Sadly, mine hasn't had much of an interest in Zelda. She did just get herself addicted to WoW though, which is sorta-kinda Zeldaish. So maybe she'll give it another try.
My wife was never really interested in games either. When we were dating, she got pretty sick and was confined to the couch all day long, so I came over with some DVDs and my GameCube so she wouldn't die of boredom. She ignored the GameCube the whole time it was there until one day I started playing Windwaker. Zelda's good because it's one of those games that anybody can play, even if they've never played, and do reasonably well.
For me, Zelda 2 was the first NES game I ever played, with LoZ not too far behind. Good times, those were. Good times.
Man, that game was hard. The first was hard enough, but I did eventually beat it (once). I've never beaten Zelda 2, and I think I've played it more times than the original, but I've never made it past the 6th (maybe 5th?) palace.
Yeah, I'm a Zelda geek. Proud of it too:) My fiancee gets sick of listening to the music though.
A geek with a fiancée? If you submitted this to the editors, you could get on the front page!
Kidding aside, I'm a Zelda geek too, and my wife had never even heard of it (well, she remembered the NES version), then one day I decided to play through Windwaker for the third or fourth time, and she laughed and said, "Ooh. Cute! Let me try!" Now she's playing through Windwaker for the second time, and our 20-month old son even stops what he's doing, sits down, and watches quietly (and that's something!). Anyway, to me, Zelda good.
Most car AC units have an energy coefficiency of somewhere around 400% - for every one watt of power used four watts of heat are removed. So having greater than 100% isn't impossible.
Most everybody here should already know this, but just in case: Thermodynamics asserts that energy can't be created or destroyed, so in the case of the AC that expends one watt to remove four watts of heat, we have what looks like net loss of 3 watts. This is why we need refrigerant -- the AC transfers those three watts into the refrigerant. Certain chemicals like freon can absorb energy better than others, so we don't see a significant increase in the temperature of the freon (so it tends to last a while).
This is not to say they don't have something, but the energy has to come from somewhere. I can think of three possibilities (in ascending order of reality):
A phenomenon where the magnetic field interferes with the trajectories of quantum particle pairs (which can spontaneously come into existence, but only in complementary pairs), in a manner similar to Hawking Radiation, except involving electromagnetism instead of gravity. So it is not really creating energy, just diverting it.
They just haven't yet observed the source of the energy.
Most likely: this is a scam. They could have just as easily published in both a scientific journal and a regular paper than to publish to just one or the other. The only reason not to publish to a scientific journal is when you're not publishing science. I searched for Steorn and came up with the top three Google results: Steorn.net - an "energy" company; Steorn.com - patent trolls; and Steorn.org - an organization of "scientists". Steorn probably did not invent squat; they were granted a bogus patent and are looking for suckers to "invest" in their perpetual motion machine.
Well, on a somewhat less expensive solution, you could just write your congressman / woman yourself.
And get back a form letter. Congress is just not concerned about what citizens have to say unless it's a hot topic, but you're right. That's the first step, so I'll do so.
the fewer people that do something the more weight granted to those that do.... we've got to make it an issue, because they are receiving letters every day about the war(s), about immigration, about the minimum wage increase.
I strung those two side-by-side to remind you that if they receive only 1 letter for every thousand people, but 999 of the 1000 they do receive are about other topics, then my voice only counts for 1000 * (1 / 999) = 1000/999. I ultimately end up only 0.1% "louder" than I was before. That's why the idea of a PAC, not to "buy" congressmen, but to get them to at least listen. Your average Joe, much less your average Congressman, doesn't read slashdot.
A PAC might buy us a representative or two in Congress, but it won't be enough to get people looking at the importance of the issue.
True, and I'd forgotten that you have to donate to an individual's campaign. You'd just have to be careful not to spend into the same leaders the RIAA/MPAA are targeting, because then they'll just take your money and apologize for not being able to help. However, even if it is just one or two reps on board, they can work to get it on the agenda. To keep it from getting voted down, you do PR to make the public realize these are issues. If you have a lot of money, you can get in with the Ad Council and do PSA's. If you don't, you can do like PETA and other smaller groups do -- stage some silly stunt to get media attention. As long as people see these are otherwise ordinary individuals concerned about freedom, i.e., don't shout, say it concisely and coherently, then you can garner a little more clout, because anybody listening to you could be a voter, and then Congress cares.
Anyway, thanks for the info. I'm still all for using the system, but I really don't think it works unless you have one of the hot issues -- when people write about something they saw on TV, then Congress listens, or acts like they are, but otherwise they just seem to ignore us. Anyway, I'll still give it a shot, because I'm tired of this.
