As they are a point source, lasers adhere to the inverse-square law of decay [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law] Previously released lasers from these guys that can light cigarettes etc are only effective within 300mm or so.
I will make the uneducated guess that [hopefully] these 1W versions will be unable to be used with malicious intent / outcome from a large distance.
Argh. The inverse-square law applies to omnidirectional point source radiators. A laser pointer is extremely directional by definition...
Oh hey, a/. topic where I have first-hand knowledge!
But are these "serious games" fun to play? That seems to be the most overlooked part of educational games.
They don't have to be. You're confusing serious games with edutainment - the latter is entertainment with an educational value (even if it, as you pointed out, quite often fails at the "entertainment" bit), while the former is basically education in the form of a game. Think "military war game" compared to "chess". Different aims, different audience. A lot of serious games would actually be called simulators, if that word hadn't carried so much semantic baggage with it. The project I'm involved in, aimed at firefighters and other rescue workers, is intended to be an replacement for and complement to certain live (and therefore dangerous and expensive) exercises, for example. That means it's meant to be played with instructors present, as part of their normal education regime. Thus, there's no need to "sell" the game with entertainment. Trainees can practice on their own if they want to (PC-based software), but if they do, they do it for the sake of their own education.
Now, maybe he makes that two grand back in his push and maybe he don't. Maybe your new method reduced his clicks from five hundred to five per month. Either way the best we can hope is that at some point that income shrinks to negative or so little it's not worth his time. The problem is that even if 0.0001% of his spam messages generates a click, he's making bank.
Unfortunately, even if the income shrinks to negative or so little it's not worth the time, the spam will keep flowing - because someone will think that it's profitable. Besides, you're thinking too oldschool: a lone spammer using his own spamming farm. That hasn't been true in a long time; today's spammers rent capacity from botnets. Take one spammer down and those botnet owners will just keep rent out the capacity to new spammers looking to make a buck. In fact, on the topic of profitability, I seem to recall reading that renting out botnets to spammers is much more lucrative than the actual spamming nowadays...
Carbon dating isn't all used for such academic pursuits as trying to determine the age of the Shroud of Turin, or figure out how old some rocks are.
The summary writer fails basic science. Carbon dating isn't used, and can't be used for dating rocks. Various forms of radiometric dating can be used, but carbon dating? Hell no. In the words of Youtube's creationism debunker Potholer54, "because there's no f-ing carbon in it!".
In 1975, American Scientist, Nature, and New York Times were publishing story after story about the imminent New Ice Age that would plunge the world into subfreezing temperatures for the next 100 years. Suddenly, 20 years later and Global Warming is all we can talk about? I don't understand. No, I do understand... both points of view have been apparent for nearly a hundred years. Politicians and marketers just grab hold of whichever evidence they want to promote their own agenda. Sure it's possible, which is exactly why it's such a powerful weapon in the social manipulator's arsenal... just like 9/11 denier's evidence is just plausible enough to make people believe it... or how creationists can bend scientific discoveries just enough to gain a following.
Oh not that myth again. The New York Times (i.e. ordinary journalists, whose job is to publish what sells)? Maybe. Nature? Hell no.
Great. Now I can have everything limited to charging at, at a maximum, 500 mA @ 5 V! Just what I've always want... oh wait, I think the charging times for most of my gadgets are already too long. If you can't charge to full capacity within a lunch break, it takes too damned long.
Fine, fine, element 114 has been verified. Now, if they could just get a move on with element 115, we could make our UFO Power Sources work and finally get those Firestorms into the air. We're practically defenseless against the sectoids!
On the other hand, you have to consider the fact that the weapons that have been used in the past in place of this "sound cannon" for crowd control - rubber bullets and wooden batons, for example - are significantly more likely to cause bodily harm, including permanent damage and "fatal aneurisms". And they are significantly harder to escape.
True, but: there is a mental (and often legal) barrier for the use of any weapon, and the less harmful a weapon is perceived to be, the lower that barrier is. Google "taser death" or "pepper spray injury"; cops perceive tasers and pepper spray to be harmless, so they use them indiscriminately. And speaking of indiscriminate use, there is also the matter of target discrimination: you have to mentally pick a person to strike with a baton and then physically hit him. You have to aim every rubber bullet you fire. This? Just sweep the entire crowd with the sound cannon - after all, it's harmless!
