Imagine if the makers of the other products out there followed suit. You would not be able to purchase second hand goods. Only directly from the original outlet. Kinda stifles the economy since the majority of vehicles out there are purchased as used items. Just one example but it would have a very bad impact if this method of controlling profit spreads.
Ignore the potential long-term impact to the overall economy, and instead ponder this:
with eBay establishing this precedent, imagine what would happen to auction sites - like eBay.
Everyone has been saying this, but I'll believe it when I see it.
The delayed commentary is due to quarterly reporting.
When people start talking about a 'pending recession', it means that the recession started about three months earlier.
The formal definition of recession is "two or more successive quarters of GDP decline". You can't assign the first quarter to a recession until the second one arrives meaning that we're not technically in a recession, as of this writing. Wait for March 31st (end of 2nd US FY08), then we can comfortably claim that Jan 24th was part of it.
By the way: since so many people look to the federal funds rate, it's easier to illustrate the overall attitude by looking at the changes to it and when they occurred. We see a minimal regular increase (+.25) in rate until September 18 when suddenly the rate drops by twice that interval (-.50). September 18 also happens to be about one quarter ago.
Even though that is just one marker to a complex market, it is one that all participants use.
People always say that we are about to enter a recession when it's an election year.
Politicians will say anything, so disregard those comments. In this case, it's not just politicians talking about recession.
I'm not familiar with Alfven, but I offer the following:
Joseph Preistley is credited with discovering oxygen. That's a wonderful honor and all except his opinion was that air gets clogged with "phlogiston" when material is burned, such that a fire within an enclosed environment gets extinguished because the air can no longer absorb this stuff. Nowadays, chemists understand that free oxygen gets depleted during a fire - which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of Preistley's strongly held belief.
Considering the history of the series, an upper limit of four players is better than just two. And even if they could raise that, a TV screen can only fit so many tracks at once. One horizontal + three vertical seems to be the practical limit, given that they invested quite a bit in the background scenery animation.
My biggest issue is that when my group plays through career, "Blitzkrieg Bop" is not only in the fixed setlists, but also appears to be in all of the random setlists. After the dozenth 'random' time, we now just expect it. I don't mind so much, but our vocalist isn't as patient. Oh yeah, WRT the main discussion topic, I can't picture any of us getting a copy of that song BECAUSE of the game experience - so there is a downside to this type of exposure.
The minor issue is that the band leader's avatar can't be changed. I don't really care, but my friend (the 'leader') seems to be a bit disappointed in this inflexibility.
We've lost two guitars and one foot pedal so far -- they needed to build in a lot more durability in those, c'mon folks, engineering like this is not rocket science.
They're made well for what they are. Then again, I've handled real guitars and drums so I'm always aware of the physical weakness of these controllers. I guess if someone's not familiar with the real equipment, they're not going to be as aware and are more likely to break the devices. Also, the drum kit is too narrow for my tastes (which is not my position in the group anyway), so I could easily imagine the awkward placement contributing to any damage.
BTW: I really like the new strum bars. They're quiet, which makes it much less distracting to the other players.
Think about touring one of Europe's beautiful cathedrals. There's a reason that they build them that big, and that beautiful. The architecture, and the art all around you, helps people find God. Tennis and Guitar Hero can be art too, and can have the same effect if you know what you're seeing.
Up until now, I always thought it was motion aftereffect. It never occurred to me that, immediately after playing Guitar Hero, my eyes were actually trying to look upward... toward God! Zen, indeed.
I think everyone missed the point of this, and Slashdot fell right into it. The more page hits Drew Curtis gets, the more money he makes. So he has now created a stupid practical joke that is guaranteed to get dozens, if not hundreds, of websites to mention fark.com over and over and over.
After I read his book, I see that he's adopting the publicity stunt. The book is not in front of me, but this reminds me of the restaurant advertising their $1000 omelet. Of course, he was strongly criticizing this type of news coverage. How about this observation:
he found a weakness,
warned everybody,
waited,
and now is exploiting it.
oh yeah... profit!
The stupid thing about this is how a few months ago fark went from being fairly open about NSFW imagery, to banning anyone that links to or posts it. Apparently they can make more money by being family(or workplace) friendly.
