In collecting evidence for those takedown notices, Media Sentry investigators do not usually download suspect music files. Instead, the company uses special software to check the "hash," a sort of unique digital fingerprint, of each offered file to verify that it is identical to a copyrighted song file in the RIAA's database. In the rare cases in which the hashes don't match, the investigators download the song and use a software program sold by Audible Magic to compare the sound waves of the offered audio file against those of the song it may be infringing upon. If the Audible Magic software still doesn't turn up a match, then a live person will listen to the song. So they have to check popular songs audibly if they don't match their automated tests. It is quite likely that RIAA pays Mediasentry for work hourly or files searched. So I had an idea and propose we need the following tools: microphones, bored people, and lots of computers to host.
1) Figure out what music is currently quite popular.
2) Make your own covers of it without instruments. Sing both the lyrics and the melody with interpretive musicianship. The worse it sounds, the better.
3) Host as the file name.
4) ????
5) Waste their time!
IANAL but I don't think you could get in trouble for posting fake songs up. Technically, you could claim you're helping fight piracy while making Mediasentry's job harder. I imagine the in worst case they ask you to cease and desist. Perhaps someone more versed in law can say if this is valid.
Another option could be to simply use the band's name and make up fake songs with similar names to original songs with fictitious lyrics. This would replace step 2. Granted I believe they are solely looking for song titles.
Ben Folds - Rocking the Penguin
Beastie Boys - Ubuntu in Effect
Whitney Houston - OSX will save the day
Once you've taken the time to study the subject, you'll come to agree with them. A look at your name and homepage tells me you're unbiased...
Sarcasm aside, their report and conclusion overlooks the manufacturing process of solar panels - pretty nasty chemicals are involved from what I hear. If cleanup of those isn't taken into account, how can we fully measure the true costs of implementation? Everyone rags on nuclear for waste storage, coal for CO2 and subsidies, oil for subsidies. None of the studies are being truly fair to any source such that you can deliver any results you want. DoE should be dedicating resources to developing a fair study of energy costs.
Fact is, this is not a problem with a golden ticket solution. You have four sides: consumption, transportation (grid), production, and regulation. Tech needs to be focused on all three. On the consumption side, we want to reduce overall consumption as it requires far less production (more energy efficient computers, AC, dryer, etc). Transportation improvements will help eliminate losses and mildly reduce some production (better lines, etc). Production needs to be focused towards finding the proper balance of production that will meet current demand and projected growth (more environmentally friendly sources). Regulation can be used for all sorts of things to help drive people towards the chosen decision (requirements on insulation in houses or setting maximum energy consumption of appliances sold).
Could this be in nuclear, solar, wind, and algae based fuel? Could it be in Ironman power tech? Could it be in fusion? There's not going to be one answer and once we get past that point, we can figure out what we need to do to get where we all want to be. I think solar will play a big part but it isn't going to be alone - I think my first scenario may be the most likely. But I'm all for disruptive techs with cases two or three.
I read various accounts with many of them crazy because crazy sells. Crazy is loud and fun. I've seen the popular youtube videos with the theories.
I personally find it hard for such a conspiracy to have taken place without anyone coming forward or letting it slip; too many people had to be involved to for such a fleece pulling to occur. For curiosity's sake, what parts of 9/11 do you find suspect? What do you think happened?
Yes, I'm legitimately interested in what you think.
Try finding the extended version of the episode and give it a chance. It makes a whole lot more sense than the original and it really sets up character development for Apollo and Starbuck down the road. I still don't like the episode (I still think it's unnecessary) but I like it more now having seen the extended version and seeing what it was meant to be.
Another problem is that the third season consisted of a lot of stand alone episodes. Some were good and others weren't. It really sort of hurt the season as there was a lot of nothing going on because of budget constraints due to Exodus.
It's tough this season because I know Moore wanted to sum everything up in 2 seasons rather than 1 but that's how things go. It will hopefully end in an interesting way regardless as it has been enjoyable so far even through the bad. Grandparent is right about Roslin being the bad guy this season - at least so far. Everytime she's on camera, I want to punch her through my TV. There's a lot of setup for the ending - searching for Earth, final 5 Cylons, internal Cylon conflicts, getting skeletons out of the closet, and probably other unforeseen things. I can't promise you would like it - I don't know if I will either - but I'd like to stick through to the end to see how it goes.
I also can't rip too hard on BSG without writing an essay on Lost after having gotten through the second season two years ago. Lost has rebounded but at this point, I have no idea how it will end and don't actively recommend people start watching the show (from the beginning). I'll tell people what I think but it's not all good.
The problems with stuff like this is that people are different. Some people can drive, talk on the phone, and drink coffee all at the same time. Others can't focus on anything but one task at a time. Since we aren't all the same, there are a variety of solutions to the problem.
1) Give everyone all the options and let them decide. Current system in place which leads to incapable people trying to do what their more capable peers can. This isn't the best solution but changing this will be hard.
2) Give everyone the bear minimum - the single seater cars without radio. Unfortunately, this holds everyone back just because some people can't handle multiple tasks. Same problem as that No Child Left Behind crap.
3) Some middle ground solution that depends on the driver/conditions. Option 3 is pretty hard to implement. So the only fair solution would be to push for automated driving as people that aren't as high on the totem are going to complain as they were higher before.
Questions
Who is responsible when something fails? -> Who do Americans, the legal happy folk we are, get to sue?