1) The name makes me think it's a bunch of people who want to eliminate IP rights, i.e., want to pirate movies, music, software, etc., and I don't think too many people would listen (whether or not that's what the Pirate Party wants) because of the name. I do think limited IP rights help society, but I'm concerned when the current "limited" terms mean that any members of society alive when the protection started will be dead long before said period expires.
And 2) Never heard of 'em. I'll see what they're about. Thanks.
Meny apps and games need administrator rights install. I think you ment to say that most games do not need admin to run.
That's just the thing, I run in limited mode and most games install just fine. XP can handle installs on just one user account, even if it's a limited account. The only reason they need those rights is to change the something specific to the OS. (I haven't checked, but DirectX probably shouldn't even require it now, since DX 9 went.NET)
Installations aside, though, CoD/CoD2 can only be played by administrators, too, which is absurd. This was admittedly trivial to fix. Just bad rights assignment by the vendor, not sure if it's intentional or not.
I do owe EA an apology though. CoD is published by Activision, not EA.
The thing with that is they need admin so they can auto update them selfs, run the cd check crap, and for things like punkbuster for on line play.
Even with a priveliged install, it seems to me you should be able to uses these without requiring a user to have admin rights, once the software is installed. Even if you have to perform certain tasks off limit to a limited account, there are still ways to use interprocess communication to allow a user to perform these actions by proxy.
I don't think that vista will be able to fix all of that and will popup the UAP dialog box when you try to play the game or the game will just error out if you don't run it as admin.
Agreed. Even supposing Vista shipped with zero vulnerabilities, it can still only do what it's told, and if the software demands access rights, it's up to somebody with authority to tell Vista yes or no. And of course, Activision knows most users will have absolutely no problem with saying it's fine, and then 4c71v1510|\| 0wN3z j00.
I second that motion. Make him like a cross between Kirby and Samus. Kill another player, and Mega Man inherits their powers. That would be way better than macaroni.
You know, slashdot has so many readers, we ought to form a PAC for/. style issues, you know fixing IP law (can you name a movie in the public domain?), protecting privacy, withdrawing from WIPO, dismembering the DMCA, etc. Kinda like the EFF, but for convincing Congress to protect our personal information, our computers, our rights, etc. Everybody donates $20 bucks, and before you know it, we've got a couple million dollars to lobby with. You know, if freaking PETA can do it, I think the slashdot community can do it, and if we did, I bet Congress would pay attention.
I found some very odd little registry setting installed on my computer, thought it was a worm or something, but when I looked in it, it had a list of all EA titles on my computer. The worst was that when I installed the CoD expansion pack, it tried to phone home w/o even telling me, it just went ahead and opened up a dial-up connection running as Network Service. To me, that sounds like they infiltrated my computer. Games should not (and most do not) require administrator rights to install, but EA games do. If a game requires admin rights, that's a red flag. If only CoD2 wasn't so freaking good...
This, to me, is spyware, and customer data collection needs to be conspicuously disclosed (not buried in an EULA*), and it needs to be opt-in only, by law.
* The most infuriating part is that I read the EULA for CoD/CoD2, and I didn't see anything about them collecting my data and sending it home. They didn't disclose it at all.
Do biologists have some kind of different definition of organic chemistry from engineers and physicists?
Well, it might not be fair for me to answer on behalf of biologists, but what the heck. IIRC, you can define organic chemistry as the chemistry of pretty much anything with hydrocarbons, so, technically, no, there's only one organic chemistry. However, for me at least, they taught organic chemistry in both chem and biology. The one in chem was actually pretty cool, but not very practical (for me), so I gradually forgot everything because I never used any of it. As for the one in bio, well, I'd venture to guess that's probably what pre-med feels like, so it might be more accurate to say I repressed those memories.
By all means, pick away. I thought I would like biology, but I didn't -- more accurately, I didn't like organic chemistry. I guess because it's one of those sciences you can study and study and study and pass all your exams and still be completely in the dark as to what's going on. In math, music, history, literature, and just about any other subject you can name, the more you learn, the more sense it makes, but biology just gets weirder and weirder the more you learn. Once I finished my credits, I promptly forgot pretty much anything at all related to organic chemistry other than the fact that we're carbon based (we are carbon based, right?;^).
Anything is 'possible'. However, the odds of this are quite small.
The odds of replicating proteins strands spontaneously self-assembling are quite small. The odds of these proteins developing protective coatings are quite small. The odds of these things grouping together to form complex structures are quite small. The odds of those structures developing an electrical computational center, or walking on land, or using tools, or adding viruses to food are also, each, quite, quite small. And yet, here we are. It just takes time....
