Install your own internal light, and use rechargable batteries. Run the batts dead, swap in a new pair. The SP users are tethered to the cord until the internal battery charges. Our family has all 3 (no original, but GB, GBA, GBA/SP) - The SP has a nice form factor, but with the afterburner in place, the GBA is also very nice, and in fact the button positions make it a little nicer for gameplay. Doesn't fit in the pocket as well, is all.
I also like reading on a device; for me it's a Palm. It's not that I don't like paper better, but the Palm has other advantages that outweigh the crappiness of the display (my IIIxe's green display that is). Number one is I always have it. I get a lot more books read now that I have one to read if I'm 5 minutes early for a meeting, or have to wait for the dentist. Number two is I never have to remember a bookmark, the prog always remembers where I left off.
Hmm. Most of the people that I know who sew are under 40. I do know a few people, one of them my mom, who are above retirement age, but I also know people who USED to sew when they were younger, and stopped because they'd rather enjoy their retirement than fool around sewing. I suspect I'll be about the same regarding programming when I hit my 70's.
There is a popular waterfall on private property near where I went to college. Students and locals had been going there by the hundreds per day for picnics, climbing, etc for about 100 years, and there was about 2 feet of accumulated trail erosion from that 100 years. I started there in 1982.
While I was at school there was when mountain biking became popular in the area.
I personally witnessed idiots on mountain bikes coming around blind corners at high speeds, scaring and forcing people off the trail, and tearing the shit out of the trail. Within 4 years, the erosion had doubled. 2 years later, the owner banned the public from the site.
I've seen some very nice and careful people on the trails with bikes. I've also seen blooming dangerous idiots. Unfortunately one of the latter outweighs 1000 of the former.
It doesn't sound like this person has had much experience talking to journalists. In my experience, you can talk with them for an hour, and they ALWAYS write an article that has nothing to do with what you thought you were talking about, misquote you or take it out of context. I've never talked to a journalist and had a sensible story come out the other side.
I think this is why companies have gone to press releases.
$100, less on eBay. Nothing else required other than shoes. There are few hobbies that you can get into for less. It's certainly not a rich man's sport when it costs less than a bicycle. Hell, I spent $100 just getting my bike that I already owned ready for the road this year, and I'm a cheap bastard buying stuff at K-mart. I could have spent $500.
You want a rich man's hobby, try woodworking, astronomy, golf, just about anything else... you can spend as much as you want on any of them.
I don't think it's even possible to spend more than about $500 for a handheld GPS, no matter what the capability.
Absolutely. As I stated in another post, the fun part of geocaching to me is finding places that are in public lands but in extremely lightly travelled areas. We found one cache under a weedy bush on the edge of a grassy clearing, right on a very lightly used trail. I wouldn't be surprised if no more than 5 or 10 people a month visit the area. It was less than 5 miles from my house, and I didn't know it was there.
There are hundreds/thousands of acres of places like this around my state (Michigan). The authorities might set up places for geocachers to play in major parks, but IMHO there's not much point in even putting a cache in a major park. The fun caches are in places where you would never know about or go. It's not even necessary for there to be anything there to find.
I agree with this. However, the thing that I have found great about geocaching is that it gives people a great way to share favorite spots with strangers. Within a few months of starting geocaching, my kids and I found a half dozen really great trails and picnic clearings that were totally NOT on the main trails of any of the parks around here. A good cache spot will introduce someone to a great spot that they will want to return to even when the cache is removed. This is one of the reasons why virtual caching is becoming more popular; people are realizing that actually putting a treasure box there is not necessary.
I've never seen a single cache that could be mistaken for litter. An ammo box or well sealed tupperware container painted black, hand lettered with "Dave's XYZ cache #5 - geocaching.com", with the standard notice placed inside explaining to an accidental discoverer what geocaching is, and giving a name and phone number for authorities to call if the cache is in any way in violation of rules so that the placer can reclaim and remove the cache, placed 20 feet off the trail, in the crotch of a tree and covered with sticks, is not what litter typically looks like.
I've not seen any evidence that any cacher has littered. Most times you can tell the cachers on the trails because they have a bag full of litter that they have PICKED UP and are carrying out of the park. My kids and I pull out more trash every time we visit a cache than any 50 careless people are likely to leave behind.