...to the time blizzard sued several of the largest WoW gold farmers. Here's hoping it works better lol.
While my feelings towards the parent post may be colored by the Pavlovian hatred I feel every time someone uses "lol" as a word in a sentence, how are they in any way similar?
Let's compare the two: a) Committing fraud to compromise people's computers, violating their privacy and potentially exposing them to such risks as identity theft or credit card theft. b) Selling gold in an online RPG, causing no direct harm to anyone.
And unlike Blizzard who went after a bot creator through a ridulous copyright claim that should have been thrown out of court at first glance, Microsoft is fully in the right here.
So can anyone explain to me what exactly a Kelvin gram is, and how it relates to hard drives? I'm guessing something to do with heat capacity... Oh, you meant kilogram? k = kilo K = Kelvin It's not rocket surgery, people. And it's something that should be caught by Slashdot's "editors" before it goes up on the main page.
The game has amazing re-playability (multi-player). You can only play single player campaigns for so long until it gets boring. Trust me when I say that the majority of the Starcraft gaming community have NOT been playing single player campaign for 10 years.
Sure. But how many copies will a pure single-player gamer (who will only play through the game once and then shelve it) buy? One. How many copies will a hardcore multi-player gamer (who will play it obsessively for years and years until he finally croaks in an internet café) buy? One. Once you've bought your copy, it doesn't matter how much or for how long you play it. The money's already changed hands. Good multi-player is a selling point. But don't delude yourself for a minute that the fanatic cliché is who the game is developed for - it's developed to lure in as many customers as possible, and there are a hell of a lot more casual than hard-core gamers.
Like the Anonymous Coward, I don't really care about Starcraft II's multiplayer (and much for the same reasons) - but if its single-player mode is as good as Starcraft I's, I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
I'd be much, much more interested to know how much of the currency showed evidence of, say, uranium or plutonium. Those are supposed to be scarce, really, really scarce.
Plutonium, yes, uranium, no. Uranium is actually fairly abundant - about 4 ppm average in the Earth's crust, or the 48th most abundant element in natural crustal rock. Plutonium OTOH is entirely man-made. It is present in nature due to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing back in the '40s, '50s and '60s, but the levels should be below detectability in currency, I believe.
In any case, you would be perfectly safe, unless you were using the bills to snort the plutonium. Most common uranium and plutonium isotopes are almost pure alpha, with inhalation being the major danger. You'd have to have really bad luck to get any detectable health effects even if you inadvertently handled directly contaminated bills.
Note that the underlying autocomplete algorithm is the Firefox 3 algorithm, not the Firefox 2 algorithm. oldbar only affects the presentation of the results.
The presentation isn't the problem - it's the "search everything but the kitchen sink and suggest a bunch of irrelevant results" behavior that annoys people. AFAIK, there is no existing plugin that brings back the proper autocompletion behavior.
Honestly, all this fear running around and western democracies - and the Russians - are the ONLY ones who have managed them responsibly. We haven't blown the world up, and the worst are some "near misses" which didn't produce anything. Shoot, we're farther away now from nuclear war between major powers than we have been since before the Cold War.
I realize I shouldn't be feeding the trolls here, but still: some of those near misses have been prettyfuckingnear (and these are just some well-known examples!). So what constitutes "handling them responsibly" then? Not blowing the world up? Sorry, all the other nuclear powers have managed so far as well. Pretty circular reasoning, if you ask me.
Point fingers at Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and their ilk. Leave the rest of us out of it. They're the nuclear "powers" to be afraid of, and we should raise defenses against their armament which are overwhelming - not detente.
Pakistan and India are basically just proliferation threats (and India only indirectly so) - their weapons are only aimed at each other, no one else. Sucks to be them if the conflicts escalate, but no threat to the rest of us. North Korea? Pretty much the same deal, and they are in the process of dismantling their program. Not that they even need nuclear weapons - the fact that Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea is their deterrent. They can inflict genocidal levels of casualties with conventional weapons (and they have plenty of non-nuclear, non-conventional weapons as well). And Iran? They don't have any nuclear weapons!
