Posts by Chez 47 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2015
I've long maintained that the 20 series were the last true thinkpads. I've got a T520 that I've been using for 5 years, and is still going strong. Lots of chassis dings and chips, lots of falls from various desks, and it simply won't stop working. Just got a T420 from a scrap pile a few months back, that's become my new linux box.
CBP is hardly abusive. The US has incredibly lax immigration policies. It amuses me to no end that Mexico complains about US policy, but if you emigrate illegally to Mexico, it's a felony, some jail time, and instant deportation when you get out. Second offense is an automatic 10 year sentence. Meanwhile, in the US, if you dodge CBP for 15 minutes, you're pretty much home free - it's so lax and easy that you'd think the policies were written by Rockstar Games.
>People forcing their way into hotel rooms while not wearing obvious uniforms and presenting legitimate identification (verified with the front desk) are going to get shot at some point.
Not terribly likely, unless entry was genuinely forcible; gun owners are fairly responsible about these sorts of things, specifically when deadly force can and cannot be used.
A man in Texas was acquitted of manslaughter charges after killing several deputies during a no-knock raid in which the police failed to announce that they were actually police, making the raid indistinguishable from a well-coordinated home invasion. Hotel staff opening your door with a keycard is fairly different from that sort of forceable entry.
I'm American. You're all just foreigners to us, you're lucky if we distinguish between the tea-drinking-foreigners-with-funny-accents and the talk-like-mexicans-but-don't-make-tacos foreigners, especially since neither type is allowed to own guns. Probably because you're all commies.
(I jest, of course - I read the article too quickly. Except for the gun part, it's a shame you don't get those, they're wicked fun.)
>In this type of safe, you would keep the gun with a loaded mag, but not one in the chamber.
For home defense? No, you'd leave it at Condition 1 or 2, depending on the type of safe, 1 being completely ready to fire and 2 being chambered and uncocked. Loaded but no round in chamber is Condition 3, which is what I keep my handgun in. No safe, it's just on the nightstand, but I don't have kids. You also have to turn off the safety before you can rack the slide.
Price, add-ons, and the biggest failing in the entire world of consoles: paid online use. That's right, no multiplayer unless you pay extra. Even though you're already paying for internet.
I simply don't understand how that's considered to be even remotely acceptable. Can you imagine the outcry there would be if Valve started charging a subscription for basic Steam services? If you had to pay $60/year for multiplayer on Steam games? Why on earth do console owners accept this?
Quite nice to see that Lego is continuing with their robotics kits. I had an excellent time with my Mindstorms set as a kid, although I inevitably got tired of only having three sensors to play with.
I do hope that it ships stock with an option more complex than drag-and-drop programming. I found myself resorting to some hacked-together version of C back then simply so I could use and store arbitrary variables, something that the RCX was capable of but was not included in the software.
I'd have killed for a distance sensor...
As if it doesn't work both ways. The left was in love with Assange back in the day, now they hate his guts. The right hated Assange back in the day, now they're falling all over him.
While I've only half-followed the drama, it seems like Assange has been fairly constant, and everything else is just the political winds.
Back in my helldesk days, had a desktop come in that was "running slow". I arrived right after it did, so I got there in time to see the porn splashscreen. Then the porn wallpaper, cycling through an unknown number of images. At some point, a porn screensaver. Shortcuts to porn sites splashed all over the desktop. At one point, something particularly nasty popped up and the female helpdesk tech just got up and walked out.
The computer was dubbed "The Pornado", and with time and retellings, has passed into the department annals.
Oculus is hot garbage, I'm afraid. Exclusivity is the one thing that VR simply cannot do if the tech as a whole wants to remain relevant, and Oculus has pushed for it, contrary to Luckey's initial vision.
And the broken promises! Pricing is far higher than was initially announced (my Rift DK2 cost less than half the price of the consumer version), and trust was shattered after they went closed-source. Support has been cut for the dev kits, you can't downgrade firmware for compatibility with titles that were never updated, and they've shown a nasty anti-community streak, which pushed devs to Vive.
Palmer Luckey might have been an asshat about politics, but at least he understood what people wanted. All of that vanished when the facebook buyout happened.
Regrettably, one cannot legally build a machine gun legally in the US. A damn shame, really. ATF regs for full-auto require it to be pre-1986. For artillery, destructive device laws are fairly bizarre - I think you're allowed the artillery itself, but each piece of ammo requires a DD tax stamp that will cost significantly more than the actual round.
