I was trying to root an old android device and put a custom ROM on it, and guess what? Most of the files were hosted on megaupload. I ended up spending more time looking for the files hosted on other sites than I spent actually messing with rooting.

I don't expect the kind, awesome people who created the rooting tools to check on stuff they uploaded 3 years ago and make sure links aren't broken; it would be nice if there was at least one place where you could safely store public files that won't be shut down. It's just like that older xkcd comic, with as awesome as the internet is, just transferring files around is still so frustratingly difficult sometimes.

This happened in Counter-Strike 1.x back in the day. Some people may hate me for admitting this, but I used to cheat in Counter-Strike and started scripting my own aimbots using some of the cheating software packages that were available back then. The reason I got so into it and started getting into the scripting was because I found a server that specifically allowed and encouraged hackers to join.

It was like playing a completely different game. A lot of people were using the same packages of cheats that I was using, so it became a game of tweaking tiny variables here and there to make sure that your first shot always hit the head. Then once you set everything up, you had to learn the maps carefully, specifically knowing which walls were able to be shot through. While a lot of people just ran around and let the aimbots do all the work, the people who were winning were using wallhacks to see players through walls, and use a bound key to toggle the aimbot to shoot through walls (normally it'd only shoot players with direct line of sight).

Yeah, in the end there was little skill required to actually play the game, but the rewarding part came when you knew your aimbot was better than the other guy's because of the tweaks you made to it. I got out of it when Valve started implementing cross-server bans.

There's another video interview with John Carmack about the headset over at giantbomb.com, and doesn't have some of the terrible background noise: http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2012-john-carmack-interview/17-6164/

He really goes into detail about why he was disappointed with previous headsets, and how he went about making his own and optimizing refresh rates and such.

I wouldn't be so quick to lump them into "professional" drivers -- anyone with enough practice can learn how to threshold brake. The more in-depth driving courses force students to practice it quite a few times so that hopefully it becomes second nature and you don't have to be in the right state of mind, you just do it naturally.

What always gets me is how little people seem to know about anti-lock braking, and specifically, how you should be braking. People should be practicing what instructors now call "threshold braking," where you find the point at where your wheels just start slipping and keep it around there. People should _not_ rely on ABS and simply slam on the brakes as hard as they can.

If you imagine a graph of the velocity of wheel rotation:
- Slamming on brakes without ABS makes graph stay at 0, meaning your car is sliding (not ideal obviously).
- If you slam on the brakes with ABS, the graph skips between spinning and flat, each spinning point getting slower until you stop. Every time it catches you sliding, it'll force the brakes off to make your tires roll again. This is better, because the brakes will catch more often, but it's still not the best.
- The threshold braking graph will be a downward pointing graph that goes from spinning to stopped without ever slipping.

Those with calculus backgrounds--the integral of the threshold braking graph will be smaller than that of ABS braking, meaning deceleration is quicker. It does take practice to learn how to tell when your car is slipping and letting off the brakes just a smidge until it's not, but it really is the better way to brake.

I took this as a sign to change all my passwords. It's been a pain in the ass honestly, and provided a nice overview of who is is good at letting you change passwords and who sucks. ICQ so far is by far the worst, you can't change it through their website, so you have to download their client, plus they don't allow special characters. Ebay's was really hard to find where to change it as well.

I just went through my bookmarks, starting with the imporant stuff and working my way down. Unfortunately, there are surely some sites i've forgotten. I'll have to change them as they come up, but are mostly throwaway accounts anyway.

I was about to post the same thing. I'm taking an online art class and the photograph is printed in the book, "Preble's Art Forms 9th Edition". I do find it fascinating how old news can suddenly jump into popularity all over the web.

Yes, I'm painfully aware of this. Lucky for me, there is still a lot of QA/QC work to be done to make sure that the program worked correctly and the model isn't screwed up.

Hence why I said that this is very cool :) I can think of more than a few instances where this backpack would come in handy. Unfortunately, noone is really dumping a lot of money into mapping caves, since there isn't anyone about to start constructing inside them. Right now the majority of the laser scan work I've done is for buildings where the original schematics are lost, or painfully out of date. I did once scan a rockslide so that someone could analyze what went wrong after the fact, but even that was over a large highway.

Just to add to my previous comment, working without gps is actually a bad thing for surveying work. For surveying work for the government/engineering firms, you need to show the model in state plane coordinates. Have you ever seen those little medal medallions on the sidewalk? Those are set by land surveyers who placed them with a very accurate GPS data to later come back and use for land size disputes, future engineering work, etc. It's what helps the electric company, the building contracters, the drainage people, all coordinate and make sure that whatever they're doing doesn't interfere with eachother.

Every year more and more companies are releasing algorithms that are getting better at automatically turning that data into simple 3d models. As someone who reduces this "raw" point cloud data by hand, these new methods are both a blessing and a curse in terms of ease of use/job security.

This thing is very very cool. Though we do have faster ways already than "painstakingly collecting in a stop and go fashion". I've worked with lasers attached to low-flying aircraft and also attached to a truck that can drive about 40 miles an hour. Two passes with the truck is just as good as this backpacks data. We primarily mount tracks on the truck and drive it on railroad tracks to collect data for upcoming rail projects. You can check out the technology at www.ambercore.com/titan.php

The coldest spot in the universe would be in Boulder Colorado where they do absolute zero experiments.

[source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/phenom-200801.html ]

This is kind of old news, Penny Arcade even made a comic about this way back in the day:
http://penny-arcade.smugmug.com/photos/215553534_T79Vh-L-2.jpg