Cannabis is an effective and non-toxic analgesic. Every medicine cabinet should have some cannabis extract for general aches and pains, insomnia, stomach upset, and many other mild ailments.
Many other mild ailments.. uh huh, like boredom?
Never mind that it's habit forming as hell.;) (And also never mind that the GP specifically mentions safety during pregnancy... lol).
Sorry, a law which criminalizes the act of modifying your console to play your legitimate(legal) backups sort of trumps fair use. Anyways, fair use is not a law.. it is a court ruling. Laws trump court rulings.
Modifying your own console so that you can execute backups that YOU CREATED from original discs YOU OWN is illegal in the USA
No it's not. Not even a little bit.
I can do anything I want to modify my console.
This is an unbased argument which is often espoused by console modders. Please have a look at Title 17 Chapter 12 (which was added by the DMCA): http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1201.html
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. "
My friend, opening up your console and installing a modchip is a circumvention of a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work. Ever wonder why it is that modchip sellers & manufacturers in the united states no longer exist? They've been raided for selling something that is now illegal in our country.
Yep, it's the de facto standard for backing up games thanks to the DMCA. Modifying your own console so that you can execute backups that YOU CREATED from original discs YOU OWN is illegal in the USA and punishable under the DMCA. This is because the game manufacturers have found that it is much more lucrative to let children destroy originals than it is to let consumers make backups and possibly never by a 4th copy of that $60 game.
We wanted to make it where there's a real story, and it goes on and on surprisingly long and - or usually, unless you come to a bad ending.
I seem to recall that in the books, nearly all choices resulted in "bad endings". That is to say, they were a page at the END of the book and only one page long. I always thought that these books could have really used a page shuffling before publishing, because you easily get used to thinking, "Ok, I'm on page 14. Choice one leads to page 15. Choice two leads to page 387. I'll go ahead and put a finger in page 14 [nod to parent], and read page 387, and then head back to page 15."
Folks should definitely check out that implementation of the z-machine. It's build in story search/downloading is just fantastic. Now everyone download and play "Blue Chairs", "Photopia", and "Spider and Web".
For starters.
The parent is talking about past IF (Interactive Fiction) Competition winners. The IF Competition has been running for more than 10 years and has brought some really impressive pieces of IF to the world's attention.
http://www.ifcomp.org/
Once, in a Microsoft interview, I was asked to write a memory allocator. I always assumed that after I left, the conversation went like:
"Great, copy this down. Tell the next guy to write us a sound driver."
http://xkcd.com/488/
I actually don't really play many videogames, so while we've obviously touched on a topic that you feel extremely strongly about, I don't really care. Plus, you are inferring (wrongly) that I pirate videogames, simply because I said I would not shed a tear over the fact that it is done. You ought to pay more attention before you climb up on that high horse of yours. Also, YOU are the one that described buying videogames as "charity". Now you say it isn't charity. Discuss.
There's still one more group that you haven't listed.. Compulsive game pirates who pay for indie games. I'll not shed a tear over pirating a copy of Spore (especially since the warez version is BETTER than the paid for version), but for some reason, I refuse to pirate an indie game. In fact, I actually buy indie games that I don't really care for, just because I want to encourage the developer. Now, for my opinion on this game: Firstly, Machinarium is a great game (I bought it on the day it released) but the developer didn't even include a SERIAL to protect his game. This is back to the old Commodore 64 game copying days, I can just imagine every kid in the world passing the disc to their buddy. Why didn't the developer put a serial on this game? This is common practice and hardly DRM. Also, the fact that there is no serial protection means that you can't download a replacement copy from his website if you lose yours.. You are given one chance to download the game, and if it is gone, then you're out of luck (mostly.. The developer actually is very nice and let me redownload my copy once I provided an order number). I think that a better choice for protection would have been something more like the penny-arcade games or torchlight, where there is a serial but very loose restrictions on how many machines you can install it on. That's another point I should add, that I have a lot of kids, and I am always on the lookout for a game like torchlight that actively encourages you to go ahead and install on every system in your house for only the cost of one license. That's a GREAT deal, I mean a GREAT deal. Incidentally, if you haven't played & purchased Torchlight, the penny-arcade adventures, Braid, Machinarium, then do yourself a treat and buy them now.
PocketSat+ http://www.bigfattail.com/software/pocketsatplus/ is a free satellite tracking software for PalmOS that I find extremely sufficient, so no need for a laptop. I agree with working satellites being pretty tricky, though.
