The automatic blocking of enemy blasts with the lightsabre was supercool- one of the only games I went back and played through again. I always wanted to try the dark side but the moment I got my light sabre I knew it was time to be a hero.
For creating documents and workshopping ideas, Wave was actually pretty good. I just suspect that there aren't that many people who actually need to do that.
If there is space for patents in the world of software I think it needs to be way smaller - a soft patent might last 18 months unexploited up to three ( or perhaps five ) years exploited. That way the potential for trolling is greatly reduced but it is possible to protect your IP for long enough to get your startup working if you are genuinely doing something with it. If this was applied retrospectively to existing software patents it would make everyones lives a lot less hassley and open the door to all kinds of exciting new endeavours.
That game was so intense. Knowing the Sentinel was turning towards you and you had to get out somehow. Amazing stuff, given the technology they were using.
I might even have got one if I could have found one here a while ago as I quite want a decent size music player, hate iTunes with a passion and have heard bad things about the reliability of the Creative offerings.
I think sometimes to try and catch up with the leader in a given area, Microsoft end up making pretty good kit which is just inherently uncool because Microsoft are inherently uncool and so never really gets the credence it might achieve if it didn't have the stamp of Technology Walmart on it.
I remember when I studied AI as part of my CS course at university, we had a few lectures discussing medical expert systems. The statistics were interesting both in terms of how much accuracy was increased by the use of expert systems and how bad doctors did in general. These were very much area-specific applications but if a system like Watson can offer a more general solution and becomes widely used, that can only be good news for anyone who gets ill in future.
There are no serious philosophers who espouse free will- within a determinate physical universe it just doesn't make sense and by this point enough brilliant minds have failed to argue convincingly against it that people who take their philosophy seriously accept determinism.
An interesting question though - is there just one timeless brick or are there many endlessly dividing timeless bricks, intersected at certain temporal locations? In the latter case could what we perceive as free will be the decision as to which timeless brick happens to be the one we experience?
Experientially we will only know one future, so we can treat the future as absolutely fixed, but while it remains unknowable that really makes no difference to how any of us lives our life.
Opera was amazing for a while, then somewhere around version 10 to 11 they seemed to lose track of the things that made the browser good - it got slow, clunky and it kept failing to work on sites I use regularly so after sticking with Opera since version 6 or thereabouts, I switched to Chrome.
Then Chrome started getting slow and clunky - it seems like Chrome installations accumulate cruft like crazy and you have to just reinstall and lose all your profile data on a regular basis - and I went back to the old faithful to discover that as of 11.50 they seem to have bucked their ideas up and it's working nicely again.
It may be annoying that most users ignore the most useful browser, but I guess it saves Opera users from being targeted by malevolant scripts...
Surely at that budget, the materials used couldn't be much more than paper and a bunch of balloons. Have they specified that they need interstellar humans or would playmonauts be sufficient?
I don't care about having too much width, that doesn't bother me at all. But having not enough height is another matter entirely. In order to get the vertical space that you would have on an old 15" monitor you need something like a 19" widescreen one. At that point it starts to get very impractical to carry around.
The looters in general have cost the nation hundreds of millions of pounds at the least. It seems to me that there should be some way for them to bring money back into the economy. I suggest that as a community service type sentence they should have to run the nationalised banks free of charge.
They are vile looting scum who went out with no moral sense to destroy, steal and burn everything they could so they're a lot better than the people running the banks at the moment and think of the savings on bonuses!
That works great if anybody thinks they will get caught when they commit a crime. But they don't, which is why the deterrent effect of strong sentencing exists only in the minds of the people who insist on stronger sentencing.
I would appreciate it if NSW would add a word beginning with "F" between the South and the Wales so that I can stop being momentarily baffled every time I read their initials and instead become permenantly baffled.
This may seem a stupid question but is anyone making laptops that aren't i that useless widescreen format?
Given that most of what I do on screens is reading and writing text, having two horizontal miles of space is useless to me if I only have three vertical inches for the column of text I'm perusing. It's like reading a novel through a letterbox.
