"Police Ratio" is an artificially high number in the US Military. The actual number of MP's and MA's is very low in reality, what makes up that huge number is people who are detached for Gate Guard Duty or Internal Patrol. Both are acting as police during those duties, while not actually being attached to the MP at all. Hell, Internal Patrols of bases aren't even there to stop problems from breaking out for the most part, its a duty thats only reason for being is to keep a person in the mindset of a normal Patrol, increased base security is a byproduct.
As for trusting the man beside me who's been drafted over someone who chose to join, bah. I don't really trust half the grunts in the military as is. Example, we all know the almost cliche'd guy who joins the military with the idea he's going to get to kill someone; one way or another we all know someone who joined just for that reason. Do I trust this guy beside me? Nope. I'd rather go in with a guy I know may turn tail and run than go in with a guy I have no accurate idea of what he's going to do. At least with the Drafted guy I'm going to be somewhat prepared for it happening(Oversimplification, yes).
And for the record, I was in the military. Non-combat engineer, kept everything in working order for the people who wanted to go get themselves shot at. Which btw, is another perfectly good thing to do with draftees. They don't have to fight, but if they can fix a hum-ve, cook, or for the slashdot crowd... keep windows running. They are a perfectly good addition to the military, no matter how they got there.
I don't know. To build anything like this in US cities, you have to add in costs of elevating the line, or sinking it into the ground. None of the infrastructure exists here. To make matters worse, you can't just drop in lines as you go along. Everything needs to be deployed at the same time to make it usable. I'm all for public transportation, if it works. But the cost of converting the major cities in the US isn't billions, its trillions once you add all the cities involved and the amount of track/cars needed to be built. I just don't know if I'll ever see public transportation take off in my lifetime regardless of what sort of prices we see at the pump. The problems facing it are huge, and while its gains are probably larger than the investment made, no politician is going to sign off on that sort of investment of resources because Presidents, Congressmen, and Mayors don't worry about the future, they only worry about now. Maybe if you privatize it, we'd see real growth in the market. Add in subs for companies willing to put in the investment, in turn for a limited monopoly(5-10 years) to make a return on the investment, give the company a chance to retain the monopoly in exchange for another large chunk of capital used for upgrading the line. I don't know, I just don't see the government ever building anything as extensive as the nations highway system ever again.
Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal mind numbingly hard that one.
The first thing I always do with every linux distro I've ever ran, was copy that to the desktop/hotbar. On windows the first thing I do is move the start bar to the left of the screen instead of the bottom. Very uncomplicated tasks for anyone who frequents slashdot. I liken it to getting in a car for the first time and then complaining because you have to adjust the mirrors.
It depends on the collection methods employed, as well as what band the energy is beamed down on. But either way, this is a pie in the sky answer to a problem that will never solve the problem unless you overbuild the system to the Nth power. Energy usage peaks and valleys too much during a 24 hour period and batteries do not have the charge life to make them an alternative to fuel. The best case scenario is that you use the energy from the sats, so that energy can be converted to hydrogen, which can easily be stored in comparison to flat electricity. But then the waste points become absolutely huge. You have the waste at the point of collection in space, the waste of the beam used to beam it down, the waste at the collection point for the beam on ground, the waste turning it into hydrogen, and finally the waste at actual point of use. And thats just my napkin doodling. Sure, batteries could come a long way in 10-15 years before this gets off the ground. But they aren't going to come that far.
Even for military usage this isn't going to start to solve anything. An M1 Abrams for instance requires 11 gallons of gas just to crank the engine up, and electric motors are seriously lacking in torque compared to their oil powered cousins. Sure, there are some nice proof of concepts out there in the world of sports cars, but they are all placed in very light chassis because of the under powered characteristic of the power plant on a power/weight/volume ratio. And that doesn't even begin to solve the logistical nightmare of refueling an electric powered tank, its faster and simpler to replace the batteries with a fully new set of charged batteries in a race than to wait for the recharge time. Could you even imagine doing that on a tank? Or the size of the batteries which would have to be moved around? The logistics train for a tank is already staggering.
Sure, a tank is on the extreme side of things, but every problem arising with a tank, comes up with every other platform in the military. To give you a real world military example of what this would do to things. The Israeli Airforce has for many years, been considered the best airforce in the world, and the reason is simple, turn around time. A plane goes out, comes back in, refuels and refits and is back out in the air for another mission faster in their airforce than any other airforce in the world. That means each plane is doing the maximum amount of work possible in a given period of time. The entire force, from the ground up, is built upon that hallmark. From the planes they fly, to the weapons they use, to the height requirements of pilots. Everything is to keep the plane in the air as long as possible. They use planes which have better fuel efficiency to save refueling time, they use weapons platforms which are quick and easy to add and remove from the plane, they use pilots with the same basic build so they can swap pilots out on the tarmac with minimum reconfiguration of the cockpit on the tarmac so no one gets overly fatigued. And they do it all because those few minutes shaved off here and there, add up to tens of minutes, and hours, and days, and then years of extra time in the air.
