what about retroactive revocation of retroactive immunity? It's not like your making something illegal that wasn't illegal when it happened, you're just taking away the get-out-of-jail-free-card which they weren't entitled to anyway.
Actually, it is an excuse - you cannot reasonably expect someone to obey a law that they don't know - that's plain common sense.
It's not a defence useable in a court of law, because those who arbitrate on what counts as a defence would rather see injustice done to the few who genuinely are ignorant than throw the door open to those who aren't ignorant to claim that they are so as to get off scott-free.
It's potentially an incredibly dangerous principle (re: secret laws) but there's no forseeable time when it will be done away with (we'd need to read minds for that) - the solution is to do away with laws that a reasonable person cannot be reasonably expected to not be ignorant of.
To some extent, we do accept that involuntary ignorance is a defence, which is why ex post facto laws aren't allowed - if you couldn't know that it was illegal that's normally a defence, it's not a large step to consider not knowing for some other reason to be a defence.
I'd like to hear your solution to the rock-and-a-hard-place problem where person (a) who has the ability to hassle you legally in the immediate term says that you must do X, and person (b) who has the ability to hassle you legally in the long term says don't do X (and often after you've already done X).
Whether it's an excuse is a matter of conscience for the individual to decide upon themselves - perhaps you should state why people should share your view, rather than stating your view as fact.
But feel free to go about saying that it's not a legal defence, that IS a fact.
actually, that's not entirely a defence against bad laws either - parliament considers itself to be 'supreme' meaning that if parliament wants it, then it trumps everything else, and that scares the life out of me. At present we do what the European Court wants and voluntarily tie our hands with the convention on human rights, but parliament reserves the right to ignore the former (re: national sovereignty), and crafted our implementation of the latter such that they can ignore it if they really want to.
and so do their parents. Arcades work well when the kids can't possibly hope to play video games any other way, so they hand over their money bit-by-bit, every week. But now a games console is not out of the financial reach of the average kid \ parent, and if you can afford to buy a console and play an unlimited amount for no further spending, why wouldn't you?
It's the same as the death of hiring televisions, or why more people are paying a mortgage rather than rent. Repeatedly paying to use something but get nothing out at the end is a ridiculous arrangement to get yourself into, it only ever really suckers the people who can't afford to buy whatever it is outright from the start, and there's less of those people about.
I also suspect that many parents would be happy to fork out the cost of a games console for the peace of mind that Little Jimmy is playing his video games in the living room than paying slightly less overall for him to go out on to an arcade on his own. (defined as 'without parental supervision')
In fact, to reply to myself, from the report you cited:
page 27:
Before the accident flight, the top up with Jet A1 fuel had been completed at around
13 h 55. An overfill of 300 litres corresponding to a quantity of 237 kg had been added.
According to witness statements, this overfill was performed on tanks 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Page 32:
The maximum structural weight on takeoff being 185,070 kg, it appears that the aircraft
was slightly overloaded on takeoff, regardless of the hypotheses used to make the
calculations.
Section 1.16.7.2, starting page 111:
Examination of the piece found on the runway allowed investigators to exclude the
possibility that the destruction of this part of the tank resulted from a direct puncture by a
large object or by tearing off of the piece as a result of a puncture... Because of the incompressibility of liquids, and in
as much as the tank is "full", that is to say there is no free surface too near
the impact area that disturbs the phenomenon, this displacement tends to
push the tank structure towards the outside, first of all in the nearest areas... The initial shock, by pushing the walls, displaced a certain amount of fuel, which caused a
displacement movement within the liquid. It was this displacement that pushed out the
surfaces neighbouring on those on which the impact occurred... [some criteria for this to work] Note: the piece of the tank found on the runway responds to these criteria...