Because any item that can be used to convert semi-auto to full-auto is considered subject to the aforementioned ATF regulations, for three years, shoestrings were considered machine guns. One can tie any length of string off to the bolt of, say, an SKS, and wrap it around the trigger in such a way that pulling on it results in fully automatic fire. The decision was reversed in 2007, and shoestrings were deemed machine guns only when used in conjunction with a semi-automatic rifle.
This is a legal, serialized shoestring machine gun from 1996: http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/shoestring-machinegun.jpg
I would buy a brand new laptop from them right now, if they went straight back to the classic Thinkpad design. Follow it to the letter, just give me updated specs (and no fucking malware in the BIOS).
Doubtless, we'll instead just see more glossy, thin, fragile wannabe-macbooks with no battery life.
You all also forget about the massive microbrew scene rising in the US. Hipsters are learning that good money can be made by doing relatively small batches of top-quality stuff to sell at Whole Foods and in little pubs. There's a place not far from me that only sells what they brew in-house, and I've never had a bad beer there, although it's generally rather high-priced.
It's terribly sad to see how rare manuals are here in the states, but on the other hand, the low demand drives down the price. I was taught on automatic, my first car (an ancient Buick) was an automatic, but I got a standard once that died. I can't imagine going back, now.
Actually, that's only relevant for handguns, and generally in the context of police. If you have to fire in a crowded area, you don't want overpenetration, as you risk injuring civilians. When you're talking about rifle rounds, they almost always overpenetrate, as even intermediate rifle rounds are vastly more powerful than mainstream pistol rounds - and 7.62 NATO is much too large to be considered intermediate.
What's intriguing about this is the trend of penetration over cavitation. They're following the 5.45 model, penetration instead of tumbling and cavitation (causing more damaging wound channels). And they're going for a heavier round as well, for a less flat trajectory. Strange choices to make, really - stuff that the russkies have been doing for decades.
There's a lot of fairly complex equipment inside. Every sensor and device is designed for minimal latency in order to prevent nausea.
That said, the price jump from the $300 USD of the Oculus DK2 was surprising to a lot of people, myself included. I could understand if they were jumping to a 4k screen, but it seems like a lot.
On the other hand, I don't know all the technical differences between the DK2 and CV1, so I can't really speculate much.
In my helldesk days, we had a computer come in that was absolutely loaded with all kinds of stuff. I wasn't there to see the guy drop it off (or pick it up), but the wallpaper, the screensavers, it was all pr0n. We dubbed it the "pornado", and I still laugh about it with my coworkers every now and then.
>This is the land where you can buy a gun with few questions asked
Apparently you've never tried to purchase a gun before. You've got to fill out ATF form 4473, and go through a full NICS background check, unless you're purchasing privately - and in that case it's still illegal across state lines, and illegal to sell to someone who you know can't own. Only reason you're not forced to do the same paperwork for a private sale is that it's simply impossible to enforce.
I can barely understand what he's saying. Something something advertisers something streaming video? I've already got a Rift DK2, and the only things I'd want to use VR for would be games, possibly a monitor replacement if someone can whip together a nifty HUD, and flying a drone from VR - if I had the kind of money needed for such a fancy drone in the first place.
Beyond these, and porn, I just can't see any real potential for VR. And it's irritating, because if it bubbles and then pops, the handful of VR uses I actually care about are going to take a hit.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It's a bad thing that a bunch of angry neckbeards tried to out journalists that were sleeping with devs and then giving their shovelware good reviews? There were plenty of women and minorities mixed in with the neckbeards, check #notyourshield for instance.
How about altering one of those little Estes model rockets that I used to have so much fun with as a kid? You could have quite a lot of fun with one of those. I've even wondered about mounting some of the really tiny models (or just the engines themselves with fins and a nosecap glued on) to a large quadrotor for, er, just because I can.
Guidance systems would be tricky and will make it exponentially more expensive, so I think the best solution in this case is simply the application of more dakka. Maybe a dozen or so of these mini-rockets, dumbfired sequentially Katyusha-style.
So much stripped from the original games that it's not even funny. I wanted Battlefront 3, not a reskinned Battlefield 4. As buggy as it is, even Angels Fall First gives a better Battlefront experience than this does. I'm happy I got to play the open beta on PC before release, because it stopped me from shelling out a single cent on the game.
Graphics are good. Sound is great. Everything else is awful, from TTK, to map structure, to AT-ATs being on rails. Why couldn't they take the DICE engine and make something great out of it?
Hey, if the government wants to subsidize an upgrade of my home lab for the sake of being green, I'll take it. But for now, my free (salvaged) Poweredge 1950 eating lots of power is a sight better than spending thousands on a modern replacement for something I technically don't even NEED to run.
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