I'd say its a love story set in a sci-fi world and written by a tree hugging hippie who's spent a bit too much time in a sweat lodge high on peyote. Then again, I'd say Lewis Carroll did the same, but by all accounts he didn't use any chemicals (though possibly laudanum for headaches, however I think its highly unlikely anything was used for extended periods, given historical records).
my geek friends just aren't geek enough... they got the hippie save the planet crap message and totally missed the subsurface scattering. They need to spend less time smoking dope and more time programming:P
I believe you're talking about different things - the detector itself vs dark matter.
Lets do some armchair physics, since I need to dumb it down to my level anyway (I've got a minor in physics...). The known factors of (theoretical) dark matter is it has gravity but does not emit or reflect energy as heat or light, and the reason we think it exists is because galaxies aren't spiraling apart fast enough given the amount of visible matter. I won't pretend to understand that, I'll take it as a given and that the real physicists know what they're talking about.
Now imagine you put up a "wall" and throw particles at it. When a visible particle hits the wall, it bounces off and release some energy such as heat, just like when you toss a ball at the garage door - it may not be much, but it certainly is there. Now say we throw a dark matter particle at that same wall - what form of energy would it release, assuming it doesn't retain all energy (perfect reflection)? Personally, I don't know, but gravity doesn't sound like a bad suggestion.
A bit of an understatement... having had a gun pointed at my temple once I'd describe it more like piss-your-pants abject terror. YMMV.
It probably didn't help that the guy holding said gun also was paranoid, coked up (at least I took his word on that), and had a Shlitz malt liquor and unfiltered cigarette with a long line of ash and a cherry almost burning his fingers in his other hand while he stood in my apartment. Fortunately for me (and my roommate who also was home at that time), he was really looking for the guy that used to live in that apartment to get money owed, not to start a killing spree, and my kindly mentioning his cigarette was almost out probably saved any accidental discharge of said firearm. The hard part was convincing him that the dealer he was looking for moved and that every movement either of us made no matter how slow wasn't just to grab a hidden firearm and off him (did I mention paranoid?).
I've never picked up DLC myself, but Bethesda games have been notoriously buggy, especially memory leaks and crashes and save/load in particular. I finally got Fallout 3 to not crash in 2 hours of play - by adding 8GB more RAM (from 2 to 10) and patching the crap out of it. Oblivion suffered the identical problem, as did Morrowind (on the older NetImmerse). IMO, graphical glitches are acceptable, random crashes and memory leaks are not, ever. I've left some other games up for days without crash (Guild Wars, WoW, KotoR, Mass Effect, Half Life 2, and Bioshock to name a few, usually because I take a break and forget to come back...). I don't know if the leaks are Bethesda's fault or Gamebryo's, but I've never had problems with other Gamebryo/NetImmerse games (like Civ4 and the Freedom Force series).
Incidentally, I didn't have any of the reported problems with Empire: Total War, even running at 2GB of RAM and Windows 7 Beta (with a 285GTX GPU) - those are the bugs that suck - ones that require specific setups. Vampire: TM Bloodlines was very buggy, though not the worst I've ever seen (which is still owned by the original Pax: Imperia on mac - it was a fantastic game, but registration cards sent less than 10 days after purchase shouldn't have to list 50+ bugs, and I found many, many more).
As much as I dislike bugs, I dislike unfinished games more, and I point a big fat finger at EA and Interplay in particular (Lionheart, Legacy of the Crusader is my personal peeve - great start and then... empty places and a rushed end). I can't talk about a specific EA title for legal reasons, but I think most people can name at least one rushed title by them (and I think they are better now - it was really bad in the late 1990s when I worked in the industry). Bethesda also has gotten into that game - their published title Rogue Warrior was short and seemed unfinished - IGN's review says it all: "Completely bankrupt of any value whatsoever" and I didn't think anything could possibly be worse than Painkiller: Resurrection this year (which was bad, buggy and leaked memory). Thankfully I played review copies of both (having friends in the game review industry is fun;)
hmm, but this was 15 years ago, and everyone knew George Bush did coke but was off it for at least 15 years before becoming President. I can't claim to be an angel myself 15-20 years ago - my pseudonym is mentioned several times on textfiles;)
My problem is the "relevance" people are at odds with wiki projects. There was a wiki project to catalog early Apple ][ and C64 games and every article I added got flagged immediately for relevance even if relevance was cited in the article (e.g. awards, top 10 lists, etc), and then within a couple of days, candidate for deletion. I would then have to defend the relevance on the Talk page and it just became an exercise in frustration. Many times the article would just get deleted anyway.