"The US Air Force is hoping that it can develop the high-speed platform as a “global strike” capability that could reach any location on the planet within a few minutes."
Given that it's a year since the last trial and they lost that as well, suggesting they can develop this high speed platform within a few minutes seems a trifle ambitious.
If a patent troll wins and charges for lost profits, presumably the judge can just award them nothing as they are a patent troll and would never have used the patent to make anything, so there are no potential profits for them to lose.
I like the idea of three balloons with a simple pipe between the three of them, up which the rocket is launched.
Alternatively could one performe some kind of hack involving a guidance wire attached to the outside of the balloon ( or even not attached, just long enough that it is displaced as the balloon expands, and set up so it doesn't pierce the side ) that the rocket plane could simply travel along during it's initial launch?
Also, most of us are more interested in how to launch the Vulture 2 aircraft from beneath HYDROGEN-filled funbags. Hence the icon...
Could you use the release timing so that the rocket swings around the balloon and the balloon's inertia can be used to orient it to a more vertical angle before releasing it?
I know nothing about rocketry or physics, but in my imagination this works perfectly and I believe hard enough that I think it just could work...
I just tried the upgrade and it hasn't fixed the problem I was having where Chrome locks up completely when it can't open the page on one tab ( so where is the benefit of using separate threads the whole time? ) and can't open a whole lot of Google sites. In my experience it has proved to be shockingly and consistently unreliable as a browser.
Fortunately Opera appear to have sorted out the abysmal performance that their 10.* versions so I have switched back to that, which apparently also makes me more intelligent, so I guess that's a win all round really.
Peer review was designed for a time when there were few enough papers published that other researchers could look at a paper and actually reproduce the results for themselves. With so much research and so much data available now, how often does this actually happen and what are the incentives for it to be done? Especially when most research scientists seem to be judged by the papers they have published rather than those they have rigorously reviewed.
In Russia LJ is the major blogging service and there are a lot of political journals, making it a major centre of free speech. As dissent is practically ( if not theoretically ) frowned on there, it seems to attract a lot of attacks from those who would prefer the actions of the government to go unquestioned.
I don't think most people inclined to the left of Mussolini/Mr Worstall actually do dislike the notion of markets. We just tend to think that they are not the only model that fits every single element of life and that even in some cases where the idea of a market can be jammed in as a model in some circumstances doesn't mean it is the only model that fits and certainly doesn't imply it is the best one.
We all see things in terms of our own reference points and understanding. When all you have is free-market theory then every problem looks like it can be solved by free markets. Like most ideas that we commit ourselves strongly to there is probably more religion than rationality to that.
Now Paris, there is a lady who understands how love and markets intersect...
That is how it works. Now go and talk to some climatologists about data and models and get the view from real scientists working with real data about what is happening. If you understand the scientific method and you can follow the maths then you'll get a lot more out of that than reading endless articles of loose interpretation from either side.
The simple fact is that the evidence points in one direction. The real scientific evidence, not the cherry-picked lobbyist pseudo-data. In highly complex disciplines like this, you rarely hit datapoint for datapoint, but trends are predictable and the underlying physics is fairly simple. The people with the truth are rarely the people making the most noise.
The simple fact is that although most of us who work in a specialised field are aware of the complexities of our own area of specialisation, apparently any mook with a pipe and an armchair knows more about climate science than any of the people who have been studying it full time over decades.
So apparently they sent the deputy Serjeant at Arms to ask for their presence.
I have high hopes that after his request was rejected they will next send in the actual Serjeant at Arms who will proceed to totally flip out with his halberd.
I'm not an expert on constitutional affairs, but I assume this is the kind of thing that usually happens in this kind of situation.
Have you *seen* the clear-up rates for crime in this country?
If a criminal doesn't find themselves overwhelmed with morality and turn themselves in or actually leave their phone or full name and address at the scene of a crime, the chances of them being apprehended are so close to zero as to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes.
Of course, News International did involve known criminals comitting clear and easy to follow up crimes and the Guardian had already found all the evidence for him when he refused to reopen the case, so it's not excuse in this case...
