Google is a complete pain in the ass sometimes. I don't recall exactly what I was searching for, but I was once searching for something about decibels, in which I knew that the content I was looking for would never mention the full word, but only the abbreviation "dB" instead. Google assumed that the "db" in my search query was an abbreviation for "database" and I never could figure out how to get it to stop giving me nothing but results about databases.

You'd better hope so if you want to play Descent again. It's impossible to find a joystick these days without a dead zone, a spot in the middle of the axis where you can wiggle the stick a little without the value reported to the OS being changed.

Descent, being designed for proper joysticks, is simply incompatible with dead zones. You need to turn slowly left, so you move the stick a little, and nothing happens. Your brain's immediate instinct is to assume it simply moved the stick too little, and so it tries moving it twice as far, but still, nothing happens. So then your brain doubles that, but still, nothing happens, as you've only just now reached the edge of the dead zone. So your brain doubles up again, and suddenly you're turning 8x faster than you wanted.

I tired, but it's apparently impossible for the brain to learn the limits of the dead zone such that it can reliably move the stick just barely past the dead zone to make a slow turn.

I actually thought about making a Descent-like game about a year ago, but attempting to play the old Descent with modern joysticks revealed the above problem, and without a proper joystick, there's just no fucking point.

This is getting sad. I see this posted somewhere in the comments of every article about cable television on Slashdot. Aren't people on Slashdot supposed to be smart enough to not accept facts without question simply because they support whatever argument they'd like to make?

It does seem some people on the internet are smart enough to question the story: link and link.

Others seem far too blinded by their desire to believe the story to realize just how likely it is that it is complete bullshit, like this guy who even put "fairy tale" in the title of his story. At first I thought maybe he was presenting it as a fairy tale, but with no argument against the story being presented, I can only conclude that he believes that commercial-free cable television did exist at one time, but has now become a "fairy tale" as it no longer exists.

...and just to make sure I get down-modded, I'll also point out the other popular myth Slashdot is unable to recognize as such: that "hacker" originally meant "intelligent person who is able to make technology do awesome things." Sorry, people, but the only time the word had any meaning besides "criminal" was when it meant (and still means) "to do something in an incorrect way which never the less works," e.g., "I think I can hack that equipment to do what we need." As such, applying the word to computer criminals is entirely appropriate, as they break into computers by exploiting the software on those computers in clever ways to do things that software wasn't intended to do. The legality of the action is irrelevant to the word. Even with the original definition, a hacker isn't something one should aim to be, but rather, being able to hack is merely a useful skill to have. Defining yourself as a hacker makes no more sense than defining yourself as an ass wiper. Yes, you have to wipe your ass, and it's good that you can do it, but if that's how you choose to define yourself then there's something wrong with you.

A capacitor with plates closer together has a higher capacitance. This means that a voltage applied to that capacitor will cause more charge (a.k.a. electrons) to move between the plates, or in other words, it means that less voltage is required to cause the same amount of charge to move between the plates. So if you have two capacitors with identical charge, the one with plates closer together has a lower voltage, and the one with plates further apart has higher voltage.

So whatever charge is on two surfaces, when you pull those surfaces apart, you increase the voltage between them.

...or just turn their own customers against them. Presumably these people require some sort of proof of having paid the fine before they'll reimburse people. Just offer that proof to anyone who asks for it whether they've paid the fine or not. People who don't pay for the trains probably also have no issues with occasionally getting a free $150 from the people insuring them against their $150 fines.

This is why the ends don't justify the means. As soon as someone says "the ends justify the means" it gives everyone an excuse to use any solution to a problem, even if it isn't the best solution. An intelligent robot would figure out some way to stop the plane without killing anyone.

...and how do we even know anyone is going to die? Can the robot predict the future as well? For all it knows, it merely appears that people are going to die, but if it does nothing, the passengers on the plane will regain control and no one will die.

...or maybe the robot simply had bad information and there's actually nothing wrong at all.

Also, while it doesn't apply in this case since the people on the airplane will die whether the robot does anything or not, consider a situation where a robot (with magical all-knowing predictive powers) can save ten people by killing one innocent person. What makes the robot so special (aside from the magical all-knowing predictive powers) that it gets to decide who lives and who dies? Even if we assume that ten lives are better than one, how do we know that one person wouldn't go on to save thousands of lives? Sometimes the only moral choice is to let fate do what fate is going to do. Just because you'll never know what that one innocent person might have done later in his life doesn't mean it's OK that you killed him to save ten others.

The simple fact is that the ends don't justify the means. The morality of one's inactions is an important thing to think about, but nowhere near as important as the morality of one's actions. If the world were full of people who often fail to do good things, but who at least never intentionally do bad things, it'd be a fairly nice place, especially compared with a world where people often do bad things because they think they're good, a.k.a. the world we have now. Even those terrorists on that plane think they're doing the right thing, and so a set of morals that allow you to kill innocent people as long as you have a good reason aren't all that useful.

Time Warner Cable kind of has. They use the "copy once" flag which makes it impossible to use MythTV as there are no cable card compatible tuners that will stream to non-DRM systems. So you're left paying $10/mo for the DVR and $13/mo for "DVR Service" whatever that is.

You can get a TiVo instead of using MythTV, but it kind of defeats the purpose if you just end up taking the money you save and using it to pay for "TiVo Service" which costs $15/mo with a one-year commitment and a $75 early termination fee. Unfortunately the FAQ doesn't mention their excuse for raping their customers like that, as I'd be quite interested to know. With MythTV you can get channel listings for $25/year, a.k.a. $2/mo, or with over-the-air programming you can get listings data from the over-the-air signal, though I still pay for the listings as they're higher quality, e.g. they indicate whether a showing is a new episode or a re-run.

