Not at all, I noticed the reference to communism, I was just firstly pointing out that the reason communism doesn't scale is that as the number of humans involved rises, the probability becomes excessive that a sufficiently ruthless and greedy individual takes over and exploits the system. Secondly was throwing a nod at the 'kill all humans' meme that floats around. Knew I should have linkied it.:P
Are you talking about the CEO of a corporation? Or the owner of a private business? Because frankly, while the CEO has obligations to his shareholders, the private business owner can do whatever the hell pleases him, as long as it doesn't put him out of business (and even if it does that's his personal choice).
They exist exclusively to facilitate the serving of your copyrighted material. If I were to rent a server in some country with no copyright laws, host a bunch of movies on it, then host a front end somewhere in a first world country linking to a redirect on the back-end server (not directly to the file), would you expect the front end to escape litigation?
The monsanto went out and purposely spread their modified corn in other farmers normal crop, then sued the farmers to have the crop destroyed due to patent violations, which the judges have always upheld in all the trials.
Um, isn't one of the prime criticisms of GM crops that they lead to extreme vendor lock-in, since the crop produced no longer consists of fertile wheat, forcing the farmer to keep buying seed grain?
Unless they developed a patented, fertile strain purely for infecting otherwise non-GM crops, as well as their commercial strain? That sounds a bit too blatantly evil...
True, but that's a transient, superficial effect. Water external to your body boils (I'd think the worst place would be inside your lungs, as I understand it they're somewhat moist) but once it's all gone the effect stops unless you're continually leaking (eyes might be a bit of a problem). Remember we're talking about a very brief exposure here, 90 seconds at the absolute tops. So if you're starting to pick up a little hoar frost by then it's still OK, you're not instantly a human corpsicle.:)
In fact if you were in your space ship at the same pressure as space outside is, you could technically hold your breath and go outside and be OK, at least until the extreme cold causes other bodily functions to fail. The holding your breath part would suck too of course.
Yeah, the holding your breath part might be problematic. If you find a pressure gauge, though, and blow into it, if you can hit ~14psi, you could definitely hold your breath in space.
As for the extreme cold, it's misleading. You're in a vacuum, which is nominally very cold but has incredibly low thermal mass. It's not going to instantly freeze you, and in fact I'm not sure if it could even drain enough heat to stop a human from overheating. Your main concern (assuming that you get oxygen soon enough) will be sunburn.
More info - apparently it takes ~14 seconds to lose consciousness, although I'd be interested to see if, with proper preparation, that couldn't be extended significantly. Arthur C. Clarke made this interesting suggestion in one of his stories (I believe it was 'Earthlight'), although that story overestimated the viable time (to the tune of 2 minutes before becoming impaired) because Clarke didn't take into account the fact that in a vacuum, lungs deplete the blood of oxygen.
This is one thing that really, really annoys me. I go into a Telstra Shop, to sign up for an internet plan (this was a few years ago, they were the only company that supplied cable to my apartment block) and he was blatantly filling out the "apply online" form on their website. I'd hoped to get slightly faster service, and maybe some professional advice, by going to the store in person... well, I *was* young and foolish then.
Wow, I have a copy of Little Big Adventure that I yoinked from Underdogs (I owned the game way back when but predictably discs are long gone), but it didn't come with the sound files. I'd happily pay a few dollars for the soundtrack, some of the music on that game was beautiful.
No, actually I live in Australia, where you can still find Black & White on the shelves of our local game shops for $79.95. The used game market is there but it's not as big as getting things off Steam, or simply torrenting stuff.
The school whereby it's 100 times as many beta signups as concurrent players, and 100 times as many concurrent beta players (since beta tests tend to have more focused, "please log on at time X" type events rather than everyone just logging on whenever) as there are sales on launch day.
Ah, but the latency of the station wagon for transferring, say, 5gb of data over 150kms is pretty horrible. Especially so when you're trying to coordinate observations in realtime to detect interesting events.