I've been a fark.com lurker for a few years now, and I've never seen a 'fairly open' attitude toward NSFW image posting.
A simpler form of this behavior was observed by Charles Darwin. Wasps laying eggs on live caterpillars which were eaten alive by wasp larvae! That convinced Darwin that no moral, just, fair God would design such a system. It was one of his motivations in seeking natural explanations for behavior of animals. Darwin wanted to plug the hole, "I am bad because God designed me to be bad and sinful" defense for the sinners. Because if Paley's watchmaker God was true, then every immoral behavior is a designed behavior, specifically created by God. It is ironic that present day fundies paint Darwin in the darkest hue.
For those who believe in the morally-driven God-design framework (your 'fundies'), the existence of immoral behavior is not a contradiction but a prerequisite.
Think of it this way: Without testing morality, a person cannot be good - they would just be neutral (wouldn't know any better). If immorality does not exist, how then do you test morality?
And since when does morality, justice and fairness get applied to the actions of non-humans?
Although it's not really analogous to your comment, I'm reminded of a very old bit (I'm talking about 40+ year old material here) in Mad Magazine: the marketing of a company called "Brand X".
The concept was that "Brand X" was marketing itself strictly to the marketing departments of other companies and were available to make any type of product, but they would do so very poorly. That way, a normal company can contract them to make a competing version of their product and claim, "Every customer preferred our product over our competition", or something along those lines.
That reminds me of a little fun I had a long while ago.
Some friends of mine were emailing each other, developing similar 'encrypting' schemes. The one they ultimately shared with me was the nospacesorpunctuationsintheentiremessage type of thing, and how awesome it was.
In response, I decided to show them a few tricks: a pseudo-substitution cipher (L33T speak, actually) fed into a columnar transposition cipher. But the really fun part was actually within the plaintext, as it was grammatically difficult to follow. Of course, I had to provide an explanation for each step in another email so that they could actually decode it.
While I admit that I was playing the 'one-up' game, my response was also meant to expose them to the basic techniques. If I wanted to go crazy I would have used RSA or similar, but the one I chose could easily be accomplished by hand.
This has been debated quite a bit, over these experiments in particular.
Why is it unethical? If you could save thousands of lives by curing a disease, but curing the disease required potentially deadly experiments on a few people, wouldn't it be unethical NOT to proceed with the research?
Who decides on the severity of the disease in question? In fact, what qualifies as a disease? How about the disease of OCD? Or allergies? One way to read your comment is that if we could cure allergies to cats, the benefit to millions would far outweigh the loss of life - to which I would have to disagree.
Do not dismiss this point, either. The definition of disease is important here. Referring to the linked example above, some of the Nazi scientists were looking to cure the disease of Gypsy, Jew, homosexuality, etc - and they deeply believed them to be terrible afflictions. Now repeat your comment with that definition in place. I doubt you'd have the same conviction.
A conclusion that usually surfaces is that such lethal experiments have value if the situation is truly dire - otherwise, the testers are just treating the subjects as expendable material for their own curiosity or sadism. You can rationalize the costs after you find a cure, but before that happens there will be an ever increasing sum of lives consumed. If research stops without a cure, what rationalization do you offer then?
I've been looking for solid confirmation of a meeting place/time in your comments. Since I haven't seen any, I'm assuming that you're arranging this all via email - so I'll send you a message.
Over two decades ago, I noticed a second set of jaws in a moray eel on display at a local pet store. If I had known that such an observation was newsworthy, I'd have shown it to more than just my brother and father.
Since I see this as a non-story, I'll offer an anecdote:
Seeing the second set made me even more afraid of morays - they're creepy enough with just one set. The worst was seeing one with a body cross section similar in size to a 3 liter soda bottle just a few yards from me while SCUBA diving. Daggers for teeth. That thing could have easily killed anyone in the group. Not something you want to meet that far under water, protected only by a bathing suit and basic SCUBA gear.
BTW, even though the article makes SciFi comparisons, this article should not be categorized under SciFi. Otherwise, every subject should be categorized under SciFi (find me a subject that cannot be compared to SciFi).
i wonder what percentage of cds released 20-25 years ago actually work nowdays:)
The Library of Congress studies this issue. (700kb pdf file)
I don't see it in the pdf, but I had heard in an interview with an archivist at LoC that some early CDs were shipped in packages that slowly corroded the CD itself. It was either paper acids or a glue or something like that. If I can find a link to that interview, I'll post it.
