*splutter*
"a humorously confusing mess of bad people hitting each other in the face with bricks"
That mental image just made my day a whole lot more fun. Thank you! :)
406 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2009
"this great space-faring nation"
Which hasn't sent a living creature of any sort beyond low earth orbit since just before I was born and which now has to rely on other great space-faring nations to even get to low earth orbit. By that standard we can call Switzerland a great sea-faring nation.
Sending probes into space is quite a technological achievement. But it isn't "space faring".
"one thing's indisputable: America's not going to stop exploring"
I presume he means our exceptional unmanned programs, which have done some excellent work. They're no substitute for manned exploration though, which we haven't done at all since Apollo was canned.
India vs China in manned exploration, now that could get interesting. They may not be first to the Moon but they're driven by beating each other to it and being the first nation to land humans on Mars would be quite the coup. They have the pride, willpower, and desire to prove themselves which we once had, before we got complacent.
I have many happy memories of Friday night UFO sessions, 4 of us grouped around an Amiga 1200HD, cheap alcoholic beverages (mmm, Buckfast...) at the ready, the only light in the room coming from the fuzzy portable TV and blazing fire in the hearth.
We'd play multiplayer by each taking a couple of troops, and spend all night playing until we couldn't stay awake, or the sun came up. When one of our longest serving soldiers was killed in action, we were utterly devastated, and swore to destroy the enemy, to avenge his loss.
Oh, we did. We flew to Mars and kicked alien butt. I remember being a little disappointed by how easy that last battle was, but it was probably just because by then we were a well-organized, well-equipped team of veterans, our strategies finely honed and practiced to perfection. How different from those dark, early days when Sectoids invaded our base and the sparsely equipped crew barely held them off at great cost.
I don't see any good reason why it couldn't have been implemented in 8 bits, though a tape-based version would have been a PITA to work with.
The turn-based gameplay *was* descended from such Speccy greats as Laser Squad and the Rebelstar series, after all, Julian Gollop had a fine history of these turn-based games long before UFO/X-COM.
For a long time, my domain name had email set up so that *@domain were forwarded to my actual email address. I generally only received spams at a username on that domain which I'd been stupid enough to put online somewhere (probably a forum system which was stupid enough to put your email address on a public profile page). Blocked that one from receiving anything and forgot about it. Back then, it looked like they mainly harvested email addresses from websites and Usenet posts.
One morning somewhere around 2003 or thereabouts, I woke up to several thousand spams in my inbox, and more arriving as fast as I could download them. They were addressed to all kinds of usernames@mydomain, looked like they went through a long list of names and appended the domain to the end. Since then, I no longer receive mail to anything other than legit usernames. It helped, a lot.
These days I get a couple of hundred spam mails per day, but GMail for all it's other faults does a near-perfect job of dispatching them. I doubt that having an email address on a web page would make much difference now and I tend not to worry much about spam. Still, it's good to see active effort being made to take these scumbags down, even if it is just Microsoft clearing up the mess their dog made on the carpet.
Trouble, mostly. If they're anything other than an "IP house" I'd be shocked.
I don't know which I find more disgusting: this kind of "patent ambush" where it's obvious you waited to allow the "infringing" product to become well established before sticking your oar in; or the practice of extorting licencing fees from companies using your competitor's product on the vague threat of patent warfare without ever telling anyone WTF the patents you're talking about are.
Both are symptoms of a patent system which needs urgent repair.
I was wondering how many Nooks-sold-as-e-readers are in that 12% when they were bought with the sole intent of being rooted for use as a full-blown Android tablet and not merely an e-reader. I'm seriously considering going that route myself to replace my ancient laptop which, with 30-60 seconds of battery life and a non-working trackpad, is long past the point of being "portable". $250 I can stretch to for something which actually works, unlike most other tablets in that price range.
In fact it looks like B&N have noticed this too, as I just found out they have a Nook App Store and developer site up.
If you want to use a piece of software (or data) "forever", it best not be something that's dependent on servers that someone else is in control of, or that has a means to be remotely disabled or removed. MMOs, cloud apps, phone apps, e-books...all can and have been killed off at the whim of their owners (you, the paying user, are not the "owner", sorry).
Even stand-alone software can meet its demise. Several old, good games went the way of the dodo with the move to Windows 2000 and newer. But plenty more still work.
Overall, don't get too attached to your digital stuff. You'll probably outlast it all.
Or are DVLA just being typical humourless civil service prats?
