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Darth is right, I sort of hijacked Raggits thread.

I've only dealt with police in traffic.. general experience is that I'm super polite about it, they're not at all, and I don't usually end up with tickets.  I've been demeaned, mocked and asked if I was stupid.  Well, no, I'm not stupid, I was in a little bit of a hurry and did something that I thought was safe given the circumstances even though it was a minor infraction of the law.  Regardless, they always ask if or imply that I am stupid.  There was one time that this did not happen, and that was when I got a ticket.  I was simply pulled over, gave my papers, given a ticket, and sent on my way.  Then I went to court to argue my case.  This is the proper way to deal with misdemeanors.  The reason it was different was because this particular small town was a speed trap and 99.5% of infractions were speeding.. i.e., he didn't have anything better to worry about.

But arguing with the police gets you gestapoed.  The thing is that they know certain things, while illegal, are very very minor in comparison with other things they could be dealing with, so if you're amiable you get away with a warning.  If you're a smartass and you point out that the law is too strict and what you were doing wasn't going to hurt anyone they justify lots of things that are entirely inappropriate, like choking.  COME ON, holding someone down, ok.  Twisting their arms to pain points to get them to subdue, ok.  Choking is torture, depriving you of oxygen, not an acceptable method of asserting your position of power to someone committing a misdemeanor.  Assault is a much more serious offense than skateboarding for civilians and it should be equally unacceptable as a repercussion for skateboarding, even though the perpetrators run.  On a tangent.. show me a place where bicycling is illegal.  The only difference is that there is a prejudice against kids, and knowing this, they fight it in a typical smart-assed teenage fashion.

The more I write about it the more I realize that in most cases the people who argue with and run away from police are the ones that most need to be taught a lesson.. but the proper channel is the judiciary system, not a police officer roughing them up.

Every time a discussion of the police comes up someone always chimes in, "Well they put up with a lot of crap."  This is true, but everyone who deals with the public deals with all manner of verbal abuse and the police are the only ones who can respond back with violence for that (usually triggered by waiting for minor resistance or any physical contact initiated by the perpetrator) and get away with it.

I don't think that the other people who are assholes make it justified for the cops to be arrogant and pretentious to everyone.  This isn't a case of a few bad ones either, there is a personally observed culture of arrogance and pretension, even (and especially) with the people I've closely known who are police officers.  You get confronted, it's understood that the attitude of the cop is going to be, "You're in the wrong, I'm righteous and I'm here to tell you what to do," when it should be, "Pretty sure what you just did is illegal, go talk with the judge about it."  They're not our judges and executioners, they're our enforcers.

I think the biggest problem with my county and local police is that they aren't paid crap.  There's a huge market for people with a high school education who want to tell other people what to do and get a company car to boot so they don't have to offer much money.  But if they did pay more, people would put up with more and do their job a lot better, probably without all of this extra nonsense.

In bigger cities with the budgets for it there is a requirement for an associates degree, higher pay, and a much more professional police force than I am used to dealing with.  The same goes for our state police.

Basically, I understand what the problem is, and it's that we don't pay for the extra quality that we need, but allowing people to get away with this crap just because it's hard to find good help isn't worth the consequence.

American beer tastes like ass. I'm told that this is because rice has been used with the beer stock ever since prohibition ended in the states so we don't have the full beer flavor that is supposed to be there. Even worse, this light beer craze is nuts. That stuff tastes like watered down ass.

It all gets me drunk, and quickly, but what're some good beers that I might find imported and in a low-point state?

I don't know if you guys have heard about this or not because it's fairly new, but brace yourself for some crazy shit.

The Warner Brothers decided to redesign the Looney Toons to fit in with today's hip anime generation.

Click here to view the preview. (.mov, 8mb)

In short:

Buzz: Team leader with laser and martial arts expertise
Duck: Weapons expert with built-in sonar
Roadster: Super speed
Spaz: Team muscle with jaws of steel
Lexi: Disguise expert with super hearing
Slick: Vehicles and surveillance; regeneration abilities

This is utterly ridiculous, much emphasized by this parody flash movie (not worksafe).

Ancient, Tiny Humans Shed New Light on Evolution

All Things Considered, October 27, 2004 · In a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, scientists have unearthed the bones of a species of human never seen before. About three-feet-tall when fully grown, Homo floresiensis resembles some of our most primitive ancestors -- but lived as recently as 13,000 years ago. They made tools and hunted dwarf elephants, but were physically unlike modern pygmies.

A missing link? The way the article talks, the answer is no.. but it's still interesting.

Thoughts?

Make a song, at least one minute long, which is classical themed and sounds fun.

All formats acceptable, but try to keep under 1.5mb. If you save as mp3 or ogg you can keep under that limit by saving in a lower bitrate or in mono.