Oh yeah, here's a related slashdot discussion that even links to that LoC pdf.
Take-Two bought DMA Designs in September 1999. Take-Two is the parent company of Rockstar Games. In 2002, all they did was rename DMA Designs to Rockstar Studios. (see: March 19, 2002)
The overall issue: companyA is now called companyB. From my experience, the biggest impact of a company name change is that a lot of stationary needs to be replaced.
From the article:
Even in a community as level-headed as this, the thread about the name change is ruthless, posters furious that Take-Two would claim any credit for the eventual success of BioShock and sully Irrational's good name with brand recognition bollocks.
Maybe I'm crazy but perhaps they'll re-brand it because they pay for everything.
I would like to point out that the Nazis never actually won an outright majority;, the highest vote they got was 43.9%. This does make them a significant party, but it is not "the will of the people"- Hitler did not gain his power through the vote of the people, but the "Enabling Act" given to him by the Reichstag gave him all executive and legislative power.
I would like to point out that the Republicans never actually won an outright majority in 2000, the highest vote they got was 47.9%. This does make them a significant party, but it is not "the will of the people" - Bush did not gain his power through the vote of the people, but "Bush v. Gore" given to him by the Supreme Court gave him all executive power.
Ignoring the usual trolls here, McKellar did adopt a tabloid-style format that much of the/. crowd would usually deride. Therefore, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by much of the relevant discussion.
But, from what I understand, that's the best approach since the target audience has been fed this format for a number of decades. Actually, I anticipate that mothers will buy it (for their kids) and even flip through it themselves given the probably that they will appreciate the similarity.
And quit whining about the appearance of horoscopes. If horoscopes appear in teen magazine, and you're trying to adhere to the teen magazine format, then something that resembles a horoscope had better be included. In fact, if it was done well, the audience may remember the math the next time they see a similar horoscope (analogy: count the number of Simpson's parodies do you notice on a daily basis).
I applaud the goal and concept but the hardest (and most crucial) part is having the content itself read like a teen magazine. I have no idea how to make that happen, but I'm not the one attempting this. Hopefully McKellar has that talent. Good luck.
That's the problem with patenting plants. Intention is a difficult thing to prove absolutely when you're talking about pollination. As we all learned from Jurrasic Park, DNA is a hard thing to control.
And as we all learned from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, household plants will suck the life out of you while you sleep.
You know... maybe it's the insomnia talking... but I'm beginning to think that these patents are probably involved in that very same interstellar invasion of doppelgangers!
We've had 132-column terminals for a long time, but what I generally tend to jones for is taller, not wider. With a taller screen, you see more code.
I had the same problem years ago. Here are my suggestions:
Rotate your display 90 degrees (many OS brands support this). Now your wide screen is a tall screen. You will need to remount the display, though.
Install a second video card and place the new display above your existing one. This one is tricky in that you'll have to mount them together to maintain horizontal placement. Also, you may have potential ventilation problems and a less-mobile display.
If you want a REALLY tall area, combine the previous two suggestions. This is a bit excessive for my tastes, but I figured I'd add it anyway.
There's a better system than that - your vote is stored in a database, but your vote is also printed out for you to review. You then put the paper in a box that is kept under lock and key. For quick results, the database count is the one that is looked at. However, any third party can request to count the paper votes and compare them to the database count. If they do not match, then there is a physical audit trail to show that someone was monkeying with the software. This way, we get fast results, and verification.
Trust, then verify, is the solution in this case.
That requires that the auditing process be changed. Currently, an audit only occurs if there is a closely contested election - when the leaders in a race have a nearly identical tally. For example, the 2006 Sarasota (FL) vote was audited only because one race (US Congress) was close (about 400 votes difference) and only then did they notice that 18,000 people (~13%) did not register a vote for that race while the US Senate race had no such non-votes. Of course, in that case the audit was just looking at the same tally twice, since there was no other record. My point here is that they probably never would have noticed if the results were not close.