Whatever you may think of this guy because he chose to have a vanity plate attached to an already conspicuous example of crass consumerism, I have a big issue with how much influence whiny complaining tossers get to have over other people's freedom. Even if it is the freedom to be a bit of a git.
US politicians using misleading hyperbole to table amendments which protect large incumbent industries (also known as "campaign finance providers")?
The only way they could be more obvious about their fully-paid-for status would be to start wearing clothing with their sponsors' logos plastered all over.
MP3s and the hardware they play on are just more examples of the ongoing race to the bottom we're trapped in as we trade quality for "convenience". Yeah, they're fine for listening in the car or the office or out on a walking trail where sound quality is secondary to being able to take a large amount of music with you easily. At home I'll take quality, because I'm in a position to do so. For now that means music on CD played through a low-budget separates system (by no means "audiophile-quality", but a lot closer to that ideal than it is to what most people listen to).
Most consumers, sadly, do not seem to know better or care that their lossy-compressed download played through a cheap DAC into a crappy pair of earbuds barely resembles the music as it was supposed to be heard. God help us all, they're the ones driving the market.
"For enthusiast photographers, they'll balk at the small sensor and inevitable lower quality images."
This factor doesn't seem to hurt the G-series or S-series Canon compacts much. An enthusiast isn't going to make this their sole camera, but it would be a useful and flexible alternative when you don't want to drag a big DSLR (or film gear, in my case).
They might balk at the price though. Owww...
"Windows will dutifully execute code embedded into CDs and DVDs that are inserted into computers. To date, malware criminals have shown little interest in exploiting the weakness"
Isn't this how Sony's rootkit found its way onto numerous computers? Oh, yeah, I forgot, they're a big corporation, definitely not criminals. No sir.
Bloody hell, I just realized that when development started on this, I was still using a Commodore Amiga as my primary computer and wouldn't build my first Wintel box for another couple of years.
This game was a running joke throughout the entire 4-year period in the early 2000's I spent as an avid PC gamer.
From what I've read, it should be used as a case study of how a software project shouldn't be managed. Constant feature creep and no fixed idea of what the final product should be, leading to endless delays and a released product which would have been cutting edge if only the world had stood still for a while.
"E-mail addresses are disposable things these days, no one expects to keep an electronic address any longer than a physical one."
I've had the same email (and web) address for 11 years now and so long as I keep paying the small annual registration fee I expect to continue to have the same email address for the forseeable future.
During that same period of time I've had 5 different ISPs (none of whose email systems I used, they all sucked), 6 different web hosts (including a period of self-hosting) and 3 or 4 email providers. To anyone communicating with me by email or viewing my web site, there's effectively no difference.
"these days most of us rely on Facebook and LinkedIn to keep track of people we met last week, let alone last year."
Perhaps, but the day I have to rely on the likes of Facebook for my electronic communications is the day I start buying postage stamps and envelopes again.
But I know back a few years ago there were a number of emulators which did not ship with any original firmware code precisely because of legal concerns. They were useless as downloaded. The disclaimer was that you had to legally obtain a copy from your own hardware and of course use your own legally owned software. In practice neither were hard to find online, but the important point was that the emulator author could not be reasonably held responsible for the actions of the user.
Now if he was shipping ROM images that are still under copyright and aren't licensed for emulator use, or if he took the emulator code from elsewhere and breached whichever license it originally shipped under, then he's the responsible party.
The ZX Spectrum is the sane, responsible model to follow here. Amstrad retains copyright on the system ROMs but specifically permits use and distribution of them in emulators. Software titles are pulled from the big online archive if the copyright holder comes forward and complains (which is why you won't find Codemasters software on World of Spectrum, for example, but in practice there are very few denied titles out of a catalog of nearly 10,000 games). If the copyright holder can't be found and doesn't come forward it's assumed abandoned until notified otherwise, and more than a few copyright holders and original authors have given their blessing (I understand that some are even quite thrilled that anyone still gives a rat's crap about the game they wrote 20-odd years ago in their bedroom).
Sounds just like my hometown. All it needs to complete the comparison is no cinema, no nightlife, a body of water so chemically polluted only algae can survive near it, nothing open on a Sunday or after 6pm any other day, so many shoe shops that it's dangling on the edge of the shoe event horizon, and a bunch of young louts doing laps around the one-way system in their chavved-up land speeders.
Those bags were full of coal gas (or whatever the municipal gas supply was), used as a fuel since Blighty had plenty of it available while petrol, needed for the war effort, was heavily rationed to the public. Sort of like a rather-less-safe version of LPG tanks used today in some vehicles.
