I've no regret buying my MD-Player(s), except the fact that if you use them regualarly for running, their lifespan drops to about 12 months. For their time, they were the dog's bollocks.
I own a NetMD minidisc player and use it for nothing but running. It's been going for two or three years now, and still running beautifully. Is it a commonly documented thing that they have limited lifespans when frequently jostled?
When a transaction is complete, the user has an identical copy of the file on his or her computer and may also then disseminate the file to other users connected to the network.
If part of the transaction is that you (the downloader) has an identical copy of the file on your hard drive, if the software changed a single bit at the very end of the file mean that you aren't using a P2P program? Keep twiddling that one bit back and forth with every transfer...
The P2P developers need gun lobbyists on their side! Since when was a gun developed that took "reasonable care" in preventing accidental death? The gun should be able to detect human presence and not fire a round! Yeah, it might cost a lot of money and time to develop that feature but we have to make sure that people don't use it the wrong way!
Are you being serious or humorous? Virtually every single gun has at least one safety on it to prevent accidental discharges. These include drop safeties to prevent the hammer from falling if the gun is dropped, a manual safety to lock the hammer/sear in the cocked position and prevent the trigger from being pulled, grip safeties to ensure that the trigger can only be pulled if the pistol is being held properly, trigger safeties (such as on Glocks) to ensure that the trigger can only be pulled if the entire trigger face is pressed, and not just snagged, loaded chamber indicators, disconnectors to keep the firearm from going full-auto, and so on and so on. Multiple mechanical devices have to fail for a firearm to accidentally fire.
Note that there is a fine distinction between Accidental Discharges and Negligent Discharges. Accidental Discharges occur when the mechanical devices do fail, and the firearm fires when no shot was intended. Some SKS's were notorious for inadvertantly going full-auto when the sear catch failed, and the rifle slam-fired. Negligent Discharges occurs when a person violates a basic rule of firearm handling, and fires a shot when s/he did not intend to. 99.9% of the time, this is what happened when "the gun just went off!" - the person had their finger on the trigger and pulled it when they were not paying attention.
Your invention would have to read the user's mind - what if I want to shoot that mugger coming at me with a lead pipe?
I'm not intending to start a RKBA debate here, I merely wanted to educate.
Aliens vs Predator has great atmosphere too (the original; I've never played the sequel). Playing through the Marine missions in near-pitch black, with the clicking of your motion sensor and the faint 'tink tink tink' sounds of Aliens crawling on the ceilings somewhere ahead.. I actually could not finish the Marine missions because it just creeped me out too much. I ended up cowering in a corner, tossing flares constantly, and dreading the sound of the aliens crawling.
The people playing MMORPG's are wealthy enough to buy a computer/rent time on a game server and have the free time to do so. I.e. the MMORPG's are not poor people living under the gun as far as meeting physical needs (food, shelter) goes. Since poverty is the #1 cause of criminal behavior, it's not suprising to see (relatively) rich people behaving in a law abiding fashion, even in an imaginary world.
This may be true, but it also seems to me that most people online tend to be younger (teenagers). These kids take advantage of the shield of anonymity to act like jerks, in accordance with John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. I think you just need to browse/. at -1 to realize this. Where's the motivation to act like this?
While that is true, the blurb about the article states that passwords and usernames may have been revealed. Encrypting your e-mail probably wouldn't prevent that.
Does the space dust and meteors offset all of the satellites and rockets we've been launching into space?
I honestly don't know, but I am curious.
Hmm, I guess it does. A bit of looking at the Straight Dope reveals:
Dear Cecil:
Is the earth getting heavier or lighter? After all, we've littered the cosmos with a lot of NASA stuff, which should shave off a few pounds, along with vapor escaping from the atmosphere. On the other hand, there's a lot more people and meteorites around than there was in 8011 BC. What do you think? --Edward M. Smith Jr., Los Angeles
Dear Edward:
Puny humanoid, you think the pitiful efforts of mankind have appreciably altered the mass of the earth, reliably estimated at 6 sextillion, 588 quintillion tons? (And man, if you don't think it was a bitch getting that puppy on the scale...) If so, shed your illusions. It's believed the earth gains anywhere from several dozen to several hundred tons per day due to meteorites and meteoritic dust--10,000 to 100,000 tons a year. (Sorry, but estimates vary widely.) This far exceeds any losses. The weight of the people, incidentally, has increased the mass of the earth by zero, for the obvious reason that we are but dust, and unto dust we shall return. To put it another way, human cells are merely rearrangements of the compunds previously found (i.e., before dinner time) in plant cells and animal cells. Net change pound-wise, nada.
Would you buy a car that could be stolen by any bored teenager that cared to do so?