Why do we even need two services? Could we not have a single defence force with a single leadership role that provides an umbrella for sea, land and air endeavours?
Sounds like a great excuse for dodgy civil engineers: "Explosive charges of the wrong power in the wrong locations? Not at all! It was ... erm... Elves! That's right, it was Elves! No liability on our part!"
It's not like you benefit from lack of flammability in Helium given that you have a rocket strapped to it. Perhaps there would be a way to harness the Hydrogen as extra fuel or blow the balloon up to provide an initial boost to the rocket. In fact it would be fair to say that there is NO WAY this could POSSIBLY go wrong.
So it begins like this and you're all like "WHOA! This is going to be amazing!"
Then the game proper starts and you're a mook on Tatooine with some dude who wants you to kill ten wamprats, then fifteen wamprats, then twenty greater wamprats...
I seem to recall Peter Hamilton having remote armed vehicles as the mainstays of space combat in his "Night's Dawn" trilogy. It always seemed an entirely plausible idea to me.
They could have something like one of those fairground style "must be under this height to ride ( if you are an animal )" type signs. Of course, how you would put that in terms that animals would be able to understand is another question entirely...
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525 posts • joined Thursday 24th May 2007 11:51 GMT
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In Dark Forces 2 you had a light sabre...
The automatic blocking of enemy blasts with the lightsabre was supercool- one of the only games I went back and played through again. I always wanted to try the dark side but the moment I got my light sabre I knew it was time to be a hero.
Re: Get creative...
For creating documents and workshopping ideas, Wave was actually pretty good. I just suspect that there aren't that many people who actually need to do that.
Re: IBM ROMP vs. ARM
If ARM and WANG had worked together they could have greated the Jenerally Executable Reliable Kompiler, which would have been a major release.
It's the wrong kind of patent
If there is space for patents in the world of software I think it needs to be way smaller - a soft patent might last 18 months unexploited up to three ( or perhaps five ) years exploited. That way the potential for trolling is greatly reduced but it is possible to protect your IP for long enough to get your startup working if you are genuinely doing something with it. If this was applied retrospectively to existing software patents it would make everyones lives a lot less hassley and open the door to all kinds of exciting new endeavours.
That game was so intense. Knowing the Sentinel was turning towards you and you had to get out somehow. Amazing stuff, given the technology they were using.
Sounds like Steve Yegge
He's never been backwards about saying what he thinks and he is, for all the deliberately controversial debating manner, a very smart guy.
I'll just Bing it on my Zune
I might even have got one if I could have found one here a while ago as I quite want a decent size music player, hate iTunes with a passion and have heard bad things about the reliability of the Creative offerings.
I think sometimes to try and catch up with the leader in a given area, Microsoft end up making pretty good kit which is just inherently uncool because Microsoft are inherently uncool and so never really gets the credence it might achieve if it didn't have the stamp of Technology Walmart on it.
About time
I remember when I studied AI as part of my CS course at university, we had a few lectures discussing medical expert systems. The statistics were interesting both in terms of how much accuracy was increased by the use of expert systems and how bad doctors did in general. These were very much area-specific applications but if a system like Watson can offer a more general solution and becomes widely used, that can only be good news for anyone who gets ill in future.
The who now?
There are no serious philosophers who espouse free will- within a determinate physical universe it just doesn't make sense and by this point enough brilliant minds have failed to argue convincingly against it that people who take their philosophy seriously accept determinism.
An interesting question though - is there just one timeless brick or are there many endlessly dividing timeless bricks, intersected at certain temporal locations? In the latter case could what we perceive as free will be the decision as to which timeless brick happens to be the one we experience?
Experientially we will only know one future, so we can treat the future as absolutely fixed, but while it remains unknowable that really makes no difference to how any of us lives our life.
Opera was amazing for a while, then somewhere around version 10 to 11 they seemed to lose track of the things that made the browser good - it got slow, clunky and it kept failing to work on sites I use regularly so after sticking with Opera since version 6 or thereabouts, I switched to Chrome.