I did in fact move my articles to a non-wikipedia web site and have stopped contributing to it for the most part. Either the relevance admins should allow wiki projects to add their entries or kill the wiki project - there are always going to be somewhat minor entries for any wiki project, but the entries need to be there for completeness.
True, but you are also making the assumption people use the search in the toolbar, and I know plenty of people that just bookmarked google and click the link on the left hand nav bar (like my wife...). She was using that link long before search was added to the toolbar, so it is habit I think.
Yeah - I can't imagine the roles offered are all that great to begin with. Not always the writer's fault, either, though they're often to blame. Sometimes the blame for a bad film can even go to a producer - either cutting funding, limiting funding (restricting retakes), or demanding script changes during filming.
Maybe not - dilatants like D3o do something like that. I believe the British military commissioned helmets made of the stuff and they are currently used by the US Ski Team, amongst others. YouTube has videos of people being whacked by hammers and bats while wearing the stuff.
that's for sticky bit on a file; on a directory it has a different meaning (like/tmp - a user or superuser can write to or remove files there but other users can't if that file exists)
UNIX file permissions are good for most situations, but do contain some issues: 1) groups don't nest 2) you can't add a mix of users and groups 3) you can't have groups with different permissions (say read and execute on one and read, write, and execute for another). 4) you can't have multiple users that own a file 5) no way to have cascading permissions (if this condition then add write, if this condition add read, etc).
For instance, you're a teacher and have two TAs and four groups of students. You want to give the TAs read access to everything in the directory, read and write access to the grade file and only give the students write access to create new files in the directory and read access to their own files. After grading, you want to initially allow the students to see the other students in their group's work but not the other groups and later allow all groups to see each other's work (e.g. you wouldn't want a group to see the other group's work before they had their class).
ACLs can also key off of other attributes of the file - for instance, you could key off creation date or filesize or even multiple attributes - for instance, the user is the creator but no longer in the group, remove write permission.
Never used Intel GMA, huh? 9400M is a rocket compared to the best GMA (see notebookcheck). Should work fine for WoW and HD video, but keep Crysis away.
Vastly incorrect, in fact. MICROSOFT was the one that initially ditched OpenGL support in Vista - well, technically they were going to support 1.3 and deprecate the API, but then they reworked the display driver model so that it worked again when CAD companies including the one I work for were about to strangle them. The display driver model currently used is a vast improvement over the initial model that only allowed DirectX contexts and didn't allow compositing. The current driver model allows compositing of contexts of different types (meaning you can draw OpenGL with Aero on in a window, but you do get a performance hit).
nVidia not only supports OpenGL, they support many extensions that ATI historically has not - for instance, I added Geometry Shaders to a graphics engine nearly 2 years ago and ATI still doesn't support them (but they have promised better support in future drivers.
lol - still Re:9400M - 9400M is a mobile, so you're probably stuck with it unless you have a MXM module, in which case it may be possible to upgrade. Incidentally, my previous laptop did not and blew its graphics card for the second time (the notorious 8XXXM laptop series...) 3 days out of warranty but my new laptop does, so I may toy with upgrading graphics someday. From a basic fillrate, 9400M gets about 3.6 gigatexels/second and the 240 about 17. It is more comparable to the 9800M GTX I have on my current laptop (16GT/s). The GTS 240 slated for this quarter is supposed to be closer to 40GT/s, which is close to the GTX 260 (core 216) I bought for my desktop after a price drop to under $200 earlier this year.
I was warned the cheap stuff is like that, and the good stuff is $100+, so never bothered to try it. Whiskey (which means life's water, lol) has rotgut varieties, too.
As for Dec 21, 2012, which Mayan said it was the end of the world? I've only heard that from, well, pretty much only white loonies and doomsday Christians (oop, we missed May 2003 - gotta reschedule, lol).
Actually, it is a little beyond that, otherwise it would be identical to what Apple has done since MacOS X.0. What this does different is bring up a dialog box WITH USERS that can run the application, and you can select one of those to run the app as instead, if you know the password. In a UNIX-like system this is worthless because you may have hundreds or thousands of users, but most desktop windows systems only have a handful of users at most.
