It didn't happen to be the Boost Ball Guardian in MP2: Echoes, did it? That thing was insanely hard for being that early on in the game, and if you didn't do it exactly right and move around fast enough, you'd die pretty quick. Not to mention you were pretty well constantly losing health due to being in the Dark atmosphere. And I do remember there being quite a bit of running through the level and cutscenes to get to it from the nearest save point.
I can't think of any in the first game that were that hard. Corruption had some that were hard, but none of them were overly ridiculous until the end. Well, as long as you were playing on the easiest difficulty that is. On the medium and hard difficulties, they got a lot tougher, and the final boss was largely an exercise in luck and endurance on the hardest difficulty.
I expect nothing less from them, actually. They have certified Panasonic electronics repair locations, after all. There's only one repair shop in my area that is certified. However, I do tend to like their products, and I've had very few issues or complaints with the ones I have. I would gladly pay the premium for their certified products/services, and have in the past, and have been very satisfied.
Could it be possible that they are doing this as a reaction to the laptop battery recalls? Perhaps they don't want to have to suffer the repercussions of a battery catching on fire or exploding in someone's hands or even face. If they limit the batteries that can be used to Panasonic certified ones, then this becomes less of an issue for them. If someone uses a non-certified battery, and it explodes in their face, Panasonic can try to dodge the litigation.
Replying to myself instead of each one individually...
I agree with most of your points, the classics do generally contain intriguing story lines, are thought provoking, etc. I was commenting mostly on the style in which they are written. I love to read, and enjoy many different genres. But a lot of the books that are labeled as classics are very difficult reads. Most of them, if I were not forced in some way to read them from beginning to end, I would have put them down after the first few chapters and never picked them up again. Dickens in particular has wonderful multi-leveled plots, but the style in which it he writes is simply intolerable to me.
As for the one who compared classic novels to Britney Spears... please. We all know she is the crowning singer of our time./sarcasm
That whole bit was just something I've been toying with in my mind lately. Classics are supposed to be those books that withstand the test of time, those whose themes and ideas are still valid and intriguing decades after they had been written. Granted, that's true of most of the books I mention (no matter how painful to read). However, I simply wonder what percentage of total sales of those books are because students are required to read them for their schooling. Would they still be considered classics without those sales? Clearly,/. is not the place to ask these sorts of questions since most of us are the types who enjoy a good read, and many of us would pick those up and read them simply for the sake of having done so. But the general populace? Especially the general USA populace? I doubt many would pick up Moby Dick to read one rainy evening. I just wonder how the landscape of classics would change if students were allowed to choose the books they read for their schooling (of course only allowing books on the same reading level, of suitable subject matter, etc) instead of being forced to read the same classics year after year.
Over descriptive? Seriously? Have you ever read The Tale of Two Cites? The Hobbit is a children's book compared to that. The Lord of the Rings is a harder read (especially The Fellowship of the Ring), but is still relatively simple compared to some of Dickens' books, and some of the other so-called "classics."
As a side note... has it ever occurred to anyone else that maybe the reason certain books are "classics" is because of school teachers requiring all their students to purchase and read those books year after year? I mean, if it weren't for being forced to read them in school, I would never have read The Tale of Two Cities, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, etc. How many people would really go to a bookstore, pick up one of those and think, "Wow, this looks like a really interesting, enjoyable read. I think I'll buy it"? I doubt not nearly enough for them to be considered "classics."
I was wondering the same thing. It seems plausible that if the plates shifted enough in the right directions, that the cables would break due to the stress. Though, I would hope that there would have been enough slack in the cables to account for the shifting. Can anyone shed some light on this?
You're not the only one, and I'm not even very old. I thought it was talking about some sort of power spike in VGA monitors. I had even seen an advertisement for the Video Game Awards a few nights ago, and still was confused. Perhaps that's why "Confuse" is in the title?
Since when is BitTorrent only used for copyright violation and stealing music? I could be using BitTorrent completely legally, and still have an ISP trying to delay/block/throttle/etc those packets. If I encrypt them, it's harder to do.