Yes, a ham radio can get you much better range and ability to contact the nearest town without much weight. Much better than a cellphone. Cellphones are line of sight around the 2ghz range, they stink without a repeater nearby. Don't bother with a handheld HF rig, unless you know morse code you're not going to get any skywave propogation via phone at 5w.
Pick up a 2m monoband handheld transceiver and a portable 2m yagi to go with it. You'll be able to reach an easy 50 miles with FM voice modes and hit the repeater in the nearest big town. This assumes that there is not a mountain in the way, of course.. You're not going to be able to get radio THROUGH a mountain. Ideally you're up on the side of a mountain. I understand that you'll be worried about weight, but it seems to me that being able to contact civilization is pretty important if you run into real trouble. I can recommend this portable 2m yagi: http://www.arrowantennas.com/arrowii/146-3ii.html
and really any 2m monoband HT will do you well, don't pay for the bells and whistles. The old HTX-202's work great (if you don't mind paying a pound or 2 for your radio). With regard to getting a technician class amateur radio license, the code requirement is long gone and it should be pretty trivial for most slashdotters to obtain a ham radio license nowadays.
One last thought: AO-51. There are low-earth orbit amateur radio satellites that can be worked with handheld transceivers and a good dual-band yagi. The passes are short (15 minutes) and the process takes some practice, but you could definitely get out a distress call that way, no matter what the terrain is.
Because processing a limited number of scans into a useful model previously took several hours, they were forced to perform many more scans to get a more accurate picture with which to build their model - because they don't want to leave the patient lying in the scanner for 6 hours prior to treatment.
With this improvement in processing power, they can produce the model from limited data in a feasable time.
Good lord. Am I the only one that is terrified by the idea that they are take several scans and trying to come up with a vague model of how your organs tend to move, and then firing a rather large dose of ionizing radiation at their best guess? I was under the misunderstanding that imaging guided radiation therapy was somewhat real time up until now.
I can second the AC's suggestion of the midibox SID, it really is superior to the SIDstation in every way. The only problem is that you will never find one on ebay due to the restrictive licensing scheme that the project originator implemented. Sometimes you can find a completed one on the site's forums (Selling for no more than the cost of parts) but this would be VERY rare. Your best bet is to just build one yourself, it's a fairly simple PIC based project, and there are PCB's available.
I believe that this is the same battery that the old Minolta SRT's needed, and I found that installing the germanium diode under the bottom plate and using a standard 357 (silver-oxide version, not alkaline) with a small rubber o-ring around it was a perfect fit. The issue at hand here is that the old mercury cells put out something like a stable 1.35 volts throughout their entire lifespan and old camera meters used it as a reference voltage. Mercury cells are illegal now and have been for a long time, you cannot acquire them. Alkaline batteries are useless for these camera, alkaline batteries start out putting out nearly 2v and degrade over time, the output voltage dropping as the battery wears out. However, Silver-oxide batteries put out a stable 1.55v through their entire lifespan, and the trick is to put a carefully selected diode inline with the battery which will have a forward voltage drop of.2v and get your silver-oxide battery down into the mercury battery voltage. The other (easier, but more expensive) method is to by one of those air-zinc Wein cells, which are specifically designed to be drop-in replacements for mercury cells. The problem with those is that they don't last very long at all, once you open the air-tight seal on them they only last a few months.
In the case of avionics, there are rigorous design and testing standards for electronics, software, and mechanical hardware that are mandated by the FAA. Passing them is part of the certification process. This task can be handled in house or by third parties that specialize in that task. The medical industry should largely be applying the same principles.
EXACTLY. First informed post I've read on this story. I've made a career out of working on medical devices of all levels of concern (yes, including a heart pump) and the V&V process is basically as the parent states. There is a fairly rigorous validation process which is performed on the device (over the course of months to years, depending on complexity of the product and level of concern). These things aren't exactly shuffled out the door like Microsoft shuffles out a new OS (yes, I've worked there too). There is a LOT of diligence involved in receiving 510k clearance on a new device.
For me, it opened up a Chrome process which, according to top, was using 19Mbytes. System Monitor shows no unusual activity and no unexpected network traffic. Nothing interesting happened at all. Am I missing something?
Probably the rootkit that was installed and now is silently monitoring IRC.
The point is that unless I can build a device on my end that will "uncompress" your transmission, it is encrypted and obfuscated from me. I agree with N2ES, transmitting with a protocol that "anyone else is free to understand, provided they buy one of your radios" is a crock. If I invented a scheme for compression (or obfuscation) of my transmissions and let the ham community know that they're welcome to comprehend my transmissions provided they buy my secret device.. well, that would be illegal in the US. (thank god.)
By the gods, I wish that I had modpoints today.
