You know, if someone broke into my place with a sword while I was sleeping, putting on my pants wouldn't be my first, second, or even third priority. My first priority would be to avoid getting impaled on the sword. My second would be to find something with which to defend myself. My third priority would be to get some help, say by running out into a public place.
Besides, if someone broke in with a sword while I was sleeping, I think I might need to change my underwear before putting on my pants.
Ideally, you have a usability specialist and the programmer who will be coding the UI sit down together (and if you can pull in whomever will be testing it as well, all the better) and design the UI. That way the usability person can veto the programmer's suggestion to use a puce-on-pink color scheme and the programmer can tell the usability specialist when a proposed piece of the UI would be infeasible or impossible to write.
At least in the US, there would probably be a line on the federal tax forms where you could report how much you've made on copyrighted works and the appropriate fee would get rolled into your income taxes. It wouldn't really cost the IRS more to process it that way than it costs them to process any other tax form. I don't know how taxes work in other countries, but I'm guessing that it would probably be something similar.
For compilations, if the works in the compilation are under copyright and your use doesn't fall under fair use, you need to pay a fee to the owner of that work so that you can use their copyrighted material, and the copyright owner records that as income on their copyrighted work. All you need to do is keep track of how much you make on your work -- they keep track of how much they made on theirs.
For books that are in the public interest to be in print, either there's enough demand for them that their publishers keep them in print and under copyright, or there isn't enough interest to keep them in print and there's also probably not enough interest to keep them under copyright.
Have you contacted the Slash admins about the 78 open bugs and 171 feature requests they have open on their SourceForge page? It would be nice for a project covered on Slashdot to fix bugs or add features to Slashdot.
Should the Bush administration implement his idea of "Star Wars" (not the movie) whatever you're using to take advantage of that fact might just forcibly set, if you're deemed to be a threat.
A parsec is about 3.26 light years. The way I interpret that comment is that there are many different ways to make "the Kessel run" and Han managed to find an extremely short (but probably very dangerous or difficult to navigate) way to complete the run.
For instance, there are lots of ways to travel from Los Angeles to New York. Google Maps gives a route that is 2,826 miles long. If you were to tunnel directly through the Earth from LA to NY and make the trip in, say, 2,700 miles (just using a random guess that such a shortcut would save you about 100 miles) then you could say that you made the "LA-NY run" in 2,700 miles (or about 1.4x10^(-10) parsecs).
Diamonds are ridiculously strong when used in composites, if you thought plain old glass-fibre and carbon fire were strong, simply replace the glass or carbon with diamond, and you have a strength to weight ratio that is unheard of.
Yes -- this made it suitable as a building material for the space elevators in Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey. Of course, in that novel I don't think they manufactured the diamonds... they found another source. I think this article explains where they found a large natural supply of diamonds.
By the end of DS9, Sisko did achieve the rank of Captain, so I think that qualifies him for consideration. Besides, he did something Jean-Luc never did: he punched Q and put him on the ground. Picard did yell at Q, maybe he even grabbed him by the uniform and pushed him against a bulkhead (I don't remember) but he never actually struck Q.
From the article, it sounds like he survived. That makes him potentially eligible for an Honorable Mention, I think, but disqualifies him (this time) for a Darwin.
Darth Vader, being a badass Sith, probably either doesn't have one (they're obviously for Light Side pansies), or can override it in some way.
He probably used the Force to 'hold' the lightsaber, so that whatever deadman-type switch turns it off when it's not being held still experienced pressure as though it was being held.
Is role-playing a character who tortures an NPC over the course of a session any different than an actor in a movie portraying a villain who tortures another character? Not really... the actor likely has his or her lines and actions planned out, whereas the role-player is likely making things up on the fly, but they're both acting out a role.
I would hope that, for instance, Anthony Hopkins didn't start murdering and eating people before he played the role of Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs"... and I would hope that a role-player who was playing a character similar to Lecter also would not go on a murderous, cannibalistic rampage. If they did, they have deeper issues and shouldn't be playing RPGs (at the very least.)
If a role-player has the maturity level to handle the role of an evil character without losing themselves in the role, they should have some support in the game system to portray that character's action. If they don't have the required maturity level, I hope that they or their DM would decide to refrain from having that player play an evil character.
What are the odds of that student having, or being able to obtain, several million dollars to prevent the RIAA/MPAA's lawyers from stalling the case (a la SCO v IBM) through various and sundry legal techniques until the student's bank account was empty?