And with backwards compatibility (even the newer software PS3s) very good... Ok, I'll give you that, but consider for a moment the backwards compatibility of the Wii. It has the Virtual Console, which, for all intents and purposes, could be updated to emulate any older console (well, maybe not any, but you get the point). It's also directly backward compatible with the GCN. If you look at the last generation, a lot of people missed out on the GCN, and this would be their chance to play all those games that they missed out on. However, not nearly as many people missed out on the PS2, so there's not as much incentive for them to get a PS3 to play the games that they didn't have a chance to play on the PS2. With as many units as the PS2 sold (and continues to sell), I just don't see the backwards compatibility of the PS3 being a very big advantage for it. At the very least it's not as much of an advantage as it is for the Wii.
OK, so I'm buying something online. On ebay or whatever. How do you verify my ID? You know those numbers printed on the back of the card where you sign it? Those are a security code. Verifying those would be one more step. Granted, it's not a sure-fire way, but it's just one more thing that a fraudster would need to know. Of course if they have the physical card, all bets are off.
Another thing that I've seen online merchants do is require that the shipping address be the same as the billing address on the card. Kind of a deterrent to fraud when whatever you're buying gets shipped to the person who actually owns the credit card, innit? Unless you've managed to change the billing address on the card. Of course, this can be a pain if you're buying something that actually needs to be shipped elsewhere, but that's your problem, not the merchant's.
As others have said, this is not the case. I had fraudulent charges on my Chase card about a year ago; a few <$50 charges, and a couple >$1000 charges, enough to go over the limit. So I called them up, the lady on the line (who was very nice) looked at the transaction history, and immediately noticed that there were charges to places far outside of my normal buying area, some even in India. She marked and canceled the charges, ran through the rest of the charges that were on my current statement, canceled the card, and issued me a new one. I got the new card in three days, a statement that I had to sign and return a few days later, and heard nothing more of it. As far as I can tell, my credit has not taken any sort of hit (I was later able to get another card with another bank at a similar limit and APR).
The way I understand it, the CC companies take no liability for fraudulent charges. They make the merchant that processed them pay for it. I see this as a good thing. If the merchant bears all financial liability for fraudulent charges, it gives them a reason to make sure that the person buying the product/service is who they say they are.
As a side note... can we get a -1 Idiot or -1 Wrong moderation? It would have been really useful here.
Why do we as humans believe we are unique in a universe as big as what we live in? The same reason we thought that Earth was the center of the universe, that the sun revolved around Earth, that the earth was flat, etc. A person is smart. People are ignorant. Religion is also somewhat to blame.
You're still missing that I'm using tidy to mean organized.
And what I meant by the above statement (since you obviously didn't get it) is that people use multi-tasking and time-savings as an excuse for not being organized, and not being able to manage their time. One can multi-task just as well being organized.
You seem to me like you're simply arguing about my method of remaining organized (everything has a place, etc) rather than whether being organized makes you more efficient. Note that I'm not saying a messy (to the observer) desk is unorganized. It may very well be to the one using it.
My point is that I don't think it's a matter of whether tidy or messy people are more productive, it's whether organized or disorganized people are more productive. Someone who may appear very messy, might indeed be very organized, it's just that their organization scheme makes no sense to anyone but them.
It might be worth noting that I'm a very tidy and organized person, and also one of the more productive people in my department.
Obviously there are cases where it fails to be true, which are the ones you are pointing out, but failing to see the rest. Sure if your son ONLY plays with checkers, your example holds true. But say he plays with a completely different toy every thirty minutes. It's going to take a hell of a lot longer to put all of those away at the end of the week, rather than when he's done playing with it, as he's retrieving the next one.
Also, multi-tasking and time-saving is a crutch for those who are unable to be tidy and/or manage their time well.
And as far as remembering where things are... I prefer to use my memory for more important things. I don't need to waste it remembering where in the clutter that might be my desk I put that printout of my TPS report.
We're arguing over things that aren't even relevant to my point. It's not whether you're tidy or messy that makes you more productive, it's whether or not you have a good organizational system. I think you're missing tidy == organized correlation.
Your anecdote is more of an issue of multi-tasking than tidiness vs. messiness. Someone who can multi-task is going to be more production that someone who can't.
What you need to realize is that the time spent putting something in it's place is minimal compared to the time it would take to find it if it were not where it is supposed to be. Tidiness or messiness is irrelevant as long as there is a sense of order for the individual. What you see as a mess may be their organizational scheme.
Also, I've found that it takes far longer to clean up (or organize) all at once than it does to maintain that organization as you go. There is also the issues of how quickly things become messy (unorganized) again, and how often you have to clean up. If things become messy again very quickly, and you're cleaning up every day, it would be more productive to keep things organized as you go.