Then Chrome started getting slow and clunky - it seems like Chrome installations accumulate cruft like crazy and you have to just reinstall and lose all your profile data on a regular basis - and I went back to the old faithful to discover that as of 11.50 they seem to have bucked their ideas up and it's working nicely again.
It may be annoying that most users ignore the most useful browser, but I guess it saves Opera users from being targeted by malevolant scripts...
Problems with dry ice
If you are using dry ice for cooling make sure that you have facilities to exclude goths from the system. They go crazy for that stuff.
Mine's the black trenchcoat...
From a distance...
Planet Earth is white and ... erm... there's nothing I can... bite?
Applying for a grant?
Surely at that budget, the materials used couldn't be much more than paper and a bunch of balloons. Have they specified that they need interstellar humans or would playmonauts be sufficient?
Wasted horizontal space is not the problem...
I don't care about having too much width, that doesn't bother me at all. But having not enough height is another matter entirely. In order to get the vertical space that you would have on an old 15" monitor you need something like a 19" widescreen one. At that point it starts to get very impractical to carry around.
The correct way to punish looters
The looters in general have cost the nation hundreds of millions of pounds at the least. It seems to me that there should be some way for them to bring money back into the economy. I suggest that as a community service type sentence they should have to run the nationalised banks free of charge.
They are vile looting scum who went out with no moral sense to destroy, steal and burn everything they could so they're a lot better than the people running the banks at the moment and think of the savings on bonuses!
Re: Re: Strong message
That works great if anybody thinks they will get caught when they commit a crime. But they don't, which is why the deterrent effect of strong sentencing exists only in the minds of the people who insist on stronger sentencing.
New South Flippin' Wales
I would appreciate it if NSW would add a word beginning with "F" between the South and the Wales so that I can stop being momentarily baffled every time I read their initials and instead become permenantly baffled.
That screen format
This may seem a stupid question but is anyone making laptops that aren't i that useless widescreen format?
Given that most of what I do on screens is reading and writing text, having two horizontal miles of space is useless to me if I only have three vertical inches for the column of text I'm perusing. It's like reading a novel through a letterbox.
Quick R&D turnaround?
"The US Air Force is hoping that it can develop the high-speed platform as a “global strike” capability that could reach any location on the planet within a few minutes."
Given that it's a year since the last trial and they lost that as well, suggesting they can develop this high speed platform within a few minutes seems a trifle ambitious.
Close but...
I was liking this right up until the "no hydrogen" part.
Sounds a bit dodgy
I think "Lohan's Ring" sounds a bit innuendo laden.
We should keep it classy and use the latin instead.
That list of labels in full
So in addition to Sony the following labels who are less able to soak the damage also held stock there:
1234, 2020 Vision, Accidental, Ad Altiora, Adventures Close to home , Alberts , All City , Alt Delete, Ambush Reality, Angular, Ark, ATC, Atic, Atlantic Jaxx, Azuli, B Unique, Backyard, Bad Sneakers, Bandstock, Banquet, Beggars, Big Chill, Big Dada, Big Life / Nul / Sindy Stroker, Boombox, Border Community, Boysnoize, Brille, Bronzerat, Brownswood, Buzzin Fly, Can You Feel It, Catskills, ChannelFly, Chemikal Underground, City Rockers, Counter, D Cypher, Dance To The Radio, Deceptive, Def Jux, Dirtee Stank, Divine Comedy, Domino, Drag City, Drive Thru, Drowned in Sound, Duophonic, Eat Sleep / Sorepoint, Electric Toaster, Emfire, F. Comm, Fabric, Faith And Hope, Fantastic Plastic, Fargo, FatCat, Feraltone, Finders Keepers / Twisted Nerve, Fingerlickin', Flock, Free Range, From The Basement, Full Time Hobby, Goldsoul, Gronland, Groove Attack, Halftime, Hassle ,Heron. Hum&Haw, Independiente, Info UK, Join Us, Kartel, Kensaltown, Kitsune, Kompakt, Laughing Stock, Leftroom, Lex, Lo Max, Loose, Love Box, Lowlife, Lucky Number, Marquis Cha Cha, Memphis