EDIT: deadline extended due to forum downtime.

Mensa has an online "workout" quiz that will sort of determine whether you're likely to qualify for membership. I thought it was interesting, so I took it, and I made 20/30 with 28 questions answered in the timeframe given. According to the test, this means I have "a good chance," which probably means I'd score a couple of questions below the minimum and be laughed at. I took an IQ test in high school and wouldn't have qualified then.

You can take the test here. The time limit is 30 minutes, but it isn't imposed unless you want it to be.

For those not familiar with Mensa, it is an organization whose only membership requirements are that you score above 98% of the general population in a qualified IQ or Mensa test.

Every now and then, on humor sites, there'll be an eBay auction with something crazy in it, either the description or the item. Now there is a contest to see who can come up with the craziest auction. Check it out.

This one has got to be my favorite.

http://www.keyhole.com/

You can download a 7-day trial of software that will view any part of the world using satellite imagery mapped to a simple 3d translation of the Earth. I've noticed that you can zoom in close enough to figure out what kind of cars people drive in some places, but in others it's pixellated to hell. Fun to play with, nevertheless, because the entire Earth is mapped.

Best to have a fast computer, it's very heavy on system recourses. It requires faster internet connections too, because it's constantly downloading image data as you zoom in closer and closer.

It's also in full color, unlike sites like terraserver.microsoft.com.

This is kind of old news, but Blender 2.34 is out now. There are some pretty major improvements.

Changelist
Download page

Most notably, huge improvements in the particle system. Hair made with particles now recalculates in each animated frame. Particles can be assigned with force, so that you could make something like a water wheel, for example.

UV unwrapping is monumentally easier with a new LSCM tool.

Ramp shading allows much more freedom with organic objects, and now about the only thing missing that keeps Blender from rendering this kind of realism is the lack of sub-surface scattering and users who would spend 2 years working on such projects.

The game engine is further caught up with the old version (which was largely withheld when Blender was made open-source and the game engine had pieces that wouldn't allow it). Frustrum culling allows for much better framerates. The EXE export function is back, so that games don't have to be played through Blender. It still kind of sucks, but there's only one guy working on new features. In time, it will get better.

Something that is little known is that you could have had many of the above features months ago. I've been using LSCM unwrapping since just after the last release. You can download test compiles from the blender.org forums and play around with upcoming features before they are totally debugged. One toy I've been playing with is the real-time shadows for the game engine. I'm hoping that bumpmaps will follow. Another feature that is still in testing is integrated soft body dynamics. It was recently ported from a linux-only variant of Blender and is being debugged and improved upon. Previously there was only one plugin which could do this, and I recently found that it sucked hard compared to the new soft-body effects.

Anyway, enjoy, if you care for it.

EDIT:

Also, MakeHuman (poser for Blender) added muscle support right around the time 2.34 was released. I don't use it, so I don't know how good it is. Anouncement.

I've been doing nearly nonstop research into free energy, magnetics, and gyroscopic motion lately.. for me it's like one brain orgasm after another, for all of the stuff I find. The flipside is the tendency I have to want to kill people because inventions aren't used. For example, US patent #2982261, an engine which runs on air. I read that it produces a lot of heat, but it's a genuinely working device that uses plain air as its only fuel. You could say the oil companies bought it out, but this thing was filed in the 50's, which means more than 20 years ago it was already public domain.

But anyway, I digress. I need an image harvestor that will pull images by name. The design is simple, the files are simply named US00001111_01.tif where the 00001111 is the patent number and the 01 is the page number. See, some of these are upwards of 30 pages and that's a lot of tif to save before I can get to reading.

Any ideas?

This reminds me of the time that someone here offered to sell me 3ds Max for $50.

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040707-111203-6292r

I don't see how they can call that a loss.. note that the percentage of money "lost" (50%) is a lot higher than the percentage of software pirated, which tells me that the software that is pirated is largely overpriced. It especially isn't going to sell in some of the regions where piracy is the highest, coincidentally also where economies wouldn't allow much of it to be purchased.

So, my conclusion is that while this is a shocking amount of software piracy, it's really embellished as to how much these companies are losing.

[and all of the other entries can be viewed from here]

Over the weekend while studying for my finals I had to do something to keep my mind from wandering too much.. so I worked on a 3d scene between studying. I probably only spent a total of about 2 hours on it, but it was still an important diversion.

Anyway, it was an entry for a Weekend competition at elYsiun with the theme "Mad scientist." I didn't get many votes (not over, but I'll be lucky to reach 3 right now), but I don't know what makes the other entries so much better than mine. No one seems to want to tell me in the Finished works post I made because the elYsiun members have a habit of replying only to senior members (who coincidentally don't reply to much work at all either).