Don't get me wrong, I see your point. But think about how long it would take to clean your home if you never put things back where they belong and left it all for once. You'd be spending an entire day every week cleaning, rather than less than an hour a day throughout the week. And when you needed something throughout the week, you'd know exactly where it was, and would never have to go looking for anything.
Agreed, particularly on the method of maintaining neatness. Personally, I subscribe to the "everything has a place" method. Once you're done using something, put it back where it came from (or where it is supposed to go) rather than just placing it wherever. You never have to actually set aside time to tidy up, since you're in a perpetual state of tidiness. Really, this can translate into either ordered messiness (which is what most people seem to agree would be productive) or tidiness. In either state, it is productive, because you automatically know where anything is, whether it's filed away neatly, or in a stack of papers on top of a week old pizza box. It's all about how order is maintained by the individual, not how orderly things appear to an observer.
That's not the point. When a student connects, they're randomly assigned an IP via DHCP. Sure, the school might know who has a certain IP at any given time, but they're subject to change. No one student will have the same IP for any extended amount of time, unless they're manually assigning their IP address, which is doubtful. They'd know that whoever was connected was "authenticated", but unless they kept logs of who had what IP address when, it'd be difficult to say with any certainty who had a certain IP address. And yes, I know that in theory, a student might happen to keep the same address the entire time they are at the school, but if you factor in how many new students enroll each year (or even semester/quarter), how many leave, and how often students are away from the school for more than a few days, there's bound to be rotation of the addresses. Hell, the school might even mandate it as some sort of policy.
If this truly is the case, and if I were UW-M, I would respond simply with, "We use DHCP to assign IP addresses to our students. We can tell you nothing about who these belong to, since they could theoretically change on a day-to-day basis."
Of course, if UW-M has any sense, they're all behind multiple routers/switches/NATs/what-have-you, and the **AA wouldn't know individual IPs.
Agreed, unless, of course, it is a project you happen to be working on. Then it might be worth stressing over.
OTOH, the standards may say one thing, but the browsers do another. Until there are browsers that conform completely to the standards, I won't be either. It just makes more sense to do things that actually work cross-platform than worry about conforming to the standards. If it's easier and faster (and works the same in most browsers) to lay out a page using tables, you better damn well believe I'm going to do it that way.
Microsoft and Nintendo playing "me too" against the PS2's backward compatibility Just nitpicking here, but Nintendo had been doing back-compat a couple years before Sony. The Game Boy Color was released in October 1998, which IIRC was the first of the GB line to do back-compat. The PS2 was released in March 2000 (ok, not quite 2 years, but you get the point). Unless you're talking consoles only, Nintendo was in the back-compat game before Sony. Even if you are, Nintendo isn't really me-too-ing it with the Wii, since it's basically the same hardware as the GC. It only made sense to make it back-compat.
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't happen to be the Boost Ball Guardian in MP2: Echoes, did it? That thing was insanely hard for being that early on in the game, and if you didn't do it exactly right and move around fast enough, you'd die pretty quick. Not to mention you were pretty well constantly losing health due to being in the Dark atmosphere. And I do remember there being quite a bit of running through the level and cutscenes to get to it from the nearest save point.
I can't think of any in the first game that were that hard. Corruption had some that were hard, but none of them were overly ridiculous until the end. Well, as long as you were playing on the easiest difficulty that is. On the medium and hard difficulties, they got a lot tougher, and the final boss was largely an exercise in luck and endurance on the hardest difficulty.
I expect nothing less from them, actually. They have certified Panasonic electronics repair locations, after all. There's only one repair shop in my area that is certified. However, I do tend to like their products, and I've had very few issues or complaints with the ones I have. I would gladly pay the premium for their certified products/services, and have in the past, and have been very satisfied.
Could it be possible that they are doing this as a reaction to the laptop battery recalls? Perhaps they don't want to have to suffer the repercussions of a battery catching on fire or exploding in someone's hands or even face. If they limit the batteries that can be used to Panasonic certified ones, then this becomes less of an issue for them. If someone uses a non-certified battery, and it explodes in their face, Panasonic can try to dodge the litigation.
Replying to myself instead of each one individually...
