Fully agree, lots of people say "there should be a law" when there should not be. In this case, there should. We should have a "Common Carrier" rule for payment processors.
A hospital that falls under EMTALA cannot refuse care because of lack of payment or insurance (which covers nearly ALL hospitals with scant few exceptions). I've looked up the pre-hospital ALS protocols and drug list for paramedics in Springfield, and there aren't any treatment they are authorized to perform or drugs they can give (no Heparin on board their ambulances) for pulmonary embolism. They would be able to provide life support services were he to have experienced cardiac/respiratory arrest secondary his PE, which is why he should have called an ambulance. Typical response times onto a major highway are usually on the order of minutes for most major metropolitan ambulance services. A 20 mile drive takes roughly 20 minutes and highway speeds, which is plenty of time to suffer a permanent brain or cardiac injury (yes, including death) due to either cardiac or respiratory arrest, both possible side effects of a PE.
He should have pulled onto the side of the road with his hazards on and waited for paramedics. He risked dying at the wheel with no help available for what would have been very manageable emergencies for first responders.
The "ignoring existing users preferences" refers to the Windows Consumer Experience Reports you can opt into on prior versions of Windows before 10. If you have this set to not report to Microsoft, the new updates will report to Microsoft regardless of that setting. The actual updates themselves are selected to install by default, but if the user is paying attention they can deselect and hide those particular updates in Windows Updater before running that round of updates. They don't get installed automatically unless you've told Windows to handle patching autonomously.
EMT here. Unless you are getting flown in a helicopter to a trauma center it isn't going to cost "tens of thousands of dollars". BLS or ALS transport would typically be somewhere south of $700 for full unmitigated cost, and after insurance more likely $0-$200 out-of-pocket. That's if the person transported even pays the bill... many do not. An admitted ED stay would also be covered and that's usually between $0-$50 for most insurances I've seen.
I haven't updated to the latest version yet because yet again the theme I prefer to use is not compatible with the latest release. When last I updated the theme I had been using made the interface a complete garbled mess and I had to restart it in safe-mode and manually purge and reinstall all my addons and themes before it would behave correctly once more. At that time at least I knew the cause as I had just accepted an update, if it does it silently it may be a bit more confusing when something either goes bonkers or just silently stops working. What I would want is for some kind of set API or backwards compatibility that themes and addons can use so that the authors don't have to update every single time FF does.
Here is Google's contact number, give em a ring and let them know that they shouldn't be canning iGoogle. Anyone have an email address of someone higher up in the organization?
United States
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone: +1 650-253-0000
Fax: +1 650-253-0001
For some reason the FF10 update completely removed ADBLOCK+ from my PC. Even reinstalling the plugin doesn't get it to show up. It's not in the list as "incompatible", it's just gone.
Weird.
That's just the thing though... more and more people are getting into gaming all over the world. As the population grows, the market is just going to keep getting larger. So the cost of the game can be recouped for a lower cost per unit sold in greater volumes. The higher price point will prevent many of those customers from paying for the product, resulting in either the same profit for the Developer/Publisher and a higher cost for the consumer (bad for customers) rather than the same profit for the Dev and a lower cost for the consumer (win/win).
Games may cost more to develop these days... but bear in mind that all of these major dev houses got to where they are today by operating in the days when gaming was a niche market product. Devs actually have ludicrously better tools than they had in the past, making developing and asset creation easier and faster in comparison. Games cost more because devs are trying to get by solely on AAA blockbusters, instead of also creating smaller more indie-like games that got them where there are. Smaller, cheaper games that focus on great game-play rather than pushing budget boundaries.
They miss the revenue stream that smaller easily developed games gave them, and try to substitute DLC in place. Unfortunately, DLC is 99% of the time a really bad deal for the customer, being nearly the cost of an indie game in some cases for very little actual content, on top of the cost of the original game!
To summarize: I feel major devs should take the philosophy of cheaper games to more people (the population just goes up!), along with lighter games at lower costs as a way to keep revenue flowing between blockbusters and to keep actual "game-play" creation skills sharp. Because the lighter, smaller, cheaper game can't rely on uber graphics and next gen tech and famous voice actors to carry them. And one of their lighter games that succeeds beyond expectations could become their next AAA title with a sequel and funding to match. So their potential AAA IP pool is also increase with this development philosophy.