More links still correlate with more traffic, but, for example, doubling the number of incoming links increases the traffic by a factor of 1.6, not by a factor of 2.
I was wondering what they meant by that. In that case, this is good news. Although I love Google's algorithm (it's much better than other search engines), I was worried about that higher page rank could result in more sites linking to the higher sites. That would make a feedback loop, and feedback loops too often produce over-amplified results (for example, slashdot has a page rank of 9/10 <rimshot/>). Anyway, it is good news to see that the correlation is < 1. I would imagine a factor of 0 would yield "perfect" results, but a factor > 1 would make me question the usefulness of their page ranking system.
Never mind data transfer, what about distributed computing with quantum computers?
The answer to your question is, believe it or not, in NP. The size of the input is 4000 times the size of the question "0=0?", so I just have to run it through my deterministic machine for a little while. I'll let you know when it's finished...
In the meantime, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure you will), but you shouldn't actually need to distribute a problem across multiple quantum computers - they're non-deterministic so they solve all aspects of the problem simultaneously. Not only would you not experience a performance gain, but you could even experience a loss by spreading a problem out across multiple machines... I think.
Anyway, I'll get back to you as soon as my SAT-solver terminates with the correct answer....
Both are definitely improper, but neither is illegal, and calling it wrongdoing is purely speculatory. Most of the links I provided you resulted in actual criminal convictions, or at the very least, official investigations, indictments, etc. While I wouldn't go so far as to call the BBC story propoganda -- look up at the title of this story. You think maybe both sides propogandize? The right uses "astroturf" (a practice I in no way condone, it's wrong), and the left and Big Business use propoganda through the conventional media via press releases, public relations campaigns, and, apparantly, fake news.
Who said anything about dead people voting?
I did. It was mentioned prominently in a couple of the stories I linked to. It's apparent you gave no more than a cursory glance at them before dismissing them in favor of another opinion that you have no doubt researched just as thoroughly.
They're dead, and they aren't U.S. citizens anyway. [links omitted]
The deaths in Iraq page appears well researched, managed by a psych prof. in the UK. You'll also notice that the database includes everybody, including soldiers on both sides -- even the enemy, suicide bombers, and casualties from their attacks. While the numbers seem bad, this was perhaps one of the most successful and humane military operations in history -- and that's saying something. Remember Saddam killed millions - this guy was up there with Stalin, Hitler, and Polpot (sp?). Oh, those guys were all communists or socialists, weren't they? And one of your stories is a socialist newsletter, so I'm done with this discussion.
vote rigging scandals... that we get from the Republicans
Vote rigging? I ask because every time somebody hollers disenfranchisement, it's a Democrat. Fortunately, every time I've read about deadpeople, convicted felons or illegal immigrants voting, voting tours across multiple precincts, underage voting (see part (B)), and pushes for voting without identification, they always seem to be voting for Democrats, so in the end it all balances out, doesn't it?...if not, I can keep going.
You don't have to belive everything The Party tells you, comrade.
...an ever-growing but still-small (way less than half the population) group are well-informed.
I don't know if I would go so far as to say well informed, but maybe better informed, or at least differently informed (i.e., even if half the people are wrong, at least everybody will come to a bunch of different conclusions that cancel each other out, rather than having a collective knee-jerk reaction and doing something stupid, which admittedly still happens).
Unfortunately, ease of communication allows for faster disemination of both truth and falsehood, or, more succinctly: Just because you read it on the web doesn't make it true. The New Media at least allows more informed decision making: when you hear eight different versions of a story instead of just the one on TV, you at least stand a better chance of being able to figure out what actually happened.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife was never really interested in games either. When we were dating, she got pretty sick and was confined to the couch all day long, so I came over with some DVDs and my GameCube so she wouldn't die of boredom. She ignored the GameCube the whole time it was there until one day I started playing Windwaker. Zelda's good because it's one of those games that anybody can play, even if they've never played, and do reasonably well.
Man, that game was hard. The first was hard enough, but I did eventually beat it (once). I've never beaten Zelda 2, and I think I've played it more times than the original, but I've never made it past the 6th (maybe 5th?) palace.
A geek with a fiancée? If you submitted this to the editors, you could get on the front page!
Kidding aside, I'm a Zelda geek too, and my wife had never even heard of it (well, she remembered the NES version), then one day I decided to play through Windwaker for the third or fourth time, and she laughed and said, "Ooh. Cute! Let me try!" Now she's playing through Windwaker for the second time, and our 20-month old son even stops what he's doing, sits down, and watches quietly (and that's something!). Anyway, to me, Zelda good.