In fact, I don't think Linux (or UNIX for that matter) could even do this if it wanted to, or it'd be very ugly - it would have to check the sticky bit (and other special bits), then user, group, and role for all users to generate that list. Windows uses an ACL (Access Control List). Macs (since Tiger) and some UNIX/UNIX-likes support both UNIX permissions and ACLs which just compounds the mess. ACLs have a bit more flexibility than the UNIX bits - for instance, I could assign multiple groups and users not in those groups access permissions. I also don't have to edit/etc/passwd to do it (a root owned file) if I want to share a file with several users and don't have a container group.
Good luck taxing the rich - the rich pay PACs, PACs tell politicians to put loopholes in for them with lots of money backing them, and the politicians take kickbacks for doing what the rich say. In other countries they would just bribe the politician (or policeman, or whatever). The majority tax burden always falls on the middle classes.
True on capital gains being a source of income and yes income taxes tend to be much higher than capital gains taxes, however, I don't see it as an easy thing to abolish. For one, the investor is taking a risk and there is no guarantee he/she won't have a capital loss. Also counting it as income means the tax bracket will likely shift wildly - in years like the past two, they would likely have no income, even if they had a job. Does that mean they should get welfare? And why a capital gains tax at all? If I put money in the bank it earns interest - isn't investing similar?
There is DRM of a sort, though - any premium content including stuff you might have gotten with the game (e.g. preorders) require the PC to be connected to the Internet when you start the game or that content is not available. This is rather annoying when you have the game installed on a laptop like I do.
So far, the game seems pretty solid, but is certainly not without flaw. It still has the partial "rails" feel of NWN2 and Mass Effect which for me is always a nick in Bioware games (take a week and read about threads and background loading already), but the voice acting and plot seem quite good. I've played the first part of the game as a Thief, Mage, and Warrior and by far Warrior is easiest (except the Ogre), followed by Mage (freezie-mage is massively unbalancing though - makes Ogre easy even on Hard), and melee Rogue, which is extremely difficult even on Normal (light armor and hard AoE knockback hits made me suck down health too much - had to keep my rogue back and melee alternated tanking - probably easier with missile rogue). There also are parts of the game where you get an optional order to do things in, but there are no hints - in particular, I was having horrible problems with a rogue in the fade (having only 1 health potion left didn't help...) and had to hit a cheats site that basically told me the optimal order to do the quests - then it was trivial. The game also is fairly heavily geared toward combat - if you don't have some combat skills the game will be nearly impossible in some areas even on easy (I tried speccing a thief in talk skills and stealth - doesn't work). Basically, there is no way to win without combat - lots of it, so it doesn't offer a lot of gameplay styles.
So the reality is, I still have yet to find a game that gets all the parts right. Gothic 1 was close - it had good plot and voice acting and decent gameplay in an excellent game world but lousy combat (I personally feel the series has gone downhill since - many of the original programmers left Piranha Bytes after the first game) and while you always needed to be combat oriented, it didn't play out like that mattered as much as the factions you chose. I loved Fallout 1-2, but they were very buggy on release. NWN1 and 2 didn't really get much right IMO - I played some great mods, but I had a hard time getting into either and only found them interesting near the end - a BAD sign - you need to capture the gamer's attention much sooner than Act 3 or 4. Mass Effect had decent plot but some mechanics that needed work (esp. the Mako) and the dungeons were all similar and on rails. Also it is possible to max all armor and weapons after the second play-through which makes the third rather dull (never did finish the third and barely the second). Oblivion had a massive open world, but only one well developed character out of thousands (who dies in the intro), and quests that lacked variety. Ditto Fallout 3 (Bethesda - find characters that people can relate with already... aside from dad, that is... nobody) - they put all this work into giving people routines and a life schedule but emotion causing events? None. Name one character you think is worth keeping. Nobody travels with you, you have no friends (you have alliances, but characters don't act like they miss you or care about you), and this makes it wooden. Not to mention the quests, which are all basically - "I would do it, but I'm too lazy." MMORPGs as a whole pretty much run on rails plot-wise because it is difficult to branch.
There would need to be a way to get in and out, so I imagine birds and bugs would be able to, as well. I imagine such exits and any fans used to keep the dome inflated would cause a breeze, kinda like the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome.
Of course, birds would not be happy smacking the big dome window and if I were working for big sprinkler I would definitely endorse this (a 1 mile x 1 mile zone that needs sprinkler systems for irrigation? sign me up).