Certain aspects of the report confirm what I've said, others cast doubt upon it. I suppose that such abiguity as to the cause is the nature of air disasters. I can't build a foolproof set of extracts which wholly support my position to the exclusion of all others without seriously misrepresenting the findings of the report, and that's not something that I intend to do. I still don't think that you're right to lay the blame solely at the feet of Continental - reading further than the summary into the report, it doesn't, as I understand it, support that view. It appears that the tank in which there was a rupture was not one of those deliberately overfilled, but that doesn't mean that the ruptured tank was not still filled more than usual, the report doesn't say. So, to conclude, I no longer know what to think, except that we're probably neither entirely right.
Debris was thrown against the wing structure leading to a rupture of tank 5
Which is what I've been saying, '...leading to...', the debris didn't directly cause the rupture, it set up a pressure wave which caused the rupture, all of which wouldn't have happened if the tanks had been filled to the specification 97% capacity, not 100% as they were.
The crash was caused by whose utter idiocy in ignoring the safety specifications? whose national airline's concorde was it that blew up? and who compiled the report?
Air France, France & the French.
Whose DC-10 had a bit fall off? Where is that airline from? Who was France taking every opportunity to take a pot-shot at during the latter stages of the investigation during which the final report was actually being compiled?
Continental Airlines, the United States, the Americans.
The bit of metal, though it shouldn't have fallen off the DC-10, should have been picked up by ground staff (which was BA policy - the runway was checked immediately before their concordes took off - by BA staff).
The tire breaking in that way was a complete freak accident and was probably not forseeable.
The fuel tank was protected from risk of hydrodynamic pressure surge by only ever filling it to 97%, except it wasn't; it was filled to 100% so the plane could carry extra luggage and still make it across the Atlantic.
The point is that any of those factors being absent would have stopped the crash, but only the last one was caused by deliberately operating the plane outside its normal operating standards and in so doing, disabling the safety policy which would have stopped it becoming a problem. What don't you get about that?
I never claimed that it was weight or balance issues that caused the crash, I said that a desire to carry too much luggage caused too much fuel to be put in the tanks and the overfull tanks caused the crash. That's not the same thing.
You can choose to believe me that my source is a former BA concorde pilot (who I accept probably has some bias towards bashing the French), or not, but if we assume that I'm telling the truth about that would you rather believe a concorde pilot who probably understood what the report said better than you or I ever will and had reason to further investigate properly to make sure that his own aircraft were safe when they went back into service, or your own cursory read (as I assume it was) of a report that was compiled by a group of people with a vested interest in obscuring blame directed at Air France (the French government owns 18.6% of Air France's parent company)?
A pressure wave shot along the fuel tank, blowing out the weakest panel in the tank.
said panel was near and engine and fuel poured out over an engine.
Kablammo
Now, the crucial point is 3. The pressure wave only shot along the tanks because they were full, if they were only 97% filled, as per standard, the sudden increase in pressure caused by the impact would have been absorbed by the air gap in the top of the tank, rather than blowing the tank apart.
Bits fall off planes all the time, and the tyre ripping on the bit was incredible bad luck, but it wouldn't have been a major catastrophe had the tanks not been full. That was the only bit that was caused by someone screwing up.
They'd have to have made an emergency landing, probably after flying around to burn the fuel off, but the plane would not have catastrophically blown up as it did.
I heard a terrific series of lectures by an ex concorde pilot this past summer. There were a few points about its demise that he made that I'd like to pass on:
Concorde was profitable right up to the end, even including the massive overhaul costs; in its final year, 7 relatively low-capacity aircraft made £90m, whilst BA as a whole was making a loss.
The only reason BA stopped flying them was that the French wouldn't let them - the agreement under which they were originally built stated that both countries had to to keep flying their concordes and the French didn't want to keep flying theirs because THEIRS were unprofitable (because they operated them badly)
Also, the French hold the type certificate on the plane, so BA couldn't go even build new ones.
The original agreement also stated that BOAC, later BA, had to operate the British concordes; so even if Beardy Branson had purchased them, they'd still have been operated by BA staff, and if BA were going to be operating them, they'd damn well still be doing it with the planes in their own colours. Except they couldn't - see above. It was a publicity stunt and Branson knew it.
