Wouldn't the data be stored on a database rather than the card?
And even if it wasn't.. if you really didn't want people to have your "biometric data" then you'd have to walk around in a hazmat suit all the time, otherwise you're just leaving your DNA and fingerprints all over the place. The only slightly awkward one to get would be a retina scan, and were those even on the ID cards?
Fine, anonymous highly mobile communication. I'm not thinking of eliminating everything, I just thought that if you could get phones without having to sign anything they would be perfect for criminals.
I'm surprised they've been allowing it for this long. I had to sign up to get a pre-paid phone ~6 years ago here in the UK. I thought it would be the same everywhere else, otherwise you could use them for very anonymous communication, perfect for criminal activity..
I don't want fast action and strong leadership, because the same happens what happened in the bad old days: leaders that go to war, are only interested in their own agendas, start idoitic programs to suppress minorities, are susceptible to corruption and lobbyists etc etc
"Old" days? This sounds pretty much like America since 9/11 (and in some cases, before 9/11).
Just Cause 2 also has a really nice environment, I haven't played RDR yet though. I saw an ad for it at one point but I didn't realise it was an open world Rock Star game. Just finding that out alone makes me want to try it:)
Whereas I really enjoyed the GTA-games, most of my fun was to be had in the sandbox itself. I played GTA IV for about 50%, then got very bored with it: The missions in the end got really boring, as they were all small variations on the 'go to A, kill/smash X, go back to B for your reward'-gamemechanic.
I was exactly the same. If you haven't tried Saints Row 2, I recommend it. It's got a lot more stuff to do outside of the missions. I didn't buy the first one because the best thing people seemed to say about it was "wow, it has swearing, AWESOME!". This confused me as GTA also has swearing, and it was never really a deciding factor in how good the game is.
Anyway, I thought SR2 would just be a cheap rip-off of GTA - it's not. It certainly copies a lot of the game, but it then builds on it and makes it its own game. It is much more reminiscent of the GTA III games in graphics but I actually like that style better than trying to make everything ultra-real. It also has a much better sense of humour than GTA IV:)
You get to play the story in co-op multiplayer - something GTA has always been lacking, but which is actually awesome.
It's weird, because I rarely have more than say 3-4 tabs open myself, even when I've got both work and play tabs going. And the first person I saw to truly use loaaads of tabs (my last gf) was not even a geek! And in fact she seemed of only average intelligence and considered herself "not very good with technology" so I was quite impressed at first. Though personally I like to maintain a clean virtual working space (my desk isn't quite so pretty) when it comes to things like my desktop and my browser, so having 10 tabs on the go does seem messy to me if you aren't using half of them for 99% of the time - especially if like me you use a separate mail client and/or a Chrome extension for interacting with GMail.
Anyhoo, she did inspire me to start trying to leave regularly used pages open (Slashdot, Facebook, deviantArt) - only with Chrome you can do that as pinned tabs which makes it a lot more convenient than having loads of massive tabs taking up space.
But still I've ended up just going back to using hardly any tabs and checking stuff like Facebook periodically rather than leaving it open. I guess the fact that I'm running on a netbook where having lots of tabs open can end up slowing things down doesn't help.
Except your Facebook never times out unless you log into it on another computer or you don't tick the box to stay logged in.. which I suppose some people might if they don't know how to set up multiple accounts on their computer.
To create a site that people will feel compelled to leave open while they go off and do something else.. that actually sounds incredibly easy - either a porn site or a "humourous" video amalgamation feed type thing which opens the links you click on in a new tab.
I was wondering if he was posting with the aid of Google translate and "pry" was an untranslatable word in his native language. Then I realise on re-reading that he meant "probably". English is my first language, but there wasn't much contextual indication of what the guy actually meant in this case.
I do say "probly" in online chat despite knowing how to spell "probably", but anything shorter than that is just really annoying to me.
One time in University some guy was shaking his leg in the row behind me which was shaking my whole chair, really distracting and annoying. I eventually asked him to stop it and he said "no". I ended up just moving down a few seats. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I'd just stood up and beat the fuck out of him (I was pretty depressed in those days so that was a serious consideration).. seems a slight overreaction though, and I probably would have got kicked out.
Yeah there have been a couple of times where I've stood up to bullies, the first time he backed down, second one we got caught fighting almost immediately. I'm just saying if I'd ended up with broken bones as the OP suggested, then those memories would be very different:p
I thought the robot was using vibrato. With drumming, more than messing with the timing I'd simply modify the dynamics as you say, and also the pitch of the note to correspond to the dynamics. I was listening to Darwin Deez recently and even though he obviously uses a drum machine, it sounds okay simply using slightly different pitches for the snare each time.