Sounds like a perfect testbed for those portable nuclear stations NASA is considering for the moon. No emissions to worry about as it is intended to be a permanently sealed system. Also takes care of the worry of supply drops of fuel and such, leaving more room for food and other such things if we are planning on manning this site.
The Asus N10 has an HDMI out, as well as a Nvidia 9300m gpu so it handles many games well enough too. Most of the games that don't work well are cpu intensive ones like Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect. With the 9 cell battery you'll get a small laptop that runs for about 8 hours at a time and can game. The only thing that it doesn't hold a candle to on a real notebook is the full-size keyboard.
N10 forums here, with a list of games and applications that will run well on it.
http://www.n10user.com/index.php
1.ABS does shorten stopping distances on snow covered or 2.wet roads, 3.but if the road is dry, the stop time will be much shorter if the wheels lock and you skid.
First part is not true, second part and third part is slightly more true as written by you. ABS can actually lengthen stopping on snow covered roads due to the fact that locked tires build up snow dams in front of them that can stop a car quite abruptly. When ABS kicks in the tires roll and break the dam apart increasing stopping distance.
For part 2 and 3, while stopping distances may be slightly increased (but not really significantly) your tires will not lock and you will maintain control of the vehicle.
The point of ABS is NOT in anyway related to stopping distance. It's function is to give you steering control during panic breaking.... allowing you to break as hard as is possible while still being able to steer. Computer controls can be better at some things then us meatbags can... and this is one of them.
I do however agree that cars should include toggle switches for these functions. I've had good need to switch off my traction control at times, and I could think of reasons to turn off ABS as well.
I must disagree with you on the "most human eyes can't distinguish the difference between 40 and 80fps." This may be somewhat more true of movies which are made with motion blur that blends the frames together. But you can certainly still tell the difference for the better when a movie is captured at 60fps rather than 30. Its not as big a difference as changing the framerate in a game is due to the motion blur but its certainly more visually pleasing when a video is captured and played at a higher framerate.
Back on track though, games have no motion blur... each frame is sharp and leads into the next with no blur. So in order to get a smooth look to it the framerate must be much higher in order to trick the brain into seeing a smoothly transitioning scene. I can easily tell the difference between framerates up to about 120fps, after which it becomes very difficult to discerne the changes.
Of course if you are playing a game and bump up your framerate without increasing your refresh rate as well, you are basically wasting rendering power as the monitor is only drawing the same number of frames as the current refresh rate. Keeping your refresh at or higher than your average framerate will make for a much more pleasant gaming experience.
Here is an ancient but still very much valid write-up on Framerate and Refresh Rate in regards to gaming: Framerate and refresh rate write up
This wiki page is a conglomeration of work and suggestions from many different forums I am a part of. Lots of good utilities available such as:
Nokia Monitor test: Test your CRT for focus, convergence, moire, geometry, voltage regulation, etc.
Locate - Windows version of a linux utility. Creates a database of every file on your drives. You can then search and get instant results.
Unstoppable Copier - The program allows you to attempt recovery of files from a physically or logically damaged disk. The program will attempt to recover as much data as possible without giving up once an error is encountered. The program allows recursive copying of whole disks.
OpenOffice.org - Think: Free MS Office without the bloat. Has Writer (word), Calc, Impress (powerpoint), Draw (vector art program) and the DB user tools to give you all the tools you need for day to day database work in a simple spreadsheet-like form.
Here is the full list:
File Utils
CKRename - Tool to mass rename files in a folder. Works very well for renaming MP3s.
WinMerge (Use latest RC under beta builds) - Compare document, script, HTML, etc content versions (compares what has changed from revision to revision).
XXCopy - Extended version of XCopy. This is a great utility for scripting file backups from one drive to another.
ISOBuster - Open CD/DVD ISOs, BINs, IMGs, etc without having to burn them. Can extract files without burning as well.
IrfanView - Batch Image Processing and viewer (much like ACDSee, but FREE!).
Diskeeper Lite - An updated version of the disk defragmenter that comes with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This version does a better job of defragging the drive and shows you more information. The site isn't the manufacturer's, but the download does come directly from them. ExecSoft doesn't have this listed on their site anywhere anymore.
Locate - Windows version of a linux utility. Creates a database of every file on your drives. You can then search and get instant results.
