I must confess that I'm pretty disappointed with how FFXIV is looking, particularly after FFXIII was so totally underwhelming.
FFXII really impressed me. Beautiful, intricate, lovingly-crafted world; innovative gameplay that took some of the drudgery out of it; even a translation that made the English version even better than the original.
FFXII contained a lot of MMO elements, and with some of the obscure items and monster spawn conditions and the like, even managed to be a kind of meta-MMO in that players had to interact with other players on the internet in order to figure everything out.
I'm increasingly beginning to think that they should just bring back the FFXII team and have them turn that game's world, Ivalice, into some kind of MMO. Keep all the assets -- they look great in HD, as people emulating the game on high-spec PCs have shown -- and make another game out of that. Many of the elements are in place already. Do it, Square.
I do something similar: I have two computers at my desk at work, and I set up the one on the left side left-handed, and the right one right-handed. It keeps both hands in good mousing shape, allows me to have the two keyboards butting up against each other in the middle, and makes it very easy to operate both machines at the same time.
Curiously, not only does no one else at my office do this, but they all use both computers right-handed. I'm looking out at a field of dozens and dozens of desks, and every single one has two keyboards with the mice on the right-hand side of both. If only right-hander supremacism would go away; they could gain a lot of productivity by using both mice at once!
As someone with only one functional eye, I sure hope that 3D doesn't become the standard and screw me over.
Couldn't agree more. There have been several "advancements" in television that have benefited most people, but they didn't actually leave those unable to take advantage totally unable to use them -- the switch from B&W to color didn't prevent color-blind people from looking at a color screen, and people with blurred vision who can't distinguish HD content certainly don't lose anything by looking at it.
3-D, on the other hand, is less than worthless to those without binocular vision. It actually exacerbates their (our) handicap. In an age when we like to consider ourselves sensitive to handicaps of all kinds, I sincerely hope that all TVs can convert 3-D images into 2-D ones so that more of the population can see them.
Whether it takes three button presses or a hundred, the person paying for the service is getting what he wants: an updated PS3 plus the peace of mind of not having to do anything himself plus the freedom of not even having to find out that the update is a simple process.
Most Slashdotters are aware that there isn't much work involved in a PS3 system update. But a newbie, even one that doesn't mind doing the simple update manually, still has to discover how simple the update is, perhsps by searching online or asking friends who already have the device. I don't have a problem with the person who's willing to pay $30 ni part to never have to even think about that.
There's something even more slimy abour region codes, and when arguments about piracy and parallel imports start up, the issue often goes unremarked-upon.
Region codes are a violation of people's linguistic rights.
They require you to consume media in one of your nation or region's majority languages. In the US, you get English, and maybe Spanish or French, but not generally Japanese, Korean, Russian, or German. In the EU you'll get a few more choices, but not generally any languages from Asia. In Japan you typically get Japanese only.
So an immigrant family living in a certain region, wanting to raise bilingual children who know the language of their new home and of the "old country," can't do this legally, thanks to region locking.
Want to play a Japanese game on your North American PS1 or 2 (or vice versa)? Too bad. Need German subtitles to understand that Hollywood movie, because you're an expat Deutscher? Tough; wrong region. It doesn't matter that you're willing to pay the retail price. It doesn't matter that local media might be worthless to you (because you can't understand it) but that the equivalent from another region is something you want to buy. It doesn't matter that the material in another region might cost more than it does where you reside.
A series of international resolutions over the past 60 years have affirmed the rights of people -- particularly linguistic minorities -- to use whatever language they desire in private, and not be forced to abandon one language in favor of another, more politically powerful one.
Not even the most virulent nativist would attempt to prevent people from reading books or watching films in the language of their choice in the privacy of their own homes, but region-locking corporations are doing this very thing.
It's one thing for a company not to produce versions of a product in multiple languages because they don't have the budget. It's quite another to actually produce them, and then say "We refuse to allow you to use it, because you live in the wrong place."
Things are getting better -- the PS3 is region free and you can set the OS to whatever language you like. Computers will let you change the region 5 times, and these days a lot of people have more than one PC, so they can set one for each of the regions they're interested in. And older game systems are cheap enough that you can just buy two of them. But this is a far cry from a real, genuine right to multilingualism. If a government tried what these media corporations get away with, there would be hell to pay.
do you think that when somone is accused of a crime the government should first spend several days or weeks looking into wether the accuser is credible or not?