So this is where you come in.. I know what's wrong with the image visually (the bunsen burner's hose looks thick because of shadows, the text is too perfect, metal doesn't look real, etc), but what is there about it that makes it so much worse than the other entries?

Here is my entry (thumbnail) 138kb at 1280x1024 resolution:

"After consuming one of the chemicals he normally treated with great care, the professor went mad, he turned on all of the faucets, filled the board with his ramblings, and then passed out on the floor beneath it!"
===><===

and all of the other entries can be viewed from here

http://www.419eater.com/html/stev_ebe.htm

This is brilliant, hilarious, and something I plan to do in the future.

E-mail scammer gets scammed and tricked into taking photos holding a sign saying, "I take it up the arse."

EDIT:
Holy crap, there's a whole gallery full of these people!

http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/

I know some of you guys are trying to learn Blender, and it's hard because of the outdated recourses. Now the new guide has been placed online by the BF (Blender Foundation) for anyone to download, server costs paid by book sales.

I hope this will encourage more to learn Blender.. I'm going to enter the next MAGS contest to make a tutorial using Blender's toon shading, I've decided. Finals are next week, after which I will have ample free time.

EDIT:

I've been reading through this a bit, and the manual is really good and most importantly, COMPLETE. I have a PDF, it's 32 mb though.. I suppose if you wanted to print it this would be more useful, if you were willing to do all 558 pages.

If you know nothing about Blender, this explains everything from beginning to end.

http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24147

Originally, someone with the name "Stonesour" made a post at elYsiun (Blender 3d community) in the "Finished Works" forum that had "test" as a title and "trr" as it's only text. The reaction was basically the forum members critiquing his text, since it was in the critique forum. It never got locked or deleted, but was eventually moved. That kind of crap really annoys a lot of people at elYsiun, but the mods still don't delete everything. This guy, Valarking, decided to test out other internet forums to see what the general reaction was. The results are sometimes funny, because it can easily generate anything from locking to a political argument.

The original question posed by Einstein was “Who keeps the fish?”

In a street there are 5 houses painted 5 different colors. In each house lives a person of a different nationality. The 5 homeowners each drink a different beverage,
smoke a different brand of cigar, and keep a different pet.

The question is: Who keeps the fish?

HINTS:

1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede has a dog.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The owner of the green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes pall mall has birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the center house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes blends lives next to the one who has cats.
11. The man who has horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhills.
12. The man who smokes blue master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Albert Einstein wrote this riddle in the early 20th century. He said that 98% of the population would not be able to solve it. Good luck.

I think that at the turn of the century, perhaps 98% of people couldn't solve this. However, in another forum I go to, at least 5 people have solved it already out of my estimated 15 who tried.

Try to figure it out. It might take a while, and if you get it I'm sure you'll be excited, but don't post it here, PM me and I'll tell you if you are correct. I want to see a realistic amount of people who can solve it.

Use Excel or some heavy Algebra for best results. It took a couple of sheets of paper for me to get it, and ~45 minutes thinking really hard.

BALETED!!

Words can't describe how hilarious this is.

The bad guys finally got what was "coming" to them (it's a pun, if you watch all the way to the end, you'll get it).

Still though, why would someone animate the teenage mutant ninja turtles getting it on? Someone going to Harvard University..

http://img32.photobucket.com/albums/v96/shbazjinkens/rocky_fin.jpg

I made him for practice and to use in a battle system I'm working on with Blender.. It's one of my friends with Cloud Strife influences. He has 1,004 tris, and carries a sword that ways in at 98 tris (edit: yes 98, not 998 ). A 256x256 pixel colormap supplies them with their rugged good looks. The Turtle is an untextured WIP that he will fight once I'm finished.

Any thoughts? I have a WIP thread and a finished work thread at elYsiun, but I was hoping someone here might be mean to me and tell me what's wrong with it (not that it's blocky, because that is something that must be done to be compatible with slower systems).

The two in the bottom right (front and back views) are viewing in "orthographic" mode, which means they appear proportionally accurate, while the others are in "perspective" mode, so they appear like a photo would, with depth perception. That is why they appear slightly different. It was made to look good in perspective mode because that's how game engines display, usually.

The Gimp is now available in it's shiny brand-new 2.0 form. The interface has much improved and there is a "better" windows version. I'm told that people with thousands of fonts have problems opening it and you need to use a debug statement in the launch line like "-nofonts" or something.

Anyways, go, download. Some of the new features include font editing, window docking, and photoshop (psd) files can be opened AND saved.

I found this anti-America video through a hotlink, thought it was pretty funny.

Fucking USA

Also, it seems like being an independent country and all, they'd make a better webpage. http://www.korea-dpr.com/

How did they figure out how to make an atomic bomb again?