7-Zip - A freeware file archiver. It supports all of the popular formats (ZIP, CAP, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB) as well as its own format, 7z.
Max Lister - Create text lists of files in folders. For example, it's useful for an mp3 list.
ISTool - A GUI front-end for creating InnoSetup installer scripts.
WinINSTALL LE 2003 - Create your own MSI installers. Also edit existing MSI installers (change options, add/remove components, etc).
KiXtart - Advanced batch processing language. Commonly used for logon scripts but can be used to accomplish many tasks (comparable to using VBScript and WELL documented).
AutoIt - Create scripts to send keys to applictions. Commonly used to "silently" install applictions that don't natively support silent install switches.
Multimedia Tools
Tom Hollenshead (ceo of ID) talks about the movie:
on
Doom Movie Update
·
· Score: 2, Informative
http://general.gamerfeed.com/gf/news/7478/
exerpts:
Todd Hollenshead: The script is close to final and we're very happy with it.
Todd Hollenshead: I want to see the movie be true to what the legacy of the DOOM games mean to fans. Scary, intense, lots of action, and consistent with what we've done in the games. However, movies and games are different media, so some things will and should be different. I'm not looking for "DOOM 3: The Movie" and that's not what it will be. The script is not based on the DOOM 3 story, but is based on the DOOM universe, so fans will see plenty in the movie that they will recognize from the game.
Todd Hollenshead: We didn't tie the script to the specific story in the game. There are lots of similarities, but there are many things that are different in a way that's not inconsistent with what we've done in the games. I believe that fans will find the story in the movie fresh and exciting, but still very much DOOM.
Seems that the ID guys don't want Doom the movie to be like Doom the game. However he does say that he wants it to be based on the doom universe. Still, I don't see how super-viruses and no space-marines are a part of the doom universe:(
I think ID has left the ball drop recently. I had a lot of fun playing doom1 and 2, but doom3 was almost tedious. The graphics were great but it wasn't really fun to play. I hope they have better judgement about the movie script than about their latest game.
If there are indeed blatant attempts to gain access to your network and server, then a simple letter or email to their ISP should do the trick and help show your boss that you were trying to be proactive. Keep in mind that those IP's could be spoofed however, so without something a little more substantial than an IP addy, you are likely to be ignored by most major isp's.
Best chance for a response is to keep it polite and request a notification of what action (if any) they will take. Don't fill your letter or email full of legalese and vauge threats and I'm sure most of the people in charge of a particular abuse department will take you seriously enough. Whether or not they have the clout to take action on your behalf is another matter entirely however.
Another thing to do is to just keep yourself patched, firewalled, and a close eye on your network. If the attempts are rising, someone thinks your network/servers is/are an easy target. Prove them wrong and perhaps you won't need to write that letter after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Fully agree, lots of people say "there should be a law" when there should not be. In this case, there should. We should have a "Common Carrier" rule for payment processors.
How does one deduce what company that person buys their auto insurance from, exactly?
A hospital that falls under EMTALA cannot refuse care because of lack of payment or insurance (which covers nearly ALL hospitals with scant few exceptions). I've looked up the pre-hospital ALS protocols and drug list for paramedics in Springfield, and there aren't any treatment they are authorized to perform or drugs they can give (no Heparin on board their ambulances) for pulmonary embolism. They would be able to provide life support services were he to have experienced cardiac/respiratory arrest secondary his PE, which is why he should have called an ambulance. Typical response times onto a major highway are usually on the order of minutes for most major metropolitan ambulance services. A 20 mile drive takes roughly 20 minutes and highway speeds, which is plenty of time to suffer a permanent brain or cardiac injury (yes, including death) due to either cardiac or respiratory arrest, both possible side effects of a PE.
He should have pulled onto the side of the road with his hazards on and waited for paramedics. He risked dying at the wheel with no help available for what would have been very manageable emergencies for first responders.
The "ignoring existing users preferences" refers to the Windows Consumer Experience Reports you can opt into on prior versions of Windows before 10. If you have this set to not report to Microsoft, the new updates will report to Microsoft regardless of that setting. The actual updates themselves are selected to install by default, but if the user is paying attention they can deselect and hide those particular updates in Windows Updater before running that round of updates. They don't get installed automatically unless you've told Windows to handle patching autonomously.
