I don't have much to say about your post except to protest your quote on Medical companies, because it's an area where I have very strong opinions.
Medical research. The private sector is doing amazing things in this area - why? Because by not taking Federal money for all lines of research they are left with options they would lose otherwise. Getting the Feds involved handcuffs researchers in more ways than you can count. Medical research is big money, the risks are great but the rewards are great. Keeping people living longer means more money for the companies that can provide it. The government has no interest in you living longer as you cost them more money when you do. (remember that entitlement section of the budget? Nearly half directly spent there).
Think about what you wrote here. The government wants old people to die because they cost the government too much money. I hardly think they are that callous, especially since most of the people in the government are old men! But even if they did, think about what this means for the motivation of the private medical corporations. They want you old AND SICK!
And this is where my distrust of privatized medical research comes into play.
I ask you, why would a private midical research facility research a medicine that cures an illness? Why would a medical company fund research for a cure they can sell once when you can develop a treatment they can sell to the same patient continuously? Have you ever wondered why there are effective treatments for HIV/AIDS but no cure? Why spend money on developing a cure when there is so much more money to be had by treating HIV/AIDS patients indefinitely.
In recent year there has been no development of new types of penicillin. Why? Becuase it is very expensive to develop a new strain and they become obsoleted (the bacteria they kill become immune) rather quickly. So what is the result? If no new variants of penicillin are made within the next few years, within a decade or so people will start dying from ordinary infections. Operations will become so dangerous to perform that people will elect not to have them made. If you prick your finger on a rusty nail and get blood poisoning, you will perhaps die.
Privately funded research is a bad idea. You cannot have a company that has to make a profit and have the peoples best interest at heart all the time. Especially not in these days of daytrading, where the bottom line is how much profit you can make. Until shareholders start demanding cures for illnesses instead of a quick cashin, the medical companies will continue as they do.
And this is no conspiracy theory. This is just common sense. The money flow here comes from companies that want to maximize their profits. It's not hard to see when they fight tooth and nail to have pirated AIDS-medicines stopped when those pirated medicines are helping people in Africa to poor to buy their expensive medicines in the first place.
Also, remember that an amazing amount (I've heard figures as high as 80%) of a medical company's budget goes to advertising, buying trips for doctors to write out their brand of medicine. If the government funded all medical research, i doubt that 80% of the funds would go to waste even in a very corrupt system. Think about the price cuts if you could get the cost of medicine down 80%, how much cheaper would government spending be? How many more people could get medicine?
I'm talking about highly disciplined agile methods, where you include practices like test-driven development, acceptance testing, pair programming, collocated teams, in-room product management, aggressive refactoring, short iterations (like a week), and frequent releases (daily to monthly, no more).
What part of this is not structured?:-)
I think the problem here is that I'm Swedish and that I am not a theorist programmer but rather a practical one. Structured programming appears to be a special type of programming, I may be familiar with it but it's not what I'm referring to in my post. All I meant was that to be able to cope you must be thorough, have a clear policy on what to do and when and be careful how you solve your problems.
Quick iterations and being "agile" in your programming does not necessarily mean that you skip designing tests or that you write specifications and follow plans, it merely means that your plans are flexible enough to cope with rapid changes. So rather than having long meetings with your customer you can have successive releases with feedback.
But I must also point out that for every example you can give with a success story like Flickr, there are 99 abject failures that show how difficult it is to be flexible this way, it demands discipline.
Maybe it is even so that the more flexible and agile you are the more discipline you need to have.
I'm not sure of any line of work where that happens, let alone any other.
Not exactly sure what you mean, but I think you mean that you don't think that software engineering begins without a definition or specification of what the customer wants. Which isn't exactly my experience. Sure, the customer has a list of things he wants and a problem he wants solved, but it is never (yes, not seldom or rarely, never) complete or very accurate. First order of business before engineering begins would be to ask more questions and build a real idea of what it is the customer actually wants.
This process is fairly well established in ship/house/car/bridge/other-type-of-construction-building but not in software engineering, unfortunately.
Then again, as someone else pointed out in this thread, more often than not the customers demands will change so often and so quickly that you are best to keep your implementation as open as possible so that things can be added and removed on short notice. But this depends on the customer. Medical firms tend to want more stability and aren't as fickle, for example, whereas a web-shop will be sending you daily updates to the specifications.