Industry, Merok, Metroline, Mute, Naïve, Nation, Navigator. New World, Ninja Tune, Nuclear Blast ,One Little Indian, Output / People in the Sky / Process, Pale Blue, Palm, Peacefrog, PIAS Recordings, PIP 555 Productions, Play To Work, Powerhouse (T2), Propaganda / Ho Hum, Raw Canvas, Red Grape, Red Telephone Box, Rekids, Renaissance, Respect Productions (PES digital), Reveal Records, SMG, Rock Action, Roots, Rough Trade, Rough Trade Comps, Rubyworks, Ruffa Lane, Search And Destroy, Secret Sundaze, Secretly Canadian / Jagjaguwar / Dead Oceans, Sell Yourself, Setanta, Shatterproof, Sideone Dummy, Slam Dunk, Smalltown, Soma, Something In Construction, Sonar Kollectiv, Soul Jazz, Southern Fried, Stranded Soldier, Subliminal, Sunday Best, TARGO, Taste, Ten Worlds, Thrill Jockey, Total Fitness, Touch And Go, Track And Field, TriTone, Trouble, Try Harder, Turk, Turnstile, Twenty 20, Underworld, Union Square, Urban Torque, Vagrant, Vice, Victory, Wagram , Wall Of Sound, Warp, Wi45 , Wonky Atlas, Word And Sound, Xtra Mile, You Are Here.
( from here: http://thefourohfive.com/news/article/pias-warehouse-destroyed-in-london-riots-pias-fundraiser-event-details )
If they win
If a patent troll wins and charges for lost profits, presumably the judge can just award them nothing as they are a patent troll and would never have used the patent to make anything, so there are no potential profits for them to lose.
Two ways around
I like the idea of three balloons with a simple pipe between the three of them, up which the rocket is launched.
Alternatively could one performe some kind of hack involving a guidance wire attached to the outside of the balloon ( or even not attached, just long enough that it is displaced as the balloon expands, and set up so it doesn't pierce the side ) that the rocket plane could simply travel along during it's initial launch?
Also, most of us are more interested in how to launch the Vulture 2 aircraft from beneath HYDROGEN-filled funbags. Hence the icon...
Swing til you're winning
Could you use the release timing so that the rocket swings around the balloon and the balloon's inertia can be used to orient it to a more vertical angle before releasing it?
I know nothing about rocketry or physics, but in my imagination this works perfectly and I believe hard enough that I think it just could work...
Just upgraded
I just tried the upgrade and it hasn't fixed the problem I was having where Chrome locks up completely when it can't open the page on one tab ( so where is the benefit of using separate threads the whole time? ) and can't open a whole lot of Google sites. In my experience it has proved to be shockingly and consistently unreliable as a browser.
Fortunately Opera appear to have sorted out the abysmal performance that their 10.* versions so I have switched back to that, which apparently also makes me more intelligent, so I guess that's a win all round really.
Careful...
That now tells us more about you than you might have wanted to let on...
A problem of scale
Peer review was designed for a time when there were few enough papers published that other researchers could look at a paper and actually reproduce the results for themselves. With so much research and so much data available now, how often does this actually happen and what are the incentives for it to be done? Especially when most research scientists seem to be judged by the papers they have published rather than those they have rigorously reviewed.
This
In Russia LJ is the major blogging service and there are a lot of political journals, making it a major centre of free speech. As dissent is practically ( if not theoretically ) frowned on there, it seems to attract a lot of attacks from those who would prefer the actions of the government to go unquestioned.
We see through the filter of our ideas
I don't think most people inclined to the left of Mussolini/Mr Worstall actually do dislike the notion of markets. We just tend to think that they are not the only model that fits every single element of life and that even in some cases where the idea of a market can be jammed in as a model in some circumstances doesn't mean it is the only model that fits and certainly doesn't imply it is the best one.
We all see things in terms of our own reference points and understanding. When all you have is free-market theory then every problem looks like it can be solved by free markets. Like most ideas that we commit ourselves strongly to there is probably more religion than rationality to that.