Then my favorite example: fool's gold. Is this a type of gold?
Fool's Gold is the layman term/nickname for Iron Pyrite... and it is indeed a type of iron. Not the best comparison :)
EMT here. Unless you are getting flown in a helicopter to a trauma center it isn't going to cost "tens of thousands of dollars". BLS or ALS transport would typically be somewhere south of $700 for full unmitigated cost, and after insurance more likely $0-$200 out-of-pocket. That's if the person transported even pays the bill... many do not. An admitted ED stay would also be covered and that's usually between $0-$50 for most insurances I've seen.
I haven't updated to the latest version yet because yet again the theme I prefer to use is not compatible with the latest release. When last I updated the theme I had been using made the interface a complete garbled mess and I had to restart it in safe-mode and manually purge and reinstall all my addons and themes before it would behave correctly once more. At that time at least I knew the cause as I had just accepted an update, if it does it silently it may be a bit more confusing when something either goes bonkers or just silently stops working. What I would want is for some kind of set API or backwards compatibility that themes and addons can use so that the authors don't have to update every single time FF does.
Here is Google's contact number, give em a ring and let them know that they shouldn't be canning iGoogle. Anyone have an email address of someone higher up in the organization?
United States
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone: +1 650-253-0000
Fax: +1 650-253-0001
For some reason the FF10 update completely removed ADBLOCK+ from my PC. Even reinstalling the plugin doesn't get it to show up. It's not in the list as "incompatible", it's just gone. Weird.
You should definitely play Defense Grid, it is one of the premiere games of the genre. This is one game you'd regret putting on the back-burner.
That's just the thing though... more and more people are getting into gaming all over the world. As the population grows, the market is just going to keep getting larger. So the cost of the game can be recouped for a lower cost per unit sold in greater volumes. The higher price point will prevent many of those customers from paying for the product, resulting in either the same profit for the Developer/Publisher and a higher cost for the consumer (bad for customers) rather than the same profit for the Dev and a lower cost for the consumer (win/win).
Games may cost more to develop these days... but bear in mind that all of these major dev houses got to where they are today by operating in the days when gaming was a niche market product. Devs actually have ludicrously better tools than they had in the past, making developing and asset creation easier and faster in comparison. Games cost more because devs are trying to get by solely on AAA blockbusters, instead of also creating smaller more indie-like games that got them where there are. Smaller, cheaper games that focus on great game-play rather than pushing budget boundaries.
They miss the revenue stream that smaller easily developed games gave them, and try to substitute DLC in place. Unfortunately, DLC is 99% of the time a really bad deal for the customer, being nearly the cost of an indie game in some cases for very little actual content, on top of the cost of the original game!
To summarize: I feel major devs should take the philosophy of cheaper games to more people (the population just goes up!), along with lighter games at lower costs as a way to keep revenue flowing between blockbusters and to keep actual "game-play" creation skills sharp. Because the lighter, smaller, cheaper game can't rely on uber graphics and next gen tech and famous voice actors to carry them. And one of their lighter games that succeeds beyond expectations could become their next AAA title with a sequel and funding to match. So their potential AAA IP pool is also increase with this development philosophy.
Sounds like a perfect testbed for those portable nuclear stations NASA is considering for the moon. No emissions to worry about as it is intended to be a permanently sealed system. Also takes care of the worry of supply drops of fuel and such, leaving more room for food and other such things if we are planning on manning this site.
The Asus N10 has an HDMI out, as well as a Nvidia 9300m gpu so it handles many games well enough too. Most of the games that don't work well are cpu intensive ones like Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect. With the 9 cell battery you'll get a small laptop that runs for about 8 hours at a time and can game. The only thing that it doesn't hold a candle to on a real notebook is the full-size keyboard.
N10 forums here, with a list of games and applications that will run well on it. http://www.n10user.com/index.php
Simple to fix: The toggle resets automatically after 5 minutes or on the next start of the car or somesuch.
1.ABS does shorten stopping distances on snow covered or 2.wet roads, 3.but if the road is dry, the stop time will be much shorter if the wheels lock and you skid.
First part is not true, second part and third part is slightly more true as written by you. ABS can actually lengthen stopping on snow covered roads due to the fact that locked tires build up snow dams in front of them that can stop a car quite abruptly. When ABS kicks in the tires roll and break the dam apart increasing stopping distance.