In what other line of work does principal construction begin before the customer has defined what it is they are ordering?
A software is not a product in itself. It's not like an "apple" or an "orange", it's more like a "building" or a "vehicle". A building and a vehicle can be the solution to many different problems. A truck doesn't necessarily solve a customers problem if he's looking for a way to transport people in style from A to B.
But while I think that most people understand this, they have a very fuzzy and indistinct concept of the cost of changing the specification once construction has begun because you can't walk the customer out to the building, point at the construction and say: "To make the changes you require we will have to tear out that wall there, remove all the concrete laid here, that will require a week and scrap more than four tonnes of construction material".
This is where software engineering comes in: With a good model and by sticking to the principle that you begin with a specification from which you construct a series of test to see if the specification has been fulfilled. From the specification a design is made. The design specification is used to implement tests to see that the design has been followed. From the design the code is written and on the code the tests are run.
Now when the customer changes the specification you can look at the design and the code and see (hopefully) how substantial the changes will be and what the cost will be. Your customer will thank you for being more accurate in your estimation, for pointing out the costs (which is the only thing your customer will care about, remember that time is money and is just another type of cost).
I have so far only worked in one workplace where this model was used and it was used very successfully in my opinion. Writing all those documents surely sucked, until it came time for implementation, which was frighteningly quick and painless. The ultimate pride for the well documented, well planned, well concieved and tested code has made me utterly incapable of being satisfied with any other way of working (which is why I've switched jobs a lot).
Changing to a structured approach to working is costly, but the benifits are bountiful and will ultimately save money and time. I can almost promise that while you might lose a customer or some goodwill of a few customers in the interim, in the long run, the customers will flock to you since you are delivering on time, the functionality they asked for.
You are correct in that there is a special case. I stand corrected. However, this hardly nullifies the rest of my argument, but thank you for pointing this out. I hadn't thought of that.
My reaction as well, so corpoprations now have a new problem: they can no longer hide their illegal practices from the legal system. Shock! Horror! What injustice!
Am I the stupid one here or is this in fact a good thing for corporations? Maybe now corrupt practices will become so dangerous that the people that remain employed might actually be the honest people (gasp).
You are wrong about one thing though, corporations were never invented to serve the public, they have no other purpose than to make money for their owners (which in a lot of cases are stock holders). That's it. They can have statutes and whatnot that say that they should give back to the community and serve the countries they work in or whatever but that's just dressing on top of the one basic tenet: make money for your owners.
I say, when big companies break the law, people should go to jail, preferably the responsible people, so going through e-mails to find out who instigated what and why is a Good Thing(TM).
Is this not what that swedish hacker said?
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Spying On Tor
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is what happens in a knee-jerk-reaction-based society. You point out a security flaw, instantly identifying yourself as a security threat, get thrown into jail and while your very public trial is going on, the real bad guys are utilizing the very security flaws you found to do Bad Things(TM).
Actually, it's more like saying "please give us a key to your gym-locker so that we can check it for evidence". A gym-locker is in a place where it could very conceivably be broken into by a third party, the contents exchanged and the lock replaced. Thus you would be sitting there with a key that won't work to a locker registered in your name containing incriminating evidence even though you are innocent.
A computer that is connected to the internet is rarely more secure than a gym-locker.
We were not discussing just split-screen-games, we were discussing all games. If split-screen-games for console are more expensive because of this feature, why are the games I mentioned above more expensive as well? As you yourself said, none of them are split-screen. I don't really see your point.
Besides, split-screen is going out of style, even the game you mention Super Smash Bros. Brawl is going to be online-play for Wii.
The price level here is rediculous, of course, but even if Wii games are half price where you lived compared to here, I bet PC games are cheaper still.
