This really makes me wish I had a scratched CD to use this technique on.
So the science behind it: I imagine the goal is to make the laser not reflect wildly off a scratch, but instead, get absorbed into the goo from the banana. I have absolutely no CD repair engineering courses under my belt but it makes sense to me... sorta.
This is really screwed up and kills the legitimacy of gaming in general. The goal for games is to be challenging but for you to be able to advance if you're skillful. This pulls it down to the level of roulette.
Also it should be mentioned that the algorithm that the author used to find this out is somewhat flawed so it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Decriminalizing marijuana and taxing the hell out of it would make a metric ton of money that states and the federal government could use to do some real good in the country. Like more nuclear reactors and wind farms to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources. Or hell, anything else that our country needs to do.
I think if people abused it then they'd just end up stoned and at their house lounging around all day, all the while paying through the nose to do so. Doesn't seem that harmful unless you put a dollar figure up against lost productivity.
I think the problem with this lies in how Google crawls the SWFs. If they're just pulling out an abundance of plaintext then it's essentially useless because there's no meaning behind the data. If there's a way to attach semantic meaning to Flash information (when developing the SWF) then it will be useful.
I don't know if there's already a way to do this within Flash... any Flash developers want to chime in?
Tyme's definitely got a point about people at work not having control over their installed browser. IT departments may be lazy but it's not the users' fault, they have to deal with whatever decisions are made by other departments.
Like a lot of people, I hate running. The big problem is that it's one of the best cardio activities you can do to lose weight. Because I don't like it (read: it's tough for me cause I'm a bigger guy) it's difficult to make myself do it, so my compromise with myself is to get a road bike and get my cardio that way. My wife has been training for her first triathlon so she's in the process of buying herself a road bike as well.
So, any bikers in here that could give a tip to a newbie rider? I've been doing a lot of reading on bike manufacturers, components and drivetrain types, but it's tough to put it all together into one cohesive idea. Basically I'm looking for an entry-level road bike, could be new or used, and I care more about the quality of the components than the brand of the frame itself.
I've always been a fan of fixed-width layouts because of line-length readability issues that creep up in fluid page designs. Many studies regarding line-length readability have been conducted, and with very few dissenting opinions, optimal readability and comprehension levels for the participants were found to lie at around 60 CPL (characters per line) or around 12 medium-sized words per line. When you start expanding the columns out with a fluid layout you sacrifice comprehension and readability.
This has got to be the first time I've seen something like this actually happen. Gordon Smith, a republican senator from Oregon, campaigning for office by telling his constituents how well he and Obama have worked together. He even uses the Obama campaign's Gotham typeface in the ad. Cool!
I think this is pretty smart for Smith, and reminds me of the ads that Richard Moore (Democrat running for North Carolina governor) ran in his campaign, saying that he was one of the first to endorse Barack Obama. He got my vote.
A fairly stunning new ad from Oregon's Republican senator Gordon Smith leaves little doubt as to which way the wind is blowing there.
In the ad, Smith, running hard away from Bush, associates himself at length and explicitly with Obama.
People following you on Twitter could think of it as an RSS feed for your personal life and thoughts. I'm a little frightened by the amount of people who follow me on Twitter so now I try to think twice before posting (whenever I actually do post) because in head there's "more on the line" when people are actively listening.
Looks a ton better, nice to see the ugly menu and header get some refreshed treatment.
Honey Nut Clusters Of Oats or something.
I think engineers who wish to work at Apple are doing it because they're obsessed with Apple technology and products, perhaps enough that they're willing to take a pay cut to do so.
Another thing to think about is that Google engineers and Apple engineers do very different things. Apple engineers are writing Objective-C and Cocoa, developing operating systems and desktop-based software, whereas Google engineers are writing C++, Java, or Python, tweaking algorithms for the search application or web-based software. I'm not saying that one job function should pay more than the other, but it's two very different types of jobs for an engineer. I'd suspect that Apple engineers used to writing desktop applications in ObjC are less likely to hop over to the web app world at Google and completely switch over to Python. Two very different skillsets.
Now Microsoft and Apple would be a fairer comparison, but the cost of living between Redmond and the Bay Area is pretty different so a comparison might be tough.
I remember reading a great article about this topic a few years ago saying that the technology is "coming up fast". Lo and behold in 2008, it's here. Lab-made diamonds are now virtually indistinguishable from natural diamonds. Boy, does this bring up a lot of questions.
I'm using the sexually-indeterminate forms of pronouns here but we all know how this will go over with the ladies. Diamond engagement rings might go out of style faster than the dodo died off, so now what would be the most precious thing to put on your beloved's finger? Depleted uranium?