I agree with you the sample is a bit suspect and Asia contains a lot of territory, and for that matter, Asian-American usually means eastern Asian people with slanty eyes and not Asia as a whole (and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but that is just the main divisive feature from other Asian groups such as Russians, Indians, etc). Granted America isn't North America as a whole, either, but it is a much larger sample of North America - its like comparing Wisconsin (one of the smartest states in the nation) to the southeast US as a whole (the dumbest part of the nation generally on test scores). Some of the smartest people I know live in Florida and Georgia, but throw in Louisiana, Alabama, etc and you're basically a bunch of morons.
I'd like to know how Hmong compare - they are a refugee people and generally come from uneducated families (the two families I know had illiterate parents, but so did my [Germanic refugee] family when they came to America over a century ago, so that's no excuse). One of my best friends growing up would fall in that category and he designs rocket engines for a living (not technically a rocket scientist - his degree was aerospace engineer with specialization in jet based propulsion). The Hmong are a perfect group to sample because they aren't only the best and the brightest.
Well, what I got out of this was George Bush really really is an idiot (I knew my IQ is in the top 1%, I didn't realize his was merely top 10% - pshaw - moron;) ), and I score better than 17% of the population on their test, too:D
my city recently started requiring GFCI at the breaker for all bedrooms and bathrooms. Currently the Consumer Product Safety Commission doesn't require either. The bedroom breaker is about $15 more than the bathroom one for some reason (more sensitive?).
Mac DVDs aren't copy protected, but the DMCA also forbids decoding of encrypted files and some files like com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X and the Finder are either fully or partially encrypted files loaded at runtime. The former is used to detect mac hardware and give keys for decrypting other parts of the OS.
So basically, mac adds a check for atom processors, throws it into the encrypted Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X kernel extension, and suddenly no atom support without a DMCA violation. Of course, traditional copyright law says you can do whatever you want with a copy you own with the type of license Apple sells, including removing copy protection and moving it to platforms it wasn't intended for (i.e. you can legally make one backup), so the law seems a bit ambiguous to me.
Actually, UTF-8 can and is being used in DNS - as long as you stick to basic Latin characters, that is. Also it is Unicode - as I posted earlier, Unicode is a blanket for UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 which makes it ambiguous.
UTF-8 bits 0-7 is ASCII as long as bit 8 isn't set, so to fully support it you'd need to still exclude bits below 7 that are not valid html characters and include support for multiple bytes and bit 8. The reason existing DNS servers won't work with it is because bit 8 indicates multibyte and the second byte may carry an invalid character from the 0-7 bits and the first byte may have a language encoding for the second byte (indicated by bit 8). For instance character 43 is + and that is invalid in a URL. If character 1 had bit 8 set and indicated the language as French in the language encoding (which I believe is done in the first 7 bits and can in some cases be extended to the second or even third byte, but its been a while since I read the spec - I do know there is an encoding that does this and I'm pretty sure it is UTF-8), the second byte 43 would (probably - I'm not going to look it up) mean something entirely different and be perfectly valid.
Unicode can mean many things - UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 - so specifying Unicode is not detailed enough to implement and by not specifying, it is opening a can of worms IMO. UTF-8 tends to be slower and larger for non-ASCII but has wide acceptance. It would also be the favorite for Linux/UNIX because it is very common there (my Linux box has LANG=en_US.UTF-8) and also for communication with databases (in my experience, UTF-8 is what most enterprise companies use for their database settings if they need multi-language databases). UTF-16 is worse for ASCII because it always has a second byte, but is generally faster and smaller for multibyte languages. It is also the default character encoding for MacOS and Windows (and contrary to its name, it can, in fact, contain 4 bytes of characters - the older format, UCS-2 was 2-byte only). It would be possible to support multiple encodings maybe on the URL, but this needs to be specified (for instance you could do something like http8:// or http16://).
To further throw a wrench in the works, wchar_t in C has unspecified length and can be 8, 16, or 32 bit characters. On Windows and Linux it is 16 bits. On mac and BSD UNIX it is generally 32 bit. This makes multi-platform programming using wide characters in C/C++ a bitch (and I say that from experience).
Prototyping was the first thing that popped into my head, but my brother, a chip designer, said to me once that most electronic circuits don't scale well (e.g. inductance may cause to much line noise), so prototyping may be limited. Not sure how you would do feedthroughs, either (seems like you'd still need to solder), so probably best for simple circuits like the mentioned RFID tags.
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but Native Americans essentially lost...
