red and blue values were swapping places across thousands of pixels

Just convince the customers that "the Avatar look" is in style. Who needs technicians when you have a good sales team.

I once contracted with a shop that had a process that generated garbled output data rows. It appeared to be extra stuff that didn't affect (over-write) the intended rows. The shop had added an extra processing step to filter out the garbage rows and eventually just worked around the glitch.

They had asked me to try to track it down, among other projects, because they were newbie programmers. I couldn't figure it out either because it never appeared in my intermediate trace statements. I put a trace (print) statement before every "write" in the program. None of the prints showed the garbage, yet garbage ended up in the output file. Head-scratcher galore. I was supposed to be "the expert", and thus feeling a bit deflated.

On I think the last day of my contract, I was running a test copy of the code with some changes to perform speed tests. I went to try a certain speed tweak, and I suddenly spotted the error: the file handle variable was re-used for another non-handle purpose, something like this:

fhandle = openFileForWrite(fileName);
...
writeToFile(fhandle, someData);
...
fhandle = countX + countY - 7;
...
closeFile(fhandle);

The actual handle name was something like "qhand". But a regular variable, "quantity on hand" ended up "qhand" also, the same name as the file handle.

When it dawned on me what happened, I started screaming like a wildman and the others popped out of their cubicles to see what was going down. They took my coffee away :-)

As far as the link on goofy video game bugs, I remember somebody discovered that if you don't put a game cartridge in all the way, certain characters dance and spin randomly and rapidly in the sky.

It created an Internet meme, and spoofs started appearing all over, typically using stop-motion with live actors. I forgot the nickname of the meme, but I found it hilarious. It took my mind off the handle bug.

That dictionary can't even spell colour correctly so it's hardly surprising it doesn't know how to pronounce the words either.

A can-do attitude is useful when you have an idea about how to do something new and nay-sayers then argue against that idea ever working. What we have here is a political goal with no clue about how to achieve it which is not the same thing. The problem with a 100 % 'renewable' energy solution is that the power is very variable. Show me a plan to deal with that and I'll be interested. Until then this appears nothing more than political hot air.

Actually the argument also used pulsars. These have densities at, or above, that of a nucleus. A blackhole produced at the surface of one would swallow the entire star due to the phenomenally large cross-section. Pulsars are easy to detect and since we have never yet observed a pulsar winking out of existence we can exclude dangerous black hole production.

I don't blame Google for trying. There are too many variables to say what will work and won't. Social networking is too big of an industry to not bother making a play for. Honda started out a successful motorbike company, and successfully pushed into automobiles even though that industry was full of established players.

However, I do blame Google for forcing their services to be or act like a social networking site, where private info magically showed up elsewhere in unexpected ways. That's just desperation and/or forceful denial in play, ticking off your user base. They forgot "Don't Be Evil". Obsession made them stupid.

I hope Google goes back to what it does well: lots of specialized little services that can OPTIONALLY share info between each other as the user sees fit.

You are using "guilty until proven innocent". And I don't see ABC as particularly left-leaning in general (although these kinds of bias claims are difficult to objectify and often contentious.)

I'll apply Hanlon's Razor as the more likely here.

cut the cables between the two boards [of a TRS-80] and send them separately to avoid getting caught in customs.

Reminds me of the story of Richard Garriott's Sputnik 1. It's an actual spare probe prepared by the Soviets in the 1950's as a backup.

When Russia was having a hard time transitioning away from Soviet rule in the 90's, Soviet space stuff was being auctioned for ridiculously low prices.

Richard snapped up the spare Sputnik for a bargain, and disassembled it to get it past customs. His team unscrewed the metal sphere into two halves and presented them as "new-age salad bowls" to customs officials.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10...

Sure, but that's only an issue if the regulations specify Tesla levels of performance and efficiency. I'm suggesting the regs could be written with the most efficient ICE automobiles on the market *today* as the benchmark for what is feasible. These are by not necessarily fantastically expensive, nor are they hair-shirt city cars. The Mazda 3 is a four door sedan that seats five and has an engine that delivers 184 hp at 26 mpg city/35 highway; MSRP is 18.8K$. If you need a people mover you can get a seven passenger Mitsubishi minivan rated 25 city/31 highway for 23.2k$.

It's clear that the current state of the art in ICE makes affordable, practical cars that exceed the current average mileage technologically feasible. They're being sold now. If on the other hand you want high performance, e.g., to go 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds, then you're talking big bucks and exotic technology.

What manufacturers won't be able to do is slap a tarted-up body on a primitive $26,000 truck chassis, call it an SUV, and charge $50,000 for it. I'm talking about the Silverado based Suburban. I think there's a place in the world for such vehicles, but it's insane to charge an additional 24k to slap two rows of seating in place of a pickup bed; there's plenty of headroom to charge a gas guzzler tax on that one.