To exploit this, make certain that an audit never occurs by adjusting the totals to offer the 'winner' a comfortable lead. A landslide may prompt scrutiny, so some balance would be required. Given the voting history of a district it would not be difficult to undermine the system in this way.
Mandated audits would defend against this exploit, but that's not how it currently works.
Slashdot Mirror
with eBay establishing this precedent, imagine what would happen to auction sites - like eBay.
</ironic>
You know, that actually would explain the apologies from party leaders.
Seems to be a lot of water supply problems in China, lately.
When people start talking about a 'pending recession', it means that the recession started about three months earlier.
The formal definition of recession is "two or more successive quarters of GDP decline". You can't assign the first quarter to a recession until the second one arrives meaning that we're not technically in a recession, as of this writing. Wait for March 31st (end of 2nd US FY08), then we can comfortably claim that Jan 24th was part of it.
By the way:
since so many people look to the federal funds rate, it's easier to illustrate the overall attitude by looking at the changes to it and when they occurred. We see a minimal regular increase (+.25) in rate until September 18 when suddenly the rate drops by twice that interval (-.50).
September 18 also happens to be about one quarter ago.
Even though that is just one marker to a complex market, it is one that all participants use.Politicians will say anything, so disregard those comments. In this case, it's not just politicians talking about recession.
I'm not familiar with Alfven, but I offer the following:
Joseph Preistley is credited with discovering oxygen.
That's a wonderful honor and all except his opinion was that air gets clogged with "phlogiston" when material is burned, such that a fire within an enclosed environment gets extinguished because the air can no longer absorb this stuff.
Nowadays, chemists understand that free oxygen gets depleted during a fire - which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of Preistley's strongly held belief.
What can I say, "misplaced honor happens".
And even if they could raise that, a TV screen can only fit so many tracks at once. One horizontal + three vertical seems to be the practical limit, given that they invested quite a bit in the background scenery animation.
My biggest issue is that when my group plays through career, "Blitzkrieg Bop" is not only in the fixed setlists, but also appears to be in all of the random setlists. After the dozenth 'random' time, we now just expect it. I don't mind so much, but our vocalist isn't as patient. Oh yeah, WRT the main discussion topic, I can't picture any of us getting a copy of that song BECAUSE of the game experience - so there is a downside to this type of exposure.
The minor issue is that the band leader's avatar can't be changed. I don't really care, but my friend (the 'leader') seems to be a bit disappointed in this inflexibility.They're made well for what they are. Then again, I've handled real guitars and drums so I'm always aware of the physical weakness of these controllers. I guess if someone's not familiar with the real equipment, they're not going to be as aware and are more likely to break the devices. Also, the drum kit is too narrow for my tastes (which is not my position in the group anyway), so I could easily imagine the awkward placement contributing to any damage.
BTW: I really like the new strum bars. They're quiet, which makes it much less distracting to the other players.
It's all so simple:
- the lumber industry gets their replanting operation subsidized,
- the broker pockets the remainder,
- the customer gets to exploit feel-good marketing exposure.
I mean, with huge corporations as customers, who else is going to let you plant and grow tens of thousands of trees without much hassle?It never occurred to me that, immediately after playing Guitar Hero, my eyes were actually trying to look upward
Zen, indeed.
Of course, he was strongly criticizing this type of news coverage.
How about this observation:
- he found a weakness,
- warned everybody,
- waited,
- and now is exploiting it.
- oh yeah
... profit!
I've been a fark.com lurker for a few years now, and I've never seen a 'fairly open' attitude toward NSFW image posting.Think of it this way: Without testing morality, a person cannot be good - they would just be neutral (wouldn't know any better).
If immorality does not exist, how then do you test morality?
And since when does morality, justice and fairness get applied to the actions of non-humans?
Although it's not really analogous to your comment, I'm reminded of a very old bit (I'm talking about 40+ year old material here) in Mad Magazine: the marketing of a company called "Brand X".
The concept was that "Brand X" was marketing itself strictly to the marketing departments of other companies and were available to make any type of product, but they would do so very poorly. That way, a normal company can contract them to make a competing version of their product and claim, "Every customer preferred our product over our competition", or something along those lines.
I'm a fan of the Splinter Cell series.
:)
However, I'm less surprised by a delay than I am the title: "Splinter Cell: Conviction".