What do you do about the folks that really do enjoy driving?
If they can still drive, do certain areas become automatic only? - highways and such
Do we just have the cars react to each other independently like bees in a swarm acting as a whole or hive mind control?
There are clearly more questions that require answers...
It's a difficult system to develop and maintain but would eliminate many of the general problems associated with driving. I would rather we find ways to develop more reasonable mass transit systems that people can and would use. Unfortunately, people don't seem keen on giving up their cars. Something has to be done as Atlanta, for example, doesn't look like it can handle much more in terms of capacity. Other major cities have the same problem. Automated driving might solve a lot of those problems. So would mass transit.
Yea, I thought I'd seen this before here and other places including this simulation http://vwisb7.vkw.tu-dresden.de/~treiber/MicroApplet/ (java warning). A lot of the modeling is interesting because it simply captures a lot of the real behavior you see every day.
A couple of early posters are making jokes about faulty drivers and writing your own. But honestly, eliminating the human component from driving would significantly improve traffic flow across the board and would allow it to be optimizable. It's really just the problem of so many different drivers making such a system a complete failure - it's like General Motors and their 31 different models (gratuitous car analogy). But until people become less lawsuit happy and unless such a scheme can work with people that want to drive, I doubt that such a system could be implemented. It's far more likely that we'll see passive incremental improvements such as intelligent braking instead of more active disruptive improvements like auto-drive.
More or less. Apps matter to people. Windows has apps.
I've been playing a lot of TF2 lately as well as The Witcher recently. I know I can play them on Windows with zero hassle. I might be able to play them on Linux with Wine but from everything I've heard, it can be a crapshoot and a variety of tweaking/editing to get things to work. I'm not going to say I know anything about Wine and using it (my perception could be quite wrong) but with Windows, I just install and go - maybe update drivers if I need to. If Linux can match that with most all apps, I think the switch would happen far more easily than people think.
So how does one convince apps to move to Linux if there isn't a market? Why does the market move to Linux if there aren't apps? Sounds like a chicken and egg problem. Assuming a company wants to develop for Linux/OSX (ignoring market forces), what's keeping developers from producing software for them? Is there anything similar to DirectX vs OpenGL in general?
I thought it was interesting looking through the international response to it.
Russia goes on about us using it as a cover for anti-satellite testing. As sh00z mentioned, it's an anti-missile missile. Then they ramble about how toxic fuel has crashed to Earth before and how they think it isn't a big deal. But since we didn't know where it would exactly land and don't have the luxury or using Siberia or Kazakhstan as a crash site, there could be enough risk of exposure to civilians as it was projected to hit North America. Besides, I'd like to hope we shoot for a higher safety standard than Russia. They do a lot of really cool things for really cheap
I found China's response is both hilarious and hypocritical. Their concern about security in space is a joke given that they hit a real satellite just last year. At 800 km against our 200 km! I think their test says more than ours in the international dick waving sense - plus a majority of their debris won't burn up within a week. I don't really see the two launches as apples to apples; more like China totaling a working 1993 Honda and the US totaling a 2007 BMW with a cracked engine block.
Odds are quite good that it was really just to destroy the top secret components on the satellite. Fair enough since it's our tech and we don't like giving it away. The environmental concern with the hydrazine happens to be convenient whether as a cover or for real legitimate concern - hydrazine is nasty stuff regardless. As for a weapons test, the missile couldn't hit a satellite in use. It really could only be useful as both a cruise phase interceptor test and a cold tracking (no infrared) sensor test. Besides, it's been known for years that the US can hit working satellites - no need to flip out over hitting a lame bird.
I hate Smash Lab because they seem to have no idea what they are doing. From an idea perspective, they might be okay but from an implementation approach, they are awful at both actually doing it and selecting feasible ideas.
One of my roommates ripped apart the hurricane-proof house episode - studs not build properly or mount the house to the pad. The other two and I watched the soft concrete episode. They don't seem to have anyone telling them things that are common sense such as pouring concrete on uneven surface yields uneven densities. Even if their idea worked (and there's a pretty clear reason it would never work), implementing that ridiculous concrete strip in the infrastructure would cost far too much to make it worth a damn.
We pretty much considered creating a kid-code on our DVR so no one could watch this show. The Mythbusters are at least honest that they may not know what they are doing. Their experience in special effects provides them with a reasonable implementation know-how. When fans call them out, they step it up and reinvestigate. Some of the myths aren't very good but they have 114 episodes produced. Smash lab has 7 and popular opinion is that it sucks - I read that Discovery's forums have 5 pages of requests to kill it.
So I was discussing this news with a couple of my friends as we'd all been interested in the game. Sadly, I will be in the middle of studying for PhD qualifiers instead of being able to play. This brought up joking of just getting a real job instead so I could actually play. The conversation might go something like this:
"So Dr Adviser, I was thinking about taking quals. But Spore's coming out on September 7th so I'm going to get a job instead. kthnxbye."
Sadly, I don't think my adviser or the research engineers I work with would be amused.
I got my mother Seasons 1 and 2 of 24 for Christmas years ago. We only managed to get through Season 1 before I had to go back to school and she'd already seen Season 2. Fast forward three months. I was back at home for Spring Break and decided to watch Season 2 but while going through it, one of the DVDs had the equivalent of a burn mark on it and skipped like 10 minutes of one episode. Contacted Amazon and within a week we had a brand new Season 2 with no return slip. Tough to beat that service.
