Some tragedy happens, perhaps a mass murder like newtown, and people who want power come out and seek to use it to control people who are scared.
Perhaps the first thing they try is to invoke a visceral response to some aspect of the tragedy, the tools used, for instance. "Let's ban guns," they say, then the tragedy wouldn't happen because the perpetrator wouldn't have the tools (conveniently ignoring the possibility that a different tool would be used...)
Some recognize this for what it is - a manipulative power grab by people who desire power, for what checks the power of a government better than a citizenry who can convincingly chose not to consent to be governed. But they can be manipulated as well. They might be tricked into bargaining for their rights, arguing for whittling down rights guaranteed by the first amendment to stave off encroachments on the second amendment. "Oh, it must be violent TV shows and video games that are the cause," they might say, and talk about "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater."
So, now we can't bring water bottles and have to take of our shoes and treated like criminals when we want to travel any great distance quickly and safely, and we're talking about regulating minor tweaks to magazine size (is 7 rounds really all that different from the typical 10-round magazine?), regulating video games and movies (are books next? newspapers? blogs?), and giving law enforcement carte blanche access to our medical records.
We shouldn't put up with any of this. Don't let the bullies divide us up into camps all arguing that this thing is important, so it's ok to concede this "less important" thing to keep it, playing us against each other for their own benefit. That path leads to the irrelevance of the rights supposedly guaranteed by the 9th, 10th, and 13th amendments...
Are we really better off with that? What benefit to the society was achieved?
Ironically, the answer is yes, in this specific example. The only situation I could find worse than every chain restaurant participating in the public embarrassment of their patrons by loudly singing a brief jingle is if every restaurant had the same awful song....
Get something like one of these - dual-arm Ergotron mounting system or equivalent. That one comes with a laptop platform in case you don't have two monitors, and the arms have cable channels, so you should be able to move things around frequently without too much effort or risk of tangling the cables. The screen bracket is on a swivel, so you don't have to stick with the portrait/landscape orientation.
Only downside is that when switching between orientations, I didn't get a monitor with an accelerometer, so the orientation switch requires a manual change to the display settings. Which is unfortunate if the monitor is the primary one and you don't have a hotkey to swap the orientation.
Also, it would be nice if the height delta was a little greater, to allow switching between standing/sitting postures, but you can reduce the need for that with a higher desk/chair combo to raise the sitting level closer to the standing level, I guess.
The point of requiring warrants to do wire tapping is not to protect the right of criminals to get away with crimes. It's to protect the rest of us from officials abusing their power....
You can over charge it (I did on older batteries) it you leave them charging for too long.
This is fully a problem with every laptop manufacturer skimping out on the charge controller design. It's apparently cheaper to let your customers burn out their batteries by leaving them plugged in "too much" rather than designing a power supply that cuts off the charging current when the battery is full.
But they still sell the laptops as "desktop replacement" devices, which to me implies that they should be able to be plugged in all the time without damage. Also, they're in computers. They should be able to take care of their own charging profile without people making up their own deep cycle treatment.
So, you run a load of bags through the washer/dryer? Now there's all the power use for cleaning the things, as well as water use, and soap. After all that, I'm not sure they seem better than the disposable bags any more....
TL;DR - you sound angry because you can't see the sailboat. But there really is a sailboat, for some people.
The DVD had enough pixels to see a 3d image if you paused it on just the right frame. Unless the downsampling of putting it to video changed it in just the right way to make an entirely different 3d image, it wasn't a sailboat.
i doubt it's meant to work with the driver sleeping or anything.
But that is exactly the reason why people want and precisely how they will use self-driving cars - so that they can take their attention off the road. Like the poster above said.. it's good for a prototype, but not for a consumer product.
The battery versions defeat a part of benefits, though.
The whole point of the spring was to be simple and low-tech. These are supposed to be low-maintenance radios that not only can be used in remote areas without power supply, but also can be stored away for years and still be expected to work when needed.
I'm pretty sure that in a low-technology environment, you're more likely to be able to repair or replace a spring with local materials than a battery and charge pump.