Adding something with performance characteristics as flat as a batteries and electric motors to a military machine doesn't just hurt performance, it cripples it.
Who knows, she's guilty. We all know that. We could inject a lot of FUD into a jury case of this sort if we wanted to very easily because of our knowledge on the subject. I doubt it would have made any difference though, unless the/.'er in question is one hell of a charismatic person. We could talk about how making available isn't sharing under the law, explain away how the usr/pwd issue is able to be sidestepped, explain how wireless works even if she wasn't using it, how DHCP works, and a ton of other things which would add alot of doubt into the case. We're all skilled at BSing a normal person under with vague or completely made up information. But in the end, I don't think it would have made much difference because of the amount of circumstantial evidence. I can snow under or explain away everything on the RIAAs list, but the more things I explain away, the more it seems I'm trying to vindicate my view, and am not solely interested in justice being done to the rest of a jury.
She didn't wipe the drive. She had a hard-drive go bad. She had full documentation by an outside source(bestbuy) that the drive had in fact died. Bestbuy then replaced the drive and kept the old one for whatever reason bestbuy does things like this. The Juror in question has no idea of what he speaks of. While I admit with the defense she took, for the case as a whole, she is guilty as sin. She is not guilty of fraudulently giving the RIAA a different drive, it is convenient as far as this case is concerned, but it does happen. That fact, more than anything else, made me think Mr Hegg is an idiot.
I'm not the brightest bulb in the box by any means. I always thought the law was there as a guideline for what is legal and illegal, as far as jury trials were concerned. And that it was the job of the jury to decide if those guidelines applied, and to what extent, if at all. If the jury isn't able to decide what the guidelines are, how are they able to rule on the facts. Maybe my logic is flawed.
I think what the earlier poster was getting at, is HP started out of someones garage. So'd AMD. So'd MS in some respects. All of the big companies that control the market now, other than IBM... Started out as a bunch of geeks sitting around a table sharing beers and talking about pie in the sky dreams. Unfortunately the computer market has grown up. You can't enter manufacturing of chips anymore because its no longer thousands of dollars, its millions. You can't enter software development for the sake of software development because someone else already has that market covered, with normally some competition on the free side of the street. Sure, there are some people who will make it in software development. But even then, it seems like the goal is to become successful enough to be bought out by a larger well established company, and then simply becoming part of their portfolio.
The days of seeing startups in true hardware and software development, take off as it did in the past, is well and gone. The net is really the only place left to try and build the sort of success that other companies have made in the computer field, and its fast becoming hard to compete there as well for a small guy. Think about it, 10 years ago everyone was competing for "portal space". No one is competing for it now, and the victors are pretty much set in stone. Yahoo, MSN, Google, and AOL pretty much own the game, and all the rest got bought out, or went the way of the dodo. Now we have a war for who will allow users the most access with creating, uploading, and displaying content. All of the big 4 have players in the game, and so far, it looks like the big four are going to win there as well. They control the 'portal', and can add links directly to their horse.
This doesn't mean that others can't do well in this market, look at wikipedia for instance. But it means its much harder to actually get something successful of the ground than it was only a few short years ago, and its only going to get harder as the players continue to solidify their hold on it.
I am in dire fear for the Live Action Evangelion. Too many problems surround it.
They want to do a trilogy of films first up, with child actors who are going to grow between each film. Which means all three films need to be shot all at once in a whirl wind.
ADV owns sole rights to such an enterprise, and while they have stated they're consulting with Gainax, they have veto power over its original creators.
Find me a director who can treat the religious symbolism in NGE with any amount of respect and not totally mess it up by the numbers.
They still haven't finished funding for it after a decade of shopping it around, this project first started being whispered about not long after the completion of the series in the US. Thats certainly when ADV bought the rights to doing a live action version.
I simply don't know if it will ever be made, and even if it does, I cannot see it being any good. I already think Anno and crew are starting to suffer from George Lucas Syndrome. So far the ending has been re-written and re-packaged 2 times, with a 3rd "Official Ending" coming this year or next. A live action movie would constitute as a 4th, official ending. At what point will everyone just leave Eva alone as the masterpiece that it was and quit trying to improve the wheel.
I think most people who support Ron Paul, myself included, aren't supporting him on hope of him getting elected. When the primary hits, I'm not voting for him, I don't want him in office. What I DO want to happen, is for a lot of the things he is talking about, to get more press. He may not have fully formed ideas, or workable solutions. But no one else is even entertaining some of the ideas he is, for fear of voter backlash.