...which I'm reasonably sure was intended to apply mostly in cases where an employee refers to Telstra AND in doing so mentions they're employed by Telsra. It's pretty standard/common for corporations to require that- and I know a couple of friends who do it anyway just to cover their asses.
Sounds sort of reasonable. The way it's worded, they want to stop employees saying "I work for Telstra and blah blah" without adding a "And my name is Bob Jones, Cable Engineer". I don't really see how it applies to the Fake Stephen Conroy fiasco unless Fake Stephen Conroy claimed at some point to work for Telstra, which would have been both odd and out of character.
What's also odd is this part:
If the employee refers to Telstra, they are expected to identify themselves as an employee of the company and ensure they do not imply they are authorised to speak on Telstra's behalf.
It looks like some half-hearted attempt to rule out astroturfing but otherwise is patently ridiculous. It's going to cause a lot more damage to Telstra's image if randomguy123 posts "Telstra's broadband rates are criminal and service sucks, you should get naked ADSL from iiNet. The views expressed in this post are mine only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Telstra." instead of just some anonymous rant.
If you go into Dymocks or Barnes & Noble or some other book store, you don't really expect them to say "go buy it from Amazon.com", do you?
This applies even more so for digital media where the entire product can be downloaded (barring shiny manuals and soforth that rarely happen these days anyway). Isn't a physical retailer becoming irrelevant anyway?
The rule of thumb is 1 to 100. Of your beta signups, only 1 in 100 of them will be online at any given time, and only 1 in 100 of THOSE will actually buy the game when it comes out. So if you have ten million beta signups, budget for roughly 1000 concurrent users on launch day.
Blizzard managed to make WoW good enough, however, that a lot more than 1 in 100 of the beta testers went out and bought the game on launch day. And a server for 1000 concurrent users might be able to handle 2000 concurrent users if they bought a little abovespec. No matter how you slice it, though, it's not going to handle 50,000. And demand KEPT rising as they brought out new servers and people could finally get in, play, and show their friends.
They seem pretty stable on the population front now, and have been for some time. I'd bet that most of the growth in accounts was due to their recruit-a-friend scam, though. That had everyone and their dog buying a second account to powerlevel their alts. Master move on Blizzard's part to harvest even more money, but it'd be interesting to see a drop in subscribed account numbers in the next few months, and all the "wow is dying, end of the world" waah-fest that accompanies it.
See, you just needed to work on presentation. If you'd called it "Kill Orcs And Meet Hot Elf Chicks Who Really Are Hot Girls IRL" then you'd be onto a winner!
Bingo. But this was with a pre-release demo, which is a much better time to find problems like this than at release. If it were a post-release "yay I just paid $89 for this game and this is my first time playing it" situation you'd be a lot more upset than simply "meh".
I believe that's the fundamental reason behind Blizzard's horrid schedule slippages.
(Warning: rabid Blizzard fanboy post ahead:) In the early days, yes, Blizzard had some pretty bad schedule slippages. Unlike most companies, they correctly identified the problem to be the schedule, not the slippages. The reason that their games are still regularly played over 10 years after release is the uncompromising attitude towards quality. That's why these days they keep everything completely dark until a game's already been in development for a couple of years, and they don't commit to a release date until a couple of months before that date.
Games are art, and artwork isn't done until it's done. You can schedule an accounting app, because it has a strict function that's determined by an arbitrary set of rules. You can't schedule 'finishing' a game because the completion criteria are incredibly fuzzy and vauge. "It has to be fun." "The storyline needs to be engaging." "The player has to feel significant." "The world needs to be realistic." If you don't give this stuff enough time to be iterated over and refined, you end up with a bodgy game no matter how good your tech is.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all, I noticed the reference to communism, I was just firstly pointing out that the reason communism doesn't scale is that as the number of humans involved rises, the probability becomes excessive that a sufficiently ruthless and greedy individual takes over and exploits the system. Secondly was throwing a nod at the 'kill all humans' meme that floats around. Knew I should have linkied it. :P
Are you talking about the CEO of a corporation? Or the owner of a private business? Because frankly, while the CEO has obligations to his shareholders, the private business owner can do whatever the hell pleases him, as long as it doesn't put him out of business (and even if it does that's his personal choice).