Obviously spoken by someone who has no f'in idea what he's talking about.
Geocaches are not buried, just placed and usually covered with a few sticks. Properly placed, they are difficult to see unless you are looking straight at them, and even then they blend in. Most people use ammo boxes, or tupperware painted black or brown.
The rules state that the landscape is NOT to be disturbed, including when hunting, as much as possible. No food of any kind is to be in the cache, to avoid animals getting into them. Also, the "Cache in, trash out" campaign urges cachers to bring a bag and carry out trash that you see. My kids and I typically carry out one or two grocery bags of trash every trip. I've never seen ANY evidence that cachers have left any garbage; most of the stuff we find is the sort of thing that partying kids would dump.
Let's see them ban virtual caching
on
Geocaching Crackdown?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There's a type of cache that's becoming very popular, called a "virtual cache." Nothing is stored on the site, it's just a coordinate, and a clue as to what you're supposed to find there. I'd like to see them ban that. What are they going to do, ban GPS units?
There have been a few cases of serious damage caused by cachers. In one instance, a cache was placed within 10 feet of a teepee ring, which is considered a sensitive archaeological site. If you've seen how the ground gets trampled around a cache, you'd see how this could be a problem. I can certainly understand the park officers being upset that someone posted a "please trample the grass" sign on such a site.
I do think it's a BIT hypocritical though; the public parks are always aching to increase flow through the park to keep their budgets, but apparently they just want people to come in the gate, get the headcount, eat a picnic out of their trunk and leave. When those people start exploring, they get upset.
OTOH, I have seen geocachers that have no interest in exploring. They beeline straight to the coordinates, tramping anything in the way, do their logging, and tromp straight out. But many of us spend an afternoon checking out the trails while we're there, which is exactly why the parks are (supposed to be) there.
Maybe the former types of cachers should take up benchmark hunting instead.
I read a study at one time that said that taking the 50 top polluting vehicles out of 1000 on the road, and replacing them with vehicles that met emissions standards would be by far the cheapest way to cut pollution.
They had devices that could read emissions of a vehicle as it was stopped at a light. Their study indicated that on average, the 50 top polluting vehicles out of any 1000 put out more pollution than all the other 950 vehicles combined. They suggested that it would benefit cities to acutally BUY THE VEHICLES off those people in order to crush them, just to get the stinkpots off the road.
OK, there technically could be such devices. But it's amazing the number of people (the majority that I talk to, seems like) that think that if you have a GPS, then THEY can tell where you are. Even the cops don't use such a thing, if it even exists. In the cited case (in the article) they just put a GPS on the car to record a breadcrumb trail, then retrieved the receiver later to follow the trail.
There's no way this thing is going to be able to transmit your position out. Not because it's not possible, just that the logistics of doing this for hundreds of thousands of cars would get unmanageable. Possibly it could, short range, like to the gas pump you're parked next to. But how would they even do it otherwise? Cell phone link? It would be a huge, huge radio network, and they just couldn't pay for it; the cell phone companies wouldn't just give them the access, and this would have to double or triple the cost of the device, plus it would turn it into a large ongoing maintenance nightmare.
Not all states have inspections. I live in Michigan, and outside of a couple of counties (around Detroit) there are NO inspections of any type. As long as you pay for your license tag renewal and keep your insurance paid up, you can drive any damn thing that still moves.
You can tell we don't have emissions inspections; just ride a bike a few km down the road and see how you like breathing what's coming out the back of some of these vehicles. GAAHH!
Every time this comes up, people say there's no way to stop them. I have stopped ALL the junk mail and telemarketing calls to my house. It is NOT hard.
Send your opt-out to the Direct Marketers Association. IT DOES WORK, it just takes about 6 months for the list to get updated. I did it and I get ZERO junk mail now.
When a telemarketer calls, use the following script:
You: What company are you calling in behalf of? TM: ABC company. You: Do you personally work for ABC company, or for a telemarketing firm?
If TM says "ABC company" then say "Please put me on your do-not-call list."
If TM says "A telemarketing firm" then say "I would like to be put on the do-not-call list for all of the companies that your company represents."