Most of us do. I locked my keys in my car once and called a towtruck. The driver opened my car using a plastic wedge and a piece of wire in about 5 seconds.
Just about any car can be quickly and easily stolen. Heck, the thief could just get a tow truck and tow your car away and circumvent your alarm, fuel cut-off switch, engine imobilizer, and so on. Does this dissuade you from buying a car?
I think the grandparent poster has a point. A piece of software can be highly secure, but it also needs to be useful. If it's not useful, nobody would use it.
There's a number of design principles to pay attention to when you are designing a secure system:
-Least Privilege
-Fail-Safe Defaults
-Economy of Mechanism
-Complete Mediation
-Open Design
-Separation of Privilege
-Least Common Mechanism
-Psychological Acceptability
These often work at odds against one another. For example, if you follow Least Common Mechanism to its logical end, you cannot have a multi-user/multi-tasking system. Most of these design principles are at odds with Psychological Acceptability. How willing are you to have the computer verify via at least two different tokens your access level every single time you access an object? Can you imagine having to enter your password AND thumbprint every time you saved a modification to some code, and then had to enter the same information again to compile the code, and yet again to write the output file to the disk? Who would want to use a system like that? Who would want an unstealable car if that meant that it was cemented to the ground so that no one could take off with it, and encased in a three foot thick steel shell that it could never leave (after all, you don't want to be carjacked, do you?)?
Again, it's all a balancing act. Windows is easy for most people to use, because they configure things to 'just make it work!' instead of paying attention to security. Linux is a bit more of a pain, because instead of just letting you open your control panel and modify system settings, it asks for a password. Which one is better? Well, it's up to you. Just don't complain if your box gets owned, I suppose.
I've been contemplating doing that. My computer room gets pretty hot during the summer anyways (upstairs in a townhouse), and it'd be nice to have a portable A/C unit in the room. I wonder how much it'd help the temps inside my computer if I took some ducting and pumped nice cold A/C air straight into the intake fans.
I don't think he was implying that selling water for $20 a bottle is fraud; I think he was trying to lament the fact that even in times of disaster, people can't find it in themselves to actually help other people, rather than profit for themselves.
Hmm, it seems to me that if you look at the game modding community (such as Half Life modders, UT modders, and so on), there are lots of people who can generate pretty good looking models of weapons and players, generate new maps, and so on. It seems like coding is the difficult thing to do.
ACT Labs used to make a steering wheel, 6 speed shifter, and clutch/brake/gas pedal set. One of my friends has it. I don't know if newer games supports it, but he plays Viper Racing and Colin McRae Rally 3, using the clutch to shift and such. It's pretty fun!
Unfortunately, I believe the wheel/shifter/pedal set has been discontinued, but perhaps Ebay may come to your rescue.
3.5" hard drives often have four platters on which to store data. 2.5" hard drives usually only have one or two. In addition, the 2.5" hard drive platters are (obviously) physically much smaller than the 3.5" hard drive platters. For a given data density, not only do you have half the number of platters, you have much less surface area.
As far as transfer performance, you can transfer the most data where the platter is spinning the fastest - on the outer edge. The 3.5" hard drives' edge spins that much faster than the edge of a 2.5" hard drive, so it's easier to get higher data rates.
Spinning the hard drives faster and faster also builds up much more heat, and consumes more energy than slower drives. Laptops have a harder time coping with heat (it's not like you can just keep adding fans to the chassis), and battery lives are already short enough.
There is also a lack of SATA interfaces for laptops. I don't know why this is, but you are faced with a chicken/egg situation - do you build SATA 2.5" drives if there is no connector for it? Do you build connectors for a hard drive that doesn't exist?
SATA 2.5" drives are supposed to come out sometime early this year. We'll see.
Not always true. My Toshiba laptop, for one, simply parks the lower resolution image in the center of the larger screen.
For instance, if I was trying to display a 640x480 image on my 1024x768 monitor, there'd be 192 dark pixels on either side of the image, and 144 dark pixels on the top and bottom of the image. The image itself is not stretched or disorted.. just small. Sort of like watching a widescreen DVD on a 4:3 aspect TV.
This is nothing new. Do you remember the ads for the game Forsaken? There was absolutely nothing about the game in the ads. Was it a FPS? An RPG? A RTS? Who knows?! (As it turns out, the game was a Descent clone).
All the ads showed was a very pretty lady with a tattoo that said "Forsaken" in front of a desolate background. Various ads would show various parts of her body (face, tummy, and so on). I'm sure you could google the ads if you felt like it. IIRC, even the box for the game showed the Forsaken girl.
I had a guy at Radio Shack refuse to sell me something (for cash, no less), unless I provided name and address. This was a few years back when they still bugged everyone for info. I haven't been back since.