So, to conclude, the reason that the only supersonic airliner is sitting rotting on the tarmac is because the French killed it, not BA. Also, the Paris crash was caused by Air France putting too much luggage on board and then overfilling the fuel tanks to give it enough to get across the Atlantic. (The tanks were supposed to be 97% full, the French filled them to 100%.)
well, they have a system wherein they find out who is actually remotely qualified to consider the case, and automatically exclude them. Anyone who might think for themselves is a large obstacle to blindly enforcing the law as written, irregardless of the wider consequences, collateral damage, or overall self-destructive effect, so lawyers don't want them - they want a jury that's predictable, not one irrational enough to do the right thing.
concur - people lead themselves into tyranny when they get themselves into the mindset that personal self-defence is not the single most important; fundamental; inalienable and absolute right that exists for all.
well, the N64 controller seemed more intuitive to me, one cursory glance over the controller gave you enough information to work out what key you needed from a description. A & B are the keys just under your thumb, A is on the left, B is on the right, just like in the order in which they're printed in the usual order of the latin alphabet. The C-pad is the block of yellow keys directly above it, c-up, down, left & right are all fairly easy to find, the clue is in the names. The D-pad is thus the only other pad, and looks like D-pads have always looked. The Z-key is on the bottom of the controller, note here that Z is also the last letter of the alphabet. The analogue stick is, well, the stick. The L & R keys were the only hard ones to find, they were on the top edge of the controller - the L key was on the left, the R key was on the right - but they weren't used very often and I don't remember having played a game where they were critical anyway.
Now, pick up a PS controller. Which button is square? and which of the underside keys in the trigger position fires your gun and which does 'nothing' by which it means 'throws a grenade which you don't notice and blows you up later'? Good, now pick up an N64 controller and Goldeneye; you fire with the trigger, move with the stick (aiming is done for you), the button on the left changes weapon and the button on the right reloads. down-c crouches, up-c stands back up, left & right -c strafe and R allows manual aiming. Maybe it was just the games that I played on each console, but it seemed that Nintendo games tended to use the obvious key for everything (which I posit was caused by the fact that the N64 had better keys for 'obvious' usage), and the PS games didn't.
agree. N64, greatest console ever.
1) The controller was genius and is still utterly unsurpassed. The only real challenger is the Wii controller, and that's a whole different kettle of fish. A quick overview of the other challengers:
The playstation controller - it's barely changed from the PS1 to the PS3, it was crap then and it's crap now. The two analogue sticks are too much for one person to control, the buttons are badly placed and the square-cross-circle-triangle keypad is madness! There's no underlying logic to the way that they're laid out - if you get an instruction that says 'press triangle' and you haven't memorised the controller you have to take your fingers off and look at the controller. That is NOT newbie-friendly.
The xBox controller - no, just no, buttons are badly placed. The controller is too chunky to hold and they've made Sony's mistake of putting two analogue sticks on it.
The N64 controller was ergonomic, allowed you to hold it so only the controls that you needed were accessible, had a good variety of buttons and all well placed (the z-button was great and so intuitive). My only gripe was that the rumble pack was an external extra and needed batteries.
2) It was the last of the cartridge consoles. Cartridges were good. They were fast, they were rugged (you could throw them across the room in a fit of rage - I've only ever seen them broken once and that was after the circuit board had been deliberately snapped with pliers) and they allowed game makers to put the kibosh on most unwanted copying by the simple fact that no blank media existed. Everything has gone down the pan since consoles switched to discs.
3) The games were just that good - MarioKart64, FZero-X, Goldeneye, Smash Brothers and, to a lesser extent, The World is Not Enough. 4 or 5 games guaranteed endless replayability.
4) 4 players - didn't happen often, but was magic when it did.
exactly. You can steal the credit for the idea, because credit can only be assigned once, but you can't steal the idea because the idea is infinitely replicable at no cost to the original holder. Also, to be able to specifically take someone's idea, you have to know what that idea is, which means that the idea has already been given to you. Coming up with the same idea independently is, of course, not stealing, and to suggest otherwise would be akin to getting upset when you realise that the person on the other side of the room has the same jumper as you.
well, a simple mis-application of Fleming's left-hand rule could result in anyone standing directly behind the gun from getting a fairly substantial hole put in them. That could go wrong.