Is Oblivion really something a 6 year old should be playing? I'm more curious now since I never considered it a game for a young child. Are there switches that turn some of that (violence, language, gore) off? Regardless of the previous answer, how do you explain the killing, thieving, and the like?
I'm more curious from a parenting perspective since these are questions I've never seriously considered answering to a child - I'm 24 so I have years to think about answers and how. But I really think that answers that arise require some deeper moral understanding beyond the "don't kill people, don't steal" and really the core of why we don't. Perhaps I'm wrong and I'm not opposed to that - I don't spend any time around young children but I know they are more perceptive than people think they are capable of.
I'm just curious as to your reasoning. I respect and maintain the 'your house, your rules' mantra, as whenever I have children of my own I want the same treatment from others.
I always envisioned Thief being much more like a first person Assassins Creed in a huge city (I've only watched 20 minutes of Creed before I left). Something where you can wander the city and do whatever and take jobs to raise funds to work towards getting intel, bribing folk, getting better equipment/skills, or snagging a disguise for more prospective work.
The only limits would be funding to get the intel - in theory you could go into this badass place right at the beginning but you might not be able to open a lock or you can't figure out where the item is without spending 3+ hours to get it. Or it might take 2 hours to cross the map unless you had a sewers key that provides a more direct route.
Eventually, you'd need things to lead to some overarching story/objective. You could have all sorts of buildings that one could break into with both day and night cycles and the like. I always thought a game like this would be awesome - something like Creed meets Morrowind.
The gamer voting base isn't that large in comparison to the general population so there's no voting power present. Even if it were, there's no lobby to protect them and the community isn't like to drum up the money to support one (though I think industry should build a bigger one).
Most these candidates are going to play the "keep your kids safe" card and parents that could mildly fit into the pro-gamer base will likely switch because they are too damn lazy to parent their kids. Movies, music, games, tv.. blaming them for the evils in the world are smokescreens to cover for people that are piss poor parents.
So your only conflict is no father (two and three are essentially the same) versus no more lists? I'm not really going to discuss the bad parent side since there isn't a real solution to that. This leaves me with no such conflict whatsoever.
Normal citizens do not require access to any such lists specifically because of reasons like this. Providing these lists to citizen does not released criminals ANY chance at reintegration into society and instead sets the system up for abuse: as your neighbors will just watch you to see that you do something wrong and report you (NIMBY). Criminals deserve fair second chances at society or otherwise, we might as well just execute all our prisoners for any crime. For some released criminals, that's what we're equivalently doing already with the lists. The lists belong to the police and parole officers as they should have this access to do their jobs. But the penalty for leaking any such information to citizens should have punishments equivalent to those for other corrupt cops.
If we allow the citizens to "police" themselves and keep themselves safe, things like this will continue to happen. Perhaps I'm just cynical but I don't need to know that there's a child molester that moved into my area - the police should know and keep tabs on them. As long as I do my job as a parent by teaching my children about strangers, situational awareness and the like, I've done all I can. If someone kidnaps/rapes/molests my child, there isn't much I could teach them to prevent it physically from happening.
It just seems that people these days are unwilling to accept that bad things happen to good people. We've tried to prevent the bad and I think we're doing the best we can in some places and need improvement in others. And short of police-stating things up with cameras and listening devices everywhere (in homes too), you will always have gaps. The problem is convincing people that they just have to accept this and make sure their children know this too.
I'm not involved with naval work but I think I can still conceptually explain it. You design an engine to operate at a design point - generally your predominant operating point. Aircraft engine manufacturers generally use a multi-point design and I imagine naval engines might too - other critical conditions are integrated into the design process.
Points that fall outside of these points are off-design. You might use less fuel but for some reason, the cycle is less efficient than before and more emissions are produced per pound thrust. So you could reduce your fuel consumption by a third but only reduce output emissions by 10-20% because the inefficiencies produce more emissions.
but there are also plenty of arguments against. The biggest of these are:
- waste
- safety
- containment in case the 'safety' bit fails Not a nuclear engineer, physicist, etc.. but I've looked into them for an energy project. I can try to find sources if you'd like or wikipedia has outside links to some of them in the Gen IV article. Google also had some interesting papers on it. http://nuclear.energy.gov/genIV/neGenIV1.html was an excellent starting point. There's also an international nuclear research program: http://www.gen-4.org/
Waste would not be a problem if we would be allowed to reprocess the waste from our current reactors. However, that is a legislative issue. Additionally, a large portion of the next generation (Gen IV) reactors are supposed to run on the waste of their predecessors and produce far less waste than before.
Many of these "new" (Loosely used, some are enhancements of old designs with improved tech. Others are new since the tech now exists to make them feasible) reactors will have significantly improved safety controls over their predecessors; many of these are passive such that the reactor will stop itself instead of having a guy do it. A lot of these designs are also closed cycle so a large portion of the containment problems would be alleviated.
Glancing through your posts, it's pretty clear that you're a solar/wind guy but you did acknowledge that nuclear was a need to solve the problems as a stopgap. My opinion is that we need nuclear as a replacement for coal plants given that both are pretty much continuous output. Wind and solar have their places but we can't always count on their consistency. Hell, solar won't be able to provide all our energy needs due to the maximum energy that hits the Earth at a given location. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be considered.