Your logic doesn't quite carry over to games that are the same/similar between the platforms, such as:
Tiger Woods PGA 08: PS3 = 579kr ($92), Wii = 519kr ($83) and PC = 374kr ($59)
Colin McRae Dirt: PS3 = 515kr ($82), X-Box 360 = 394kr ($63) and PC = 234kr ($37)
Valve's Orange Box: PS3 = 559kr ($89), X-Box 360 = 559kr ($89) and PC = 393kr ($62)
If you think that Super Smash Bros. Brawl costs $100 because it is multiplayer, you are naive. It is that expensive because it is a Nintendo exclusive game, with Super Mario and on a console with very little or no piracy. Or more simply explained: This is what they can charge for the game and people will happily (or grudgingly) pay.
Also, I forgot to mention what PS3 games (and Wii games for that matter) cost here in Sweden. A fairly recent game will set you back 600kr, which is the equivalent of about $100. New games for PC are $50.
The scary part is that people seem to be paying these prices for these games. It's mad!
I know what you mean. I went to a large electronics outlet here in Sweden, wanting to buy one of two new games that had just been released. One was for Wii and one for PS3. Neither was available and when I looked through the games that were available I could just confirm what I already knew: the Wii and the PS3 aren't worth buying yet. In a year or so more, there will probably be one or two games worth buying for the PS3 and the Wii will have some big games available. Right now, they're both lame ducks compared to the 360.
And you must realize that I have both a Wii and a PS3 (for which I bought a 15.000kr (about $2400) television), so I'm not saying this because I'm a 360 fanboy but rather the opposite. I will never buy a 360 (simply because of its maker).
Regarding what you said about FPS, I agree. FPS should be handled with a mouse. Why there are no gaming mice with some sort of free-hand keyboard available (and supported) for all consoles I don't know. But then again, the PS3 doesn't even have friggin force feedback for their steering wheels (it boggles the mind, it's like not having a rumble-feature in the controller).
There appears to be one company, Splitfish, who have realised the need for mice for gaming consoles, unfortunately the quality of the device seems not to be okay, so I'm still waiting for a proper gaming mouse. However, Resistance Fall Of Man is actually playable with just the controller once you realise that you should adjust your aim not with the aiming stick but with your movement stick. Worked for me.:)
Well, I'm happy with my Wii purchase anyway, playing Super Mario Party 8 with four people is fun (mostly because I always win) and Big Brain Academy is also fun, plus playing FPS on Wii is actually OK (although a mouse would still have been preferable). The PS3 is for me just a glorified Media Center and DVD-player, a job of which it is not doing very well for some reason. I'm having trouble with my TV I think, because I can't imagine the picture should look this way.
Both Novell and Redhat make GNU/Linux distributions, which they sell with hardware. This means that their product (the GNU/Linux) contains the patents. They are not simply selling the software. Of course, you could argue that they have not written the patent-infringing software itself, but that, I think (IANAL), is covered by IP law. When you buy a piece of technology from a subcontractor, the contracts will probably stipulate that all technology in the device has been licensed from any patent holders, releasing the buyer from liability. Since OSS is used without such contracts, there is no protection for the user.
Wrong. They're not attacking GNU/Linux. They are attacking companies that make money selling Linux. They're not after the people who won't pay for an operating system, they're after the people who will. This suit is against Redhat and Novell, who provide a system with a GUI, that GUI infringes on the patent.
My question is, what product does this company sell that they can claim to have lost revenue on? Or is IP law so crap that there is no need to even have made an attempt at creating a product to be able to sue someone for damages? I mean, I can understand royalties, but damages?
Also, it will be interesting to see when they informed Redhat and Novell of the infringement since they are suing for willful infringement.
Is it possible for Chinese people to vote no confidence in the ruling party?
Possibly, but who would they be replaced with?:-P
Let me clarify that I'm not an advocate of the Chinese government and make it clear that I don't think they are actually democratic. What I'm saying is that the democracy that Plato once laid down the rules for looks very different from our modern day definition and that there are many totalitarian regimes in the world that claim to be democratic. See the wikipedia page about democracy for a more in depth analysis of this.
Exactly. It is understandable why people often gets these facts wrong since all (practically) communist governments in the world have been dictatorships in one form or another. But it must be noted that communism in itself does not exclude democracy. Democracy means that the majority rules. In the original democracies, not all people were allowed to vote (only the people who turned up for the meetings, excluding slaves and women, of course).