Most everybody here should already know this, but just in case: Thermodynamics asserts that energy can't be created or destroyed, so in the case of the AC that expends one watt to remove four watts of heat, we have what looks like net loss of 3 watts. This is why we need refrigerant -- the AC transfers those three watts into the refrigerant. Certain chemicals like freon can absorb energy better than others, so we don't see a significant increase in the temperature of the freon (so it tends to last a while).
This is not to say they don't have something, but the energy has to come from somewhere. I can think of three possibilities (in ascending order of reality):
And get back a form letter. Congress is just not concerned about what citizens have to say unless it's a hot topic, but you're right. That's the first step, so I'll do so.
I strung those two side-by-side to remind you that if they receive only 1 letter for every thousand people, but 999 of the 1000 they do receive are about other topics, then my voice only counts for 1000 * (1 / 999) = 1000/999. I ultimately end up only 0.1% "louder" than I was before. That's why the idea of a PAC, not to "buy" congressmen, but to get them to at least listen. Your average Joe, much less your average Congressman, doesn't read slashdot.
True, and I'd forgotten that you have to donate to an individual's campaign. You'd just have to be careful not to spend into the same leaders the RIAA/MPAA are targeting, because then they'll just take your money and apologize for not being able to help. However, even if it is just one or two reps on board, they can work to get it on the agenda. To keep it from getting voted down, you do PR to make the public realize these are issues. If you have a lot of money, you can get in with the Ad Council and do PSA's. If you don't, you can do like PETA and other smaller groups do -- stage some silly stunt to get media attention. As long as people see these are otherwise ordinary individuals concerned about freedom, i.e., don't shout, say it concisely and coherently, then you can garner a little more clout, because anybody listening to you could be a voter, and then Congress cares.
Anyway, thanks for the info. I'm still all for using the system, but I really don't think it works unless you have one of the hot issues -- when people write about something they saw on TV, then Congress listens, or acts like they are, but otherwise they just seem to ignore us. Anyway, I'll still give it a shot, because I'm tired of this.
1) The name makes me think it's a bunch of people who want to eliminate IP rights, i.e., want to pirate movies, music, software, etc., and I don't think too many people would listen (whether or not that's what the Pirate Party wants) because of the name. I do think limited IP rights help society, but I'm concerned when the current "limited" terms mean that any members of society alive when the protection started will be dead long before said period expires.
And 2) Never heard of 'em. I'll see what they're about. Thanks.
It's a reference to Futurama, something weird that Fry said that I hoped might clue in any idiot moderators that the thing was a joke. Oh, well...
I did mean that as a rhetorical question, but touché. And I think I might, it's a classic.
Most films that anybody can name are still in copyright, and the very few public domain films we've ever heard of are in the public domain because they were released prior to the '70s, before the current © terms went into effect (thanks for reminding me we still have a few more works expiring to look forward to). If somebody were to release a movie under © today, then you will probably be dead before it ever makes it into PD. I don't see how this benefits society.
Yeah, I figured that out in this post. My bad.
Arizona Cardinals?! That dog won't hunt, monsigneur. Please moderate the above post to -1 Cardinals Fan!
Let's see... Alter relationship... Foe!
That's just the thing, I run in limited mode and most games install just fine. XP can handle installs on just one user account, even if it's a limited account. The only reason they need those rights is to change the something specific to the OS. (I haven't checked, but DirectX probably shouldn't even require it now, since DX 9 went .NET)
Installations aside, though, CoD/CoD2 can only be played by administrators, too, which is absurd. This was admittedly trivial to fix. Just bad rights assignment by the vendor, not sure if it's intentional or not.
I do owe EA an apology though. CoD is published by Activision, not EA.
Even with a priveliged install, it seems to me you should be able to uses these without requiring a user to have admin rights, once the software is installed. Even if you have to perform certain tasks off limit to a limited account, there are still ways to use interprocess communication to allow a user to perform these actions by proxy.
Agreed. Even supposing Vista shipped with zero vulnerabilities, it can still only do what it's told, and if the software demands access rights, it's up to somebody with authority to tell Vista yes or no. And of course, Activision knows most users will have absolutely no problem with saying it's fine, and then 4c71v1510|\| 0wN3z j00.
... is Sierra's own Liesure Suit Larry. I don't want to know what his special weapon is, though.
Hear, hear!