Almost every time, the latter will happen. This gets you on hundreds to thousands of do-not-call lists in one fell swoop.
Keep records by the phone. It's not hard, just have a small spiral notebook, write down the time and date and company name when you ask to be put on the do not call list.
NOTE: NONE OF THE FOLLOWING WORKS AT ALL, EVER: Please don't call this number anymore. No, thank you. Profanity Hanging up Saying anything except for the magic phrase "Please put me on your do-not-call list"
IT WORKS. I do not get telemarketing calls now, and haven't for a couple of years.
If you want to really kick them in the pants, then request a written copy of their do-not-call policy. They are required to send it to you and it's a major pain in the butt for them to do so.
Spam is another matter. Spammers are just lowlife M****rF***ers. They will not stop. For them, I like spambayes.sourceforge.net. It works on many platforms and is easier to maintain than rule-based stuff.
If true, that'll be because Apple will build it right. A friend at work has an Archos multimedia player (the forerunner to this model). It broke in normal use in a few days, and though they got him a replacement, their service was HORRIBLE, and the thing feels like a cheap wad of plastic. I've held $10 kid's toys that felt less likely to break. No FSCKIN' WAY am I going to give these yahoos that kind of money for the kind of stuff they've cranked out in the past, given their service history.
If Apple builds one, it'll look great, work great, sound great, and shit, it can't cost more than this, can it?
NOTE: I have never owned a SINGLE Apple product, been running PCs since my 286-16, but DAMN I'd love an iPod.
I think they're advocating spending the big bucks on data storage rather than on big iron.
When they mention beowulfs, it's in the context that when researchers need the equivalent of a supercomputer, they can just build/use a beowulf cluster. What they can't do on their own is come up with petabyte storage facilities and the data in them.
So what they're really advocating is spending money on storage; it doesn't say in the article what form that storage should take.
The government may very well like this. They're going to need big data farms to support the TIA program. It takes a lot of space to remember what kind of toppings every person in the US likes on their pizza.
Among its other uses, DeCSS would permit the creation of a player that doesn't have to follow the CSS license rules, and allow you to skip "mandatory" content for example.
I have used DeCSS to make copies of some Disney DVDs that I own. It allows me to have a copy that skips all their damn commercials. It's about the only way that I can bear watching a Disney release anymore. Even when I bought the movie, they can't just let me watch the damn thing, they've got to take the opportunity to wedge more fsckin' commercials down my throat.
Screw that. I bought the DVDs, made 'movie-only' copies for the kids, and shelved the originals.
We haven't been back to the moon because there's nothing to do there except collect samples and plant flags.
According to most educated people in the 1700's, there was no reason to go west of the Mississippi in North America, either. Stinkin', indian-infested, overgrown, swamps / desert / wasteland. Why the heck would anyone go there?
There may or may not be much on the moon of value of itself, but it's a good staging point for outward expansion.
Hell, we're not doing anything useful in the ISS but we're still running it.
I don't care who goes to the moon, as long as someone does. People actually love this kind of stuff, but they're easily distracted. Having a human presence on the moon might get enough people interested again to kickstart the industry.
I was actually thinking about this possible product yesterday in regard to the story a few days ago about the plan to put RFID tags in currency, and the 1/3 of the posts to that thread being about muggers being able to use a portable scanner to easily see who had a lot of money on them.
So get a shift as a DJ on the station and play stuff people DO want to listen to. A bunch of my friends at college got shifts and played whatever the hell they wanted (OK, the station manager had taken a sharp knife to a few tracks on the Surf Punks albums (showing my age again)). Doing a DJ shift is pretty fun. I suppose it might not be if the station manager is a jerk or the university tries to control the station playlist.
If the radio station sucks that bad, then maybe you should organize a massive walk to the station. If 1200 people show up and want their $4.50 back because of the massive suckage of the station, maybe they'll do something about it (shutting down the station and killing the fee counts as "something").
"Organizing" can mean as little as making a few hundred copies of a poster announcing the walk and sticking them up around campus.
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Install your own internal light, and use rechargable batteries. Run the batts dead, swap in a new pair. The SP users are tethered to the cord until the internal battery charges.