Democracy is often confused with a "fair" governmental systems because it is what most western countries have. But the fact of the matter is that China is a democracy. Of course there is only one party to vote for and all other parties are forbidden, but a democracy doesn't mean that it has to be fair. Many people have different opinions on what a democracy is, how it should be run and a democratic system is often unfair to the minority (which is the most difficult part of a democracy, how to activate those people who feel marginalised and make them feel like they are part of the system).
What the NZ government is doing is very interesting. The wiki obviously isn't supposed to be used for new laws, but it will probably be a very good source of interesting ideas for the government to ponder, a very democratic thing to do. In an ultimate democracy all people would vote for all decisions of government (of course this would be impossible and impractical since all people will neither have the time nor the inclanation to get the information needed to make informed decisions). This way you get the best of both worlds, anyone interested enough can speak up and those with the knowledge and position to make the changes can read ti and pick up good ideas. Very nice.
The one where a mac zealot says that M$ just badly imitates Apple, and the inevitable response that Apple in turn steals all their ideas from elsewhere.
The real danger with non-leathal weapons is that the line for using them will get moved down further and further until it is OK to tazer a kid who is behaving badly in class. Hence the proposal to use these "non-lethal" weapons once on all who intend to use them. If they are so non-lethal, it should be safe, and afterward I think that the users will be less likely to utilize them indiscriminantly.
Those people who still will misuse them should be filtered out of the police force anyway because they will be psychopaths. The police department have their share of these people too and should (if they don't) have safeguards in place to remove them (before they become police officers peferably).
I have a generally favourable view of law enforcement people. Most of them are real nice people. But power corrupts and non-lethal weapons for sure is more power than a gun. With a gun you can kill someone but if you kill the wrong guy you're in big trouble. With a tazer, you can disable someone and if you tazer the wrong person, no harm done, right?
No I'm not. I'm fairly sure they don't do that in Sweden, where I live. Is CS gas tear-gas? If it is, then its not exactly the same thing as pepper spray or tazers. I think the reason why they have to be subjected to tear gas is partly because in a situation where tear-gas is employed, they will be working in it and they have to know the consequences of not operating their gas masks properly. I did that in my army training (well, not me, but the others did, I was sick at that occasion and never got the "chance" to try it:).
Being tazered I think would make anyone think twice before using it. I have been electrocuted with 220 volts and that was not fun (although my lab partner who handed me the live wires thought I made a funny face, I haven't quite forgiven him for it yet he is still my friend). Anyone who has been in contact with live voltage knows that the pain doesn't quite go away just because the electricity does, it lingers for quite a while.
Since non-leathal weapons are not leathal, there is no reason not to use them.
This is what we're seeing everywhere where the police force gets these weapons. They tend to use them more and more liberally as time goes by. At first the weapon is a bit of an unknown, you don't know its effect and you are told by your superiors that it is to be used only as a last recourse. So you do.
After a while, you become quite comfortable with knowing that anyone you spray/tazer becomes easier to handle and very rarely does anyone have a good case of excessive force. "He/she was resisting!" is generally enough for any judge.
In the end, it all comes down to the simple fact that the people who use these weapons don't know how they feel. It should be required that every member of the law enforcement should feel the effects of the weapons they use at least once. This should be so with knight-sticks and other such utilities as well, but since these can actually permanently disable people this would be impractical, but pepper spray and tazer should be fine.
Using pepper spray is the equivalent of punching someone in the face. Tazer is the equivalent of beating someone in the head with a gold brick wrapped in a lemon. If everyone thought like this, then these weapons would not be used as much.
Ah. But, you see, to me that ending was a cop-out, just for the very reason you discribe.
Well, your opinion is just as valid as mine, and since someone else here also liked the ending, then I must concede that maybe he wrote a good ending after all. It just didn't sit too well with me.:)
Nevertheless it is interesting to note that the longer his books took to write, the shorter they were. The first book, which took a really long time to write (I think 10 years or something) was fairly short, 200 pages or something, and then I remember getting the one with the train, which was really thick. Fortunately, King has such a high lowest standard that even when he was writing those really long books, they were very good, unlike Robert Jordan, whose penchant for infuriatingly (but amazingly) detailed descriptions of peoples and places just grinds any story line to a screeching halt.
Say what you want about the length of King's books, but he is very very rarely longwinded.