Energy is ultimately going to be provided by a suite of sources: wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, solar, etc. They all have their places and none of them can be ignored. All need R&D to work on ways to improve safety, manufacturing, efficiency, and the like to make them more feasible and attractive to industry.
However, I see the energy problem as a two-pronged problem: supply and demand. Everyone continues to focus on the supply side so heavily while demand generally goes overlooked. I think a large portion of the problem stems from the fact that reducing demand is seen as a move to decrease "quality of life" even though it doesn't have to. I really think there needs to be technology (or legislative) goals to reduce power consumption of appliances throughout the house and office: air conditioning, fridge, stove, computer, printer, networking equipment, etc... By reducing demand and making our supply more environmentally friendly, I think we can make a pretty big difference in emissions and air quality, future energy supply security and growth (plug-in electrics), job security for many, environmental damage (coal mining), etc...
We are really only borrowing this planet from our children and grand children after all. I see it more as our children and grandchildren inherit all the problems we weren't bothered to solve in our lifetimes. Similar premise though.
Also, for a little experiment in speed limits, try coordinating with 3 other people to each drive in one lane of the expressway at the speep limit. Not directly beside eachother, but with just enough room for other drivers to pass and go around you. Some Georgia State students tried that as a part of campus moviefest in the Atlanta area. Results were interesting to say the least. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5366552067462745475
I speed down some of these same roadways. So does pretty much everyone else. The way I see it, I could drive the speed limit or I could follow flow of traffic. One option makes me a huge hazard on the road while the other at least helps keep me from being a barrier and getting hit. Sure, people could become traffic vigilantes and only drive the speed limit and get in the way for speeders. But that isn't safe and it isn't their job to enforce the law.
However, my sole beef with these systems are that they aren't programed to look at the situation. They are simply going to be used to look for speeding over a set number. I see a lot of people getting tickets up front with whatever the initial rule is and once enough complaints have been drawn up, the system being scaled back to almost nothing and being a huge waste of money.
I would love to see such technology looking for reckless drivers. Those guys that weave through traffic at speeds way greater than flow of traffic in cars or bikes. I think giving them tickets is far more important and can make everything far safer for everyone.
I was almost in that boat. I immediately played Portal and beat it within three hours of getting home with my purchase. Then I played around in all the bonus maps and commentary. I still haven't unlocked everything yet but I'll get around to it. Some of them are hard...
Then I went to Episode 2. I really wanted to play TF2 but I knew if I did, I would likely never get around to Episode 2. So I beat EP2 and got all the achievements except for two (because I played when the servers were down and they weren't uploaded). Now I'm just waiting on them to create the fix so I can get both of those. One is beating the two antlions...
TF2 has been amazing. It's pretty much what I do for a couple hours every day. I love how many of the achievements involve multiple classes such that you have to play them to earn them. I wish there were some operational one for the demoman and spy (like sapping devices). I love the soldier and heavy but the medic and scout are really growing on me a lot. I'm really getting into the bat kills. I love the pyro too but multiple servers I've been on have complained about the new range.
I really want to get voice chat and posted in the previous thread about whether to get a mic or headset and although I agree a headset is more courteous, I've always had problems with the headphones and pressing my glasses earpieces into my head uncomfortably. Without voice chat I feel like it's a lot harder to be helpful, especially with spies and locations of things. I'm welcome to any suggestions on brands, especially from anyone that wears glasses and a headset. I suppose my head just has a weird contour since my optician complained about fitting my earpieces a couple years ago in a joking way.
Everyone's played with the assbasket that feedbacks the game with his speakers and mic. Since I wear glasses and headsets usually drive the earpieces into my head and give me headaches. I'm not opposed to them as an option but I consider my comfort important too. I'm not really interested in being that guy but there's no point in wearing a headset if it just gives me headaches. Are there no ways to get a mic that only picks up me talking without speaker feedback?
Since we have telecons pretty regularly at work and the device we use has no problems with it, I'm willing to put 'no' as not a 100% correct answer. If a phone system can do it, a PC should easily be able to.
So it's been just under a year and we're finding that Vista user growth is slowly increasing. Some users may refuse to upgrade out of principle, other are like me and waiting it out. I don't really find the results that surprising.
I've got XP SP2 on my gaming rig and I don't see myself upgrading to Vista anytime soon. I may do so in time when there are a couple games that I consider must haves available only on Vista. But I just don't see the point in spending money on a new OS when I don't feel there are any Vista-only must haves. Once there are a couple must haves and my PC needs upgrading, I'll probably add drive for Vista and get the games. But for now, I'm content with TF2 and the Orange Box. Hell, I haven't even had a chance to look at The Witcher yet. Plus, I can wait and find out what SP1 breaks.
Off-topic: I want to get a mic for TF2 but I don't know if I should get a headset or just a mic. Anyone have opinions?
Yea, I thought this would be an amazing concept when I first read the article but thinking about it more and more realized that there would be no real incentive for the politicians to compete. Like you said, they gain nothing and can lose everything. It would be interesting to see their views on science, their thoughts on what we should study and strive towards, etc but again, most of America doesn't care at all.
Since no one cares and the politicians won't throw their careers up to any real debate, I propose a new "debate" stage: American Gladiators. Our grand American voters can watch as candidates compete in events like Joust, Assault, and the Eliminator!!! Sadly, I think this may draw a large crowd than actual debates.