/sarcasm
/. is not the place to ask these sorts of questions since most of us are the types who enjoy a good read, and many of us would pick those up and read them simply for the sake of having done so. But the general populace? Especially the general USA populace? I doubt many would pick up Moby Dick to read one rainy evening. I just wonder how the landscape of classics would change if students were allowed to choose the books they read for their schooling (of course only allowing books on the same reading level, of suitable subject matter, etc) instead of being forced to read the same classics year after year.
I agree with most of your points, the classics do generally contain intriguing story lines, are thought provoking, etc. I was commenting mostly on the style in which they are written. I love to read, and enjoy many different genres. But a lot of the books that are labeled as classics are very difficult reads. Most of them, if I were not forced in some way to read them from beginning to end, I would have put them down after the first few chapters and never picked them up again. Dickens in particular has wonderful multi-leveled plots, but the style in which it he writes is simply intolerable to me.
As for the one who compared classic novels to Britney Spears... please. We all know she is the crowning singer of our time.
That whole bit was just something I've been toying with in my mind lately. Classics are supposed to be those books that withstand the test of time, those whose themes and ideas are still valid and intriguing decades after they had been written. Granted, that's true of most of the books I mention (no matter how painful to read). However, I simply wonder what percentage of total sales of those books are because students are required to read them for their schooling. Would they still be considered classics without those sales? Clearly,
Over descriptive? Seriously? Have you ever read The Tale of Two Cites? The Hobbit is a children's book compared to that. The Lord of the Rings is a harder read (especially The Fellowship of the Ring), but is still relatively simple compared to some of Dickens' books, and some of the other so-called "classics."
As a side note... has it ever occurred to anyone else that maybe the reason certain books are "classics" is because of school teachers requiring all their students to purchase and read those books year after year? I mean, if it weren't for being forced to read them in school, I would never have read The Tale of Two Cities, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, etc. How many people would really go to a bookstore, pick up one of those and think, "Wow, this looks like a really interesting, enjoyable read. I think I'll buy it"? I doubt not nearly enough for them to be considered "classics."
The drugs!! They do NOTHING!!
I was wondering the same thing. It seems plausible that if the plates shifted enough in the right directions, that the cables would break due to the stress. Though, I would hope that there would have been enough slack in the cables to account for the shifting. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Don't forget AVP-R.
You're not the only one, and I'm not even very old. I thought it was talking about some sort of power spike in VGA monitors. I had even seen an advertisement for the Video Game Awards a few nights ago, and still was confused. Perhaps that's why "Confuse" is in the title?
Since when is BitTorrent only used for copyright violation and stealing music? I could be using BitTorrent completely legally, and still have an ISP trying to delay/block/throttle/etc those packets. If I encrypt them, it's harder to do.
Forget the Lunar Lander and the Blackjack!
Another thing that I've seen online merchants do is require that the shipping address be the same as the billing address on the card. Kind of a deterrent to fraud when whatever you're buying gets shipped to the person who actually owns the credit card, innit? Unless you've managed to change the billing address on the card. Of course, this can be a pain if you're buying something that actually needs to be shipped elsewhere, but that's your problem, not the merchant's.
As others have said, this is not the case. I had fraudulent charges on my Chase card about a year ago; a few <$50 charges, and a couple >$1000 charges, enough to go over the limit. So I called them up, the lady on the line (who was very nice) looked at the transaction history, and immediately noticed that there were charges to places far outside of my normal buying area, some even in India. She marked and canceled the charges, ran through the rest of the charges that were on my current statement, canceled the card, and issued me a new one. I got the new card in three days, a statement that I had to sign and return a few days later, and heard nothing more of it. As far as I can tell, my credit has not taken any sort of hit (I was later able to get another card with another bank at a similar limit and APR).
The way I understand it, the CC companies take no liability for fraudulent charges. They make the merchant that processed them pay for it. I see this as a good thing. If the merchant bears all financial liability for fraudulent charges, it gives them a reason to make sure that the person buying the product/service is who they say they are.
As a side note... can we get a -1 Idiot or -1 Wrong moderation? It would have been really useful here.
IIRC, with the EMI deal, they kept the price of the full album the same.
You're still missing that I'm using tidy to mean organized.
And what I meant by the above statement (since you obviously didn't get it) is that people use multi-tasking and time-savings as an excuse for not being organized, and not being able to manage their time. One can multi-task just as well being organized.