I'd say its a love story set in a sci-fi world and written by a tree hugging hippie who's spent a bit too much time in a sweat lodge high on peyote. Then again, I'd say Lewis Carroll did the same, but by all accounts he didn't use any chemicals (though possibly laudanum for headaches, however I think its highly unlikely anything was used for extended periods, given historical records).
my geek friends just aren't geek enough... they got the hippie save the planet crap message and totally missed the subsurface scattering. They need to spend less time smoking dope and more time programming :P
I believe you're talking about different things - the detector itself vs dark matter.
Lets do some armchair physics, since I need to dumb it down to my level anyway (I've got a minor in physics...). The known factors of (theoretical) dark matter is it has gravity but does not emit or reflect energy as heat or light, and the reason we think it exists is because galaxies aren't spiraling apart fast enough given the amount of visible matter. I won't pretend to understand that, I'll take it as a given and that the real physicists know what they're talking about.
Now imagine you put up a "wall" and throw particles at it. When a visible particle hits the wall, it bounces off and release some energy such as heat, just like when you toss a ball at the garage door - it may not be much, but it certainly is there. Now say we throw a dark matter particle at that same wall - what form of energy would it release, assuming it doesn't retain all energy (perfect reflection)? Personally, I don't know, but gravity doesn't sound like a bad suggestion.
A bit of an understatement... having had a gun pointed at my temple once I'd describe it more like piss-your-pants abject terror. YMMV.
It probably didn't help that the guy holding said gun also was paranoid, coked up (at least I took his word on that), and had a Shlitz malt liquor and unfiltered cigarette with a long line of ash and a cherry almost burning his fingers in his other hand while he stood in my apartment. Fortunately for me (and my roommate who also was home at that time), he was really looking for the guy that used to live in that apartment to get money owed, not to start a killing spree, and my kindly mentioning his cigarette was almost out probably saved any accidental discharge of said firearm. The hard part was convincing him that the dealer he was looking for moved and that every movement either of us made no matter how slow wasn't just to grab a hidden firearm and off him (did I mention paranoid?).
I've never picked up DLC myself, but Bethesda games have been notoriously buggy, especially memory leaks and crashes and save/load in particular. I finally got Fallout 3 to not crash in 2 hours of play - by adding 8GB more RAM (from 2 to 10) and patching the crap out of it. Oblivion suffered the identical problem, as did Morrowind (on the older NetImmerse). IMO, graphical glitches are acceptable, random crashes and memory leaks are not, ever. I've left some other games up for days without crash (Guild Wars, WoW, KotoR, Mass Effect, Half Life 2, and Bioshock to name a few, usually because I take a break and forget to come back...). I don't know if the leaks are Bethesda's fault or Gamebryo's, but I've never had problems with other Gamebryo/NetImmerse games (like Civ4 and the Freedom Force series).
Incidentally, I didn't have any of the reported problems with Empire: Total War, even running at 2GB of RAM and Windows 7 Beta (with a 285GTX GPU) - those are the bugs that suck - ones that require specific setups. Vampire: TM Bloodlines was very buggy, though not the worst I've ever seen (which is still owned by the original Pax: Imperia on mac - it was a fantastic game, but registration cards sent less than 10 days after purchase shouldn't have to list 50+ bugs, and I found many, many more).
As much as I dislike bugs, I dislike unfinished games more, and I point a big fat finger at EA and Interplay in particular (Lionheart, Legacy of the Crusader is my personal peeve - great start and then... empty places and a rushed end). I can't talk about a specific EA title for legal reasons, but I think most people can name at least one rushed title by them (and I think they are better now - it was really bad in the late 1990s when I worked in the industry). Bethesda also has gotten into that game - their published title Rogue Warrior was short and seemed unfinished - IGN's review says it all: "Completely bankrupt of any value whatsoever" and I didn't think anything could possibly be worse than Painkiller: Resurrection this year (which was bad, buggy and leaked memory). Thankfully I played review copies of both (having friends in the game review industry is fun ;)
exactly my first thought... you'd think there would be some originality with FLAs* that you can't really get with TLAs*@...
* Five Letter Acronyms
*@ Three Letter Acronyms
hmm, but this was 15 years ago, and everyone knew George Bush did coke but was off it for at least 15 years before becoming President. I can't claim to be an angel myself 15-20 years ago - my pseudonym is mentioned several times on textfiles ;)
My problem is the "relevance" people are at odds with wiki projects. There was a wiki project to catalog early Apple ][ and C64 games and every article I added got flagged immediately for relevance even if relevance was cited in the article (e.g. awards, top 10 lists, etc), and then within a couple of days, candidate for deletion. I would then have to defend the relevance on the Talk page and it just became an exercise in frustration. Many times the article would just get deleted anyway.