Speakeasy's business service is more expensive because of the 99.9% guaranteed uptime. I imagine that business service at other companies will have something similar to this. Hence, the extra expense.
We're paying $75 a month for 1.5d/384u. A bit more than I like but since it's only 8 people, it isn't a huge deal. I was looking at Comcast since we have Digital preferred with them (and they have faster speeds) but we already split the line too much and the signal degrades in one of the rooms for digital to work thoroughly. And BellSouth requires a home phone, which we don't want or need.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Figure out what music is currently quite popular.
2) Make your own covers of it without instruments. Sing both the lyrics and the melody with interpretive musicianship. The worse it sounds, the better.
3) Host as the file name.
4) ????
5) Waste their time!
IANAL but I don't think you could get in trouble for posting fake songs up. Technically, you could claim you're helping fight piracy while making Mediasentry's job harder. I imagine the in worst case they ask you to cease and desist. Perhaps someone more versed in law can say if this is valid.
Another option could be to simply use the band's name and make up fake songs with similar names to original songs with fictitious lyrics. This would replace step 2. Granted I believe they are solely looking for song titles.
Ben Folds - Rocking the Penguin
Beastie Boys - Ubuntu in Effect
Whitney Houston - OSX will save the day
Sarcasm aside, their report and conclusion overlooks the manufacturing process of solar panels - pretty nasty chemicals are involved from what I hear. If cleanup of those isn't taken into account, how can we fully measure the true costs of implementation? Everyone rags on nuclear for waste storage, coal for CO2 and subsidies, oil for subsidies. None of the studies are being truly fair to any source such that you can deliver any results you want. DoE should be dedicating resources to developing a fair study of energy costs.
Fact is, this is not a problem with a golden ticket solution. You have four sides: consumption, transportation (grid), production, and regulation. Tech needs to be focused on all three. On the consumption side, we want to reduce overall consumption as it requires far less production (more energy efficient computers, AC, dryer, etc). Transportation improvements will help eliminate losses and mildly reduce some production (better lines, etc). Production needs to be focused towards finding the proper balance of production that will meet current demand and projected growth (more environmentally friendly sources). Regulation can be used for all sorts of things to help drive people towards the chosen decision (requirements on insulation in houses or setting maximum energy consumption of appliances sold).
Could this be in nuclear, solar, wind, and algae based fuel? Could it be in Ironman power tech? Could it be in fusion? There's not going to be one answer and once we get past that point, we can figure out what we need to do to get where we all want to be. I think solar will play a big part but it isn't going to be alone - I think my first scenario may be the most likely. But I'm all for disruptive techs with cases two or three.
I read various accounts with many of them crazy because crazy sells. Crazy is loud and fun. I've seen the popular youtube videos with the theories.
I personally find it hard for such a conspiracy to have taken place without anyone coming forward or letting it slip; too many people had to be involved to for such a fleece pulling to occur. For curiosity's sake, what parts of 9/11 do you find suspect? What do you think happened?
Yes, I'm legitimately interested in what you think.
Try finding the extended version of the episode and give it a chance. It makes a whole lot more sense than the original and it really sets up character development for Apollo and Starbuck down the road. I still don't like the episode (I still think it's unnecessary) but I like it more now having seen the extended version and seeing what it was meant to be.
Another problem is that the third season consisted of a lot of stand alone episodes. Some were good and others weren't. It really sort of hurt the season as there was a lot of nothing going on because of budget constraints due to Exodus.
It's tough this season because I know Moore wanted to sum everything up in 2 seasons rather than 1 but that's how things go. It will hopefully end in an interesting way regardless as it has been enjoyable so far even through the bad. Grandparent is right about Roslin being the bad guy this season - at least so far. Everytime she's on camera, I want to punch her through my TV. There's a lot of setup for the ending - searching for Earth, final 5 Cylons, internal Cylon conflicts, getting skeletons out of the closet, and probably other unforeseen things. I can't promise you would like it - I don't know if I will either - but I'd like to stick through to the end to see how it goes.
I also can't rip too hard on BSG without writing an essay on Lost after having gotten through the second season two years ago. Lost has rebounded but at this point, I have no idea how it will end and don't actively recommend people start watching the show (from the beginning). I'll tell people what I think but it's not all good.
The problems with stuff like this is that people are different. Some people can drive, talk on the phone, and drink coffee all at the same time. Others can't focus on anything but one task at a time. Since we aren't all the same, there are a variety of solutions to the problem.
1) Give everyone all the options and let them decide. Current system in place which leads to incapable people trying to do what their more capable peers can. This isn't the best solution but changing this will be hard.
2) Give everyone the bear minimum - the single seater cars without radio. Unfortunately, this holds everyone back just because some people can't handle multiple tasks. Same problem as that No Child Left Behind crap.
3) Some middle ground solution that depends on the driver/conditions. Option 3 is pretty hard to implement. So the only fair solution would be to push for automated driving as people that aren't as high on the totem are going to complain as they were higher before.
Questions
Who is responsible when something fails? -> Who do Americans, the legal happy folk we are, get to sue?
What do you do about the folks that really do enjoy driving?
If they can still drive, do certain areas become automatic only? - highways and such
Do we just have the cars react to each other independently like bees in a swarm acting as a whole or hive mind control?
There are clearly more questions that require answers...