I don't know if they're going to force people to carry these ID cards around with them, but if they do, that's *worse* than a tattoo in my book. Get tattooed once, and you never have to think about it again. With mandatory ID cards, you have to consciously remember to carry your government-issued card on your person everywhere you go. From a psychological-oppression standpoint, I'd rather just be tattooed and be done thinking about it.
Dexter, thanks for the concern, but actually I'm one of the lucky ones who hasn't been through this -- it's my friends who have. I'm the guy who didn't get married and who thus avoided it! When I do marry, it will be outside the Anglosphere, to my charming better half who isn't self-absorbed and who really does appreciate the sacrifices a father makes -- the sacrifices her father made. And who doesn't have the legal system at her beck and call like she would in some countries!
Think of Dad forcing son to de-friend mom, bolstering her alienation of affection claim against him.
-- Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children.
-- Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his "write something about yourself" section: "If you have the balls to get in my face, I'll kick your ass into submission."
-- Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook's Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.
Three examples in a row of husbands/fathers being in the wrong before we finally get one where the wife is the lying one (and in that one, the mother's guilt is established at the end of the paragraph)? Here's a hint, journalists: don't make your readers wade through half an article of one-sidedness before tying to inject a little balance. Had I not kept at it, I would have thought that this was yet another hit piece on fathers, who seem to have no way of standing up to the pro-wife, pro-mother, pro-woman mainstream media. Fathers don't cheat any more than mothers do, and don't deserve the bad press they always seem to get. No wonder young men are refusing to get married these days.
This is the crux of the whole situation. For an e-book costing $2.99 (as in the example above), any change in price is either -33% or +33%, or more.
What kind of pricing system is this that allows for so little granularity? Forget the ".99" part of it for a minute -- small purchases require the ability to make smaller-still changes in price (small squared, if you will).
To get a feel for the importance of granularity, imagine that a national association of real estate agents got together and proposed a law that all properties must be sold in multiples of $100,000. Or that all used cars must be sold in multiples of $1000. You're looking to sell your old car and you think it's worth about $1500. What should you do?
I like my Mac as much as the next guy, but Apple's business tactics need some work.
Certainly, but only if all the formerly-Japanese prefectures voted as a bloc (block?).
In the presidential election, all of the State of Japan's 100 electoral votes (or thereabouts) would go to one candidate. With the candidate who wins Japan, even by a slim margin, instantly getting 30% of all the electoral votes, it would be very hard indeed for the other candidate(s) to overcome it, giving undue influence to this massive new state. Voting theory, Banzhaf power index, etc. So I'd be on the side of admitting 47 new states.
(Yes, I know, this is a silly exercise as Japan is not joining the USA in any capacity, and it started with a pedantic correction of a figure of speech. It's still fun to hash out the hypothetical details.)
Srothroc, I beg you to rethink the "it doesn't bother me" philosophy.
I live in Japan too, and work late nights. I've been stopped by police many times with demands to see this document. Once I'd left it at home by mistake -- I was taken to the police station and detained until the Ministry of Justice
Get stopped enough times, and eventally there'll be a double-witching day when a stoppage just happens to coincide with a day when you honestly forgot or lost your precious papers.
This Arizona law criminalizes ordinary behavior. Everyone drops things, loses things, etc., and in Arizona they'll now be criminals. The Japan National Railways takes in just under 100 wallets per day to their lost-and-found center. Now imagine that all the people who dropped those wallets are now technically criminals because of that oversight.
Does the psychological burden of having to remember one's precious papers whenever leaving the house also have no value?
And people shouldn't have to put themselves at risk by carrying papers to begin with. The main problem I have with mandatory carrying of identity papers is the possibility for identity theft if the papers should get lost or stolen.
Don't tell me you've never lost your wallet or left it unattended!
The Japanese cards contain a ludicrous amount of private information in plain text: bearer's name and Japanese kanji/kana name; date of birth; sex; place of birth; nationality; home municipality and state/province in home country; current address; name of householder at current address; passport number; date of issue of passport; date of first landing in Japan; visa type and expiration date; job title; employer's name and address, and, finally, signature (if issued after early 2000s) or fingerprint (if issued earlier).