A complex, self-regulating system. I live in a smallish (sub 500k population) city in the UK. Even here, congestion in the city centre gets quite bad. This means that I don't normally drive through the city centre anyway. However, on the occasions on which I do have to drive through when it's busy, I don't see why I should have to pay for it. If I could avoid going through, I would. Ok, actually, I'm opposed to paying for public services at the point of use, if there were congestion charging here I wouldn't drive through at all, which I suppose is what they want. I'd be more likely to: 1) drive 3 or 4 times as far to go around the outskirts of the city, which causes more wear on the other roads and is worse for the environment 2) cycle, which is flippin' dangerous 3) not go
I suspect that for many people who have to go into the city centre every day, because it's where they work; (1) is ridiculous because if everyone did it, the problem would just be shifted, (2) isn't practicable for much further out than where I live, or safe (3) isn't a solution because it results in them not having a job.
Those people who can avoid driving in, do. Those who can't shouldn't be penalised for it.
Now, someone do some simulations to show that once a certain level of congestion is met, the number of road users who can be disinsentivized off the roads is at a maximum given only the level of congestion and won't be significantly increased by charging.
I looked at the V+ box, but apparently all your recordings stop working every time they update the software. It also doesn't output the recordings to DVD and (I forgot to mention this requirement) you can't hook it up to your network and start streaming your recordings to the other computers in the house.
The second hand tivo sounds almost workable, but it still leaves the possibility of someone tinkering with the box, I don't know whether you can hook them up to network for streaming purposes, and I don't get to do any tinkering.
Both systems seems very closed up and as if they take control of your own system out of your hands, which is a compromise that I'm not really happy to make, especially as with either I'd be compromising on most of my other requirements as well.
no, they bought the fisher space pens at retail price just like nasa. Oh, and an ordinary biro would have worked just as well anyway - you only need a pressurized pen for a de-pressurized area, like an airlock or the surface of the moon. Some people need to watch more QI.
There's nothing to be easily recorded. Terrestrial is almost exclusively CRAP, and the only DVD recorder that I've got near only has a terrestrial tuner - that one has NEVER been used for recording anything, at all.
So, you could always plug the output of a freeview box or digital cable box into it, but that involves two devices. That involves setting the channel on the recorder and on the box, and making sure that someone else doesn't come along 1/2 an hour later and just change the channel on the box (because there will be no indication on the box that they shouldn't). Which makes it a flakey solution at best.
See, now, I'd trot mythTV out as the solution here, but I haven't used it and don't know if it is the solution (can it output what it's recorded to DVDs?), why? Because freeview isn't really enough either, especially when we're paying £30 for digital cable, and what can't you get? digital cable decoder cards. And why can't you get them? because British digital cable is a monopoly run by a bunch of morons who think it's clever to use a system which doesn't conform to the DVB-C standard. Bastards. For which there are no decoder cards and you have to use their crappy box, and the best their tech could suggest was to use the RF output and a regular video card. Which means, given that we can't plug the box into our VCR that we have no recording capability whatsoever.
So, my own ask/. , is it possible to set up a properly integrated PVR that will work with British digital cable (ex-NTL)?
well, if the screen is wholly over one eye (or could be moved as such) then a relevant lens could be put in position over the other eye. The screen could then be set to black when not in use (forcing you to use the uncovered eye) OR the gizmo could acquire a small camera to provide the relevant image on the screen (of course the camera could be anywhere, such as behind you, or be infrared-sensitive for night-vision, or both) the display could then provide extra information such as the temperature, air pressure, terrorist threat-level, a todo list or, if you happen to be a terminator, a selection of the pictures of the people that you have to kill. If you're short sighted then they'll be close enough to need no correction and if you're long sighted then more fool you (or you could wear a contact lens).
You'd still need to take them off to drive, of course.