What ever happened to Splinter Cell: Adjective Noun?
Some friends of mine were emailing each other, developing similar 'encrypting' schemes. The one they ultimately shared with me was the nospacesorpunctuationsintheentiremessage type of thing, and how awesome it was.
In response, I decided to show them a few tricks: a pseudo-substitution cipher (L33T speak, actually) fed into a columnar transposition cipher. But the really fun part was actually within the plaintext, as it was grammatically difficult to follow. Of course, I had to provide an explanation for each step in another email so that they could actually decode it.
While I admit that I was playing the 'one-up' game, my response was also meant to expose them to the basic techniques. If I wanted to go crazy I would have used RSA or similar, but the one I chose could easily be accomplished by hand.
Do not dismiss this point, either. The definition of disease is important here. Referring to the linked example above, some of the Nazi scientists were looking to cure the disease of Gypsy, Jew, homosexuality, etc - and they deeply believed them to be terrible afflictions. Now repeat your comment with that definition in place. I doubt you'd have the same conviction.
A conclusion that usually surfaces is that such lethal experiments have value if the situation is truly dire - otherwise, the testers are just treating the subjects as expendable material for their own curiosity or sadism. You can rationalize the costs after you find a cure, but before that happens there will be an ever increasing sum of lives consumed. If research stops without a cure, what rationalization do you offer then?
I've been looking for solid confirmation of a meeting place/time in your comments.
Since I haven't seen any, I'm assuming that you're arranging this all via email - so I'll send you a message.
Over two decades ago, I noticed a second set of jaws in a moray eel on display at a local pet store.
If I had known that such an observation was newsworthy, I'd have shown it to more than just my brother and father.
Since I see this as a non-story, I'll offer an anecdote:
Seeing the second set made me even more afraid of morays - they're creepy enough with just one set. The worst was seeing one with a body cross section similar in size to a 3 liter soda bottle just a few yards from me while SCUBA diving. Daggers for teeth. That thing could have easily killed anyone in the group. Not something you want to meet that far under water, protected only by a bathing suit and basic SCUBA gear.
BTW, even though the article makes SciFi comparisons, this article should not be categorized under SciFi. Otherwise, every subject should be categorized under SciFi (find me a subject that cannot be compared to SciFi).
I don't see it in the pdf, but I had heard in an interview with an archivist at LoC that some early CDs were shipped in packages that slowly corroded the CD itself. It was either paper acids or a glue or something like that. If I can find a link to that interview, I'll post it.
Oh yeah, here's a related slashdot discussion that even links to that LoC pdf.
Take-Two is the parent company of Rockstar Games.
In 2002, all they did was rename DMA Designs to Rockstar Studios.
(see: March 19, 2002)
The overall issue: companyA is now called companyB.
From my experience, the biggest impact of a company name change is that a lot of stationary needs to be replaced.
From the article:Maybe I'm crazy but perhaps they'll re-brand it because they pay for everything.
Ignoring the usual trolls here, McKellar did adopt a tabloid-style format that much of the /. crowd would usually deride. Therefore, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by much of the relevant discussion.
But, from what I understand, that's the best approach since the target audience has been fed this format for a number of decades. Actually, I anticipate that mothers will buy it (for their kids) and even flip through it themselves given the probably that they will appreciate the similarity.
And quit whining about the appearance of horoscopes. If horoscopes appear in teen magazine, and you're trying to adhere to the teen magazine format, then something that resembles a horoscope had better be included. In fact, if it was done well, the audience may remember the math the next time they see a similar horoscope (analogy: count the number of Simpson's parodies do you notice on a daily basis).
I applaud the goal and concept but the hardest (and most crucial) part is having the content itself read like a teen magazine. I have no idea how to make that happen, but I'm not the one attempting this. Hopefully McKellar has that talent. Good luck.
You know
:)
Was the first mouse treated named Algernon?
Maybe we should wait for any long term effects before celebrating.
To exploit this, make certain that an audit never occurs by adjusting the totals to offer the 'winner' a comfortable lead. A landslide may prompt scrutiny, so some balance would be required. Given the voting history of a district it would not be difficult to undermine the system in this way.
Mandated audits would defend against this exploit, but that's not how it currently works.