It's a difficult system to develop and maintain but would eliminate many of the general problems associated with driving. I would rather we find ways to develop more reasonable mass transit systems that people can and would use. Unfortunately, people don't seem keen on giving up their cars. Something has to be done as Atlanta, for example, doesn't look like it can handle much more in terms of capacity. Other major cities have the same problem. Automated driving might solve a lot of those problems. So would mass transit.
Yea, I thought I'd seen this before here and other places including this simulation http://vwisb7.vkw.tu-dresden.de/~treiber/MicroApplet/ (java warning). A lot of the modeling is interesting because it simply captures a lot of the real behavior you see every day.
A couple of early posters are making jokes about faulty drivers and writing your own. But honestly, eliminating the human component from driving would significantly improve traffic flow across the board and would allow it to be optimizable. It's really just the problem of so many different drivers making such a system a complete failure - it's like General Motors and their 31 different models (gratuitous car analogy). But until people become less lawsuit happy and unless such a scheme can work with people that want to drive, I doubt that such a system could be implemented. It's far more likely that we'll see passive incremental improvements such as intelligent braking instead of more active disruptive improvements like auto-drive.
More or less. Apps matter to people. Windows has apps.
I've been playing a lot of TF2 lately as well as The Witcher recently. I know I can play them on Windows with zero hassle. I might be able to play them on Linux with Wine but from everything I've heard, it can be a crapshoot and a variety of tweaking/editing to get things to work. I'm not going to say I know anything about Wine and using it (my perception could be quite wrong) but with Windows, I just install and go - maybe update drivers if I need to. If Linux can match that with most all apps, I think the switch would happen far more easily than people think.
So how does one convince apps to move to Linux if there isn't a market? Why does the market move to Linux if there aren't apps? Sounds like a chicken and egg problem. Assuming a company wants to develop for Linux/OSX (ignoring market forces), what's keeping developers from producing software for them? Is there anything similar to DirectX vs OpenGL in general?
I thought it was interesting looking through the international response to it.
Russia goes on about us using it as a cover for anti-satellite testing. As sh00z mentioned, it's an anti-missile missile. Then they ramble about how toxic fuel has crashed to Earth before and how they think it isn't a big deal. But since we didn't know where it would exactly land and don't have the luxury or using Siberia or Kazakhstan as a crash site, there could be enough risk of exposure to civilians as it was projected to hit North America. Besides, I'd like to hope we shoot for a higher safety standard than Russia. They do a lot of really cool things for really cheap
I found China's response is both hilarious and hypocritical. Their concern about security in space is a joke given that they hit a real satellite just last year. At 800 km against our 200 km! I think their test says more than ours in the international dick waving sense - plus a majority of their debris won't burn up within a week. I don't really see the two launches as apples to apples; more like China totaling a working 1993 Honda and the US totaling a 2007 BMW with a cracked engine block.
Odds are quite good that it was really just to destroy the top secret components on the satellite. Fair enough since it's our tech and we don't like giving it away. The environmental concern with the hydrazine happens to be convenient whether as a cover or for real legitimate concern - hydrazine is nasty stuff regardless. As for a weapons test, the missile couldn't hit a satellite in use. It really could only be useful as both a cruise phase interceptor test and a cold tracking (no infrared) sensor test. Besides, it's been known for years that the US can hit working satellites - no need to flip out over hitting a lame bird.
I hate Smash Lab because they seem to have no idea what they are doing. From an idea perspective, they might be okay but from an implementation approach, they are awful at both actually doing it and selecting feasible ideas.
One of my roommates ripped apart the hurricane-proof house episode - studs not build properly or mount the house to the pad. The other two and I watched the soft concrete episode. They don't seem to have anyone telling them things that are common sense such as pouring concrete on uneven surface yields uneven densities. Even if their idea worked (and there's a pretty clear reason it would never work), implementing that ridiculous concrete strip in the infrastructure would cost far too much to make it worth a damn.
We pretty much considered creating a kid-code on our DVR so no one could watch this show. The Mythbusters are at least honest that they may not know what they are doing. Their experience in special effects provides them with a reasonable implementation know-how. When fans call them out, they step it up and reinvestigate. Some of the myths aren't very good but they have 114 episodes produced. Smash lab has 7 and popular opinion is that it sucks - I read that Discovery's forums have 5 pages of requests to kill it.
So I was discussing this news with a couple of my friends as we'd all been interested in the game. Sadly, I will be in the middle of studying for PhD qualifiers instead of being able to play. This brought up joking of just getting a real job instead so I could actually play. The conversation might go something like this:
"So Dr Adviser, I was thinking about taking quals. But Spore's coming out on September 7th so I'm going to get a job instead. kthnxbye."
Sadly, I don't think my adviser or the research engineers I work with would be amused.
Similar experience.
I got my mother Seasons 1 and 2 of 24 for Christmas years ago. We only managed to get through Season 1 before I had to go back to school and she'd already seen Season 2. Fast forward three months. I was back at home for Spring Break and decided to watch Season 2 but while going through it, one of the DVDs had the equivalent of a burn mark on it and skipped like 10 minutes of one episode. Contacted Amazon and within a week we had a brand new Season 2 with no return slip. Tough to beat that service.
'Mötley Crüe Writes Off Microsoft'
Gonna be a long day...