When I worked at Radio Shack a few years ago, it wasn't required. I stopped asking people, as a matter of fact, since it was just a pain to type it in when I was trying to check out as many people as possible. The guy was being a jerk; the sales software they use(d) is happy without the address.
Same with me here, except with SP2. When the page loads, there's a bar at the top saying that my setting prevent ActiveX from running. Clicking the link does absolutely nothing.
Open up the offer, and read the small print on the back of the letter. There's a 1-800 number that you can call and ask to be removed from whatever list they use (IIRC, it keeps the credit card offer companies from looking at your credit report). They'll send you a letter; you have to fill it out and return it.
I called the number and returned the letter, and I stopped getting credit card offers in the mail.
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I own a NetMD minidisc player and use it for nothing but running. It's been going for two or three years now, and still running beautifully. Is it a commonly documented thing that they have limited lifespans when frequently jostled?
If part of the transaction is that you (the downloader) has an identical copy of the file on your hard drive, if the software changed a single bit at the very end of the file mean that you aren't using a P2P program? Keep twiddling that one bit back and forth with every transfer...
Are you being serious or humorous? Virtually every single gun has at least one safety on it to prevent accidental discharges. These include drop safeties to prevent the hammer from falling if the gun is dropped, a manual safety to lock the hammer/sear in the cocked position and prevent the trigger from being pulled, grip safeties to ensure that the trigger can only be pulled if the pistol is being held properly, trigger safeties (such as on Glocks) to ensure that the trigger can only be pulled if the entire trigger face is pressed, and not just snagged, loaded chamber indicators, disconnectors to keep the firearm from going full-auto, and so on and so on. Multiple mechanical devices have to fail for a firearm to accidentally fire.
Note that there is a fine distinction between Accidental Discharges and Negligent Discharges. Accidental Discharges occur when the mechanical devices do fail, and the firearm fires when no shot was intended. Some SKS's were notorious for inadvertantly going full-auto when the sear catch failed, and the rifle slam-fired. Negligent Discharges occurs when a person violates a basic rule of firearm handling, and fires a shot when s/he did not intend to. 99.9% of the time, this is what happened when "the gun just went off!" - the person had their finger on the trigger and pulled it when they were not paying attention.
Your invention would have to read the user's mind - what if I want to shoot that mugger coming at me with a lead pipe?
I'm not intending to start a RKBA debate here, I merely wanted to educate.
Wow, you received +3 Informative for telling us to shove our controllers up our asses.
Aliens vs Predator has great atmosphere too (the original; I've never played the sequel). Playing through the Marine missions in near-pitch black, with the clicking of your motion sensor and the faint 'tink tink tink' sounds of Aliens crawling on the ceilings somewhere ahead.. I actually could not finish the Marine missions because it just creeped me out too much. I ended up cowering in a corner, tossing flares constantly, and dreading the sound of the aliens crawling.
Can you give some links to some? I'd love to have a program that offers similar capabilities without the evilness.
He's not the president of the NRA anymore. It's Kayne B. Robinson.
This may be true, but it also seems to me that most people online tend to be younger (teenagers). These kids take advantage of the shield of anonymity to act like jerks, in accordance with John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. I think you just need to browse /. at -1 to realize this. Where's the motivation to act like this?
While that is true, the blurb about the article states that passwords and usernames may have been revealed. Encrypting your e-mail probably wouldn't prevent that.
I honestly don't know, but I am curious.
Hmm, I guess it does. A bit of looking at the Straight Dope reveals:
Dear Cecil:
Is the earth getting heavier or lighter? After all, we've littered the cosmos with a lot of NASA stuff, which should shave off a few pounds, along with vapor escaping from the atmosphere. On the other hand, there's a lot more people and meteorites around than there was in 8011 BC. What do you think? --Edward M. Smith Jr., Los Angeles
Dear Edward: Puny humanoid, you think the pitiful efforts of mankind have appreciably altered the mass of the earth, reliably estimated at 6 sextillion, 588 quintillion tons? (And man, if you don't think it was a bitch getting that puppy on the scale...) If so, shed your illusions. It's believed the earth gains anywhere from several dozen to several hundred tons per day due to meteorites and meteoritic dust--10,000 to 100,000 tons a year. (Sorry, but estimates vary widely.) This far exceeds any losses. The weight of the people, incidentally, has increased the mass of the earth by zero, for the obvious reason that we are but dust, and unto dust we shall return. To put it another way, human cells are merely rearrangements of the compunds previously found (i.e., before dinner time) in plant cells and animal cells. Net change pound-wise, nada.
Most of us do. I locked my keys in my car once and called a towtruck. The driver opened my car using a plastic wedge and a piece of wire in about 5 seconds.