For part 2 and 3, while stopping distances may be slightly increased (but not really significantly) your tires will not lock and you will maintain control of the vehicle.
The point of ABS is NOT in anyway related to stopping distance. It's function is to give you steering control during panic breaking.... allowing you to break as hard as is possible while still being able to steer. Computer controls can be better at some things then us meatbags can... and this is one of them.
I do however agree that cars should include toggle switches for these functions. I've had good need to switch off my traction control at times, and I could think of reasons to turn off ABS as well.
I must disagree with you on the "most human eyes can't distinguish the difference between 40 and 80fps." This may be somewhat more true of movies which are made with motion blur that blends the frames together. But you can certainly still tell the difference for the better when a movie is captured at 60fps rather than 30. Its not as big a difference as changing the framerate in a game is due to the motion blur but its certainly more visually pleasing when a video is captured and played at a higher framerate.
Back on track though, games have no motion blur... each frame is sharp and leads into the next with no blur. So in order to get a smooth look to it the framerate must be much higher in order to trick the brain into seeing a smoothly transitioning scene. I can easily tell the difference between framerates up to about 120fps, after which it becomes very difficult to discerne the changes.
Of course if you are playing a game and bump up your framerate without increasing your refresh rate as well, you are basically wasting rendering power as the monitor is only drawing the same number of frames as the current refresh rate. Keeping your refresh at or higher than your average framerate will make for a much more pleasant gaming experience.
Here is an ancient but still very much valid write-up on Framerate and Refresh Rate in regards to gaming:
Framerate and refresh rate write up
This wiki page is a conglomeration of work and suggestions from many different forums I am a part of. Lots of good utilities available such as:
Nokia Monitor test: Test your CRT for focus, convergence, moire, geometry, voltage regulation, etc.
Locate - Windows version of a linux utility. Creates a database of every file on your drives. You can then search and get instant results.
Unstoppable Copier - The program allows you to attempt recovery of files from a physically or logically damaged disk. The program will attempt to recover as much data as possible without giving up once an error is encountered. The program allows recursive copying of whole disks.
OpenOffice.org - Think: Free MS Office without the bloat. Has Writer (word), Calc, Impress (powerpoint), Draw (vector art program) and the DB user tools to give you all the tools you need for day to day database work in a simple spreadsheet-like form.
Here is the full list:
File Utils
Installation / Automation
Multimedia Tools
http://general.gamerfeed.com/gf/news/7478/
:(
:)
exerpts:
Todd Hollenshead: The script is close to final and we're very happy with it.
Todd Hollenshead: I want to see the movie be true to what the legacy of the DOOM games mean to fans. Scary, intense, lots of action, and consistent with what we've done in the games. However, movies and games are different media, so some things will and should be different. I'm not looking for "DOOM 3: The Movie" and that's not what it will be. The script is not based on the DOOM 3 story, but is based on the DOOM universe, so fans will see plenty in the movie that they will recognize from the game.
Todd Hollenshead: We didn't tie the script to the specific story in the game. There are lots of similarities, but there are many things that are different in a way that's not inconsistent with what we've done in the games. I believe that fans will find the story in the movie fresh and exciting, but still very much DOOM.
Seems that the ID guys don't want Doom the movie to be like Doom the game. However he does say that he wants it to be based on the doom universe. Still, I don't see how super-viruses and no space-marines are a part of the doom universe
I think ID has left the ball drop recently. I had a lot of fun playing doom1 and 2, but doom3 was almost tedious. The graphics were great but it wasn't really fun to play. I hope they have better judgement about the movie script than about their latest game.
Oh well, here's hoping to a great Quake4!
For those that don't know what GOP stands for off-hand:
Grand-Old-Party = republican party
Linky for a blurb about what GOP means on cbsnews.com
Best chance for a response is to keep it polite and request a notification of what action (if any) they will take. Don't fill your letter or email full of legalese and vauge threats and I'm sure most of the people in charge of a particular abuse department will take you seriously enough. Whether or not they have the clout to take action on your behalf is another matter entirely however.
Another thing to do is to just keep yourself patched, firewalled, and a close eye on your network. If the attempts are rising, someone thinks your network/servers is/are an easy target. Prove them wrong and perhaps you won't need to write that letter after all.
Good luck.