It would be great if it were to happen, but without major funding, or a lawyer willing to take the case on pro bono or for a percentage of the settlement, the 900-pound gorilla could simply wait and win.
Paper is not an audio storage medium. However, it would still fall under that surcharge, as it could be used to store illegally copied text from book or illegal copies of artwork.
I can just picture the controversy that would flare up if something like this was imposed in the US and an office supply company like Staples started charging such a surcharge.
"Okay, you're purchasing a box of copier paper. That's $5.48 for the cost of the paper, plus an extra $20 anti-piracy surcharge, plus tax..."
Sure gives new meaning to the word "ream", doesn't it?
Episode 3 doesn't start the second after episode 2 ended and (probably) won't end the second before episode 4 starts. Even if it did, a galaxy's a pretty big place:) and there's plenty of stories off to the side that could be used for a TV show.
For instance, the show could cover a group of Rebel explorers who went down to Hoth to set up the base before the main characters of the original trilogy arrived. Alternately, a series showing the adventures of a small Rebel commando team that was dispatched to take care of Imperial forces in remote locations could make for some decent TV. As a third example, imagine what would happen if we transplanted "The Sopranos" into the Star Wars universe -- we have "The Hutts". Any of those could probably manage decent starting ratings, and if they were good enough the Star Wars fan base could easily support shows like that.
There are a few issues. The first is the question of how effective this will be -- are most parents technically savvy enough to get this up and running without asking the kids for assistance? I know a lot of children who are more skilled than their parents when it comes to computer.
The second issue is whether or not parents will decide both to use this new technology and to monitor the games their children play, or if they will decide to allow the monitor to handle things on its own. Automated systems like this will not be foolproof -- the parents should be involved regardless of whatever other safeguards are in place.
IMHO, if you can screen Mature games from your 15-year-old _and_ explain why you're doing so _and_ realize when he becomes mature enough to handle those games, then you're being a good parent. If you're relying on a cyber-nanny to do your parenting for you, then you're not.
No, they'll just buy... er I mean make large campaign contributions to... certain politicians and get the politicians to create a law specifically to deal with this situation in the way that best suits the interests of the MPAA, RIAA, and/or the French equivalents thereof. At least that's how it would work in the US... I don't know if the French government works any differently, but after quickly scanning the Wikipedia entry it doesn't look functionally different.
Being bug-freeis a good goal, but it's very difficult to achieve. For a sufficiently complicated software project, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to have no bugs or no situations that users interpret as bugs in your project.
Even if there are no bugs in your code (which for a reasonably large program would be impressive) there are often potential issues where another piece of software upon which your code depends breaking will cause the users to _perceive_ that your code has a bug.
For instance, let's say your code displays some graphics on the screen. If a user has a graphics card that has a bug in its driver that causes the graphics your program displays to be messed up, guess where the user will perceive the problem to be located? I'll give you a hint -- it's not in the graphics driver... unless you have a statement written in the blood of the developer of that driver stating that the bug is in the driver, and sometimes not even then.
Space-delimited is nice, but the best way to write large numbers is in scientific notation:
5.46239472 x 10^5
6.54371653 x 10^5
If you follow the usual convention that the significand must be in the interval [1, 10) then you wouldn't even technically need the decimal point -- the decimal point would have to be after the first digit. Of course, to avoid confusion you'd usually want to leave it in.
No. Certain things (airplanes and, ironically, heating and air conditioning duct work come to mind as good examples) should not be held together by duct tape unless necessary. However, there should always be sufficient duct tape available to hold important pieces in place should the need arise.
George W. Bush's second term is scheduled to end at noon on January 20, 2009 when whomever will be elected on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2008 is inaugurated as the next President of the United States. So if that message from Mars is intercepted and translated before noon on January 15, 2009 then he will still be President for 5 days and able to declare war on Mars.
Alternately, he'll simply to send troops there -- the last war that the United States officially declared was World War II. Vietnam, the conflict against Iraq when they invaded Kuwait in 1991, and the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were approved by Congress but not officially declared as wars. Korea was a special case -- President Truman cited UN resolutions as authorization to become involved.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not where the tentacle came OUT of that you should be worrying about ...
You know, if someone broke into my place with a sword while I was sleeping, putting on my pants wouldn't be my first, second, or even third priority. My first priority would be to avoid getting impaled on the sword. My second would be to find something with which to defend myself. My third priority would be to get some help, say by running out into a public place.