I'm kind of upset that no one makes the spring version any more.
I don't think 'fail-safe' is going to be good enough for automated cars. I agree that they should do something sane on failures, but just turning control over to the driver isn't the sane thing. In an aircraft, the pilot will usually have a few seconds or even minutes to get his bearings and take control of the aircraft - the other traffic is all thousands of feet away.
In a car, you're lucky if you get a few tenths of a second to react, and having to be constantly ready to take control negates one of the principle benefits of driverless cars - the ability to relax and concentrate on other things than the road. Another proposed benefit, interleaved travel through intersections, is impossible if there is non-negligible risk of any involved car dropping to human control during the transit.
I haven't tried it as I assume there could be some damage to the transmission, but it seems like it would be possible to pop a manual transmission out of gear by just forcing the shift lever into the neutral position, regardless of whether the clutch was connected.
In other words, in exactly the situation where the computer could be programmed to respond more reliably than the pilot, the computer gives up and lets the pilot take the blame....
Those are separate issues. We can still care about not convicting innocent people, while having onerous drug laws that make huge numbers of people criminals.
If you make something a crime that a significantly fraction of the population does, or has done, you're going to end up with a lot of convicted criminals, even if you don't convict a single innocent person.
Hollywood is a tiny industry. Something like $15 billion. The last time I checked, Hollywood's entire revenues were less than Microsoft's profit in the same year.
Well, how about Virgin mobile, then. They've got a $43/month plan with unlimited talk and text...
Oddly, the virgin usa deals are quite a bit better than the canadian deals despite currency parity. The $20/month plan in the US includes 400 minutes, while it only includes 50 minutes in canada ($30/month = 1500 minutes in the US vs 100 minutes in canada.. wtf?) and the unlimited plan in canada doesn't include "canadian long distance."
And.. I just realized that the virgin canada plans I was looking at weren't even prepaid plans.
Yeah, sucks to be in canada I guess. For phones, anyway.
Not only is this not true, but with prepaid, the price is (almost) the price. There is still tax and e911, but none of the bogus "compliance fees" and other official-looking add-ons that the phone company uses to pass their cost of doing business on to you in addition to the agreed upon price where that stuff should all have already been folded into....
If they can't get it from the chance that I'll go over and pay their exorbitant fees (or, rather, the aggregate chance that a bunch of us will), then I'll be happy with a more honest product that doesn't disguise the fees.
Make no mistake, I need some kind of enticement to use their product, whether it's rewards, limited liability.. it has to be better for me than using cash. If it can't be better with the fees exposed, then tough on them, they'll have to make due with only the subset of consumers who always go over each month and find the easy credit to be the improvement over cash, who know this going into the agreement, and still want to do it...
I don't care if they drop the gimmick. I just don't think that they necessarily have to. The economics are such that a company might still benefit from offering it even without funding it from the no longer hidden merchant fees, and if there is competition, some company will.
A cubic meter, actually, I believe.. two blocks are just bigger than the player.
But that's not really all that efficient of a storage representation. By far, most of the blocks in the game are of two main type - air and stone - and almost every structure in the game is composed of some volume of mostly homogeneous blocks with perhaps smaller volumes of homogenous blocks suspended almost vacuole-like inside it - It might well be possible to more efficiently describe the landscape using the surfaces rather than the volumes.
Of course, then it's not really a voxel game any more, but was it ever? Isn't it really just that voxel games seem like the simplest to implement 3D deformable terrain games?
Slashdot Mirror
Some tragedy happens, perhaps a mass murder like newtown, and people who want power come out and seek to use it to control people who are scared.
Perhaps the first thing they try is to invoke a visceral response to some aspect of the tragedy, the tools used, for instance. "Let's ban guns," they say, then the tragedy wouldn't happen because the perpetrator wouldn't have the tools (conveniently ignoring the possibility that a different tool would be used...)