As someone who both plays instruments and has had a lot of fun in the past trying to simulate human imperfection in FPS bots in the past, I think it would be perfectly possible to make a robot that has its own style simply by putting in a few random variables. People used to think my bots were doing some advanced behaviour that I had never programmed in there simply because I had a lot of randomised behaviour, so often they'd do something that appeared quite intelligent but was really just random. Not that they had no intelligence at all, they had some really cool features, but just I knew some of the behaviours that people were describing were coincidences.
The point is that if you give the robot a good grounding in the basics and then randomise a bunch of things like vibrato (and even have them vary things slightly further over the performance), then if you play a human player (say one who's pretty good, but not good enough to have a well known "sound") and the robot player side by side, a lot of people aren't going to be able to tell the difference. They might even say how great some of the things the robot was doing sounded! I think it's a little silly to assume that something like this cannot be done via algorithms.
I'm not a professional musician or anything, but I did drum for a band for about a year, and I've played the guitar for much longer (started doing drums because the rest of my friends in the band all played guitar too and didn't really show any ability on the drums, whereas I picked things up pretty quickly):)
My point wasn't whether it was good or bad, my point was that it's pretty much pure profit. 30% to me just seems like it's going to be a *lot* of money, I bet it only would take 1% or less to run the servers (of course that depends how popular the service becomes). 10% seems to me like a fair-ish cut, 30% is just greedy.
It wasn't until much later that I realized that it just simply played track 1 of whatever disk was in the drive at that time.
"Much" later? It seems a little obvious what was going on!
One of the best things I did with that trick was put in a Star Wars audio CD into my PSX and drove around in V-Rally with the main Star Wars theme playing in the background, it was all rather absurdly dramatic:)
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't the data be stored on a database rather than the card?
And even if it wasn't.. if you really didn't want people to have your "biometric data" then you'd have to walk around in a hazmat suit all the time, otherwise you're just leaving your DNA and fingerprints all over the place. The only slightly awkward one to get would be a retina scan, and were those even on the ID cards?
Lemmings already has prior art on unspectacular pops.
However, combine 100 of these little unspectacular pops, and you get a fun noise :)
Fine, anonymous highly mobile communication. I'm not thinking of eliminating everything, I just thought that if you could get phones without having to sign anything they would be perfect for criminals.
I'm surprised they've been allowing it for this long. I had to sign up to get a pre-paid phone ~6 years ago here in the UK. I thought it would be the same everywhere else, otherwise you could use them for very anonymous communication, perfect for criminal activity..
I don't want fast action and strong leadership, because the same happens what happened in the bad old days: leaders that go to war, are only interested in their own agendas, start idoitic programs to suppress minorities, are susceptible to corruption and lobbyists etc etc
"Old" days? This sounds pretty much like America since 9/11 (and in some cases, before 9/11).
Just Cause 2 also has a really nice environment, I haven't played RDR yet though. I saw an ad for it at one point but I didn't realise it was an open world Rock Star game. Just finding that out alone makes me want to try it :)
Whereas I really enjoyed the GTA-games, most of my fun was to be had in the sandbox itself. I played GTA IV for about 50%, then got very bored with it: The missions in the end got really boring, as they were all small variations on the 'go to A, kill/smash X, go back to B for your reward'-gamemechanic.
I was exactly the same. If you haven't tried Saints Row 2, I recommend it. It's got a lot more stuff to do outside of the missions. I didn't buy the first one because the best thing people seemed to say about it was "wow, it has swearing, AWESOME!". This confused me as GTA also has swearing, and it was never really a deciding factor in how good the game is.
Anyway, I thought SR2 would just be a cheap rip-off of GTA - it's not. It certainly copies a lot of the game, but it then builds on it and makes it its own game. It is much more reminiscent of the GTA III games in graphics but I actually like that style better than trying to make everything ultra-real. It also has a much better sense of humour than GTA IV :)
You get to play the story in co-op multiplayer - something GTA has always been lacking, but which is actually awesome.
I hope you have anything important bookmarked in case your machine suddenly dies and FF/Chrome/whatever can't re-open the tabs for whatever reason!
It's weird, because I rarely have more than say 3-4 tabs open myself, even when I've got both work and play tabs going. And the first person I saw to truly use loaaads of tabs (my last gf) was not even a geek! And in fact she seemed of only average intelligence and considered herself "not very good with technology" so I was quite impressed at first. Though personally I like to maintain a clean virtual working space (my desk isn't quite so pretty) when it comes to things like my desktop and my browser, so having 10 tabs on the go does seem messy to me if you aren't using half of them for 99% of the time - especially if like me you use a separate mail client and/or a Chrome extension for interacting with GMail.