/. style issues, you know fixing IP law (can you name a movie in the public domain?), protecting privacy, withdrawing from WIPO, dismembering the DMCA, etc. Kinda like the EFF, but for convincing Congress to protect our personal information, our computers, our rights, etc. Everybody donates $20 bucks, and before you know it, we've got a couple million dollars to lobby with. You know, if freaking PETA can do it, I think the slashdot community can do it, and if we did, I bet Congress would pay attention.
You know, slashdot has so many readers, we ought to form a PAC for
I found some very odd little registry setting installed on my computer, thought it was a worm or something, but when I looked in it, it had a list of all EA titles on my computer. The worst was that when I installed the CoD expansion pack, it tried to phone home w/o even telling me, it just went ahead and opened up a dial-up connection running as Network Service. To me, that sounds like they infiltrated my computer. Games should not (and most do not) require administrator rights to install, but EA games do. If a game requires admin rights, that's a red flag. If only CoD2 wasn't so freaking good...
This, to me, is spyware, and customer data collection needs to be conspicuously disclosed (not buried in an EULA*), and it needs to be opt-in only, by law.
* The most infuriating part is that I read the EULA for CoD/CoD2, and I didn't see anything about them collecting my data and sending it home. They didn't disclose it at all.
You and me both. Before: 4th in class. After: 37th in class. I passed, but it singlehandedly knocked my GPA down by 0.35 and out of summa cum laude.
Heh. Good idea, but I'm not convinced the federal govt could actually meet that deadline...
I was wondering what they meant by that. In that case, this is good news. Although I love Google's algorithm (it's much better than other search engines), I was worried about that higher page rank could result in more sites linking to the higher sites. That would make a feedback loop, and feedback loops too often produce over-amplified results (for example, slashdot has a page rank of 9/10 <rimshot />). Anyway, it is good news to see that the correlation is < 1. I would imagine a factor of 0 would yield "perfect" results, but a factor > 1 would make me question the usefulness of their page ranking system.
well, at least yours finishes in polytime... the truly important question is, can we overclock a quantum computer?
The answer to your question is, believe it or not, in NP. The size of the input is 4000 times the size of the question "0=0?", so I just have to run it through my deterministic machine for a little while. I'll let you know when it's finished...
In the meantime, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure you will), but you shouldn't actually need to distribute a problem across multiple quantum computers - they're non-deterministic so they solve all aspects of the problem simultaneously. Not only would you not experience a performance gain, but you could even experience a loss by spreading a problem out across multiple machines... I think.
Anyway, I'll get back to you as soon as my SAT-solver terminates with the correct answer....
Both are definitely improper, but neither is illegal, and calling it wrongdoing is purely speculatory. Most of the links I provided you resulted in actual criminal convictions, or at the very least, official investigations, indictments, etc. While I wouldn't go so far as to call the BBC story propoganda -- look up at the title of this story. You think maybe both sides propogandize? The right uses "astroturf" (a practice I in no way condone, it's wrong), and the left and Big Business use propoganda through the conventional media via press releases, public relations campaigns, and, apparantly, fake news.
I did. It was mentioned prominently in a couple of the stories I linked to. It's apparent you gave no more than a cursory glance at them before dismissing them in favor of another opinion that you have no doubt researched just as thoroughly.
The deaths in Iraq page appears well researched, managed by a psych prof. in the UK. You'll also notice that the database includes everybody, including soldiers on both sides -- even the enemy, suicide bombers, and casualties from their attacks. While the numbers seem bad, this was perhaps one of the most successful and humane military operations in history -- and that's saying something. Remember Saddam killed millions - this guy was up there with Stalin, Hitler, and Polpot (sp?). Oh, those guys were all communists or socialists, weren't they? And one of your stories is a socialist newsletter, so I'm done with this discussion.
Cheers.
Vote rigging? I ask because every time somebody hollers disenfranchisement, it's a Democrat. Fortunately, every time I've read about dead people, convicted felons or illegal immigrants voting, voting tours across multiple precincts, underage voting (see part (B)), and pushes for voting without identification, they always seem to be voting for Democrats, so in the end it all balances out, doesn't it? ...if not, I can keep going.
You don't have to belive everything The Party tells you, comrade.
I don't know if I would go so far as to say well informed, but maybe better informed, or at least differently informed (i.e., even if half the people are wrong, at least everybody will come to a bunch of different conclusions that cancel each other out, rather than having a collective knee-jerk reaction and doing something stupid, which admittedly still happens).
Unfortunately, ease of communication allows for faster disemination of both truth and falsehood, or, more succinctly: Just because you read it on the web doesn't make it true. The New Media at least allows more informed decision making: when you hear eight different versions of a story instead of just the one on TV, you at least stand a better chance of being able to figure out what actually happened.