Now I think of it, you could just wear contact lenses. Except that you're probably a geek who's too cowardly to try and poke himself in the eye - I certainly am.
"Thankyou for purchasing the Armstrong-Whitworth four-pounder 'cannonette', please read these instructions carefully and it should give you years of trouble-free maiming..."
on the other hand, for those of us who are well-meaning but often have views that rub people up the wrong way, or express ourselves badly, they're a godsend defence against asshat admins who casually consider the banstick a valid way to win an argument.
Slashdot Mirror
what about retroactive revocation of retroactive immunity? It's not like your making something illegal that wasn't illegal when it happened, you're just taking away the get-out-of-jail-free-card which they weren't entitled to anyway.
"as ignorance of the law is no excuse"
Actually, it is an excuse - you cannot reasonably expect someone to obey a law that they don't know - that's plain common sense.
It's not a defence useable in a court of law, because those who arbitrate on what counts as a defence would rather see injustice done to the few who genuinely are ignorant than throw the door open to those who aren't ignorant to claim that they are so as to get off scott-free.
It's potentially an incredibly dangerous principle (re: secret laws) but there's no forseeable time when it will be done away with (we'd need to read minds for that) - the solution is to do away with laws that a reasonable person cannot be reasonably expected to not be ignorant of.
To some extent, we do accept that involuntary ignorance is a defence, which is why ex post facto laws aren't allowed - if you couldn't know that it was illegal that's normally a defence, it's not a large step to consider not knowing for some other reason to be a defence.
I'd like to hear your solution to the rock-and-a-hard-place problem where person (a) who has the ability to hassle you legally in the immediate term says that you must do X, and person (b) who has the ability to hassle you legally in the long term says don't do X (and often after you've already done X).
Whether it's an excuse is a matter of conscience for the individual to decide upon themselves - perhaps you should state why people should share your view, rather than stating your view as fact.
But feel free to go about saying that it's not a legal defence, that IS a fact.
actually, that's not entirely a defence against bad laws either - parliament considers itself to be 'supreme' meaning that if parliament wants it, then it trumps everything else, and that scares the life out of me.
At present we do what the European Court wants and voluntarily tie our hands with the convention on human rights, but parliament reserves the right to ignore the former (re: national sovereignty), and crafted our implementation of the latter such that they can ignore it if they really want to.
and so do their parents. Arcades work well when the kids can't possibly hope to play video games any other way, so they hand over their money bit-by-bit, every week. But now a games console is not out of the financial reach of the average kid \ parent, and if you can afford to buy a console and play an unlimited amount for no further spending, why wouldn't you? It's the same as the death of hiring televisions, or why more people are paying a mortgage rather than rent. Repeatedly paying to use something but get nothing out at the end is a ridiculous arrangement to get yourself into, it only ever really suckers the people who can't afford to buy whatever it is outright from the start, and there's less of those people about. I also suspect that many parents would be happy to fork out the cost of a games console for the peace of mind that Little Jimmy is playing his video games in the living room than paying slightly less overall for him to go out on to an arcade on his own. (defined as 'without parental supervision')
page 27:
Page 32:
Section 1.16.7.2, starting page 111: Certain aspects of the report confirm what I've said, others cast doubt upon it. I suppose that such abiguity as to the cause is the nature of air disasters. I can't build a foolproof set of extracts which wholly support my position to the exclusion of all others without seriously misrepresenting the findings of the report, and that's not something that I intend to do. I still don't think that you're right to lay the blame solely at the feet of Continental - reading further than the summary into the report, it doesn't, as I understand it, support that view. It appears that the tank in which there was a rupture was not one of those deliberately overfilled, but that doesn't mean that the ruptured tank was not still filled more than usual, the report doesn't say.
So, to conclude, I no longer know what to think, except that we're probably neither entirely right.
The crash was caused by whose utter idiocy in ignoring the safety specifications? whose national airline's concorde was it that blew up? and who compiled the report?
Air France, France & the French.