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I don't have much to say about your post except to protest your quote on Medical companies, because it's an area where I have very strong opinions.
Medical research. The private sector is doing amazing things in this area - why? Because by not taking Federal money for all lines of research they are left with options they would lose otherwise. Getting the Feds involved handcuffs researchers in more ways than you can count. Medical research is big money, the risks are great but the rewards are great. Keeping people living longer means more money for the companies that can provide it. The government has no interest in you living longer as you cost them more money when you do. (remember that entitlement section of the budget? Nearly half directly spent there).Think about what you wrote here. The government wants old people to die because they cost the government too much money. I hardly think they are that callous, especially since most of the people in the government are old men! But even if they did, think about what this means for the motivation of the private medical corporations. They want you old AND SICK!
And this is where my distrust of privatized medical research comes into play.
I ask you, why would a private midical research facility research a medicine that cures an illness? Why would a medical company fund research for a cure they can sell once when you can develop a treatment they can sell to the same patient continuously? Have you ever wondered why there are effective treatments for HIV/AIDS but no cure? Why spend money on developing a cure when there is so much more money to be had by treating HIV/AIDS patients indefinitely.
In recent year there has been no development of new types of penicillin. Why? Becuase it is very expensive to develop a new strain and they become obsoleted (the bacteria they kill become immune) rather quickly. So what is the result? If no new variants of penicillin are made within the next few years, within a decade or so people will start dying from ordinary infections. Operations will become so dangerous to perform that people will elect not to have them made. If you prick your finger on a rusty nail and get blood poisoning, you will perhaps die.
Privately funded research is a bad idea. You cannot have a company that has to make a profit and have the peoples best interest at heart all the time. Especially not in these days of daytrading, where the bottom line is how much profit you can make. Until shareholders start demanding cures for illnesses instead of a quick cashin, the medical companies will continue as they do.
And this is no conspiracy theory. This is just common sense. The money flow here comes from companies that want to maximize their profits. It's not hard to see when they fight tooth and nail to have pirated AIDS-medicines stopped when those pirated medicines are helping people in Africa to poor to buy their expensive medicines in the first place.
Also, remember that an amazing amount (I've heard figures as high as 80%) of a medical company's budget goes to advertising, buying trips for doctors to write out their brand of medicine. If the government funded all medical research, i doubt that 80% of the funds would go to waste even in a very corrupt system. Think about the price cuts if you could get the cost of medicine down 80%, how much cheaper would government spending be? How many more people could get medicine?
What part of this is not structured? :-)
I think the problem here is that I'm Swedish and that I am not a theorist programmer but rather a practical one. Structured programming appears to be a special type of programming, I may be familiar with it but it's not what I'm referring to in my post. All I meant was that to be able to cope you must be thorough, have a clear policy on what to do and when and be careful how you solve your problems.
Quick iterations and being "agile" in your programming does not necessarily mean that you skip designing tests or that you write specifications and follow plans, it merely means that your plans are flexible enough to cope with rapid changes. So rather than having long meetings with your customer you can have successive releases with feedback.
But I must also point out that for every example you can give with a success story like Flickr, there are 99 abject failures that show how difficult it is to be flexible this way, it demands discipline.
Maybe it is even so that the more flexible and agile you are the more discipline you need to have.
Not exactly sure what you mean, but I think you mean that you don't think that software engineering begins without a definition or specification of what the customer wants. Which isn't exactly my experience. Sure, the customer has a list of things he wants and a problem he wants solved, but it is never (yes, not seldom or rarely, never) complete or very accurate. First order of business before engineering begins would be to ask more questions and build a real idea of what it is the customer actually wants.
This process is fairly well established in ship/house/car/bridge/other-type-of-construction-building but not in software engineering, unfortunately.
Then again, as someone else pointed out in this thread, more often than not the customers demands will change so often and so quickly that you are best to keep your implementation as open as possible so that things can be added and removed on short notice. But this depends on the customer. Medical firms tend to want more stability and aren't as fickle, for example, whereas a web-shop will be sending you daily updates to the specifications.
In what other line of work does principal construction begin before the customer has defined what it is they are ordering?