Is Oblivion really something a 6 year old should be playing? I'm more curious now since I never considered it a game for a young child. Are there switches that turn some of that (violence, language, gore) off? Regardless of the previous answer, how do you explain the killing, thieving, and the like?
I'm more curious from a parenting perspective since these are questions I've never seriously considered answering to a child - I'm 24 so I have years to think about answers and how. But I really think that answers that arise require some deeper moral understanding beyond the "don't kill people, don't steal" and really the core of why we don't. Perhaps I'm wrong and I'm not opposed to that - I don't spend any time around young children but I know they are more perceptive than people think they are capable of.
I'm just curious as to your reasoning. I respect and maintain the 'your house, your rules' mantra, as whenever I have children of my own I want the same treatment from others.
I always envisioned Thief being much more like a first person Assassins Creed in a huge city (I've only watched 20 minutes of Creed before I left). Something where you can wander the city and do whatever and take jobs to raise funds to work towards getting intel, bribing folk, getting better equipment/skills, or snagging a disguise for more prospective work.
The only limits would be funding to get the intel - in theory you could go into this badass place right at the beginning but you might not be able to open a lock or you can't figure out where the item is without spending 3+ hours to get it. Or it might take 2 hours to cross the map unless you had a sewers key that provides a more direct route.
Eventually, you'd need things to lead to some overarching story/objective. You could have all sorts of buildings that one could break into with both day and night cycles and the like. I always thought a game like this would be awesome - something like Creed meets Morrowind.
Or what, you won't vote for them? Shucks...
The gamer voting base isn't that large in comparison to the general population so there's no voting power present. Even if it were, there's no lobby to protect them and the community isn't like to drum up the money to support one (though I think industry should build a bigger one).
Most these candidates are going to play the "keep your kids safe" card and parents that could mildly fit into the pro-gamer base will likely switch because they are too damn lazy to parent their kids. Movies, music, games, tv.. blaming them for the evils in the world are smokescreens to cover for people that are piss poor parents.
So your only conflict is no father (two and three are essentially the same) versus no more lists? I'm not really going to discuss the bad parent side since there isn't a real solution to that. This leaves me with no such conflict whatsoever.
Normal citizens do not require access to any such lists specifically because of reasons like this. Providing these lists to citizen does not released criminals ANY chance at reintegration into society and instead sets the system up for abuse: as your neighbors will just watch you to see that you do something wrong and report you (NIMBY). Criminals deserve fair second chances at society or otherwise, we might as well just execute all our prisoners for any crime. For some released criminals, that's what we're equivalently doing already with the lists. The lists belong to the police and parole officers as they should have this access to do their jobs. But the penalty for leaking any such information to citizens should have punishments equivalent to those for other corrupt cops.
If we allow the citizens to "police" themselves and keep themselves safe, things like this will continue to happen. Perhaps I'm just cynical but I don't need to know that there's a child molester that moved into my area - the police should know and keep tabs on them. As long as I do my job as a parent by teaching my children about strangers, situational awareness and the like, I've done all I can. If someone kidnaps/rapes/molests my child, there isn't much I could teach them to prevent it physically from happening.
It just seems that people these days are unwilling to accept that bad things happen to good people. We've tried to prevent the bad and I think we're doing the best we can in some places and need improvement in others. And short of police-stating things up with cameras and listening devices everywhere (in homes too), you will always have gaps. The problem is convincing people that they just have to accept this and make sure their children know this too.
I'm not involved with naval work but I think I can still conceptually explain it. You design an engine to operate at a design point - generally your predominant operating point. Aircraft engine manufacturers generally use a multi-point design and I imagine naval engines might too - other critical conditions are integrated into the design process.
Points that fall outside of these points are off-design. You might use less fuel but for some reason, the cycle is less efficient than before and more emissions are produced per pound thrust. So you could reduce your fuel consumption by a third but only reduce output emissions by 10-20% because the inefficiencies produce more emissions.
- waste
- safety
- containment in case the 'safety' bit fails Not a nuclear engineer, physicist, etc.. but I've looked into them for an energy project. I can try to find sources if you'd like or wikipedia has outside links to some of them in the Gen IV article. Google also had some interesting papers on it. http://nuclear.energy.gov/genIV/neGenIV1.html was an excellent starting point. There's also an international nuclear research program: http://www.gen-4.org/
Waste would not be a problem if we would be allowed to reprocess the waste from our current reactors. However, that is a legislative issue. Additionally, a large portion of the next generation (Gen IV) reactors are supposed to run on the waste of their predecessors and produce far less waste than before.
Many of these "new" (Loosely used, some are enhancements of old designs with improved tech. Others are new since the tech now exists to make them feasible) reactors will have significantly improved safety controls over their predecessors; many of these are passive such that the reactor will stop itself instead of having a guy do it. A lot of these designs are also closed cycle so a large portion of the containment problems would be alleviated.
Glancing through your posts, it's pretty clear that you're a solar/wind guy but you did acknowledge that nuclear was a need to solve the problems as a stopgap. My opinion is that we need nuclear as a replacement for coal plants given that both are pretty much continuous output. Wind and solar have their places but we can't always count on their consistency. Hell, solar won't be able to provide all our energy needs due to the maximum energy that hits the Earth at a given location. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be considered.
Energy is ultimately going to be provided by a suite of sources: wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, solar, etc. They all have their places and none of them can be ignored. All need R&D to work on ways to improve safety, manufacturing, efficiency, and the like to make them more feasible and attractive to industry.