Some recognize this for what it is - a manipulative power grab by people who desire power, for what checks the power of a government better than a citizenry who can convincingly chose not to consent to be governed. But they can be manipulated as well. They might be tricked into bargaining for their rights, arguing for whittling down rights guaranteed by the first amendment to stave off encroachments on the second amendment. "Oh, it must be violent TV shows and video games that are the cause," they might say, and talk about "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater."
So, now we can't bring water bottles and have to take of our shoes and treated like criminals when we want to travel any great distance quickly and safely, and we're talking about regulating minor tweaks to magazine size (is 7 rounds really all that different from the typical 10-round magazine?), regulating video games and movies (are books next? newspapers? blogs?), and giving law enforcement carte blanche access to our medical records.
We shouldn't put up with any of this. Don't let the bullies divide us up into camps all arguing that this thing is important, so it's ok to concede this "less important" thing to keep it, playing us against each other for their own benefit. That path leads to the irrelevance of the rights supposedly guaranteed by the 9th, 10th, and 13th amendments...
Are we really better off with that? What benefit to the society was achieved?
Ironically, the answer is yes, in this specific example. The only situation I could find worse than every chain restaurant participating in the public embarrassment of their patrons by loudly singing a brief jingle is if every restaurant had the same awful song....
slow hard disk might be good for programming - it'll help you notice performance issues where you're hitting the disk too much.
You shouldn't test your programs primarily on hardware that's better than the hardware on which it will be deployed.
Surely you mean the bottom of the screen should be slightly below your eye level.
Get something like one of these - dual-arm Ergotron mounting system or equivalent. That one comes with a laptop platform in case you don't have two monitors, and the arms have cable channels, so you should be able to move things around frequently without too much effort or risk of tangling the cables. The screen bracket is on a swivel, so you don't have to stick with the portrait/landscape orientation.
Only downside is that when switching between orientations, I didn't get a monitor with an accelerometer, so the orientation switch requires a manual change to the display settings. Which is unfortunate if the monitor is the primary one and you don't have a hotkey to swap the orientation.
Also, it would be nice if the height delta was a little greater, to allow switching between standing/sitting postures, but you can reduce the need for that with a higher desk/chair combo to raise the sitting level closer to the standing level, I guess.
one really big external monitor is almost certainly better than two medium-sized monitors, though - no gaps, so head/eye movement is reduced.
The point of requiring warrants to do wire tapping is not to protect the right of criminals to get away with crimes. It's to protect the rest of us from officials abusing their power....
So, one day the government will try to regulate high quality sand....
You can over charge it (I did on older batteries) it you leave them charging for too long.
This is fully a problem with every laptop manufacturer skimping out on the charge controller design. It's apparently cheaper to let your customers burn out their batteries by leaving them plugged in "too much" rather than designing a power supply that cuts off the charging current when the battery is full.
But they still sell the laptops as "desktop replacement" devices, which to me implies that they should be able to be plugged in all the time without damage. Also, they're in computers. They should be able to take care of their own charging profile without people making up their own deep cycle treatment.
Can you provide a link to on that uses ultra-caps?
Also, a reason why you expect the ultra caps to last indefinitely? It certainly isn't the case for electrolytics....
So, you run a load of bags through the washer/dryer? Now there's all the power use for cleaning the things, as well as water use, and soap. After all that, I'm not sure they seem better than the disposable bags any more....
TL;DR - you sound angry because you can't see the sailboat. But there really is a sailboat, for some people.
The DVD had enough pixels to see a 3d image if you paused it on just the right frame. Unless the downsampling of putting it to video changed it in just the right way to make an entirely different 3d image, it wasn't a sailboat.
i doubt it's meant to work with the driver sleeping or anything.
But that is exactly the reason why people want and precisely how they will use self-driving cars - so that they can take their attention off the road. Like the poster above said.. it's good for a prototype, but not for a consumer product.
The battery versions defeat a part of benefits, though.
The whole point of the spring was to be simple and low-tech. These are supposed to be low-maintenance radios that not only can be used in remote areas without power supply, but also can be stored away for years and still be expected to work when needed.