I have to agree. One of my favorite parts of the movie is in the beginning when the teens are playing D&D and order a pizza, as the dialogue and interactions are much more realistic than anything I'd expect to see in a movie from that time or even in the present. It wasn't even a crucial scene, so they could have easily just wrote some standard obviously-scripted dialog and left it at that, but instead they aimed higher and decided to film something that resembled reality.

I wish more films were as bad as E.T.

It's not just the news, it's television in general. The most disgusting are the shows that detail real-life murders, complete with actual crime scene photographs, as if when someone is murdered, their unfortunate death should become some corporation's profits and everyone else's entertainment.

I feel the same way about it. I can understand wanting to license people who want to build their own transceivers, and maybe even those who want to develop their own modulation schemes and data protocols, but the fact that a HAM can't design and build some nice little ARPS transceivers for his friends and neighbors and allow them to use the devices without having their own license doesn't make any sense to me. Especially if the device were to transmit his call sign when in use so that people know who to talk to if the device or its user misbehaves. The radio spectrum is a natural resource, so I don't understand why less than 1% of it belongs to the public. There's no reason why we should all be paying monthly fees to cell phone companies when ARPS shows us that volunteers are more than capable of running a public text messaging system for free.

When I looked into HAM radio, I just couldn't see anything that appealed to me. I'm not the kind of person who cares to try to see how far away I can communicate with the least amount of power just for shits and giggles. I'd want to build digital devices, using my own data protocols, and maybe experiment with new modulation schemes, but the FCC dictates what you're allowed to transmit and what modulation schemes you're allowed to use. I don't even know how they ended up with ARPS since, from what I saw when I looked into HAM radio, no one would have been allowed to start the project because, by virtue of being new, it wouldn't have been on the list of things that people are permitted to do.

Anyway, I eventually lost interest, but if I still cared I'd probably either use CB or FRS and just ignore the fact that what I was doing with those frequencies was illegal since it's unlikely anyone who heard the transmissions would give a shit anyway. Around here, both bands are rather vacant, so it's unlikely anyone would even notice what I was doing, never mind anyone caring about it.

Actually, the speed was controlled. You could feed those little motors whatever voltage you wanted and they'd continue to spin at the same speed. The problem was that the path between the motor and the tape movement contained a lot of variables, in particular a smooth rubber belt on pulleys doesn't guarantee a fixed rotational ratio like you get with gears, though I imagine that design was necessary to allow the flywheel to actually do its job and ensure a constant speed.

The big issue was that the things often just weren't calibrated well. As a kid, I liked to play my keyboard along with the music, but every time I got a new cassette player I had to take the thing apart and adjust the potentiometer in the motor until the music was in tune. After that, most store-bought tapes would be in tune, and I imagine those that weren't were more due to artists recording their music without bothering to tune their guitars properly than to the recording speed being incorrect.

I never had any of the sound quality issues people love to complain about. I had one tape that I had listened to for years, even breaking my own rules about where my tapes go by putting it into "untrusted" players, like the one in my car. So one day I thought I had probably degraded the sound quality by now, and so I bought a new copy, but I found it to be indistinguishable from the old copy. When I switched to CDs, it wasn't even because of better sound quality, because they simply weren't better in that regard. ...and why should they be? Tape can be as good as you want it to be simply by increasing the tape speed.

Wow... Suggest that everyone's happy delusion might actually be false and not only do you get no evidence to the contrary of your suggestion, but you get modded down as a troll as well. So much for discussion and the search for truth. I guess I'll have to find another web site if I want that.

I know that "hacker" originally meaning "talented programmer" is common knowledge on Slashdot, but is this story actually true?

The idea just seems like a popular meme. Slashdot is full of nerds. Nerds like to call themselves "hackers" because it sounds cool. Then someone introduces them to the idea that they're not calling themselves criminals because that's not what the word "hacker" originally meant, and they absorb that supposed fact without question because they so deeply want it to be true.

Is it actually true? Are there any references that support this history of the word's meaning that are of higher quality than "everyone on the internet says it's true?"

Even the Wikipedia article about the definition controversy lacks any citations relevant to the supposed original meaning, even as it makes statements like "the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized" which just scream for a "citation needed" tag.

If everyone stopped working 40 hours and instead worked only 32, we'd need 25% more employees to make up the difference. That would eliminate unemployment overnight. With unemployment eliminated, employers would have to compete for employees, which would drive up wages and result in more benefits like health insurance.

We already did it once during the great depression, when the standard 40 hour work week was invented. Before that, everyone worked 80 hour weeks, and they had no choice due to a mountain of people desperate for a job. If you didn't like it, you were immediately replaced by someone in the line of people literally sitting outside your employer's front door.

With automation continuing to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, we're slowly returning to that situation. Obviously we need to reduce the standard work week yet again to get things back to where we want them.

Labor prices don't respond to the free market. If you pay people less, all that happens is that their spouses enter the work force as well, and now there are even more people competing for the job you're offering, and so you can reduce wages yet again.

...or just not break it in the first place.

The problem stems from the URL being a machine address necessary to acquire content, but one that is also human-readable which inspires people to treat it as if it were the page's title or something and so they edit it as freely as they edit the page's content.

Just name all of your web pages by UUID. Then, since one random number is just as good as any other, you'll never again have the urge to change your URLs.

Similarly, just use random UUIDs as domain names, and you'll never again be bothered by having your first choice be unavailable. An added advantage of this is that you can name your site whatever you want regardless of what domain names are available since you've decided that your domain name doesn't have to match your web site's name. Suddenly the fact that virtually every domain name is being squatted upon no longer matters.