Obviously a US driver's license or social security card doesn't contain anywhere near this much information, but this is a difference in degree and not in kind. Imagine all that info on you in the hands of any mugger or pickpocket!
The ability to exist in public without carrying such valuable information on one's person should be a basic human right. Shame on the state of Arizona and on anyone who supports mandatory carrying of identification.
If Japan *were* to somehow amalgamate with the US, the 47 prefectures, each of which has a population of roughly one-third to one-half of the typical US state, would become the 51st to 97th states.
Why is it that when people want to point out that Country X is an independent nation and not part of the USA, they always make an entire country equal to one single US state? Is it just because they can't be bothered to find out how many states/provinces/prefectures Country X actually has?
If Japan *did* become the 51st state, the State of Japan would get more than twice as many electoral votes as California, and would thus quickly come to dominate all presidential elections, as well as the House of Representatives. Demagogues like Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara and incompetents like Prime Ministers Yukio Hatoyama and Yoshiro Mori would become major US political figures. If you thought Bush and Obama were trouble, wait until you meet these guys...
At least we Mac users in Japan would get to buy our stuff from various retailers, though. And we could pay cheap domestic shipping!
Thanks, that's good to know, but I still won't carry a debit card. I'm not in the habit of checking my bank balance daily to see if someone's been stealing from me.
For these laughable "protections", I'd be far better off keeping my money under my mattress. It seems to me it should be 100% of the job of the bank to keep my money safe and secure.
Check anyway; your bank could be the one stealing from you. I had a nice stash of money at a certain big American bank (whose name I won't reveal, but it alludes to that location), and they once charged me an $18 account maintenance fee out of the blue for no reason at all. (The account had to have over $5k to avoid such a fee, and at no time did my balance ever drop below that.)
Keep in mind that at today's interest rates, on a $10k balance, that was about a year's worth of interest.
I discovered this two months after it occurred, and they basically said, "too bad; we took your money and you're not getting it back". Seems they want you checking your balance regularly even though the whole point of a savings account is to keep your money there and not manage it daily.
This is a great idea; I've never seen that before.
As a further innovation, I wonder if it would be possible to give different signals to drivers at different distances from the intersection: what's a safe green at 10 meters, assuming normal driving speed, could be a you-might-not-get-through yellow at 100 meters. Particularly at night, you might not know how far you are from the intersection, or might underestimate it.
Maybe we could embed them in the roads at various points leading up to the intersection. Then the "I thought I could get through" excuse would have less validity.
Runlevelfour, I couldn't agree more. As a cyclist/pedestrian and occasional moped driver, I'd like to see any and all "safety" measures removed, or at least rethought, with the safety or the people arond the driver made paramount. All they do is cause drivers to become less cognizant of the dangers that their driving is putting the people around them in.
One more bad thing about cell phone usage in automobiles is that the noise level inside a car is ratcheted up another notch (byeond other passengers, the radio, etc.). Car horns are designed to be audible to other automobiles, and thus seem to be quite a bit louder than they were 20-30 years ago. If some distracted driver notices a pedestrian, cyclist, or motorcyclist too late, and slams down on his/her horn, anyone nearby who isn't shielded by an automobile's walls will suffer some severe hearing problems. That injurious volume level is what it is in part because it has to be audible to people inside near-soundproof cars who are also carrying on conversations on their mobile phones.
Ever see the Speed Vest, which does just what you describe? (Only with electro-luminescent wire rather than LEDs; it looks quite a bit like a Nixie tube display.) I'm looking forward to seeing this produced commercially.
All the areas you want to select are automatically obscured by the very finger(s) that are doing the selecting. How stoooopid is that?
Stupid indeed, but one way to make it slightly easier is to have iconswhose visible parts are mainly where your finger isn't.
For example, my pointer-arrow cursor assumes that the user is right-handed, so it points up and to the left, with the hot spot in the upper left corner, as if the arrow were being wielded by a right hand.