I'm pretty sure that in a low-technology environment, you're more likely to be able to repair or replace a spring with local materials than a battery and charge pump.
I'm kind of upset that no one makes the spring version any more.
I don't think 'fail-safe' is going to be good enough for automated cars. I agree that they should do something sane on failures, but just turning control over to the driver isn't the sane thing. In an aircraft, the pilot will usually have a few seconds or even minutes to get his bearings and take control of the aircraft - the other traffic is all thousands of feet away.
In a car, you're lucky if you get a few tenths of a second to react, and having to be constantly ready to take control negates one of the principle benefits of driverless cars - the ability to relax and concentrate on other things than the road. Another proposed benefit, interleaved travel through intersections, is impossible if there is non-negligible risk of any involved car dropping to human control during the transit.
I haven't tried it as I assume there could be some damage to the transmission, but it seems like it would be possible to pop a manual transmission out of gear by just forcing the shift lever into the neutral position, regardless of whether the clutch was connected.
What do shift paddles do, then?
In other words, in exactly the situation where the computer could be programmed to respond more reliably than the pilot, the computer gives up and lets the pilot take the blame....
Those are separate issues. We can still care about not convicting innocent people, while having onerous drug laws that make huge numbers of people criminals.
If you make something a crime that a significantly fraction of the population does, or has done, you're going to end up with a lot of convicted criminals, even if you don't convict a single innocent person.
Hollywood is a tiny industry. Something like $15 billion. The last time I checked, Hollywood's entire revenues were less than Microsoft's profit in the same year.
Ok.
Well, how about Virgin mobile, then. They've got a $43/month plan with unlimited talk and text...
Oddly, the virgin usa deals are quite a bit better than the canadian deals despite currency parity. The $20/month plan in the US includes 400 minutes, while it only includes 50 minutes in canada ($30/month = 1500 minutes in the US vs 100 minutes in canada.. wtf?) and the unlimited plan in canada doesn't include "canadian long distance."
And.. I just realized that the virgin canada plans I was looking at weren't even prepaid plans.
Yeah, sucks to be in canada I guess. For phones, anyway.
Don't you think you're being a little disingenuous comparing only the cheapest plan on each side?
For $20.75/month, Bell offers a plan with unlimited text, and a choice of four-hour windows with free local calls.
For the same price, Rogers offers plans with unlimited calling to five numbers.
They aren't universally better, but there are definitely use cases where the phones are both cheaper and free of a long term contract.
Not only is this not true, but with prepaid, the price is (almost) the price. There is still tax and e911, but none of the bogus "compliance fees" and other official-looking add-ons that the phone company uses to pass their cost of doing business on to you in addition to the agreed upon price where that stuff should all have already been folded into....
If they can't get it from the chance that I'll go over and pay their exorbitant fees (or, rather, the aggregate chance that a bunch of us will), then I'll be happy with a more honest product that doesn't disguise the fees.
Make no mistake, I need some kind of enticement to use their product, whether it's rewards, limited liability.. it has to be better for me than using cash. If it can't be better with the fees exposed, then tough on them, they'll have to make due with only the subset of consumers who always go over each month and find the easy credit to be the improvement over cash, who know this going into the agreement, and still want to do it...
I don't care if they drop the gimmick. I just don't think that they necessarily have to. The economics are such that a company might still benefit from offering it even without funding it from the no longer hidden merchant fees, and if there is competition, some company will.
A cubic meter, actually, I believe.. two blocks are just bigger than the player.
But that's not really all that efficient of a storage representation. By far, most of the blocks in the game are of two main type - air and stone - and almost every structure in the game is composed of some volume of mostly homogeneous blocks with perhaps smaller volumes of homogenous blocks suspended almost vacuole-like inside it - It might well be possible to more efficiently describe the landscape using the surfaces rather than the volumes.
Of course, then it's not really a voxel game any more, but was it ever? Isn't it really just that voxel games seem like the simplest to implement 3D deformable terrain games?