Now Paris, there is a lady who understands how love and markets intersect...
Indeed?
And that is why I never trust senior military officers to explain anything.
Nail on the head
That is how it works. Now go and talk to some climatologists about data and models and get the view from real scientists working with real data about what is happening. If you understand the scientific method and you can follow the maths then you'll get a lot more out of that than reading endless articles of loose interpretation from either side.
The simple fact is that the evidence points in one direction. The real scientific evidence, not the cherry-picked lobbyist pseudo-data. In highly complex disciplines like this, you rarely hit datapoint for datapoint, but trends are predictable and the underlying physics is fairly simple. The people with the truth are rarely the people making the most noise.
The simple fact is that although most of us who work in a specialised field are aware of the complexities of our own area of specialisation, apparently any mook with a pipe and an armchair knows more about climate science than any of the people who have been studying it full time over decades.
That gives me an idea
There must be a lot of people trying to follow this story who are perhaps getting confused by the complexities of it.
If only the Reg had a handy reporter on hand with a camera to capture the events as they unfold. Or at least, to recreate them using Playmobil...
Good point
That has done a great job of preventing Murdoch from undermining your media, hasn't it?
Send in the Serjeant at Arms
So apparently they sent the deputy Serjeant at Arms to ask for their presence.
I have high hopes that after his request was rejected they will next send in the actual Serjeant at Arms who will proceed to totally flip out with his halberd.
I'm not an expert on constitutional affairs, but I assume this is the kind of thing that usually happens in this kind of situation.
Not well researched
The K-Y layer has proved a slippery customer as far as geologists are concerned, it's exact location is hard to put your finger on.
You would think that...
Have you *seen* the clear-up rates for crime in this country?
If a criminal doesn't find themselves overwhelmed with morality and turn themselves in or actually leave their phone or full name and address at the scene of a crime, the chances of them being apprehended are so close to zero as to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes.
Of course, News International did involve known criminals comitting clear and easy to follow up crimes and the Guardian had already found all the evidence for him when he refused to reopen the case, so it's not excuse in this case...
Why services plural at all?
Why do we even need two services? Could we not have a single defence force with a single leadership role that provides an umbrella for sea, land and air endeavours?
An asset to inncompetent engineers...
Sounds like a great excuse for dodgy civil engineers: "Explosive charges of the wrong power in the wrong locations? Not at all! It was ... erm... Elves! That's right, it was Elves! No liability on our part!"
I was thinking this too
It's not like you benefit from lack of flammability in Helium given that you have a rocket strapped to it. Perhaps there would be a way to harness the Hydrogen as extra fuel or blow the balloon up to provide an initial boost to the rocket. In fact it would be fair to say that there is NO WAY this could POSSIBLY go wrong.
Brave equines
You've got to admire the stallions working at this bulk provision. They must really have balls.
Good start
So it begins like this and you're all like "WHOA! This is going to be amazing!"
Then the game proper starts and you're a mook on Tatooine with some dude who wants you to kill ten wamprats, then fifteen wamprats, then twenty greater wamprats...
Yes, but...
The true master of the game was Lionel Blair...
Too verbose in Java?
Are there any techniques that are *not* too verbose in Java?
I've used it often enough, but if there was ever a language designed for people who *really* like typing, it's that one.
Health issue?
I had always assumed this was raising the tone from a question about mere physical bodies to a discussion of the moral character of the questionee.
Combat wasps
I seem to recall Peter Hamilton having remote armed vehicles as the mainstays of space combat in his "Night's Dawn" trilogy. It always seemed an entirely plausible idea to me.
Wherever you are...
Maybe they can shift that awful Celine Dion song as it should be possible for viewers of a 3D version to judge whether people are near, far...
Starting when?
I'm pretty sure my tribulations started some time ago...
Good idea
They could have something like one of those fairground style "must be under this height to ride ( if you are an animal )" type signs. Of course, how you would put that in terms that animals would be able to understand is another question entirely...
Terminology
I believe the correct term is "scientists."
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