Protip: Don't argue against tattoos to the tattoo'd. They are maniacally pro-ink (and they MUST be! They'll be inked for the rest of their lives!). As the saying goes: If you have no tattoos, don't get any tattoos. If you HAVE tattoos, get MORE tattoos.
It used to be that tattoos and body modifications were mostly used as a mechanism to show membership in a particular group. Nowadays, it seems that people get ink to show that they are a member of the "people who have ink" group. Not sure what to make of that, tempted to think "fad", just as you stated. I'm sure I'll be flamed for this, just like you were.
I was a US Marine (am, I suppose. Once/Always, etc.) and I saw more young marines getting inked than NOT getting inked. They wanted to show that they were part of a group, that they belonged. I managed to avoid getting inked back then, and I figure if I didn't get inked in the Marines, then I might as well skip it going forward. I'm not against a tasteful tattoo on a man, think tattoos on women are gross, and think that all of the "people who judge me based on my tattoos are wrong." crowd are naive. People judge me based on my face and appearance all day long. As a people, we look at a face and body and make a snap decision about that person. It is how we've evolved to survive. and to be honest, I know that the in-your-face tattoo crowd are making snap judgements about my face when they see it, too.
You must not have done well at sawing the board in half. At the very least, you shouldn't be getting sparks. The worst you'd have done is sever most of the connections on the card. Not having electricity making a complete circuit isn't the same as a short circuit.
You must not have sawed many boards in half. I find that many of the traces end up dragging into other traces, and much of the time there are ground planes in there that get bent into other traces. Don't critique another person's board sawing when you clearly haven't sawed many boards of your own.
Wow, Wordperfect was your first word processor? You have just failed to date yourself, friend.
My first word processor software was WordStar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ws7_xp.PNG
Seriously, though, I do miss those little templates that wordperfect used to ship with, the ones that would tell you that F12 performed obscure functionality foo and Ctrl-F11 performed super obscure functionality bar.
Good times.
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Cannabis is an effective and non-toxic analgesic. Every medicine cabinet should have some cannabis extract for general aches and pains, insomnia, stomach upset, and many other mild ailments.
Many other mild ailments.. uh huh, like boredom? Never mind that it's habit forming as hell. ;) (And also never mind that the GP specifically mentions safety during pregnancy... lol).
Sorry, a law which criminalizes the act of modifying your console to play your legitimate(legal) backups sort of trumps fair use. Anyways, fair use is not a law.. it is a court ruling. Laws trump court rulings.
Modifying your own console so that you can execute backups that YOU CREATED from original discs YOU OWN is illegal in the USA
No it's not. Not even a little bit.
I can do anything I want to modify my console.
This is an unbased argument which is often espoused by console modders. Please have a look at Title 17 Chapter 12 (which was added by the DMCA): http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1201.html "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. "
My friend, opening up your console and installing a modchip is a circumvention of a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work. Ever wonder why it is that modchip sellers & manufacturers in the united states no longer exist? They've been raided for selling something that is now illegal in our country.
Yep, it's the de facto standard for backing up games thanks to the DMCA. Modifying your own console so that you can execute backups that YOU CREATED from original discs YOU OWN is illegal in the USA and punishable under the DMCA. This is because the game manufacturers have found that it is much more lucrative to let children destroy originals than it is to let consumers make backups and possibly never by a 4th copy of that $60 game.
We wanted to make it where there's a real story, and it goes on and on surprisingly long and - or usually, unless you come to a bad ending.
I seem to recall that in the books, nearly all choices resulted in "bad endings". That is to say, they were a page at the END of the book and only one page long. I always thought that these books could have really used a page shuffling before publishing, because you easily get used to thinking, "Ok, I'm on page 14. Choice one leads to page 15. Choice two leads to page 387. I'll go ahead and put a finger in page 14 [nod to parent], and read page 387, and then head back to page 15."
Folks should definitely check out that implementation of the z-machine. It's build in story search/downloading is just fantastic. Now everyone download and play "Blue Chairs", "Photopia", and "Spider and Web".
For starters.
The parent is talking about past IF (Interactive Fiction) Competition winners. The IF Competition has been running for more than 10 years and has brought some really impressive pieces of IF to the world's attention. http://www.ifcomp.org/
Once, in a Microsoft interview, I was asked to write a memory allocator. I always assumed that after I left, the conversation went like:
"Great, copy this down. Tell the next guy to write us a sound driver."
http://xkcd.com/488/ I actually don't really play many videogames, so while we've obviously touched on a topic that you feel extremely strongly about, I don't really care. Plus, you are inferring (wrongly) that I pirate videogames, simply because I said I would not shed a tear over the fact that it is done. You ought to pay more attention before you climb up on that high horse of yours. Also, YOU are the one that described buying videogames as "charity". Now you say it isn't charity. Discuss.