Our family has all 3 (no original, but GB, GBA, GBA/SP) - The SP has a nice form factor, but with the afterburner in place, the GBA is also very nice, and in fact the button positions make it a little nicer for gameplay. Doesn't fit in the pocket as well, is all.
I also like reading on a device; for me it's a Palm. It's not that I don't like paper better, but the Palm has other advantages that outweigh the crappiness of the display (my IIIxe's green display that is). Number one is I always have it. I get a lot more books read now that I have one to read if I'm 5 minutes early for a meeting, or have to wait for the dentist. Number two is I never have to remember a bookmark, the prog always remembers where I left off.
Hmm. Most of the people that I know who sew are under 40. I do know a few people, one of them my mom, who are above retirement age, but I also know people who USED to sew when they were younger, and stopped because they'd rather enjoy their retirement than fool around sewing. I suspect I'll be about the same regarding programming when I hit my 70's.
There is a popular waterfall on private property near where I went to college. Students and locals had been going there by the hundreds per day for picnics, climbing, etc for about 100 years, and there was about 2 feet of accumulated trail erosion from that 100 years. I started there in 1982.
While I was at school there was when mountain biking became popular in the area.
I personally witnessed idiots on mountain bikes coming around blind corners at high speeds, scaring and forcing people off the trail, and tearing the shit out of the trail. Within 4 years, the erosion had doubled. 2 years later, the owner banned the public from the site.
I've seen some very nice and careful people on the trails with bikes. I've also seen blooming dangerous idiots. Unfortunately one of the latter outweighs 1000 of the former.
It doesn't sound like this person has had much experience talking to journalists. In my experience, you can talk with them for an hour, and they ALWAYS write an article that has nothing to do with what you thought you were talking about, misquote you or take it out of context. I've never talked to a journalist and had a sensible story come out the other side.
I think this is why companies have gone to press releases.
$100, less on eBay. Nothing else required other than shoes. There are few hobbies that you can get into for less. It's certainly not a rich man's sport when it costs less than a bicycle. Hell, I spent $100 just getting my bike that I already owned ready for the road this year, and I'm a cheap bastard buying stuff at K-mart. I could have spent $500.
You want a rich man's hobby, try woodworking, astronomy, golf, just about anything else... you can spend as much as you want on any of them.
I don't think it's even possible to spend more than about $500 for a handheld GPS, no matter what the capability.
try google:
e tails.aspx? ID=26051
e tails.aspx? ID=47593
e tails.aspx? ID=35152
crash bomber site:geocaching.com
yields four hits but one is a traveller.
Here's a cache NEARBY a B52 crash in Maryland:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_d
This cache is AT the location of a B18 crash in New Hampshire
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_d
Here's a cache at a B52 crash site in Maine, which is apparently well labelled:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_d
Absolutely. As I stated in another post, the fun part of geocaching to me is finding places that are in public lands but in extremely lightly travelled areas. We found one cache under a weedy bush on the edge of a grassy clearing, right on a very lightly used trail. I wouldn't be surprised if no more than 5 or 10 people a month visit the area. It was less than 5 miles from my house, and I didn't know it was there.
There are hundreds/thousands of acres of places like this around my state (Michigan). The authorities might set up places for geocachers to play in major parks, but IMHO there's not much point in even putting a cache in a major park. The fun caches are in places where you would never know about or go. It's not even necessary for there to be anything there to find.
I agree with this. However, the thing that I have found great about geocaching is that it gives people a great way to share favorite spots with strangers. Within a few months of starting geocaching, my kids and I found a half dozen really great trails and picnic clearings that were totally NOT on the main trails of any of the parks around here. A good cache spot will introduce someone to a great spot that they will want to return to even when the cache is removed. This is one of the reasons why virtual caching is becoming more popular; people are realizing that actually putting a treasure box there is not necessary.
I've never seen a single cache that could be mistaken for litter. An ammo box or well sealed tupperware container painted black, hand lettered with "Dave's XYZ cache #5 - geocaching.com", with the standard notice placed inside explaining to an accidental discoverer what geocaching is, and giving a name and phone number for authorities to call if the cache is in any way in violation of rules so that the placer can reclaim and remove the cache, placed 20 feet off the trail, in the crotch of a tree and covered with sticks, is not what litter typically looks like.