I never thought I'd say anything good about the lingering right-hand-centrism of even the computer world, but in this case I could easily see my own light pen to the left of the cursor, because it was on the opposite side of the cursor's "body".
Obviously this won't work for touch-screen keys and buttons that are smaller than a finger. But I wonder if better icons and cursors wouldn't help a bit. Imagine a "mouseover"-like button explanation that comes up to the right of the button, confirming what it does, as your left index finger hovers over the actual button. Better than what we've got noe!
I agree wholeheartedly, and also wonder if the mania for helmets comes from car-centric culture. In my experience the people who are most vocal about forcing cyclists to wear helmets are not cyclists themselves, but automobile drivers. When someone who drives or rides in a car thinks "accident", they imagine being thrown forward through a windshield, head-first. *Those* people would do great to have a cycling helmet on, but when you consider what happens to a cyclist who falls off the bike or is thrown off, it's not the top of your head that's in danger -- it's everywhere else.
Speaking as someone who does a few thousand kilometers a year on urban roads (and who has never owned a car), I'd rather have some kind of protection for my wrists (since it's instinctive to use your hand to break a fall), and knees. If you're thrown off a bicycle and do a faceplant into the ground, you want protection for your chin (which I've never seen before). But the top of your head? I don't think I could land on the top of my head, flying off a bicycle, if I tried. *Maybe* if I were riding near a cliff that could be tumbled down, but at a child's speed (under 10 MPH, surely) on regular streets?
I also find the small increase in the size and weight of my head to be surprisingly disorienting; that difference might slow my reaction time by just enough to prevent me from seeing an oncoming car or other danger. Maybe that's just me, but still, I'd give my kid knee and elbow pads and some kind of wrist guard instead. That's where the realistic danger is, and where the increase in safety is less equivocal.
Slashdot Mirror
I must confess that I'm pretty disappointed with how FFXIV is looking, particularly after FFXIII was so totally underwhelming.
FFXII really impressed me. Beautiful, intricate, lovingly-crafted world; innovative gameplay that took some of the drudgery out of it; even a translation that made the English version even better than the original.
FFXII contained a lot of MMO elements, and with some of the obscure items and monster spawn conditions and the like, even managed to be a kind of meta-MMO in that players had to interact with other players on the internet in order to figure everything out.
I'm increasingly beginning to think that they should just bring back the FFXII team and have them turn that game's world, Ivalice, into some kind of MMO. Keep all the assets -- they look great in HD, as people emulating the game on high-spec PCs have shown -- and make another game out of that. Many of the elements are in place already. Do it, Square.
I do something similar: I have two computers at my desk at work, and I set up the one on the left side left-handed, and the right one right-handed. It keeps both hands in good mousing shape, allows me to have the two keyboards butting up against each other in the middle, and makes it very easy to operate both machines at the same time.
Curiously, not only does no one else at my office do this, but they all use both computers right-handed. I'm looking out at a field of dozens and dozens of desks, and every single one has two keyboards with the mice on the right-hand side of both. If only right-hander supremacism would go away; they could gain a lot of productivity by using both mice at once!
Couldn't agree more. There have been several "advancements" in television that have benefited most people, but they didn't actually leave those unable to take advantage totally unable to use them -- the switch from B&W to color didn't prevent color-blind people from looking at a color screen, and people with blurred vision who can't distinguish HD content certainly don't lose anything by looking at it.
3-D, on the other hand, is less than worthless to those without binocular vision. It actually exacerbates their (our) handicap. In an age when we like to consider ourselves sensitive to handicaps of all kinds, I sincerely hope that all TVs can convert 3-D images into 2-D ones so that more of the population can see them.
Whether it takes three button presses or a hundred, the person paying for the service is getting what he wants: an updated PS3 plus the peace of mind of not having to do anything himself plus the freedom of not even having to find out that the update is a simple process.
Most Slashdotters are aware that there isn't much work involved in a PS3 system update. But a newbie, even one that doesn't mind doing the simple update manually, still has to discover how simple the update is, perhsps by searching online or asking friends who already have the device. I don't have a problem with the person who's willing to pay $30 ni part to never have to even think about that.
Have reports of the program's demise been exaggerated?
For a project named Orion, you should quote not from Sam Clemens, but rather find something from his older brother!