Just about any car can be quickly and easily stolen. Heck, the thief could just get a tow truck and tow your car away and circumvent your alarm, fuel cut-off switch, engine imobilizer, and so on. Does this dissuade you from buying a car?
I think the grandparent poster has a point. A piece of software can be highly secure, but it also needs to be useful. If it's not useful, nobody would use it.
There's a number of design principles to pay attention to when you are designing a secure system:
-Least Privilege
-Fail-Safe Defaults
-Economy of Mechanism
-Complete Mediation
-Open Design
-Separation of Privilege
-Least Common Mechanism
-Psychological Acceptability
These often work at odds against one another. For example, if you follow Least Common Mechanism to its logical end, you cannot have a multi-user/multi-tasking system. Most of these design principles are at odds with Psychological Acceptability. How willing are you to have the computer verify via at least two different tokens your access level every single time you access an object? Can you imagine having to enter your password AND thumbprint every time you saved a modification to some code, and then had to enter the same information again to compile the code, and yet again to write the output file to the disk? Who would want to use a system like that? Who would want an unstealable car if that meant that it was cemented to the ground so that no one could take off with it, and encased in a three foot thick steel shell that it could never leave (after all, you don't want to be carjacked, do you?)?
Again, it's all a balancing act. Windows is easy for most people to use, because they configure things to 'just make it work!' instead of paying attention to security. Linux is a bit more of a pain, because instead of just letting you open your control panel and modify system settings, it asks for a password. Which one is better? Well, it's up to you. Just don't complain if your box gets owned, I suppose.
I've been contemplating doing that. My computer room gets pretty hot during the summer anyways (upstairs in a townhouse), and it'd be nice to have a portable A/C unit in the room. I wonder how much it'd help the temps inside my computer if I took some ducting and pumped nice cold A/C air straight into the intake fans.
I don't think he was implying that selling water for $20 a bottle is fraud; I think he was trying to lament the fact that even in times of disaster, people can't find it in themselves to actually help other people, rather than profit for themselves.
Hmm, it seems to me that if you look at the game modding community (such as Half Life modders, UT modders, and so on), there are lots of people who can generate pretty good looking models of weapons and players, generate new maps, and so on. It seems like coding is the difficult thing to do.
Unfortunately, I believe the wheel/shifter/pedal set has been discontinued, but perhaps Ebay may come to your rescue.
As far as transfer performance, you can transfer the most data where the platter is spinning the fastest - on the outer edge. The 3.5" hard drives' edge spins that much faster than the edge of a 2.5" hard drive, so it's easier to get higher data rates.
Spinning the hard drives faster and faster also builds up much more heat, and consumes more energy than slower drives. Laptops have a harder time coping with heat (it's not like you can just keep adding fans to the chassis), and battery lives are already short enough.
There is also a lack of SATA interfaces for laptops. I don't know why this is, but you are faced with a chicken/egg situation - do you build SATA 2.5" drives if there is no connector for it? Do you build connectors for a hard drive that doesn't exist?
SATA 2.5" drives are supposed to come out sometime early this year. We'll see.
"Just like spandex, Communism a great idea in theory, but then real people began to use it."
For instance, if I was trying to display a 640x480 image on my 1024x768 monitor, there'd be 192 dark pixels on either side of the image, and 144 dark pixels on the top and bottom of the image. The image itself is not stretched or disorted.. just small. Sort of like watching a widescreen DVD on a 4:3 aspect TV.
I wonder what Crazy Joe is going to do with all the gold. I kind of doubt that he gave receipts for refunds.
All the ads showed was a very pretty lady with a tattoo that said "Forsaken" in front of a desolate background. Various ads would show various parts of her body (face, tummy, and so on). I'm sure you could google the ads if you felt like it. IIRC, even the box for the game showed the Forsaken girl.
I had a guy at Radio Shack refuse to sell me something (for cash, no less), unless I provided name and address. This was a few years back when they still bugged everyone for info. I haven't been back since. When I worked at Radio Shack a few years ago, it wasn't required. I stopped asking people, as a matter of fact, since it was just a pain to type it in when I was trying to check out as many people as possible. The guy was being a jerk; the sales software they use(d) is happy without the address.
You need a completely random source of data to make the one time pad, otherwise it's useless and will be cracked.
Same with me here, except with SP2. When the page loads, there's a bar at the top saying that my setting prevent ActiveX from running. Clicking the link does absolutely nothing.
I guess I missed the Star Wars movie that featured the Enterprise and Klingons.
Open up the offer, and read the small print on the back of the letter. There's a 1-800 number that you can call and ask to be removed from whatever list they use (IIRC, it keeps the credit card offer companies from looking at your credit report). They'll send you a letter; you have to fill it out and return it. I called the number and returned the letter, and I stopped getting credit card offers in the mail.