Anyhoo, she did inspire me to start trying to leave regularly used pages open (Slashdot, Facebook, deviantArt) - only with Chrome you can do that as pinned tabs which makes it a lot more convenient than having loads of massive tabs taking up space.
But still I've ended up just going back to using hardly any tabs and checking stuff like Facebook periodically rather than leaving it open. I guess the fact that I'm running on a netbook where having lots of tabs open can end up slowing things down doesn't help.
Except your Facebook never times out unless you log into it on another computer or you don't tick the box to stay logged in.. which I suppose some people might if they don't know how to set up multiple accounts on their computer.
To create a site that people will feel compelled to leave open while they go off and do something else.. that actually sounds incredibly easy - either a porn site or a "humourous" video amalgamation feed type thing which opens the links you click on in a new tab.
Not all of us enjoy being dateraped.
Not sure about laser chopsticks, but here's an example of antimatter chopsticks :)
Someone has actually read the terms and conditions on Facebook? I am at the same time impressed, horrified and disgusted.
I was wondering if he was posting with the aid of Google translate and "pry" was an untranslatable word in his native language. Then I realise on re-reading that he meant "probably". English is my first language, but there wasn't much contextual indication of what the guy actually meant in this case.
I do say "probly" in online chat despite knowing how to spell "probably", but anything shorter than that is just really annoying to me.
I don't think that stupid and honest are always mutually exclusive.
One time in University some guy was shaking his leg in the row behind me which was shaking my whole chair, really distracting and annoying. I eventually asked him to stop it and he said "no". I ended up just moving down a few seats. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I'd just stood up and beat the fuck out of him (I was pretty depressed in those days so that was a serious consideration).. seems a slight overreaction though, and I probably would have got kicked out.
Yeah there have been a couple of times where I've stood up to bullies, the first time he backed down, second one we got caught fighting almost immediately. I'm just saying if I'd ended up with broken bones as the OP suggested, then those memories would be very different :p
I'm thinking a bully beating you so hard that he breaks your bones is probably going to be quite emotionally scarring.
I thought the robot was using vibrato. With drumming, more than messing with the timing I'd simply modify the dynamics as you say, and also the pitch of the note to correspond to the dynamics. I was listening to Darwin Deez recently and even though he obviously uses a drum machine, it sounds okay simply using slightly different pitches for the snare each time.
As someone who both plays instruments and has had a lot of fun in the past trying to simulate human imperfection in FPS bots in the past, I think it would be perfectly possible to make a robot that has its own style simply by putting in a few random variables. People used to think my bots were doing some advanced behaviour that I had never programmed in there simply because I had a lot of randomised behaviour, so often they'd do something that appeared quite intelligent but was really just random. Not that they had no intelligence at all, they had some really cool features, but just I knew some of the behaviours that people were describing were coincidences.
The point is that if you give the robot a good grounding in the basics and then randomise a bunch of things like vibrato (and even have them vary things slightly further over the performance), then if you play a human player (say one who's pretty good, but not good enough to have a well known "sound") and the robot player side by side, a lot of people aren't going to be able to tell the difference. They might even say how great some of the things the robot was doing sounded! I think it's a little silly to assume that something like this cannot be done via algorithms.
I'm not a professional musician or anything, but I did drum for a band for about a year, and I've played the guitar for much longer (started doing drums because the rest of my friends in the band all played guitar too and didn't really show any ability on the drums, whereas I picked things up pretty quickly) :)
The Robots are gonna be pissed when they find out we always mod their threats as "funny"
Let's see if Santa Claus has any advice. He says "ho ho ho". I like the stories where he gives me presents for being a good boy.
My point wasn't whether it was good or bad, my point was that it's pretty much pure profit. 30% to me just seems like it's going to be a *lot* of money, I bet it only would take 1% or less to run the servers (of course that depends how popular the service becomes). 10% seems to me like a fair-ish cut, 30% is just greedy.
A Stephen Hawking model programmable calculator?
Nah, I think I'll stick with one where I can use my fingers.
while we have some ideas for the latter few have been tested
All we need a is a massive clone army. "Fathered" by Bruce Willis.
It wasn't until much later that I realized that it just simply played track 1 of whatever disk was in the drive at that time.
"Much" later? It seems a little obvious what was going on!
One of the best things I did with that trick was put in a Star Wars audio CD into my PSX and drove around in V-Rally with the main Star Wars theme playing in the background, it was all rather absurdly dramatic :)