I did in fact move my articles to a non-wikipedia web site and have stopped contributing to it for the most part. Either the relevance admins should allow wiki projects to add their entries or kill the wiki project - there are always going to be somewhat minor entries for any wiki project, but the entries need to be there for completeness.
True, but you are also making the assumption people use the search in the toolbar, and I know plenty of people that just bookmarked google and click the link on the left hand nav bar (like my wife...). She was using that link long before search was added to the toolbar, so it is habit I think.
Yeah - I can't imagine the roles offered are all that great to begin with. Not always the writer's fault, either, though they're often to blame. Sometimes the blame for a bad film can even go to a producer - either cutting funding, limiting funding (restricting retakes), or demanding script changes during filming.
Maybe not - dilatants like D3o do something like that. I believe the British military commissioned helmets made of the stuff and they are currently used by the US Ski Team, amongst others. YouTube has videos of people being whacked by hammers and bats while wearing the stuff.
that's for sticky bit on a file; on a directory it has a different meaning (like /tmp - a user or superuser can write to or remove files there but other users can't if that file exists)
UNIX file permissions are good for most situations, but do contain some issues:
1) groups don't nest
2) you can't add a mix of users and groups
3) you can't have groups with different permissions (say read and execute on one and read, write, and execute for another).
4) you can't have multiple users that own a file
5) no way to have cascading permissions (if this condition then add write, if this condition add read, etc).
For instance, you're a teacher and have two TAs and four groups of students. You want to give the TAs read access to everything in the directory, read and write access to the grade file and only give the students write access to create new files in the directory and read access to their own files. After grading, you want to initially allow the students to see the other students in their group's work but not the other groups and later allow all groups to see each other's work (e.g. you wouldn't want a group to see the other group's work before they had their class).
ACLs can also key off of other attributes of the file - for instance, you could key off creation date or filesize or even multiple attributes - for instance, the user is the creator but no longer in the group, remove write permission.
Never used Intel GMA, huh? 9400M is a rocket compared to the best GMA (see notebookcheck). Should work fine for WoW and HD video, but keep Crysis away.
Vastly incorrect, in fact. MICROSOFT was the one that initially ditched OpenGL support in Vista - well, technically they were going to support 1.3 and deprecate the API, but then they reworked the display driver model so that it worked again when CAD companies including the one I work for were about to strangle them. The display driver model currently used is a vast improvement over the initial model that only allowed DirectX contexts and didn't allow compositing. The current driver model allows compositing of contexts of different types (meaning you can draw OpenGL with Aero on in a window, but you do get a performance hit).
nVidia not only supports OpenGL, they support many extensions that ATI historically has not - for instance, I added Geometry Shaders to a graphics engine nearly 2 years ago and ATI still doesn't support them (but they have promised better support in future drivers.
lol - still Re:9400M - 9400M is a mobile, so you're probably stuck with it unless you have a MXM module, in which case it may be possible to upgrade. Incidentally, my previous laptop did not and blew its graphics card for the second time (the notorious 8XXXM laptop series...) 3 days out of warranty but my new laptop does, so I may toy with upgrading graphics someday. From a basic fillrate, 9400M gets about 3.6 gigatexels/second and the 240 about 17. It is more comparable to the 9800M GTX I have on my current laptop (16GT/s). The GTS 240 slated for this quarter is supposed to be closer to 40GT/s, which is close to the GTX 260 (core 216) I bought for my desktop after a price drop to under $200 earlier this year.
I was warned the cheap stuff is like that, and the good stuff is $100+, so never bothered to try it. Whiskey (which means life's water, lol) has rotgut varieties, too.
As for Dec 21, 2012, which Mayan said it was the end of the world? I've only heard that from, well, pretty much only white loonies and doomsday Christians (oop, we missed May 2003 - gotta reschedule, lol).
Actually, it is a little beyond that, otherwise it would be identical to what Apple has done since MacOS X.0. What this does different is bring up a dialog box WITH USERS that can run the application, and you can select one of those to run the app as instead, if you know the password. In a UNIX-like system this is worthless because you may have hundreds or thousands of users, but most desktop windows systems only have a handful of users at most.