Whose DC-10 had a bit fall off? Where is that airline from? Who was France taking every opportunity to take a pot-shot at during the latter stages of the investigation during which the final report was actually being compiled?
Continental Airlines, the United States, the Americans.
- The bit of metal, though it shouldn't have fallen off the DC-10, should have been picked up by ground staff (which was BA policy - the runway was checked immediately before their concordes took off - by BA staff).
- The tire breaking in that way was a complete freak accident and was probably not forseeable.
- The fuel tank was protected from risk of hydrodynamic pressure surge by only ever filling it to 97%, except it wasn't; it was filled to 100% so the plane could carry extra luggage and still make it across the Atlantic.
The point is that any of those factors being absent would have stopped the crash, but only the last one was caused by deliberately operating the plane outside its normal operating standards and in so doing, disabling the safety policy which would have stopped it becoming a problem. What don't you get about that?I never claimed that it was weight or balance issues that caused the crash, I said that a desire to carry too much luggage caused too much fuel to be put in the tanks and the overfull tanks caused the crash. That's not the same thing.
You can choose to believe me that my source is a former BA concorde pilot (who I accept probably has some bias towards bashing the French), or not, but if we assume that I'm telling the truth about that would you rather believe a concorde pilot who probably understood what the report said better than you or I ever will and had reason to further investigate properly to make sure that his own aircraft were safe when they went back into service, or your own cursory read (as I assume it was) of a report that was compiled by a group of people with a vested interest in obscuring blame directed at Air France (the French government owns 18.6% of Air France's parent company)?
so a strategy game rather than a tactical game then? You are aware that such a game was Chris Taylor's stated intention with supcomm, right?
- the metal tore the tyre apart.
- the lump of tyre hit the wing.
- A pressure wave shot along the fuel tank, blowing out the weakest panel in the tank.
- said panel was near and engine and fuel poured out over an engine.
- Kablammo
Now, the crucial point is 3. The pressure wave only shot along the tanks because they were full, if they were only 97% filled, as per standard, the sudden increase in pressure caused by the impact would have been absorbed by the air gap in the top of the tank, rather than blowing the tank apart. Bits fall off planes all the time, and the tyre ripping on the bit was incredible bad luck, but it wouldn't have been a major catastrophe had the tanks not been full. That was the only bit that was caused by someone screwing up. They'd have to have made an emergency landing, probably after flying around to burn the fuel off, but the plane would not have catastrophically blown up as it did.- Concorde was profitable right up to the end, even including the massive overhaul costs; in its final year, 7 relatively low-capacity aircraft made £90m, whilst BA as a whole was making a loss.
- The only reason BA stopped flying them was that the French wouldn't let them - the agreement under which they were originally built stated that both countries had to to keep flying their concordes and the French didn't want to keep flying theirs because THEIRS were unprofitable (because they operated them badly)
- Also, the French hold the type certificate on the plane, so BA couldn't go even build new ones.
- The original agreement also stated that BOAC, later BA, had to operate the British concordes; so even if Beardy Branson had purchased them, they'd still have been operated by BA staff, and if BA were going to be operating them, they'd damn well still be doing it with the planes in their own colours. Except they couldn't - see above. It was a publicity stunt and Branson knew it.
So, to conclude, the reason that the only supersonic airliner is sitting rotting on the tarmac is because the French killed it, not BA. Also, the Paris crash was caused by Air France putting too much luggage on board and then overfilling the fuel tanks to give it enough to get across the Atlantic. (The tanks were supposed to be 97% full, the French filled them to 100%.)well, they have a system wherein they find out who is actually remotely qualified to consider the case, and automatically exclude them. Anyone who might think for themselves is a large obstacle to blindly enforcing the law as written, irregardless of the wider consequences, collateral damage, or overall self-destructive effect, so lawyers don't want them - they want a jury that's predictable, not one irrational enough to do the right thing.
concur - people lead themselves into tyranny when they get themselves into the mindset that personal self-defence is not the single most important; fundamental; inalienable and absolute right that exists for all.