Oh shit it's the timecube guy!
They exist exclusively to facilitate the serving of your copyrighted material. If I were to rent a server in some country with no copyright laws, host a bunch of movies on it, then host a front end somewhere in a first world country linking to a redirect on the back-end server (not directly to the file), would you expect the front end to escape litigation?
Well, it only took me 27 years to get here from the peaceful system of Vegetar. Then again we're more adaptable and less picky than those Vegans.
The monsanto went out and purposely spread their modified corn in other farmers normal crop, then sued the farmers to have the crop destroyed due to patent violations, which the judges have always upheld in all the trials.
Um, isn't one of the prime criticisms of GM crops that they lead to extreme vendor lock-in, since the crop produced no longer consists of fertile wheat, forcing the farmer to keep buying seed grain?
Unless they developed a patented, fertile strain purely for infecting otherwise non-GM crops, as well as their commercial strain? That sounds a bit too blatantly evil...
A market that abolishes greed? You are proposing that we kill all humans?
Tagging it 'xaser'. Because, you know, it is. And because of cool X-Men sound of it. :)
True, but that's a transient, superficial effect. Water external to your body boils (I'd think the worst place would be inside your lungs, as I understand it they're somewhat moist) but once it's all gone the effect stops unless you're continually leaking (eyes might be a bit of a problem). Remember we're talking about a very brief exposure here, 90 seconds at the absolute tops. So if you're starting to pick up a little hoar frost by then it's still OK, you're not instantly a human corpsicle. :)
Routing butts in a bathroom, hey... sounds like it could be unhygenic.
In fact if you were in your space ship at the same pressure as space outside is, you could technically hold your breath and go outside and be OK, at least until the extreme cold causes other bodily functions to fail. The holding your breath part would suck too of course.
Yeah, the holding your breath part might be problematic. If you find a pressure gauge, though, and blow into it, if you can hit ~14psi, you could definitely hold your breath in space.
As for the extreme cold, it's misleading. You're in a vacuum, which is nominally very cold but has incredibly low thermal mass. It's not going to instantly freeze you, and in fact I'm not sure if it could even drain enough heat to stop a human from overheating. Your main concern (assuming that you get oxygen soon enough) will be sunburn.
More info - apparently it takes ~14 seconds to lose consciousness, although I'd be interested to see if, with proper preparation, that couldn't be extended significantly. Arthur C. Clarke made this interesting suggestion in one of his stories (I believe it was 'Earthlight'), although that story overestimated the viable time (to the tune of 2 minutes before becoming impaired) because Clarke didn't take into account the fact that in a vacuum, lungs deplete the blood of oxygen.
You wish to use the interbutts, sir? I'm afraid that's premium content, please enter your credit card number.
Are you implying that a cat5 network is a series of tubes? O.o
This is one thing that really, really annoys me. I go into a Telstra Shop, to sign up for an internet plan (this was a few years ago, they were the only company that supplied cable to my apartment block) and he was blatantly filling out the "apply online" form on their website. I'd hoped to get slightly faster service, and maybe some professional advice, by going to the store in person... well, I *was* young and foolish then.
Wow, I have a copy of Little Big Adventure that I yoinked from Underdogs (I owned the game way back when but predictably discs are long gone), but it didn't come with the sound files. I'd happily pay a few dollars for the soundtrack, some of the music on that game was beautiful.
No, actually I live in Australia, where you can still find Black & White on the shelves of our local game shops for $79.95. The used game market is there but it's not as big as getting things off Steam, or simply torrenting stuff.
The school whereby it's 100 times as many beta signups as concurrent players, and 100 times as many concurrent beta players (since beta tests tend to have more focused, "please log on at time X" type events rather than everyone just logging on whenever) as there are sales on launch day.