In fact, I don't think Linux (or UNIX for that matter) could even do this if it wanted to, or it'd be very ugly - it would have to check the sticky bit (and other special bits), then user, group, and role for all users to generate that list. Windows uses an ACL (Access Control List). Macs (since Tiger) and some UNIX/UNIX-likes support both UNIX permissions and ACLs which just compounds the mess. ACLs have a bit more flexibility than the UNIX bits - for instance, I could assign multiple groups and users not in those groups access permissions. I also don't have to edit /etc/passwd to do it (a root owned file) if I want to share a file with several users and don't have a container group.
Good luck taxing the rich - the rich pay PACs, PACs tell politicians to put loopholes in for them with lots of money backing them, and the politicians take kickbacks for doing what the rich say. In other countries they would just bribe the politician (or policeman, or whatever). The majority tax burden always falls on the middle classes.
True on capital gains being a source of income and yes income taxes tend to be much higher than capital gains taxes, however, I don't see it as an easy thing to abolish. For one, the investor is taking a risk and there is no guarantee he/she won't have a capital loss. Also counting it as income means the tax bracket will likely shift wildly - in years like the past two, they would likely have no income, even if they had a job. Does that mean they should get welfare? And why a capital gains tax at all? If I put money in the bank it earns interest - isn't investing similar?
There is DRM of a sort, though - any premium content including stuff you might have gotten with the game (e.g. preorders) require the PC to be connected to the Internet when you start the game or that content is not available. This is rather annoying when you have the game installed on a laptop like I do.
So far, the game seems pretty solid, but is certainly not without flaw. It still has the partial "rails" feel of NWN2 and Mass Effect which for me is always a nick in Bioware games (take a week and read about threads and background loading already), but the voice acting and plot seem quite good. I've played the first part of the game as a Thief, Mage, and Warrior and by far Warrior is easiest (except the Ogre), followed by Mage (freezie-mage is massively unbalancing though - makes Ogre easy even on Hard), and melee Rogue, which is extremely difficult even on Normal (light armor and hard AoE knockback hits made me suck down health too much - had to keep my rogue back and melee alternated tanking - probably easier with missile rogue). There also are parts of the game where you get an optional order to do things in, but there are no hints - in particular, I was having horrible problems with a rogue in the fade (having only 1 health potion left didn't help...) and had to hit a cheats site that basically told me the optimal order to do the quests - then it was trivial. The game also is fairly heavily geared toward combat - if you don't have some combat skills the game will be nearly impossible in some areas even on easy (I tried speccing a thief in talk skills and stealth - doesn't work). Basically, there is no way to win without combat - lots of it, so it doesn't offer a lot of gameplay styles.
So the reality is, I still have yet to find a game that gets all the parts right. Gothic 1 was close - it had good plot and voice acting and decent gameplay in an excellent game world but lousy combat (I personally feel the series has gone downhill since - many of the original programmers left Piranha Bytes after the first game) and while you always needed to be combat oriented, it didn't play out like that mattered as much as the factions you chose. I loved Fallout 1-2, but they were very buggy on release. NWN1 and 2 didn't really get much right IMO - I played some great mods, but I had a hard time getting into either and only found them interesting near the end - a BAD sign - you need to capture the gamer's attention much sooner than Act 3 or 4. Mass Effect had decent plot but some mechanics that needed work (esp. the Mako) and the dungeons were all similar and on rails. Also it is possible to max all armor and weapons after the second play-through which makes the third rather dull (never did finish the third and barely the second). Oblivion had a massive open world, but only one well developed character out of thousands (who dies in the intro), and quests that lacked variety. Ditto Fallout 3 (Bethesda - find characters that people can relate with already... aside from dad, that is... nobody) - they put all this work into giving people routines and a life schedule but emotion causing events? None. Name one character you think is worth keeping. Nobody travels with you, you have no friends (you have alliances, but characters don't act like they miss you or care about you), and this makes it wooden. Not to mention the quests, which are all basically - "I would do it, but I'm too lazy." MMORPGs as a whole pretty much run on rails plot-wise because it is difficult to branch.
There would need to be a way to get in and out, so I imagine birds and bugs would be able to, as well. I imagine such exits and any fans used to keep the dome inflated would cause a breeze, kinda like the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome.
Of course, birds would not be happy smacking the big dome window and if I were working for big sprinkler I would definitely endorse this (a 1 mile x 1 mile zone that needs sprinkler systems for irrigation? sign me up).