well, the N64 controller seemed more intuitive to me, one cursory glance over the controller gave you enough information to work out what key you needed from a description. A & B are the keys just under your thumb, A is on the left, B is on the right, just like in the order in which they're printed in the usual order of the latin alphabet. The C-pad is the block of yellow keys directly above it, c-up, down, left & right are all fairly easy to find, the clue is in the names. The D-pad is thus the only other pad, and looks like D-pads have always looked. The Z-key is on the bottom of the controller, note here that Z is also the last letter of the alphabet. The analogue stick is, well, the stick. The L & R keys were the only hard ones to find, they were on the top edge of the controller - the L key was on the left, the R key was on the right - but they weren't used very often and I don't remember having played a game where they were critical anyway.
Now, pick up a PS controller. Which button is square? and which of the underside keys in the trigger position fires your gun and which does 'nothing' by which it means 'throws a grenade which you don't notice and blows you up later'? Good, now pick up an N64 controller and Goldeneye; you fire with the trigger, move with the stick (aiming is done for you), the button on the left changes weapon and the button on the right reloads. down-c crouches, up-c stands back up, left & right -c strafe and R allows manual aiming. Maybe it was just the games that I played on each console, but it seemed that Nintendo games tended to use the obvious key for everything (which I posit was caused by the fact that the N64 had better keys for 'obvious' usage), and the PS games didn't.
agree. N64, greatest console ever.
1) The controller was genius and is still utterly unsurpassed. The only real challenger is the Wii controller, and that's a whole different kettle of fish. A quick overview of the other challengers:
The playstation controller - it's barely changed from the PS1 to the PS3, it was crap then and it's crap now. The two analogue sticks are too much for one person to control, the buttons are badly placed and the square-cross-circle-triangle keypad is madness! There's no underlying logic to the way that they're laid out - if you get an instruction that says 'press triangle' and you haven't memorised the controller you have to take your fingers off and look at the controller. That is NOT newbie-friendly.
The xBox controller - no, just no, buttons are badly placed. The controller is too chunky to hold and they've made Sony's mistake of putting two analogue sticks on it.
The N64 controller was ergonomic, allowed you to hold it so only the controls that you needed were accessible, had a good variety of buttons and all well placed (the z-button was great and so intuitive). My only gripe was that the rumble pack was an external extra and needed batteries.
2) It was the last of the cartridge consoles. Cartridges were good. They were fast, they were rugged (you could throw them across the room in a fit of rage - I've only ever seen them broken once and that was after the circuit board had been deliberately snapped with pliers) and they allowed game makers to put the kibosh on most unwanted copying by the simple fact that no blank media existed. Everything has gone down the pan since consoles switched to discs.
3) The games were just that good - MarioKart64, FZero-X, Goldeneye, Smash Brothers and, to a lesser extent, The World is Not Enough. 4 or 5 games guaranteed endless replayability.
4) 4 players - didn't happen often, but was magic when it did.
exactly. You can steal the credit for the idea, because credit can only be assigned once, but you can't steal the idea because the idea is infinitely replicable at no cost to the original holder. Also, to be able to specifically take someone's idea, you have to know what that idea is, which means that the idea has already been given to you. Coming up with the same idea independently is, of course, not stealing, and to suggest otherwise would be akin to getting upset when you realise that the person on the other side of the room has the same jumper as you.
well, a simple mis-application of Fleming's left-hand rule could result in anyone standing directly behind the gun from getting a fairly substantial hole put in them. That could go wrong.
A complex, self-regulating system.
I live in a smallish (sub 500k population) city in the UK. Even here, congestion in the city centre gets quite bad. This means that I don't normally drive through the city centre anyway. However, on the occasions on which I do have to drive through when it's busy, I don't see why I should have to pay for it. If I could avoid going through, I would.