*shrug* All charity is selective.
There's still one more group that you haven't listed.. Compulsive game pirates who pay for indie games. I'll not shed a tear over pirating a copy of Spore (especially since the warez version is BETTER than the paid for version), but for some reason, I refuse to pirate an indie game. In fact, I actually buy indie games that I don't really care for, just because I want to encourage the developer. Now, for my opinion on this game: Firstly, Machinarium is a great game (I bought it on the day it released) but the developer didn't even include a SERIAL to protect his game. This is back to the old Commodore 64 game copying days, I can just imagine every kid in the world passing the disc to their buddy. Why didn't the developer put a serial on this game? This is common practice and hardly DRM. Also, the fact that there is no serial protection means that you can't download a replacement copy from his website if you lose yours.. You are given one chance to download the game, and if it is gone, then you're out of luck (mostly.. The developer actually is very nice and let me redownload my copy once I provided an order number). I think that a better choice for protection would have been something more like the penny-arcade games or torchlight, where there is a serial but very loose restrictions on how many machines you can install it on. That's another point I should add, that I have a lot of kids, and I am always on the lookout for a game like torchlight that actively encourages you to go ahead and install on every system in your house for only the cost of one license. That's a GREAT deal, I mean a GREAT deal. Incidentally, if you haven't played & purchased Torchlight, the penny-arcade adventures, Braid, Machinarium, then do yourself a treat and buy them now.
How about using the power rails inside the case to generate high voltage and light obsolete neon display devices? http://www.illuwatar.se/project_pages/nixieclock2/muxnixie.htm
PocketSat+ http://www.bigfattail.com/software/pocketsatplus/ is a free satellite tracking software for PalmOS that I find extremely sufficient, so no need for a laptop. I agree with working satellites being pretty tricky, though.
Yes, a ham radio can get you much better range and ability to contact the nearest town without much weight. Much better than a cellphone. Cellphones are line of sight around the 2ghz range, they stink without a repeater nearby. Don't bother with a handheld HF rig, unless you know morse code you're not going to get any skywave propogation via phone at 5w. Pick up a 2m monoband handheld transceiver and a portable 2m yagi to go with it. You'll be able to reach an easy 50 miles with FM voice modes and hit the repeater in the nearest big town. This assumes that there is not a mountain in the way, of course.. You're not going to be able to get radio THROUGH a mountain. Ideally you're up on the side of a mountain. I understand that you'll be worried about weight, but it seems to me that being able to contact civilization is pretty important if you run into real trouble. I can recommend this portable 2m yagi: http://www.arrowantennas.com/arrowii/146-3ii.html and really any 2m monoband HT will do you well, don't pay for the bells and whistles. The old HTX-202's work great (if you don't mind paying a pound or 2 for your radio). With regard to getting a technician class amateur radio license, the code requirement is long gone and it should be pretty trivial for most slashdotters to obtain a ham radio license nowadays. One last thought: AO-51. There are low-earth orbit amateur radio satellites that can be worked with handheld transceivers and a good dual-band yagi. The passes are short (15 minutes) and the process takes some practice, but you could definitely get out a distress call that way, no matter what the terrain is.
Because processing a limited number of scans into a useful model previously took several hours, they were forced to perform many more scans to get a more accurate picture with which to build their model - because they don't want to leave the patient lying in the scanner for 6 hours prior to treatment. With this improvement in processing power, they can produce the model from limited data in a feasable time.
Good lord. Am I the only one that is terrified by the idea that they are take several scans and trying to come up with a vague model of how your organs tend to move, and then firing a rather large dose of ionizing radiation at their best guess? I was under the misunderstanding that imaging guided radiation therapy was somewhat real time up until now.
I can second the AC's suggestion of the midibox SID, it really is superior to the SIDstation in every way. The only problem is that you will never find one on ebay due to the restrictive licensing scheme that the project originator implemented. Sometimes you can find a completed one on the site's forums (Selling for no more than the cost of parts) but this would be VERY rare. Your best bet is to just build one yourself, it's a fairly simple PIC based project, and there are PCB's available.