Besides, if someone broke in with a sword while I was sleeping, I think I might need to change my underwear before putting on my pants.
Ideally, you have a usability specialist and the programmer who will be coding the UI sit down together (and if you can pull in whomever will be testing it as well, all the better) and design the UI. That way the usability person can veto the programmer's suggestion to use a puce-on-pink color scheme and the programmer can tell the usability specialist when a proposed piece of the UI would be infeasible or impossible to write.
Be careful. Those crime shows sometimes do things that aren't feasible or possible in reality. See this USA Today article or this article on CSI Files
At least in the US, there would probably be a line on the federal tax forms where you could report how much you've made on copyrighted works and the appropriate fee would get rolled into your income taxes. It wouldn't really cost the IRS more to process it that way than it costs them to process any other tax form. I don't know how taxes work in other countries, but I'm guessing that it would probably be something similar.
For compilations, if the works in the compilation are under copyright and your use doesn't fall under fair use, you need to pay a fee to the owner of that work so that you can use their copyrighted material, and the copyright owner records that as income on their copyrighted work. All you need to do is keep track of how much you make on your work -- they keep track of how much they made on theirs.
For books that are in the public interest to be in print, either there's enough demand for them that their publishers keep them in print and under copyright, or there isn't enough interest to keep them in print and there's also probably not enough interest to keep them under copyright.
Impressive ... it predicted how far in the future it would be before it was Slashdotted!
200 TTL Chips in a server,
200 chips running well,
Post URL to Slashdot,
Fry server to hell,
199 TTL Chips in a server.
And ... that's a thousand points to everyone in this thread! Questions Only, what a great game. Now on to ... Scenes from a Hat!
... here's an explanation.]
[For anyone who doesn't get the "Whose Line" reference
Have you contacted the Slash admins about the 78 open bugs and 171 feature requests they have open on their SourceForge page? It would be nice for a project covered on Slashdot to fix bugs or add features to Slashdot.
Should the Bush administration implement his idea of "Star Wars" (not the movie) whatever you're using to take advantage of that fact might just forcibly set, if you're deemed to be a threat.
A parsec is about 3.26 light years. The way I interpret that comment is that there are many different ways to make "the Kessel run" and Han managed to find an extremely short (but probably very dangerous or difficult to navigate) way to complete the run.
For instance, there are lots of ways to travel from Los Angeles to New York. Google Maps gives a route that is 2,826 miles long. If you were to tunnel directly through the Earth from LA to NY and make the trip in, say, 2,700 miles (just using a random guess that such a shortcut would save you about 100 miles) then you could say that you made the "LA-NY run" in 2,700 miles (or about 1.4x10^(-10) parsecs).
Diamonds are ridiculously strong when used in composites, if you thought plain old glass-fibre and carbon fire were strong, simply replace the glass or carbon with diamond, and you have a strength to weight ratio that is unheard of.
... they found another source. I think this article explains where they found a large natural supply of diamonds.
Yes -- this made it suitable as a building material for the space elevators in Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey. Of course, in that novel I don't think they manufactured the diamonds
By the end of DS9, Sisko did achieve the rank of Captain, so I think that qualifies him for consideration. Besides, he did something Jean-Luc never did: he punched Q and put him on the ground. Picard did yell at Q, maybe he even grabbed him by the uniform and pushed him against a bulkhead (I don't remember) but he never actually struck Q.
From the article, it sounds like he survived. That makes him potentially eligible for an Honorable Mention, I think, but disqualifies him (this time) for a Darwin.
Let's not forget the FDIV bug. Here's another article that discusses the details of that problem.
Darth Vader, being a badass Sith, probably either doesn't have one (they're obviously for Light Side pansies), or can override it in some way.
He probably used the Force to 'hold' the lightsaber, so that whatever deadman-type switch turns it off when it's not being held still experienced pressure as though it was being held.
Is role-playing a character who tortures an NPC over the course of a session any different than an actor in a movie portraying a villain who tortures another character? Not really ... the actor likely has his or her lines and actions planned out, whereas the role-player is likely making things up on the fly, but they're both acting out a role.
... and I would hope that a role-player who was playing a character similar to Lecter also would not go on a murderous, cannibalistic rampage. If they did, they have deeper issues and shouldn't be playing RPGs (at the very least.)
I would hope that, for instance, Anthony Hopkins didn't start murdering and eating people before he played the role of Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs"
If a role-player has the maturity level to handle the role of an evil character without losing themselves in the role, they should have some support in the game system to portray that character's action. If they don't have the required maturity level, I hope that they or their DM would decide to refrain from having that player play an evil character.