I agree with you the sample is a bit suspect and Asia contains a lot of territory, and for that matter, Asian-American usually means eastern Asian people with slanty eyes and not Asia as a whole (and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but that is just the main divisive feature from other Asian groups such as Russians, Indians, etc). Granted America isn't North America as a whole, either, but it is a much larger sample of North America - its like comparing Wisconsin (one of the smartest states in the nation) to the southeast US as a whole (the dumbest part of the nation generally on test scores). Some of the smartest people I know live in Florida and Georgia, but throw in Louisiana, Alabama, etc and you're basically a bunch of morons.
I'd like to know how Hmong compare - they are a refugee people and generally come from uneducated families (the two families I know had illiterate parents, but so did my [Germanic refugee] family when they came to America over a century ago, so that's no excuse). One of my best friends growing up would fall in that category and he designs rocket engines for a living (not technically a rocket scientist - his degree was aerospace engineer with specialization in jet based propulsion). The Hmong are a perfect group to sample because they aren't only the best and the brightest.
Well, what I got out of this was George Bush really really is an idiot (I knew my IQ is in the top 1%, I didn't realize his was merely top 10% - pshaw - moron ;) ), and I score better than 17% of the population on their test, too :D
my city recently started requiring GFCI at the breaker for all bedrooms and bathrooms. Currently the Consumer Product Safety Commission doesn't require either. The bedroom breaker is about $15 more than the bathroom one for some reason (more sensitive?).
Mac DVDs aren't copy protected, but the DMCA also forbids decoding of encrypted files and
some files like com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X and the Finder are either fully or partially encrypted files loaded at runtime. The former is used to detect mac hardware and give keys for decrypting other parts of the OS.
So basically, mac adds a check for atom processors, throws it into the encrypted Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X kernel extension, and suddenly no atom support without a DMCA violation. Of course, traditional copyright law says you can do whatever you want with a copy you own with the type of license Apple sells, including removing copy protection and moving it to platforms it wasn't intended for (i.e. you can legally make one backup), so the law seems a bit ambiguous to me.
Actually, UTF-8 can and is being used in DNS - as long as you stick to basic Latin characters, that is. Also it is Unicode - as I posted earlier, Unicode is a blanket for UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 which makes it ambiguous.
UTF-8 bits 0-7 is ASCII as long as bit 8 isn't set, so to fully support it you'd need to still exclude bits below 7 that are not valid html characters and include support for multiple bytes and bit 8. The reason existing DNS servers won't work with it is because bit 8 indicates multibyte and the second byte may carry an invalid character from the 0-7 bits and the first byte may have a language encoding for the second byte (indicated by bit 8). For instance character 43 is + and that is invalid in a URL. If character 1 had bit 8 set and indicated the language as French in the language encoding (which I believe is done in the first 7 bits and can in some cases be extended to the second or even third byte, but its been a while since I read the spec - I do know there is an encoding that does this and I'm pretty sure it is UTF-8), the second byte 43 would (probably - I'm not going to look it up) mean something entirely different and be perfectly valid.
Unicode can mean many things - UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 - so specifying Unicode is not detailed enough to implement and by not specifying, it is opening a can of worms IMO. UTF-8 tends to be slower and larger for non-ASCII but has wide acceptance. It would also be the favorite for Linux/UNIX because it is very common there (my Linux box has LANG=en_US.UTF-8) and also for communication with databases (in my experience, UTF-8 is what most enterprise companies use for their database settings if they need multi-language databases). UTF-16 is worse for ASCII because it always has a second byte, but is generally faster and smaller for multibyte languages. It is also the default character encoding for MacOS and Windows (and contrary to its name, it can, in fact, contain 4 bytes of characters - the older format, UCS-2 was 2-byte only). It would be possible to support multiple encodings maybe on the URL, but this needs to be specified (for instance you could do something like http8:// or http16://).
To further throw a wrench in the works, wchar_t in C has unspecified length and can be 8, 16, or 32 bit characters. On Windows and Linux it is 16 bits. On mac and BSD UNIX it is generally 32 bit. This makes multi-platform programming using wide characters in C/C++ a bitch (and I say that from experience).
Prototyping was the first thing that popped into my head, but my brother, a chip designer, said to me once that most electronic circuits don't scale well (e.g. inductance may cause to much line noise), so prototyping may be limited. Not sure how you would do feedthroughs, either (seems like you'd still need to solder), so probably best for simple circuits like the mentioned RFID tags.