I believe that this is the same battery that the old Minolta SRT's needed, and I found that installing the germanium diode under the bottom plate and using a standard 357 (silver-oxide version, not alkaline) with a small rubber o-ring around it was a perfect fit. The issue at hand here is that the old mercury cells put out something like a stable 1.35 volts throughout their entire lifespan and old camera meters used it as a reference voltage. Mercury cells are illegal now and have been for a long time, you cannot acquire them. Alkaline batteries are useless for these camera, alkaline batteries start out putting out nearly 2v and degrade over time, the output voltage dropping as the battery wears out. However, Silver-oxide batteries put out a stable 1.55v through their entire lifespan, and the trick is to put a carefully selected diode inline with the battery which will have a forward voltage drop of .2v and get your silver-oxide battery down into the mercury battery voltage. The other (easier, but more expensive) method is to by one of those air-zinc Wein cells, which are specifically designed to be drop-in replacements for mercury cells. The problem with those is that they don't last very long at all, once you open the air-tight seal on them they only last a few months.
In the case of avionics, there are rigorous design and testing standards for electronics, software, and mechanical hardware that are mandated by the FAA. Passing them is part of the certification process. This task can be handled in house or by third parties that specialize in that task. The medical industry should largely be applying the same principles.
EXACTLY. First informed post I've read on this story. I've made a career out of working on medical devices of all levels of concern (yes, including a heart pump) and the V&V process is basically as the parent states. There is a fairly rigorous validation process which is performed on the device (over the course of months to years, depending on complexity of the product and level of concern). These things aren't exactly shuffled out the door like Microsoft shuffles out a new OS (yes, I've worked there too). There is a LOT of diligence involved in receiving 510k clearance on a new device.
I can't believe that nobody has mentioned the USB kits for classic controllers sold by RetroZone. http://www.retrousb.com/
For me, it opened up a Chrome process which, according to top, was using 19Mbytes. System Monitor shows no unusual activity and no unexpected network traffic. Nothing interesting happened at all. Am I missing something?
Probably the rootkit that was installed and now is silently monitoring IRC.
The point is that unless I can build a device on my end that will "uncompress" your transmission, it is encrypted and obfuscated from me. I agree with N2ES, transmitting with a protocol that "anyone else is free to understand, provided they buy one of your radios" is a crock. If I invented a scheme for compression (or obfuscation) of my transmissions and let the ham community know that they're welcome to comprehend my transmissions provided they buy my secret device.. well, that would be illegal in the US. (thank god.)
Don't forget Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People! http://www.telltalegames.com/strongbad
And, more generally, don't go around saying "all people in group X are deficient because I say so".
Um, I didn't say that anybody was deficient. I said they were pro-ink. You're the one that is inferring that to mean a deficiency. Check yourself.
It's about how you talk to people, and if you show a little respect for dissenting points of view without being a complete dick.
Again, Check Yourself.
By the gods, I wish that I had modpoints today. Protip: Don't argue against tattoos to the tattoo'd. They are maniacally pro-ink (and they MUST be! They'll be inked for the rest of their lives!). As the saying goes: If you have no tattoos, don't get any tattoos. If you HAVE tattoos, get MORE tattoos. It used to be that tattoos and body modifications were mostly used as a mechanism to show membership in a particular group. Nowadays, it seems that people get ink to show that they are a member of the "people who have ink" group. Not sure what to make of that, tempted to think "fad", just as you stated. I'm sure I'll be flamed for this, just like you were. I was a US Marine (am, I suppose. Once/Always, etc.) and I saw more young marines getting inked than NOT getting inked. They wanted to show that they were part of a group, that they belonged. I managed to avoid getting inked back then, and I figure if I didn't get inked in the Marines, then I might as well skip it going forward. I'm not against a tasteful tattoo on a man, think tattoos on women are gross, and think that all of the "people who judge me based on my tattoos are wrong." crowd are naive. People judge me based on my face and appearance all day long. As a people, we look at a face and body and make a snap decision about that person. It is how we've evolved to survive. and to be honest, I know that the in-your-face tattoo crowd are making snap judgements about my face when they see it, too.
You must not have done well at sawing the board in half. At the very least, you shouldn't be getting sparks. The worst you'd have done is sever most of the connections on the card. Not having electricity making a complete circuit isn't the same as a short circuit.
You must not have sawed many boards in half. I find that many of the traces end up dragging into other traces, and much of the time there are ground planes in there that get bent into other traces. Don't critique another person's board sawing when you clearly haven't sawed many boards of your own.
Wow, Wordperfect was your first word processor? You have just failed to date yourself, friend. My first word processor software was WordStar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ws7_xp.PNG Seriously, though, I do miss those little templates that wordperfect used to ship with, the ones that would tell you that F12 performed obscure functionality foo and Ctrl-F11 performed super obscure functionality bar. Good times.