There's something even more slimy abour region codes, and when arguments about piracy and parallel imports start up, the issue often goes unremarked-upon.
Region codes are a violation of people's linguistic rights.
They require you to consume media in one of your nation or region's majority languages. In the US, you get English, and maybe Spanish or French, but not generally Japanese, Korean, Russian, or German. In the EU you'll get a few more choices, but not generally any languages from Asia. In Japan you typically get Japanese only.
So an immigrant family living in a certain region, wanting to raise bilingual children who know the language of their new home and of the "old country," can't do this legally, thanks to region locking.
Want to play a Japanese game on your North American PS1 or 2 (or vice versa)? Too bad. Need German subtitles to understand that Hollywood movie, because you're an expat Deutscher? Tough; wrong region. It doesn't matter that you're willing to pay the retail price. It doesn't matter that local media might be worthless to you (because you can't understand it) but that the equivalent from another region is something you want to buy. It doesn't matter that the material in another region might cost more than it does where you reside.
A series of international resolutions over the past 60 years have affirmed the rights of people -- particularly linguistic minorities -- to use whatever language they desire in private, and not be forced to abandon one language in favor of another, more politically powerful one.
Not even the most virulent nativist would attempt to prevent people from reading books or watching films in the language of their choice in the privacy of their own homes, but region-locking corporations are doing this very thing.
It's one thing for a company not to produce versions of a product in multiple languages because they don't have the budget. It's quite another to actually produce them, and then say "We refuse to allow you to use it, because you live in the wrong place."
Things are getting better -- the PS3 is region free and you can set the OS to whatever language you like. Computers will let you change the region 5 times, and these days a lot of people have more than one PC, so they can set one for each of the regions they're interested in. And older game systems are cheap enough that you can just buy two of them. But this is a far cry from a real, genuine right to multilingualism. If a government tried what these media corporations get away with, there would be hell to pay.
Their jobs are in no danger; there are plenty of people in this world who need to be horsewhipped. Wasn't there a story earlier today about the RIAA?
Yes, this is exactly what I think.
I don't know if they're going to force people to carry these ID cards around with them, but if they do, that's *worse* than a tattoo in my book. Get tattooed once, and you never have to think about it again. With mandatory ID cards, you have to consciously remember to carry your government-issued card on your person everywhere you go. From a psychological-oppression standpoint, I'd rather just be tattooed and be done thinking about it.
Dexter, thanks for the concern, but actually I'm one of the lucky ones who hasn't been through this -- it's my friends who have. I'm the guy who didn't get married and who thus avoided it! When I do marry, it will be outside the Anglosphere, to my charming better half who isn't self-absorbed and who really does appreciate the sacrifices a father makes -- the sacrifices her father made. And who doesn't have the legal system at her beck and call like she would in some countries!
From the article:
Think of Dad forcing son to de-friend mom, bolstering her alienation of affection claim against him.
-- Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children.
-- Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his "write something about yourself" section: "If you have the balls to get in my face, I'll kick your ass into submission."
-- Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook's Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.
Three examples in a row of husbands/fathers being in the wrong before we finally get one where the wife is the lying one (and in that one, the mother's guilt is established at the end of the paragraph)? Here's a hint, journalists: don't make your readers wade through half an article of one-sidedness before tying to inject a little balance. Had I not kept at it, I would have thought that this was yet another hit piece on fathers, who seem to have no way of standing up to the pro-wife, pro-mother, pro-woman mainstream media. Fathers don't cheat any more than mothers do, and don't deserve the bad press they always seem to get. No wonder young men are refusing to get married these days.
This is the crux of the whole situation. For an e-book costing $2.99 (as in the example above), any change in price is either -33% or +33%, or more.
What kind of pricing system is this that allows for so little granularity? Forget the ".99" part of it for a minute -- small purchases require the ability to make smaller-still changes in price (small squared, if you will).
To get a feel for the importance of granularity, imagine that a national association of real estate agents got together and proposed a law that all properties must be sold in multiples of $100,000. Or that all used cars must be sold in multiples of $1000. You're looking to sell your old car and you think it's worth about $1500. What should you do?
I like my Mac as much as the next guy, but Apple's business tactics need some work.