A software is not a product in itself. It's not like an "apple" or an "orange", it's more like a "building" or a "vehicle". A building and a vehicle can be the solution to many different problems. A truck doesn't necessarily solve a customers problem if he's looking for a way to transport people in style from A to B.
But while I think that most people understand this, they have a very fuzzy and indistinct concept of the cost of changing the specification once construction has begun because you can't walk the customer out to the building, point at the construction and say: "To make the changes you require we will have to tear out that wall there, remove all the concrete laid here, that will require a week and scrap more than four tonnes of construction material".
This is where software engineering comes in: With a good model and by sticking to the principle that you begin with a specification from which you construct a series of test to see if the specification has been fulfilled. From the specification a design is made. The design specification is used to implement tests to see that the design has been followed. From the design the code is written and on the code the tests are run.
Now when the customer changes the specification you can look at the design and the code and see (hopefully) how substantial the changes will be and what the cost will be. Your customer will thank you for being more accurate in your estimation, for pointing out the costs (which is the only thing your customer will care about, remember that time is money and is just another type of cost).
I have so far only worked in one workplace where this model was used and it was used very successfully in my opinion. Writing all those documents surely sucked, until it came time for implementation, which was frighteningly quick and painless. The ultimate pride for the well documented, well planned, well concieved and tested code has made me utterly incapable of being satisfied with any other way of working (which is why I've switched jobs a lot).
Changing to a structured approach to working is costly, but the benifits are bountiful and will ultimately save money and time. I can almost promise that while you might lose a customer or some goodwill of a few customers in the interim, in the long run, the customers will flock to you since you are delivering on time, the functionality they asked for.
You are correct in that there is a special case. I stand corrected. However, this hardly nullifies the rest of my argument, but thank you for pointing this out. I hadn't thought of that.
My reaction as well, so corpoprations now have a new problem: they can no longer hide their illegal practices from the legal system. Shock! Horror! What injustice!
Am I the stupid one here or is this in fact a good thing for corporations? Maybe now corrupt practices will become so dangerous that the people that remain employed might actually be the honest people (gasp).
You are wrong about one thing though, corporations were never invented to serve the public, they have no other purpose than to make money for their owners (which in a lot of cases are stock holders). That's it. They can have statutes and whatnot that say that they should give back to the community and serve the countries they work in or whatever but that's just dressing on top of the one basic tenet: make money for your owners.
I say, when big companies break the law, people should go to jail, preferably the responsible people, so going through e-mails to find out who instigated what and why is a Good Thing(TM).
Don't you mean "Screw you guys, I'm going home"
This is what happens in a knee-jerk-reaction-based society. You point out a security flaw, instantly identifying yourself as a security threat, get thrown into jail and while your very public trial is going on, the real bad guys are utilizing the very security flaws you found to do Bad Things(TM).
Good grief.
Actually, it's more like saying "please give us a key to your gym-locker so that we can check it for evidence". A gym-locker is in a place where it could very conceivably be broken into by a third party, the contents exchanged and the lock replaced. Thus you would be sitting there with a key that won't work to a locker registered in your name containing incriminating evidence even though you are innocent.
A computer that is connected to the internet is rarely more secure than a gym-locker.
I, for one, welcome or new computer criminal statue overlords!
We were not discussing just split-screen-games, we were discussing all games. If split-screen-games for console are more expensive because of this feature, why are the games I mentioned above more expensive as well? As you yourself said, none of them are split-screen. I don't really see your point.
Besides, split-screen is going out of style, even the game you mention Super Smash Bros. Brawl is going to be online-play for Wii.
The price level here is rediculous, of course, but even if Wii games are half price where you lived compared to here, I bet PC games are cheaper still.
Your logic doesn't quite carry over to games that are the same/similar between the platforms, such as:
Tiger Woods PGA 08: PS3 = 579kr ($92), Wii = 519kr ($83) and PC = 374kr ($59)
Colin McRae Dirt: PS3 = 515kr ($82), X-Box 360 = 394kr ($63) and PC = 234kr ($37)
Valve's Orange Box: PS3 = 559kr ($89), X-Box 360 = 559kr ($89) and PC = 393kr ($62)
If you think that Super Smash Bros. Brawl costs $100 because it is multiplayer, you are naive. It is that expensive because it is a Nintendo exclusive game, with Super Mario and on a console with very little or no piracy. Or more simply explained: This is what they can charge for the game and people will happily (or grudgingly) pay.