Great. Another OpenOffice.org version. But will this one finally kern out of the box? 2.4 doesn't (despite previous promises). I used to recommend OpenOffice as a viable Office alternative - my conscience prevents me from doing that nowadays. It's too horribly broken in so many different regards.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought of Arthur C Clarke's A Slight Case of Sunstroke myself...
As they are a point source, lasers adhere to the inverse-square law of decay [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law]
Previously released lasers from these guys that can light cigarettes etc are only effective within 300mm or so.
I will make the uneducated guess that [hopefully] these 1W versions will be unable to be used with malicious intent / outcome from a large distance.
Argh. The inverse-square law applies to omnidirectional point source radiators. A laser pointer is extremely directional by definition...
Oh hey, a /. topic where I have first-hand knowledge!
They don't have to be. You're confusing serious games with edutainment - the latter is entertainment with an educational value (even if it, as you pointed out, quite often fails at the "entertainment" bit), while the former is basically education in the form of a game. Think "military war game" compared to "chess". Different aims, different audience. A lot of serious games would actually be called simulators, if that word hadn't carried so much semantic baggage with it.
The project I'm involved in, aimed at firefighters and other rescue workers, is intended to be an replacement for and complement to certain live (and therefore dangerous and expensive) exercises, for example. That means it's meant to be played with instructors present, as part of their normal education regime. Thus, there's no need to "sell" the game with entertainment. Trainees can practice on their own if they want to (PC-based software), but if they do, they do it for the sake of their own education.
Anyway, if anyone's interested in the subject I can recommend the freely available
From Gaming to Training: A Review of Studies on Fidelity, Immersion, Presence, and Buy-in and Their Effects on Transfer in PC-Based Simulations and Games. It's DARPA-funded (DARWARS - I love that name!) so it's aimed at military educational gaming, but it's a good introduction to the field.
Unfortunately, even if the income shrinks to negative or so little it's not worth the time, the spam will keep flowing - because someone will think that it's profitable. Besides, you're thinking too oldschool: a lone spammer using his own spamming farm. That hasn't been true in a long time; today's spammers rent capacity from botnets. Take one spammer down and those botnet owners will just keep rent out the capacity to new spammers looking to make a buck.
In fact, on the topic of profitability, I seem to recall reading that renting out botnets to spammers is much more lucrative than the actual spamming nowadays...
The summary writer fails basic science. Carbon dating isn't used, and can't be used for dating rocks. Various forms of radiometric dating can be used, but carbon dating? Hell no. In the words of Youtube's creationism debunker Potholer54, "because there's no f-ing carbon in it!".
Are they saying a picture of a fan does not provide the same level of cooling as a real fan?
That depends on if you're using an Intel Magritte or not...
Oh not that myth again. The New York Times (i.e. ordinary journalists, whose job is to publish what sells)? Maybe. Nature? Hell no.
(And while you're at it, please watch his video on the hacked e-mails as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg . It's very enlightening.)
And "Quarantine" is a remake of a Spanish movie, [Rec].
Great. Now I can have everything limited to charging at, at a maximum, 500 mA @ 5 V! Just what I've always want... oh wait, I think the charging times for most of my gadgets are already too long. If you can't charge to full capacity within a lunch break, it takes too damned long.
Fine, fine, element 114 has been verified. Now, if they could just get a move on with element 115, we could make our UFO Power Sources work and finally get those Firestorms into the air. We're practically defenseless against the sectoids!
True, but: there is a mental (and often legal) barrier for the use of any weapon, and the less harmful a weapon is perceived to be, the lower that barrier is. Google "taser death" or "pepper spray injury"; cops perceive tasers and pepper spray to be harmless, so they use them indiscriminately.
And speaking of indiscriminate use, there is also the matter of target discrimination: you have to mentally pick a person to strike with a baton and then physically hit him. You have to aim every rubber bullet you fire. This? Just sweep the entire crowd with the sound cannon - after all, it's harmless!