10,000,000 / (100 * 100) = 1,000. Capice?
Or "opposable". :P
Ah, but the latency of the station wagon for transferring, say, 5gb of data over 150kms is pretty horrible. Especially so when you're trying to coordinate observations in realtime to detect interesting events.
...which I'm reasonably sure was intended to apply mostly in cases where an employee refers to Telstra AND in doing so mentions they're employed by Telsra. It's pretty standard/common for corporations to require that- and I know a couple of friends who do it anyway just to cover their asses.
Sounds sort of reasonable. The way it's worded, they want to stop employees saying "I work for Telstra and blah blah" without adding a "And my name is Bob Jones, Cable Engineer". I don't really see how it applies to the Fake Stephen Conroy fiasco unless Fake Stephen Conroy claimed at some point to work for Telstra, which would have been both odd and out of character.
What's also odd is this part:
If the employee refers to Telstra, they are expected to identify themselves as an employee of the company and ensure they do not imply they are authorised to speak on Telstra's behalf.
It looks like some half-hearted attempt to rule out astroturfing but otherwise is patently ridiculous. It's going to cause a lot more damage to Telstra's image if randomguy123 posts "Telstra's broadband rates are criminal and service sucks, you should get naked ADSL from iiNet. The views expressed in this post are mine only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Telstra." instead of just some anonymous rant.
If you go into Dymocks or Barnes & Noble or some other book store, you don't really expect them to say "go buy it from Amazon.com", do you?
This applies even more so for digital media where the entire product can be downloaded (barring shiny manuals and soforth that rarely happen these days anyway). Isn't a physical retailer becoming irrelevant anyway?
The rule of thumb is 1 to 100. Of your beta signups, only 1 in 100 of them will be online at any given time, and only 1 in 100 of THOSE will actually buy the game when it comes out. So if you have ten million beta signups, budget for roughly 1000 concurrent users on launch day.
Blizzard managed to make WoW good enough, however, that a lot more than 1 in 100 of the beta testers went out and bought the game on launch day. And a server for 1000 concurrent users might be able to handle 2000 concurrent users if they bought a little abovespec. No matter how you slice it, though, it's not going to handle 50,000. And demand KEPT rising as they brought out new servers and people could finally get in, play, and show their friends.
They seem pretty stable on the population front now, and have been for some time. I'd bet that most of the growth in accounts was due to their recruit-a-friend scam, though. That had everyone and their dog buying a second account to powerlevel their alts. Master move on Blizzard's part to harvest even more money, but it'd be interesting to see a drop in subscribed account numbers in the next few months, and all the "wow is dying, end of the world" waah-fest that accompanies it.
See, you just needed to work on presentation. If you'd called it "Kill Orcs And Meet Hot Elf Chicks Who Really Are Hot Girls IRL" then you'd be onto a winner!
Bingo. But this was with a pre-release demo, which is a much better time to find problems like this than at release. If it were a post-release "yay I just paid $89 for this game and this is my first time playing it" situation you'd be a lot more upset than simply "meh".
I believe that's the fundamental reason behind Blizzard's horrid schedule slippages.
(Warning: rabid Blizzard fanboy post ahead:) In the early days, yes, Blizzard had some pretty bad schedule slippages. Unlike most companies, they correctly identified the problem to be the schedule, not the slippages. The reason that their games are still regularly played over 10 years after release is the uncompromising attitude towards quality. That's why these days they keep everything completely dark until a game's already been in development for a couple of years, and they don't commit to a release date until a couple of months before that date.
Games are art, and artwork isn't done until it's done. You can schedule an accounting app, because it has a strict function that's determined by an arbitrary set of rules. You can't schedule 'finishing' a game because the completion criteria are incredibly fuzzy and vauge. "It has to be fun." "The storyline needs to be engaging." "The player has to feel significant." "The world needs to be realistic." If you don't give this stuff enough time to be iterated over and refined, you end up with a bodgy game no matter how good your tech is.