Also, I forgot to mention what PS3 games (and Wii games for that matter) cost here in Sweden. A fairly recent game will set you back 600kr, which is the equivalent of about $100. New games for PC are $50.
The scary part is that people seem to be paying these prices for these games. It's mad!
Rant warning
I know what you mean. I went to a large electronics outlet here in Sweden, wanting to buy one of two new games that had just been released. One was for Wii and one for PS3. Neither was available and when I looked through the games that were available I could just confirm what I already knew: the Wii and the PS3 aren't worth buying yet. In a year or so more, there will probably be one or two games worth buying for the PS3 and the Wii will have some big games available. Right now, they're both lame ducks compared to the 360.
And you must realize that I have both a Wii and a PS3 (for which I bought a 15.000kr (about $2400) television), so I'm not saying this because I'm a 360 fanboy but rather the opposite. I will never buy a 360 (simply because of its maker).
Regarding what you said about FPS, I agree. FPS should be handled with a mouse. Why there are no gaming mice with some sort of free-hand keyboard available (and supported) for all consoles I don't know. But then again, the PS3 doesn't even have friggin force feedback for their steering wheels (it boggles the mind, it's like not having a rumble-feature in the controller).
There appears to be one company, Splitfish, who have realised the need for mice for gaming consoles, unfortunately the quality of the device seems not to be okay, so I'm still waiting for a proper gaming mouse. However, Resistance Fall Of Man is actually playable with just the controller once you realise that you should adjust your aim not with the aiming stick but with your movement stick. Worked for me. :)
Well, I'm happy with my Wii purchase anyway, playing Super Mario Party 8 with four people is fun (mostly because I always win) and Big Brain Academy is also fun, plus playing FPS on Wii is actually OK (although a mouse would still have been preferable). The PS3 is for me just a glorified Media Center and DVD-player, a job of which it is not doing very well for some reason. I'm having trouble with my TV I think, because I can't imagine the picture should look this way.
The list begins and ends with "Safety Dance". Why would you need any other music?! (sings)"Everybody pull up your pants..."
You are right, of course. I don't know what I was thinking. :)
I blame that it was late friday afternoon and I was mentally already on my way home from work...
Both Novell and Redhat make GNU/Linux distributions, which they sell with hardware. This means that their product (the GNU/Linux) contains the patents. They are not simply selling the software. Of course, you could argue that they have not written the patent-infringing software itself, but that, I think (IANAL), is covered by IP law. When you buy a piece of technology from a subcontractor, the contracts will probably stipulate that all technology in the device has been licensed from any patent holders, releasing the buyer from liability. Since OSS is used without such contracts, there is no protection for the user.
Wrong. They're not attacking GNU/Linux. They are attacking companies that make money selling Linux. They're not after the people who won't pay for an operating system, they're after the people who will. This suit is against Redhat and Novell, who provide a system with a GUI, that GUI infringes on the patent.
My question is, what product does this company sell that they can claim to have lost revenue on? Or is IP law so crap that there is no need to even have made an attempt at creating a product to be able to sue someone for damages? I mean, I can understand royalties, but damages?
Also, it will be interesting to see when they informed Redhat and Novell of the infringement since they are suing for willful infringement.
Possibly, but who would they be replaced with? :-P
Let me clarify that I'm not an advocate of the Chinese government and make it clear that I don't think they are actually democratic. What I'm saying is that the democracy that Plato once laid down the rules for looks very different from our modern day definition and that there are many totalitarian regimes in the world that claim to be democratic. See the wikipedia page about democracy for a more in depth analysis of this.
Exactly. It is understandable why people often gets these facts wrong since all (practically) communist governments in the world have been dictatorships in one form or another. But it must be noted that communism in itself does not exclude democracy. Democracy means that the majority rules. In the original democracies, not all people were allowed to vote (only the people who turned up for the meetings, excluding slaves and women, of course).