However, I see the energy problem as a two-pronged problem: supply and demand. Everyone continues to focus on the supply side so heavily while demand generally goes overlooked. I think a large portion of the problem stems from the fact that reducing demand is seen as a move to decrease "quality of life" even though it doesn't have to. I really think there needs to be technology (or legislative) goals to reduce power consumption of appliances throughout the house and office: air conditioning, fridge, stove, computer, printer, networking equipment, etc... By reducing demand and making our supply more environmentally friendly, I think we can make a pretty big difference in emissions and air quality, future energy supply security and growth (plug-in electrics), job security for many, environmental damage (coal mining), etc... We are really only borrowing this planet from our children and grand children after all. I see it more as our children and grandchildren inherit all the problems we weren't bothered to solve in our lifetimes. Similar premise though.
I speed down some of these same roadways. So does pretty much everyone else. The way I see it, I could drive the speed limit or I could follow flow of traffic. One option makes me a huge hazard on the road while the other at least helps keep me from being a barrier and getting hit. Sure, people could become traffic vigilantes and only drive the speed limit and get in the way for speeders. But that isn't safe and it isn't their job to enforce the law.
However, my sole beef with these systems are that they aren't programed to look at the situation. They are simply going to be used to look for speeding over a set number. I see a lot of people getting tickets up front with whatever the initial rule is and once enough complaints have been drawn up, the system being scaled back to almost nothing and being a huge waste of money.
I would love to see such technology looking for reckless drivers. Those guys that weave through traffic at speeds way greater than flow of traffic in cars or bikes. I think giving them tickets is far more important and can make everything far safer for everyone.
I was almost in that boat. I immediately played Portal and beat it within three hours of getting home with my purchase. Then I played around in all the bonus maps and commentary. I still haven't unlocked everything yet but I'll get around to it. Some of them are hard...
Then I went to Episode 2. I really wanted to play TF2 but I knew if I did, I would likely never get around to Episode 2. So I beat EP2 and got all the achievements except for two (because I played when the servers were down and they weren't uploaded). Now I'm just waiting on them to create the fix so I can get both of those. One is beating the two antlions...
TF2 has been amazing. It's pretty much what I do for a couple hours every day. I love how many of the achievements involve multiple classes such that you have to play them to earn them. I wish there were some operational one for the demoman and spy (like sapping devices). I love the soldier and heavy but the medic and scout are really growing on me a lot. I'm really getting into the bat kills. I love the pyro too but multiple servers I've been on have complained about the new range.
I really want to get voice chat and posted in the previous thread about whether to get a mic or headset and although I agree a headset is more courteous, I've always had problems with the headphones and pressing my glasses earpieces into my head uncomfortably. Without voice chat I feel like it's a lot harder to be helpful, especially with spies and locations of things. I'm welcome to any suggestions on brands, especially from anyone that wears glasses and a headset. I suppose my head just has a weird contour since my optician complained about fitting my earpieces a couple years ago in a joking way.
Everyone's played with the assbasket that feedbacks the game with his speakers and mic. Since I wear glasses and headsets usually drive the earpieces into my head and give me headaches. I'm not opposed to them as an option but I consider my comfort important too. I'm not really interested in being that guy but there's no point in wearing a headset if it just gives me headaches. Are there no ways to get a mic that only picks up me talking without speaker feedback?
Since we have telecons pretty regularly at work and the device we use has no problems with it, I'm willing to put 'no' as not a 100% correct answer. If a phone system can do it, a PC should easily be able to.
Any specific recommendations?
So it's been just under a year and we're finding that Vista user growth is slowly increasing. Some users may refuse to upgrade out of principle, other are like me and waiting it out. I don't really find the results that surprising.
I've got XP SP2 on my gaming rig and I don't see myself upgrading to Vista anytime soon. I may do so in time when there are a couple games that I consider must haves available only on Vista. But I just don't see the point in spending money on a new OS when I don't feel there are any Vista-only must haves. Once there are a couple must haves and my PC needs upgrading, I'll probably add drive for Vista and get the games. But for now, I'm content with TF2 and the Orange Box. Hell, I haven't even had a chance to look at The Witcher yet. Plus, I can wait and find out what SP1 breaks.
Off-topic: I want to get a mic for TF2 but I don't know if I should get a headset or just a mic. Anyone have opinions?
Yea, I thought this would be an amazing concept when I first read the article but thinking about it more and more realized that there would be no real incentive for the politicians to compete. Like you said, they gain nothing and can lose everything. It would be interesting to see their views on science, their thoughts on what we should study and strive towards, etc but again, most of America doesn't care at all.
Since no one cares and the politicians won't throw their careers up to any real debate, I propose a new "debate" stage: American Gladiators. Our grand American voters can watch as candidates compete in events like Joust, Assault, and the Eliminator!!! Sadly, I think this may draw a large crowd than actual debates.
Speakeasy's business service is more expensive because of the 99.9% guaranteed uptime. I imagine that business service at other companies will have something similar to this. Hence, the extra expense.
We're paying $75 a month for 1.5d/384u. A bit more than I like but since it's only 8 people, it isn't a huge deal. I was looking at Comcast since we have Digital preferred with them (and they have faster speeds) but we already split the line too much and the signal degrades in one of the rooms for digital to work thoroughly. And BellSouth requires a home phone, which we don't want or need.