in my carry-on, a messenger bag with the opening on the long side. (so you can see the bag opening mismatch error already developing.)
For some reason, the group I was traveling with (a bunch of people I had no business believing had had more travel experience than myself...) convinced me to use my small suitcase as an additional carry-on so we wouldn't have to wait for bag claim.
The final piece was that it was November of 2001. Right after the rules requiring you to take the laptop out and turn it on rather than just putting it through the Xray without too much stuff in the same bag, but a number of months before someone had the bright idea of putting out tables for people to do that.
Which is why moving forward while trying to remove a laptop from nested bags with opening axis mismatch and a suitcase at the same time is not a good idea if you're also a bit of a butterfingers. At least I have an exceedingly boring story to tell about confluences of ineptness, not all of which was my own.
Anyway, the point is: the HDD was fine after that. Don't talk to me about the dvd/cd+R combo drive or the keyboard, though.
The threat of "heating prices continuing to rise" hasn't improved support for weaver's cove
Another problem is that they're not even unique. They get reused all the time.
AND, there aren't even the full billion possible numbers because some of the digits encode location information. And our estimated population is 1/3 of that billion. Identity thieves could just pick numbers at random to research and ruin.
Ah but the real story isn't that they're half-assed about publishing it *now*, but that they sat on it when he WAS a candidate.
Or at least, didn't bother investigating his boisterous claims of faithfulness at the time.
The salts have a high melting point (but not so high as to cause problems for other materials involved) and decent heats of fusion.
It lets you design your plant around a constant T_hot. Although your peak efficiency is lower than the theoretical maximum, you can run at the design efficiency for much longer. In short, the salts smooth out the heat spikes, and as a bonus, if you have some way of measuring the ratio of still-solid salts to molten salts, provide a way to determine just how long you can run before loss of efficiency.
How unexpectedly sane.
I suppose it's the difference between an organizational structure based on the premise that "people are evil, let's soak them with fines" and, "Let's minimize the number of opportunities for people to do things that result in fines."
Reminds me of Starship Troopers, actually.
Billing is an issue, though. You have to be in some kind of electronic payment system for that to work. If they have to spend $.42 to send you a $2 bill, they're not saving much over the fancy system.
But you're still right, though. Why not just register your tag with an electronic billing firm, that has permission to deduct the tolls from an account you fill for the purpose?
You can avoid them there if you aren't afraid of a few traffic lights, too. The toll roads are much nicer, though paradoxically, speed is more strictly enforced.
I know. But it's not fair: The Boy Scouts had the acronym first.
You are proposing to put a rocket engine.. right next to the hottest part of the car.. a part which also happens to contain stoichiometric quantities of liquid hydrogen and oxygen?
"Private industry good" true.
But you have to decide what you're buying. The problem comes when politicians are controlling the purse strings. Typically the thing they think they're buying is "jobs."
I don't see how the principles of the Boy Scouts would be incompatible with the goals of open source software. They even have a "computers" merit badge.
It's not working for me. I don't get an error message. All I get is a bunch of links to videos. When I click on the links, all I get is some videos of things and people talking about how great Democrats are in the background.
OS:
Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron"
Browser:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1
Why was this modded funny?
slides.
Easy: Just have the notaries register with Verisign.
When?
Or did you really mean that
Yes, we all like to assume that hospice workers aren't creepy homicidal psychopaths and are fulfilled by the "aiding and comforting" side of the business instead of the "watching people die" side.
Further, do they mean, the size of the *text* of the books when ascii-encoded, or do they mean images of every page in the books, and all the media encoded appropriately and "losslessly?"
Even further: RGB filters only? What about reflective inks/bindings, embossed covers? lenticular "hologram" covers?
If they had the time to listen to you while on hold.. why would they put you on hold?
If they could manufacture them cheaply enough for people to buy them for that purpose, they would be very well distributed, indeed.
Further, if there are millions of "worthless shiny coasters" cluttering up the archives, eventually someone's going to be curious enough to look at one of them in more detail.
Sometimes I think they maybe WERE the weekly "tv drama" and that we've imputed a little too much significance to them because the records happened to survive.
What if the relatives weren't there, would that change your mind?
You do know that the "number of guesses you need to keep in your head" is the primary criterion for judging the difficulty rating for computer generated puzzles, don't you?
Yeah, and? Those articles will typically have the letters "AP" or "Reuters" or "Dave Barry is a syndicated columnest for the Miami Herald" either at the end of the article or right after the headline.
America's Army is a FPS game. You are given tasks like "kill terrorists at outpost A and defend outpost B from terrorists." No one ever plays as a terrorist, so where do you think they come from? ;)
As pointed out below, that model would be difficult to apply to a MMORPG, but I would argue that it's not impossible.
Defend town/attack town maps pretty well, and is little different than battlegrounds, really, except in the proper game world rather than an instance. Very little additional problems need to be addressed there.
As for random characters being PCs instead, that's a bit trickier. But it might be solved by some kind of level-appropriate mage-drafting system: if one group of players are going into some dungeon, other players can be drafted into their character's equivalent roles in the dungeon under whatever pretext would be appropriate for their faction, and the dungeon itself masked to match up with the same trick as before.
Of course, it would be tricky to code, and require a lot of extra effort for content: some caves might need to have window dressing as forts or something for the "defenders" benefit.
Which is why it's not being done NOW. The only people in the MMORPG business with enough money to do so are already making more money than they know what to do with with a game without that extra complexity.