I've not seen any evidence that any cacher has littered. Most times you can tell the cachers on the trails because they have a bag full of litter that they have PICKED UP and are carrying out of the park. My kids and I pull out more trash every time we visit a cache than any 50 careless people are likely to leave behind.
Obviously spoken by someone who has no f'in idea what he's talking about.
Geocaches are not buried, just placed and usually covered with a few sticks. Properly placed, they are difficult to see unless you are looking straight at them, and even then they blend in. Most people use ammo boxes, or tupperware painted black or brown.
The rules state that the landscape is NOT to be disturbed, including when hunting, as much as possible. No food of any kind is to be in the cache, to avoid animals getting into them. Also, the "Cache in, trash out" campaign urges cachers to bring a bag and carry out trash that you see. My kids and I typically carry out one or two grocery bags of trash every trip. I've never seen ANY evidence that cachers have left any garbage; most of the stuff we find is the sort of thing that partying kids would dump.
There's a type of cache that's becoming very popular, called a "virtual cache." Nothing is stored on the site, it's just a coordinate, and a clue as to what you're supposed to find there. I'd like to see them ban that. What are they going to do, ban GPS units?
There have been a few cases of serious damage caused by cachers. In one instance, a cache was placed within 10 feet of a teepee ring, which is considered a sensitive archaeological site. If you've seen how the ground gets trampled around a cache, you'd see how this could be a problem. I can certainly understand the park officers being upset that someone posted a "please trample the grass" sign on such a site.
I do think it's a BIT hypocritical though; the public parks are always aching to increase flow through the park to keep their budgets, but apparently they just want people to come in the gate, get the headcount, eat a picnic out of their trunk and leave. When those people start exploring, they get upset.
OTOH, I have seen geocachers that have no interest in exploring. They beeline straight to the coordinates, tramping anything in the way, do their logging, and tromp straight out. But many of us spend an afternoon checking out the trails while we're there, which is exactly why the parks are (supposed to be) there.
Maybe the former types of cachers should take up benchmark hunting instead.
I'd be all for that.
I read a study at one time that said that taking the 50 top polluting vehicles out of 1000 on the road, and replacing them with vehicles that met emissions standards would be by far the cheapest way to cut pollution.
They had devices that could read emissions of a vehicle as it was stopped at a light. Their study indicated that on average, the 50 top polluting vehicles out of any 1000 put out more pollution than all the other 950 vehicles combined. They suggested that it would benefit cities to acutally BUY THE VEHICLES off those people in order to crush them, just to get the stinkpots off the road.
OK, there technically could be such devices. But it's amazing the number of people (the majority that I talk to, seems like) that think that if you have a GPS, then THEY can tell where you are. Even the cops don't use such a thing, if it even exists. In the cited case (in the article) they just put a GPS on the car to record a breadcrumb trail, then retrieved the receiver later to follow the trail.
There's no way this thing is going to be able to transmit your position out. Not because it's not possible, just that the logistics of doing this for hundreds of thousands of cars would get unmanageable. Possibly it could, short range, like to the gas pump you're parked next to. But how would they even do it otherwise? Cell phone link? It would be a huge, huge radio network, and they just couldn't pay for it; the cell phone companies wouldn't just give them the access, and this would have to double or triple the cost of the device, plus it would turn it into a large ongoing maintenance nightmare.
No such thing as a GPS transmitter.
Maybe you should find out how GPS works and what the article says before saying things like that.
Not all states have inspections. I live in Michigan, and outside of a couple of counties (around Detroit) there are NO inspections of any type. As long as you pay for your license tag renewal and keep your insurance paid up, you can drive any damn thing that still moves.
You can tell we don't have emissions inspections; just ride a bike a few km down the road and see how you like breathing what's coming out the back of some of these vehicles. GAAHH!
Every time this comes up, people say there's no way to stop them. I have stopped ALL the junk mail and telemarketing calls to my house. It is NOT hard.
Send your opt-out to the Direct Marketers Association. IT DOES WORK, it just takes about 6 months for the list to get updated. I did it and I get ZERO junk mail now.
When a telemarketer calls, use the following script:
You: What company are you calling in behalf of?
TM: ABC company.
You: Do you personally work for ABC company, or for a telemarketing firm?