Certainly, but only if all the formerly-Japanese prefectures voted as a bloc (block?).
In the presidential election, all of the State of Japan's 100 electoral votes (or thereabouts) would go to one candidate. With the candidate who wins Japan, even by a slim margin, instantly getting 30% of all the electoral votes, it would be very hard indeed for the other candidate(s) to overcome it, giving undue influence to this massive new state. Voting theory, Banzhaf power index, etc. So I'd be on the side of admitting 47 new states.
(Yes, I know, this is a silly exercise as Japan is not joining the USA in any capacity, and it started with a pedantic correction of a figure of speech. It's still fun to hash out the hypothetical details.)
Srothroc, I beg you to rethink the "it doesn't bother me" philosophy.
I live in Japan too, and work late nights. I've been stopped by police many times with demands to see this document. Once I'd left it at home by mistake -- I was taken to the police station and detained until the Ministry of Justice
Get stopped enough times, and eventally there'll be a double-witching day when a stoppage just happens to coincide with a day when you honestly forgot or lost your precious papers.
This Arizona law criminalizes ordinary behavior. Everyone drops things, loses things, etc., and in Arizona they'll now be criminals. The Japan National Railways takes in just under 100 wallets per day to their lost-and-found center. Now imagine that all the people who dropped those wallets are now technically criminals because of that oversight.
Does the psychological burden of having to remember one's precious papers whenever leaving the house also have no value?
And people shouldn't have to put themselves at risk by carrying papers to begin with. The main problem I have with mandatory carrying of identity papers is the possibility for identity theft if the papers should get lost or stolen.
Don't tell me you've never lost your wallet or left it unattended!
The Japanese cards contain a ludicrous amount of private information in plain text: bearer's name and Japanese kanji/kana name; date of birth; sex; place of birth; nationality; home municipality and state/province in home country; current address; name of householder at current address; passport number; date of issue of passport; date of first landing in Japan; visa type and expiration date; job title; employer's name and address, and, finally, signature (if issued after early 2000s) or fingerprint (if issued earlier).
Obviously a US driver's license or social security card doesn't contain anywhere near this much information, but this is a difference in degree and not in kind. Imagine all that info on you in the hands of any mugger or pickpocket!
The ability to exist in public without carrying such valuable information on one's person should be a basic human right. Shame on the state of Arizona and on anyone who supports mandatory carrying of identification.
If Japan *were* to somehow amalgamate with the US, the 47 prefectures, each of which has a population of roughly one-third to one-half of the typical US state, would become the 51st to 97th states.
Why is it that when people want to point out that Country X is an independent nation and not part of the USA, they always make an entire country equal to one single US state? Is it just because they can't be bothered to find out how many states/provinces/prefectures Country X actually has?
If Japan *did* become the 51st state, the State of Japan would get more than twice as many electoral votes as California, and would thus quickly come to dominate all presidential elections, as well as the House of Representatives. Demagogues like Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara and incompetents like Prime Ministers Yukio Hatoyama and Yoshiro Mori would become major US political figures. If you thought Bush and Obama were trouble, wait until you meet these guys...
At least we Mac users in Japan would get to buy our stuff from various retailers, though. And we could pay cheap domestic shipping!
Thanks, that's good to know, but I still won't carry a debit card. I'm not in the habit of checking my bank balance daily to see if someone's been stealing from me.
For these laughable "protections", I'd be far better off keeping my money under my mattress. It seems to me it should be 100% of the job of the bank to keep my money safe and secure.
Check anyway; your bank could be the one stealing from you. I had a nice stash of money at a certain big American bank (whose name I won't reveal, but it alludes to that location), and they once charged me an $18 account maintenance fee out of the blue for no reason at all. (The account had to have over $5k to avoid such a fee, and at no time did my balance ever drop below that.)
Keep in mind that at today's interest rates, on a $10k balance, that was about a year's worth of interest.
I discovered this two months after it occurred, and they basically said, "too bad; we took your money and you're not getting it back". Seems they want you checking your balance regularly even though the whole point of a savings account is to keep your money there and not manage it daily.
My mattress is looking safer and safer!
And it's spelled with two O's, not an A, ya moron.
OK then, you maroon.