Lab-grown gemstones are now practically indistinguishable from mined diamonds. Scientists and engineers see a world of possibilities; jewelers are less enthusiastic
I couldn't stop laughing after watching this. Slightly NSFW, about 500x more SFW than the real Goatse which I will absolutely not link to from here.
This game looks so lo-fi there's gotta be a Flash version on the Web somewhere. I don't have an Xbox to play it on so that's my only hope.
The trends of web design change every year and it's really interesting to see what someone deems as being an "in trend" and what isn't.
So what defines a trend? Who defines a trend? Obviously picking out what's hot in the world of web design right now is pretty subjective, so what would you define as being hot right now? Here's my quick list:
Also interesting to look at is the list of 2008 logo trends (and 2007) to see how they match up with trends in web design.
Grungy, painty, hand-written. Great synopsis of current trends with tons of screenshots.
This is too much for me to handle, they just tied after 18 holes. Tiger birdied and Rocco got par on the final hole, now they're going into sudden death.
Microsoft final releases are about as buggy as nightly or weekly builds anyway, so what's the difference?
Very, very interesting.
This child's model of a cell drifted in the chemical soup that created it until the correct nucleotides were absorbed and allowed it to replicated the DNA.
If it sounds hideously unlikely, be aware that some Harvard researchers, including Harvard Medical School's Jack Szostak, have managed exactly that.
I think knowing who was the star of Sliders is the only piece of sci-fi trivia I know. That and maybe EVERYTHING about X-Files. But that's it.
@Ozone, I'm with ya re: salesperson talk. I never trust anything unless I've dug it up in my own research.
iPhone has always supported video and I believe there was a third-party video recording application out within a couple weeks after the iPhone was initially jailbroken and a working compilation toolchain was put together. AT&T and Apple reps are only going to respond to the built-in uses of the phone so that's probably why they told you what they did. There are SDK-based recording apps being put together now that will support greater than 10fps recording based on some unique compression algorithms, so that will be interesting to see once they go live.
A watermelon is used for eating but it doesn't mean you hit it with a baseball bat and make it explode. Watermelon salespeople aren't going to pitch you the second usage, but it doesn't mean you can't do it.
This is really sad news for anyone involved in journalism.
An ambulance rushed to the studio and a source at the network said Russert was briefly revived. But, the broadcasting lion apparently passed away either on the way or at a local Washington D.C. hospital.
My father-in-law passed away a few short months ago in exactly the same manner -- sudden heart attack, little that could have been done. What a blow to his NBC and real-life families.
Tim Russert, NBC journalist and political heavyweight host of "Meet the Press," has died after collapsing at NBC's Washington news bureau. He was 58 years old.
C'mon, help this guy out.
But a few years ago I programmed a quite different algorithm into Mathematica. Instead of directly computing the Bernoulli numbers using a recurrence relation, I instead used a trick recently suggested by Bernd Kellner: computing Bernoulli numbers by computing the Riemann zeta function.
It’s the integrated nature of Mathematica that makes things like this practical. Without Mathematica, one has to use the simplest building blocks to make efficient algorithms. But with Mathematica, one can take for granted access to efficient very-high-level operations—like computing Riemann zeta functions.
It's time. It's difficult to see him go but this is what his campaign needs to do now and I think it affords him some additional visibility with his new Libertarian-minded group called The Campaign For Liberty.
I was a big Ron Paul supporter early on, before the early primaries and caucuses, and it was tough to see him do so poorly in states like New Hampshire where the Libertarian slant is more pronounced. I never anticipated Paul winning the Republican nomination but I did enjoy his thoughts on shrinking the government and going back to traditional foreign policy.
Rep. Ron Paul's presidential campaign, a pugnacious, ideological crusade against big government and interventionist leanings in the Republican party, will officially end Thursday at a rally outside the Texas GOP's convention, ABC News has learned.
Every fix doesn’t call for a blog post, but this one deserves it. It all started when Jonathon Jongsma found a way to make text disappear in QtWebKit on May 27th. So he raised a bug. He and I started working on fixing it. We rapidly found that WebKitGtk was also affected, but it was unreproducible on the Mac port.
He ends up talking to the engineer at Apple who committed the code that ended up causing the bug and they fix it together. Pretty interesting read.
Will and Grace was a lot less funny without Sean Hayes' character being there. I'd consider him a sidekick.
Has John McCain ever said anything that made you sit back and say, "damn, that's eloquent", or, "I agree with you"? It's almost every day that something comes up that makes me think McCain is just a complete idiot pandering to the 28% of America who he's probably already got sewn up.
» An iPhone with a keyboard? ... Last Reply: 1 month ago by ryanarrowsmith.
I don't think it'll slide out like we're used to. Maybe it'll all be magnetic and will glide out on it's own when you're thinking about typing... integration straight with your brain.