Some buses and other large vehicles in WW2 towed gas generating units behind them, which burned coal or possibly sawdust to generate the gas which powered the engine.
...is that they don't show the extremes which break your point.
"Now averaging 2,700 calories per day for every person on the planet."
And yet certain nations have extraordinary percentages of overweight, obese and even morbidly hyper-obese people, while other nations still suffer high rates of starvation and malnutrition. Hell, you can find both extremes without ever leaving any developed nation, if you care to put down the shiny toys and look closely enough.
Not to mention that calories != nutrition. How much is that average pushed up by crap processed food loaded with empty calories?
As for the class struggle, it's still very much alive and has merely changed to reflect that shifting world dynamic you mention. Replace "upper crust" with "Wall Street Bankers" or "Big Corporations" and switch out "proletariat" for "Main Street", or "the middle class" and you'll be right on the money these days.
Never mind the digital switchover, 405-line broadcasts stopped in 1985.
But not to worry! It comes with a 625-405 line converter and a Freeview box thrown in, so it really is a genuinely working, usable TV set. This setup appeals to me just for it's sheer bloody-mindedness. "I'm damn well going to keep using this TV if it kills me, I paid enough for it and couldn't even use it for a decade back then."
Reminds me of the caution printed in the original Sinclair Spectrum user manual: if your television could not receive BBC 2 you would need a converter box to connect the computer to it.
"All being well, nobody else will have their health damaged in any way"
Except for the people in the USA, driven by fear-mongering "news" coverage, who are now eating potassium iodide tablets like they were made of delicious chocolate covered candy.
This whole affair has reminded me of two things: most news reporting is worthless at best, dangerous at worst; and the nuclear industry could really benefit from just being up-front and honest instead of trying to make things sound less bad than they are.
I think you may be onto something here. Too much process and complexity, not enough good old fashioned getting stuff done in the simplest, most effective way possible. A metaphor for our times, where even "Hello World" requires several hundred kB and an installer package.
Give me a ZX Spectrum, an old black and white telly and the next half hour free; I'll give them a damn clock which works*. Hell, a 1K ZX81 would be sufficient.
* well, as long as the power supply doesn't overheat and nobody holds down one of the keys, which would screw up the PAUSE 50 statement and cause the clock to be a bit ahead of schedule.
Companies worry about having their secrets, designs, or copyrighted material stolen by the Chinese.
Then they outsource some, or all, of their manufacturing to cheap Chinese labor.
Then their designs or copyrighted material mysteriously get bootlegged at a level of quality comparable to the original goods.
Then they wonder how the hell that just happened.
Well, DUUU-UH. But hey, they only had to pay $1/day/worker so they're WINNING, right?
Idiots.
Actually makes sense. Yes I'd be firmly in the "idiot" camp on this one having had no desire to pursue calculus beyond what was strictly required of me (and even that turned out to be a complete waste of time based on precisely zero uses of that knowledge in the last 20 years), but let's face it, I'm not going to ever be signing up for an account on that system, am I?
For specialist fields like this why *not* use specialist-field-related captchas? Not only would it help defeat spammers, it would also maybe help defeat the average basement-dwelling troll, too. Wouldn't be any worse than the capctha I saw recently which had accented characters in it.
Of course it all falls apart if the field involves things which are more easily processed by computers than humans anyway but at the rate things are going with some captchas it won't be long before computers are the only things which *can* decode the bloody things.
Hey, here's a drug for the mildly annoying problem you have. The drug company rep is pushing it really hard and I get a bunch of cool free stuff for getting people onto it. It's got all these nasty side effects though, so you'll need these other drugs to counteract them. Here's another handful of pills to counteract the side effects of those ones. And here's the number for an attorney you can call in 5 years when we have to pull some of these bad boys off the market because some weak people died and stuff after taking them. Selfish bastards.
Now be a good little consumer and remember, ASK YOUR DOCTOR about blah blah blah...oh nearly forgot here's your free Mycoxaflopin pen and bumper sticker. Be sure to display them prominently! Have a nice day!
So she's suing because the mall cops didn't check if she was OK?
Um, no. People who are not OK don't get up and walk away quickly to escape their acute embarrassment. People who are not OK typically stay down and call out stuff like "help me, I'm hurt".
Her head's full of rocking-horse shite.
and release the damn documents already.
The diplomatic cables are just high school gossip on a grander scale. I don't see where they've changed the world.
Something which could have a major detrimental effect on shameless, greedy, toxic, lying sack-of-shit corporations like News Corp or BofA, now THAT is something the world could use and benefit from.