This is a great idea; I've never seen that before.
As a further innovation, I wonder if it would be possible to give different signals to drivers at different distances from the intersection: what's a safe green at 10 meters, assuming normal driving speed, could be a you-might-not-get-through yellow at 100 meters. Particularly at night, you might not know how far you are from the intersection, or might underestimate it.
Maybe we could embed them in the roads at various points leading up to the intersection. Then the "I thought I could get through" excuse would have less validity.
Runlevelfour, I couldn't agree more. As a cyclist/pedestrian and occasional moped driver, I'd like to see any and all "safety" measures removed, or at least rethought, with the safety or the people arond the driver made paramount. All they do is cause drivers to become less cognizant of the dangers that their driving is putting the people around them in.
One more bad thing about cell phone usage in automobiles is that the noise level inside a car is ratcheted up another notch (byeond other passengers, the radio, etc.). Car horns are designed to be audible to other automobiles, and thus seem to be quite a bit louder than they were 20-30 years ago. If some distracted driver notices a pedestrian, cyclist, or motorcyclist too late, and slams down on his/her horn, anyone nearby who isn't shielded by an automobile's walls will suffer some severe hearing problems. That injurious volume level is what it is in part because it has to be audible to people inside near-soundproof cars who are also carrying on conversations on their mobile phones.
My wife said that the other day she saw a man attempting to eat cornflakes while driving! She was so surprised that she nearly dropped her lipstick!
I'll bet a pound of this stuff weighs a million pounds.
s/weighs/costs ...and even that's optimistic!
Ever see the Speed Vest, which does just what you describe? (Only with electro-luminescent wire rather than LEDs; it looks quite a bit like a Nixie tube display.) I'm looking forward to seeing this produced commercially.
http://speedvest.com/faq
makes me feel good, I don't have a basement so that means I'll have a zero chance of being killed by terrorist. Actually, that sounds about right.
I long ago replaced my stairwell with a Batpole. Join the "Adam West Campaign" and get those pseky basement-stairs injuries down to zero!
All the areas you want to select are automatically obscured by the very finger(s) that are doing the selecting. How stoooopid is that?
Stupid indeed, but one way to make it slightly easier is to have iconswhose visible parts are mainly where your finger isn't.
For example, my pointer-arrow cursor assumes that the user is right-handed, so it points up and to the left, with the hot spot in the upper left corner, as if the arrow were being wielded by a right hand.
I never thought I'd say anything good about the lingering right-hand-centrism of even the computer world, but in this case I could easily see my own light pen to the left of the cursor, because it was on the opposite side of the cursor's "body".
Obviously this won't work for touch-screen keys and buttons that are smaller than a finger. But I wonder if better icons and cursors wouldn't help a bit. Imagine a "mouseover"-like button explanation that comes up to the right of the button, confirming what it does, as your left index finger hovers over the actual button. Better than what we've got noe!
I agree wholeheartedly, and also wonder if the mania for helmets comes from car-centric culture. In my experience the people who are most vocal about forcing cyclists to wear helmets are not cyclists themselves, but automobile drivers. When someone who drives or rides in a car thinks "accident", they imagine being thrown forward through a windshield, head-first. *Those* people would do great to have a cycling helmet on, but when you consider what happens to a cyclist who falls off the bike or is thrown off, it's not the top of your head that's in danger -- it's everywhere else.
Speaking as someone who does a few thousand kilometers a year on urban roads (and who has never owned a car), I'd rather have some kind of protection for my wrists (since it's instinctive to use your hand to break a fall), and knees. If you're thrown off a bicycle and do a faceplant into the ground, you want protection for your chin (which I've never seen before). But the top of your head? I don't think I could land on the top of my head, flying off a bicycle, if I tried. *Maybe* if I were riding near a cliff that could be tumbled down, but at a child's speed (under 10 MPH, surely) on regular streets?
I also find the small increase in the size and weight of my head to be surprisingly disorienting; that difference might slow my reaction time by just enough to prevent me from seeing an oncoming car or other danger. Maybe that's just me, but still, I'd give my kid knee and elbow pads and some kind of wrist guard instead. That's where the realistic danger is, and where the increase in safety is less equivocal.