You seem to me like you're simply arguing about my method of remaining organized (everything has a place, etc) rather than whether being organized makes you more efficient. Note that I'm not saying a messy (to the observer) desk is unorganized. It may very well be to the one using it.
My point is that I don't think it's a matter of whether tidy or messy people are more productive, it's whether organized or disorganized people are more productive. Someone who may appear very messy, might indeed be very organized, it's just that their organization scheme makes no sense to anyone but them.
It might be worth noting that I'm a very tidy and organized person, and also one of the more productive people in my department.
Obviously there are cases where it fails to be true, which are the ones you are pointing out, but failing to see the rest. Sure if your son ONLY plays with checkers, your example holds true. But say he plays with a completely different toy every thirty minutes. It's going to take a hell of a lot longer to put all of those away at the end of the week, rather than when he's done playing with it, as he's retrieving the next one.
Also, multi-tasking and time-saving is a crutch for those who are unable to be tidy and/or manage their time well.
And as far as remembering where things are... I prefer to use my memory for more important things. I don't need to waste it remembering where in the clutter that might be my desk I put that printout of my TPS report.
We're arguing over things that aren't even relevant to my point. It's not whether you're tidy or messy that makes you more productive, it's whether or not you have a good organizational system. I think you're missing tidy == organized correlation.
Your anecdote is more of an issue of multi-tasking than tidiness vs. messiness. Someone who can multi-task is going to be more production that someone who can't.
What you need to realize is that the time spent putting something in it's place is minimal compared to the time it would take to find it if it were not where it is supposed to be. Tidiness or messiness is irrelevant as long as there is a sense of order for the individual. What you see as a mess may be their organizational scheme.
Also, I've found that it takes far longer to clean up (or organize) all at once than it does to maintain that organization as you go. There is also the issues of how quickly things become messy (unorganized) again, and how often you have to clean up. If things become messy again very quickly, and you're cleaning up every day, it would be more productive to keep things organized as you go.
Don't get me wrong, I see your point. But think about how long it would take to clean your home if you never put things back where they belong and left it all for once. You'd be spending an entire day every week cleaning, rather than less than an hour a day throughout the week. And when you needed something throughout the week, you'd know exactly where it was, and would never have to go looking for anything.
Agreed, particularly on the method of maintaining neatness. Personally, I subscribe to the "everything has a place" method. Once you're done using something, put it back where it came from (or where it is supposed to go) rather than just placing it wherever. You never have to actually set aside time to tidy up, since you're in a perpetual state of tidiness. Really, this can translate into either ordered messiness (which is what most people seem to agree would be productive) or tidiness. In either state, it is productive, because you automatically know where anything is, whether it's filed away neatly, or in a stack of papers on top of a week old pizza box. It's all about how order is maintained by the individual, not how orderly things appear to an observer.
That's not the point. When a student connects, they're randomly assigned an IP via DHCP. Sure, the school might know who has a certain IP at any given time, but they're subject to change. No one student will have the same IP for any extended amount of time, unless they're manually assigning their IP address, which is doubtful. They'd know that whoever was connected was "authenticated", but unless they kept logs of who had what IP address when, it'd be difficult to say with any certainty who had a certain IP address. And yes, I know that in theory, a student might happen to keep the same address the entire time they are at the school, but if you factor in how many new students enroll each year (or even semester/quarter), how many leave, and how often students are away from the school for more than a few days, there's bound to be rotation of the addresses. Hell, the school might even mandate it as some sort of policy.
If this truly is the case, and if I were UW-M, I would respond simply with, "We use DHCP to assign IP addresses to our students. We can tell you nothing about who these belong to, since they could theoretically change on a day-to-day basis."
Of course, if UW-M has any sense, they're all behind multiple routers/switches/NATs/what-have-you, and the **AA wouldn't know individual IPs.
Agreed, unless, of course, it is a project you happen to be working on. Then it might be worth stressing over.
OTOH, the standards may say one thing, but the browsers do another. Until there are browsers that conform completely to the standards, I won't be either. It just makes more sense to do things that actually work cross-platform than worry about conforming to the standards. If it's easier and faster (and works the same in most browsers) to lay out a page using tables, you better damn well believe I'm going to do it that way.
I think you've confused silicon with siliconE.
Can we get a -1 Obvious mod? Because that would be a great one to use on my post.