Indeed. But it's also true that change per se puts more stress on less innovative or agile companies, especially companies that have massive investments sunk into older technologies. No matter what rules you set it'll benefit some companies over others; rules that are very favorable to GMC would be unfavorable to Tesla and vice versa. They'll both argue that rules that benefit them the most are best for the country.

I'll say this for Tesla's position, though: the notion that it's physically impossible to build fuel efficient cars that people will want to buy is balderdash.

Really?

I went back and played the original X-Com again (for the first time in a decade or so) after I finished the remake. And what I found was a game whose graphics hadn't held up quite so badly as others of a similar vintage, but whose gameplay was showing serious signs of age.

On the tactical side, squads felt overly large, micromanagement was excessive by any reasonable estimation and the random number generator was allowed to become far too dominant in determining the outcome of combat. The need to play "hunt the last alien" before you could successfully complete a mission made certain missions, particularly some of the terror missions with complex cityscapes, an absolute grind.

By contrast, the remake is slicker and smarter. I felt like it was doing more than the old X-Com to make me use all of my assets in the field and was striking a more appropriate balance between luck and skill. Moreover, with the troopers being a little less vulnerable and having more defined traits to carry over between missions, I felt a sense of connection with my squad that was missing in the old game.

Now, the remake isn't perfect; I think allowing an extra 2 soldiers in the tactical squads (so 8 rather than 6) would have struck a better balance. The strategic game is undeniably less sophisticated than in the original (though also less repetitive in the late-game stages).

But on balance, I would rank the remake as being the better game, in objective terms - and in terms of both gameplay and graphics. Admittedly, the original was a far more striking game when it was first released and had a genre-defining impact that the remake didn't. But put them side by side and I'd take the remake.

Graphics matter. Anybody who doesn't think so is a luddite and should maybe consider that the whole "technology" world might not be for them.

Advances in graphics and advances in the quality of games have frequently gone hand in hand over the years. Wing Commander wasn't massively more advanced than the space-combat bits of Elite, but it felt like a whole new experience thanks to the graphics and presentation. At the other end of the timeline, if you have the horsepower to run the PC version of The Witcher 3 on full settings, you'll get probably the most immersive experiences ever made - which complements the gameplay nicely.

Admittedly, you can have a good game without good graphics; I can think of a handful of fairly recent titles that have managed it (Super Meat Boy, Thomas Was Alone), but those tend to be the exceptions. By and large, the "graphics doesn't matter" indie scene has given us a bunch of shoddy, derivative "retro-sprite-art pseudo-8-bit roguelikes" to clog up the Steam storefront. As I get older and more cynical, I increasingly find that a lazy approach towards graphics on the part of a developer usually translates into a lazy attitude towards the broader design.

In the specific case of the Resident Evil 4 remaster, I can sort-of see the point. RE4 was a seminal game that brought in a lot of wider changes to the survival horror genre. In the long run, I think you can argue that most of those changes (the greater action focus, the upgrade systems) were detrimental to the genre; but that doesn't diminish how important (and how good) RE4 was. The problem with going back to older games, however, is that graphics can turn into an immersion-breaker. Visuals which seemed fine a decade ago frequently look horrible to eyes used to modern games (and resolution upscaling can be particularly unforgiving in exposing flaws). I've lost count of the number of times I've gone back to an old game and been shocked at how much worse it looks compared to the game from my memories. So making some improvements to enable people to go back to the game without that sense of disconnect is no bad thing.

But it is, I would argue, something Capcom should have done for the re-release. Not something that should be left to the community.

I'm trying to establish a chain-of-trust to the replicant project's files.

You have signed their key fingerprint, so if I can get a reliable .

I have 6781 9B34 3B2A B70D ED93 2087 2C64 64AF 2A8E 4C02 as YOUR (new) key fingerprint.

But MITM attacks could, in principle, have corrupted my downloading of that and/or could corrupt any handshake process I'm familiar with that we could reasonably accomplish over a Q&A over slashdot.

I'm in the silicon valley area. Is there any easy way to get in touch with you to confirm that fingerprint or obtain the correct one? Will you be appearing in person some time in the near future? Has it been painted as graffiti or a sign in a known place (and check periodically to be sure it's not modified)? Is there someone you know who is in the Silicon Valley area who is a public enough person to identify and who has your fingerprint and is willing to confirm it? Etc.

Okay I stand corrected on that. But, you have no evidence ABC edited with the intent to make her look foolish. They may have done it to simply keep it short. TV news does that a lot.

Just require ISIS show up at court.