While my feelings towards the parent post may be colored by the Pavlovian hatred I feel every time someone uses "lol" as a word in a sentence, how are they in any way similar?
Let's compare the two:
a) Committing fraud to compromise people's computers, violating their privacy and potentially exposing them to such risks as identity theft or credit card theft.
b) Selling gold in an online RPG, causing no direct harm to anyone.
And unlike Blizzard who went after a bot creator through a ridulous copyright claim that should have been thrown out of court at first glance, Microsoft is fully in the right here.
*cough*Just-world fallacy*cough*
So can anyone explain to me what exactly a Kelvin gram is, and how it relates to hard drives? I'm guessing something to do with heat capacity...
Oh, you meant kilogram?
k = kilo
K = Kelvin
It's not rocket surgery, people. And it's something that should be caught by Slashdot's "editors" before it goes up on the main page.
Sure. But how many copies will a pure single-player gamer (who will only play through the game once and then shelve it) buy? One. How many copies will a hardcore multi-player gamer (who will play it obsessively for years and years until he finally croaks in an internet café) buy? One. Once you've bought your copy, it doesn't matter how much or for how long you play it. The money's already changed hands.
Good multi-player is a selling point. But don't delude yourself for a minute that the fanatic cliché is who the game is developed for - it's developed to lure in as many customers as possible, and there are a hell of a lot more casual than hard-core gamers.
Like the Anonymous Coward, I don't really care about Starcraft II's multiplayer (and much for the same reasons) - but if its single-player mode is as good as Starcraft I's, I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
Plutonium, yes, uranium, no. Uranium is actually fairly abundant - about 4 ppm average in the Earth's crust, or the 48th most abundant element in natural crustal rock. Plutonium OTOH is entirely man-made. It is present in nature due to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing back in the '40s, '50s and '60s, but the levels should be below detectability in currency, I believe.
In any case, you would be perfectly safe, unless you were using the bills to snort the plutonium. Most common uranium and plutonium isotopes are almost pure alpha, with inhalation being the major danger. You'd have to have really bad luck to get any detectable health effects even if you inadvertently handled directly contaminated bills.
An engine made out of silver? Or just a generally excellent one? Ah, a Stirling engine.
More quality editing from Slashdot...
Ah, an SMBC reference!
You mean USB with its maximum power draw of 500 mA @ 5V? No thanks. Charging takes too damned long already.
No. No it isn't. Quoth the oldbar site:
The presentation isn't the problem - it's the "search everything but the kitchen sink and suggest a bunch of irrelevant results" behavior that annoys people. AFAIK, there is no existing plugin that brings back the proper autocompletion behavior.
This reminds me of the old Protein Synthesis Dance.
"All mimsy was mRNA, and Protein chain outgrabe..."
This is the same ISP that started a campaign for privacy certification of ISPs and that's fought tooth and nail against Lex Orwell - from general advertising/campaigning to releasing a public awareness-raising (open source) Firefox plugin to stating that they will flat-out refuse to comply with any official wiretapping request. (Swedish-only links I'm afraid)
They might actually need their bunker, with the way this country is going...
I realize I shouldn't be feeding the trolls here, but still: some of those near misses have been pretty fucking near (and these are just some well-known examples!).
So what constitutes "handling them responsibly" then? Not blowing the world up? Sorry, all the other nuclear powers have managed so far as well. Pretty circular reasoning, if you ask me.
Pakistan and India are basically just proliferation threats (and India only indirectly so) - their weapons are only aimed at each other, no one else. Sucks to be them if the conflicts escalate, but no threat to the rest of us.
North Korea? Pretty much the same deal, and they are in the process of dismantling their program. Not that they even need nuclear weapons - the fact that Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea is their deterrent. They can inflict genocidal levels of casualties with conventional weapons (and they have plenty of non-nuclear, non-conventional weapons as well).
And Iran? They don't have any nuclear weapons!
I guess TSA Gangstaz (NSFW!) was actually a documentary then...
Great. Another OpenOffice.org version. But will this one finally kern out of the box? 2.4 doesn't (despite previous promises). I used to recommend OpenOffice as a viable Office alternative - my conscience prevents me from doing that nowadays. It's too horribly broken in so many different regards.