What are the odds of that student having, or being able to obtain, several million dollars to prevent the RIAA/MPAA's lawyers from stalling the case (a la SCO v IBM) through various and sundry legal techniques until the student's bank account was empty?
It would be great if it were to happen, but without major funding, or a lawyer willing to take the case on pro bono or for a percentage of the settlement, the 900-pound gorilla could simply wait and win.
Paper is not an audio storage medium. However, it would still fall under that surcharge, as it could be used to store illegally copied text from book or illegal copies of artwork.
..."
I can just picture the controversy that would flare up if something like this was imposed in the US and an office supply company like Staples started charging such a surcharge.
"Okay, you're purchasing a box of copier paper. That's $5.48 for the cost of the paper, plus an extra $20 anti-piracy surcharge, plus tax
Sure gives new meaning to the word "ream", doesn't it?
Episode 3 doesn't start the second after episode 2 ended and (probably) won't end the second before episode 4 starts. Even if it did, a galaxy's a pretty big place :) and there's plenty of stories off to the side that could be used for a TV show.
For instance, the show could cover a group of Rebel explorers who went down to Hoth to set up the base before the main characters of the original trilogy arrived. Alternately, a series showing the adventures of a small Rebel commando team that was dispatched to take care of Imperial forces in remote locations could make for some decent TV. As a third example, imagine what would happen if we transplanted "The Sopranos" into the Star Wars universe -- we have "The Hutts". Any of those could probably manage decent starting ratings, and if they were good enough the Star Wars fan base could easily support shows like that.
There are a few issues. The first is the question of how effective this will be -- are most parents technically savvy enough to get this up and running without asking the kids for assistance? I know a lot of children who are more skilled than their parents when it comes to computer.
The second issue is whether or not parents will decide both to use this new technology and to monitor the games their children play, or if they will decide to allow the monitor to handle things on its own. Automated systems like this will not be foolproof -- the parents should be involved regardless of whatever other safeguards are in place.
IMHO, if you can screen Mature games from your 15-year-old _and_ explain why you're doing so _and_ realize when he becomes mature enough to handle those games, then you're being a good parent. If you're relying on a cyber-nanny to do your parenting for you, then you're not.
No, they'll just buy ... er I mean make large campaign contributions to ... certain politicians and get the politicians to create a law specifically to deal with this situation in the way that best suits the interests of the MPAA, RIAA, and/or the French equivalents thereof. At least that's how it would work in the US ... I don't know if the French government works any differently, but after quickly scanning the Wikipedia entry it doesn't look functionally different.
Being bug-freeis a good goal, but it's very difficult to achieve. For a sufficiently complicated software project, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to have no bugs or no situations that users interpret as bugs in your project.
... unless you have a statement written in the blood of the developer of that driver stating that the bug is in the driver, and sometimes not even then.
Even if there are no bugs in your code (which for a reasonably large program would be impressive) there are often potential issues where another piece of software upon which your code depends breaking will cause the users to _perceive_ that your code has a bug.
For instance, let's say your code displays some graphics on the screen. If a user has a graphics card that has a bug in its driver that causes the graphics your program displays to be messed up, guess where the user will perceive the problem to be located? I'll give you a hint -- it's not in the graphics driver
Space-delimited is nice, but the best way to write large numbers is in scientific notation:
5.46239472 x 10^5
6.54371653 x 10^5
If you follow the usual convention that the significand must be in the interval [1, 10) then you wouldn't even technically need the decimal point -- the decimal point would have to be after the first digit. Of course, to avoid confusion you'd usually want to leave it in.
No. Certain things (airplanes and, ironically, heating and air conditioning duct work come to mind as good examples) should not be held together by duct tape unless necessary. However, there should always be sufficient duct tape available to hold important pieces in place should the need arise.
George W. Bush's second term is scheduled to end at noon on January 20, 2009 when whomever will be elected on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2008 is inaugurated as the next President of the United States. So if that message from Mars is intercepted and translated before noon on January 15, 2009 then he will still be President for 5 days and able to declare war on Mars.
Alternately, he'll simply to send troops there -- the last war that the United States officially declared was World War II. Vietnam, the conflict against Iraq when they invaded Kuwait in 1991, and the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were approved by Congress but not officially declared as wars. Korea was a special case -- President Truman cited UN resolutions as authorization to become involved.