Ok, actually, I'm opposed to paying for public services at the point of use, if there were congestion charging here I wouldn't drive through at all, which I suppose is what they want. I'd be more likely to:
1) drive 3 or 4 times as far to go around the outskirts of the city, which causes more wear on the other roads and is worse for the environment
2) cycle, which is flippin' dangerous
3) not go
I suspect that for many people who have to go into the city centre every day, because it's where they work; (1) is ridiculous because if everyone did it, the problem would just be shifted, (2) isn't practicable for much further out than where I live, or safe (3) isn't a solution because it results in them not having a job.
Those people who can avoid driving in, do. Those who can't shouldn't be penalised for it.
Now, someone do some simulations to show that once a certain level of congestion is met, the number of road users who can be disinsentivized off the roads is at a maximum given only the level of congestion and won't be significantly increased by charging.
Stephen Fry is the embodiment of omniscience. Gads, how can you be so ignorant?
I'm sorry, are you denouncing the words of Stephen Fry as untrue? Fool!
I looked at the V+ box, but apparently all your recordings stop working every time they update the software. It also doesn't output the recordings to DVD and (I forgot to mention this requirement) you can't hook it up to your network and start streaming your recordings to the other computers in the house. The second hand tivo sounds almost workable, but it still leaves the possibility of someone tinkering with the box, I don't know whether you can hook them up to network for streaming purposes, and I don't get to do any tinkering. Both systems seems very closed up and as if they take control of your own system out of your hands, which is a compromise that I'm not really happy to make, especially as with either I'd be compromising on most of my other requirements as well.
Duh, the replicator serves drinks in these things. Sheesh - do I have to explain even the most BASIC space technology to you guys?
no, they bought the fisher space pens at retail price just like nasa. Oh, and an ordinary biro would have worked just as well anyway - you only need a pressurized pen for a de-pressurized area, like an airlock or the surface of the moon. Some people need to watch more QI.
There's nothing to be easily recorded. Terrestrial is almost exclusively CRAP, and the only DVD recorder that I've got near only has a terrestrial tuner - that one has NEVER been used for recording anything, at all. So, you could always plug the output of a freeview box or digital cable box into it, but that involves two devices. That involves setting the channel on the recorder and on the box, and making sure that someone else doesn't come along 1/2 an hour later and just change the channel on the box (because there will be no indication on the box that they shouldn't). Which makes it a flakey solution at best. See, now, I'd trot mythTV out as the solution here, but I haven't used it and don't know if it is the solution (can it output what it's recorded to DVDs?), why? Because freeview isn't really enough either, especially when we're paying £30 for digital cable, and what can't you get? digital cable decoder cards. And why can't you get them? because British digital cable is a monopoly run by a bunch of morons who think it's clever to use a system which doesn't conform to the DVB-C standard. Bastards. For which there are no decoder cards and you have to use their crappy box, and the best their tech could suggest was to use the RF output and a regular video card. Which means, given that we can't plug the box into our VCR that we have no recording capability whatsoever. So, my own ask /. , is it possible to set up a properly integrated PVR that will work with British digital cable (ex-NTL)?
well, if the screen is wholly over one eye (or could be moved as such) then a relevant lens could be put in position over the other eye. The screen could then be set to black when not in use (forcing you to use the uncovered eye) OR the gizmo could acquire a small camera to provide the relevant image on the screen (of course the camera could be anywhere, such as behind you, or be infrared-sensitive for night-vision, or both) the display could then provide extra information such as the temperature, air pressure, terrorist threat-level, a todo list or, if you happen to be a terminator, a selection of the pictures of the people that you have to kill. If you're short sighted then they'll be close enough to need no correction and if you're long sighted then more fool you (or you could wear a contact lens).
You'd still need to take them off to drive, of course.
Now I think of it, you could just wear contact lenses. Except that you're probably a geek who's too cowardly to try and poke himself in the eye - I certainly am.
"Thankyou for purchasing the Armstrong-Whitworth four-pounder 'cannonette', please read these instructions carefully and it should give you years of trouble-free maiming..."
on the other hand, for those of us who are well-meaning but often have views that rub people up the wrong way, or express ourselves badly, they're a godsend defence against asshat admins who casually consider the banstick a valid way to win an argument.