If TM says "ABC company" then say "Please put me on your do-not-call list."
If TM says "A telemarketing firm" then say "I would like to be put on the do-not-call list for all of the companies that your company represents."
Almost every time, the latter will happen. This gets you on hundreds to thousands of do-not-call lists in one fell swoop.
Keep records by the phone. It's not hard, just have a small spiral notebook, write down the time and date and company name when you ask to be put on the do not call list.
NOTE: NONE OF THE FOLLOWING WORKS AT ALL, EVER:
Please don't call this number anymore.
No, thank you.
Profanity
Hanging up
Saying anything except for the magic phrase "Please put me on your do-not-call list"
IT WORKS. I do not get telemarketing calls now, and haven't for a couple of years.
If you want to really kick them in the pants, then request a written copy of their do-not-call policy. They are required to send it to you and it's a major pain in the butt for them to do so.
Spam is another matter. Spammers are just lowlife M****rF***ers. They will not stop. For them, I like spambayes.sourceforge.net. It works on many platforms and is easier to maintain than rule-based stuff.
If true, that'll be because Apple will build it right. A friend at work has an Archos multimedia player (the forerunner to this model). It broke in normal use in a few days, and though they got him a replacement, their service was HORRIBLE, and the thing feels like a cheap wad of plastic. I've held $10 kid's toys that felt less likely to break. No FSCKIN' WAY am I going to give these yahoos that kind of money for the kind of stuff they've cranked out in the past, given their service history.
If Apple builds one, it'll look great, work great, sound great, and shit, it can't cost more than this, can it?
NOTE: I have never owned a SINGLE Apple product, been running PCs since my 286-16, but DAMN I'd love an iPod.
I think they're advocating spending the big bucks on data storage rather than on big iron.
When they mention beowulfs, it's in the context that when researchers need the equivalent of a supercomputer, they can just build/use a beowulf cluster. What they can't do on their own is come up with petabyte storage facilities and the data in them.
So what they're really advocating is spending money on storage; it doesn't say in the article what form that storage should take.
The government may very well like this. They're going to need big data farms to support the TIA program. It takes a lot of space to remember what kind of toppings every person in the US likes on their pizza.
Among its other uses, DeCSS would permit the creation of a player that doesn't have to follow the CSS license rules, and allow you to skip "mandatory" content for example.
I have used DeCSS to make copies of some Disney DVDs that I own. It allows me to have a copy that skips all their damn commercials. It's about the only way that I can bear watching a Disney release anymore. Even when I bought the movie, they can't just let me watch the damn thing, they've got to take the opportunity to wedge more fsckin' commercials down my throat.
Screw that. I bought the DVDs, made 'movie-only' copies for the kids, and shelved the originals.
We haven't been back to the moon because there's nothing to do there except collect samples and plant flags.
According to most educated people in the 1700's, there was no reason to go west of the Mississippi in North America, either. Stinkin', indian-infested, overgrown, swamps / desert / wasteland. Why the heck would anyone go there?
There may or may not be much on the moon of value of itself, but it's a good staging point for outward expansion.
Hell, we're not doing anything useful in the ISS but we're still running it.
I don't care who goes to the moon, as long as someone does. People actually love this kind of stuff, but they're easily distracted. Having a human presence on the moon might get enough people interested again to kickstart the industry.
I was actually thinking about this possible product yesterday in regard to the story a few days ago about the plan to put RFID tags in currency, and the 1/3 of the posts to that thread being about muggers being able to use a portable scanner to easily see who had a lot of money on them.
So get a shift as a DJ on the station and play stuff people DO want to listen to. A bunch of my friends at college got shifts and played whatever the hell they wanted (OK, the station manager had taken a sharp knife to a few tracks on the Surf Punks albums (showing my age again)).
Doing a DJ shift is pretty fun. I suppose it might not be if the station manager is a jerk or the university tries to control the station playlist.
If the radio station sucks that bad, then maybe you should organize a massive walk to the station. If 1200 people show up and want their $4.50 back because of the massive suckage of the station, maybe they'll do something about it (shutting down the station and killing the fee counts as "something").
"Organizing" can mean as little as making a few hundred copies of a poster announcing the walk and sticking them up around campus.