Democracy is often confused with a "fair" governmental systems because it is what most western countries have. But the fact of the matter is that China is a democracy. Of course there is only one party to vote for and all other parties are forbidden, but a democracy doesn't mean that it has to be fair. Many people have different opinions on what a democracy is, how it should be run and a democratic system is often unfair to the minority (which is the most difficult part of a democracy, how to activate those people who feel marginalised and make them feel like they are part of the system).
What the NZ government is doing is very interesting. The wiki obviously isn't supposed to be used for new laws, but it will probably be a very good source of interesting ideas for the government to ponder, a very democratic thing to do. In an ultimate democracy all people would vote for all decisions of government (of course this would be impossible and impractical since all people will neither have the time nor the inclanation to get the information needed to make informed decisions). This way you get the best of both worlds, anyone interested enough can speak up and those with the knowledge and position to make the changes can read ti and pick up good ideas. Very nice.
The one where a mac zealot says that M$ just badly imitates Apple, and the inevitable response that Apple in turn steals all their ideas from elsewhere.
Exactly.
If a weapon is non leathal, why not use it?
The real danger with non-leathal weapons is that the line for using them will get moved down further and further until it is OK to tazer a kid who is behaving badly in class. Hence the proposal to use these "non-lethal" weapons once on all who intend to use them. If they are so non-lethal, it should be safe, and afterward I think that the users will be less likely to utilize them indiscriminantly.
Those people who still will misuse them should be filtered out of the police force anyway because they will be psychopaths. The police department have their share of these people too and should (if they don't) have safeguards in place to remove them (before they become police officers peferably).
I have a generally favourable view of law enforcement people. Most of them are real nice people. But power corrupts and non-lethal weapons for sure is more power than a gun. With a gun you can kill someone but if you kill the wrong guy you're in big trouble. With a tazer, you can disable someone and if you tazer the wrong person, no harm done, right?
No I'm not. I'm fairly sure they don't do that in Sweden, where I live. Is CS gas tear-gas? If it is, then its not exactly the same thing as pepper spray or tazers. I think the reason why they have to be subjected to tear gas is partly because in a situation where tear-gas is employed, they will be working in it and they have to know the consequences of not operating their gas masks properly. I did that in my army training (well, not me, but the others did, I was sick at that occasion and never got the "chance" to try it :).
Being tazered I think would make anyone think twice before using it. I have been electrocuted with 220 volts and that was not fun (although my lab partner who handed me the live wires thought I made a funny face, I haven't quite forgiven him for it yet he is still my friend). Anyone who has been in contact with live voltage knows that the pain doesn't quite go away just because the electricity does, it lingers for quite a while.
Exactly right.
Since non-leathal weapons are not leathal, there is no reason not to use them.
This is what we're seeing everywhere where the police force gets these weapons. They tend to use them more and more liberally as time goes by. At first the weapon is a bit of an unknown, you don't know its effect and you are told by your superiors that it is to be used only as a last recourse. So you do.
After a while, you become quite comfortable with knowing that anyone you spray/tazer becomes easier to handle and very rarely does anyone have a good case of excessive force. "He/she was resisting!" is generally enough for any judge.
In the end, it all comes down to the simple fact that the people who use these weapons don't know how they feel. It should be required that every member of the law enforcement should feel the effects of the weapons they use at least once. This should be so with knight-sticks and other such utilities as well, but since these can actually permanently disable people this would be impractical, but pepper spray and tazer should be fine.
Using pepper spray is the equivalent of punching someone in the face. Tazer is the equivalent of beating someone in the head with a gold brick wrapped in a lemon. If everyone thought like this, then these weapons would not be used as much.
Ah. But, you see, to me that ending was a cop-out, just for the very reason you discribe.
Well, your opinion is just as valid as mine, and since someone else here also liked the ending, then I must concede that maybe he wrote a good ending after all. It just didn't sit too well with me. :)
Nevertheless it is interesting to note that the longer his books took to write, the shorter they were. The first book, which took a really long time to write (I think 10 years or something) was fairly short, 200 pages or something, and then I remember getting the one with the train, which was really thick. Fortunately, King has such a high lowest standard that even when he was writing those really long books, they were very good, unlike Robert Jordan, whose penchant for infuriatingly (but amazingly) detailed descriptions of peoples and places just grinds any story line to a screeching halt.
Say what you want about the length of King's books, but he is very very rarely longwinded.