Do I like his answer to the national budget problem? Nope, but no one else is really exploring some of the ideas he's talking about, they are just spouting the same party line that won't fix anything because that stance is popular with voters. Do I like his stance on abortion? Not so much, but I'm a guy, and my vote on that will never count as much as a woman saying "Its my body!!". No matter how much I had to do with the state of things, I don't get a true vote if it were to come up(yes, I an sue after the fact, but after the fact is a bit too late, isn't it?). So, meh. Do I like his stance on Iraq? Not really, once we committed to it, we're kinda stuck there for awhile, his answer is just as bad as everyone else's. But no other candidate is saying, to paraphrase, "We shouldn't be involved in any of these wars at all, its not our job to nanny the world". Nor do I like his answer to education, or a hundred other things. The only thing I can agree with him on, is that the idea of a "police action" has gotten totally out of control. It should be impossible for a President to put us in a state of war through "police action" for half a decade, with the decade mark coming up, without the 2/3rds majority vote from Congress on it. I know the whole problem of it started almost 60 years ago with the advent of the cold war, but come on!
I'll jump on a soap box, write letters, picket; anything and everything simply to get his views out there. But, I actually don't want the man in office. Everything with him is a binary solution. That doesn't help a whole lot for running things, but in todays media polarity gets time slots. If I have to endorse a man I can't see myself voting for, just to get some of his ideas and views out in a way thats taken as a viable option.... Instead of my retarded cousin Eddie's crack pot ranting... So be it.
This doesn't say a whole lot about our political process, but this is where we are.
Yes, DX for 360 and Windows are similar. Not the exact same, but close enough for most uses. But that really stops to be a selling point once you take into account that the PS3, and Wii, use close cousins of OpenGL. Its really a choice of what standard developers want to develop for. There are more really good DX coders out there than OpenGL, because back in the day, DX had a larger feature set, and was much easier to code for. Creating a larger pool of development houses that went that direction. Now though, the two are relatively matched for the most part. There is just not the pool of coders knowledgeable in using it. This could change in a few years, who knows?
I don't think its that Eve is the only space based game. I think its that Eve is the only true PVP game. I don't remember one bad night in a game destroying weeks, if not months, of work for hundreds of players like in Eve. And after that sort of risk, all other PVP seems boring and pointless. Sure, I can PVP in WoW, but why would I want to? What sort of reward do I get? Do I get the thrill of living through a battle and knowing the corp avoided a setback of weeks in equipment and funds? Or the little giddy feeling of knowing I just cost the other side exactly the same thing?
Sure, I'd like another game to take Eves place, it has its problems, and CCP has their problems as well. But in the current market of it taking 10s of millions to develop a AAA title, no-one is going to put the time into making a game like Eve. The subset of players it appeals to is simply too small of a market. But, for those of us this type of game does appeal to.. Eve is the only game in town.
Lots of games evoke emotions via gameplay itself. For instance, anyone who played Ninja Gaiden on Xbox jumped up and down several times in absolute joy once finally beating the very first boss in the game after getting thier asses handed to them 20-30 times in a row. Who hasn't went on a rapid fire killing spree in a multiplayer fps match and thought "I'm the man!"? Or the other end of the spectrum, and died 5-6 times in a row and been angery or upset? Games evoke emotion, and the emotions games evoke are often more powerful than any book or movie because you are the person doing it. The life of the protaganist is directly in your hands, something books and movies cannot do. I read alot of books, no other medium but books engage you in thought about 'life the universe and everything' as you go over the material presented. Movies are good for instant gratification, rarely do I walk out of a movie thinking about what went on in them beyond "that was pretty cool". And games do a good job of bridging those two mediums, while throwing a few other oddball mediums into the mix.
Um, Evangelion was a masterpiece, and while wierd and warped, is easily in the top 5 of best anime of all time. While FFVII is um.. the game that came after FFVI, and before FFTactics. Not much more I can say about it. But, I'm also the guy who owns NGE 5 times over because it kept being released on a new medium, or a bug got fixed in the video or translation.. so I need to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Your forgetting to factor in game sales. Project Gothem, Forza, freak'n Halo, etc etc etc. All of these fall under the Xbox letterhead, and they make the company millions because they are all first party, and some of the best selling games on the platform, and that doesn't even factor in subscription costs from Xbox Live. If the Xbox is going to become profitable its not going to be on the console alone, its going to be on game sales and subscriptions. And heck, Halo 3 alone had the chance of making the console profitable by 2008. Halo 2 was the most played game on the 360 untill gears came out, and its still pegging in the top 10. As soon as 3 hits you'll have thousands of consumers rushing to by a 360, plus halo 3, plus subscription costs. Thats a massive influx of cash to the Xbox brand.
I dunno. I'm went to school in a rural area, Iowa, and teachers regularly spanked kids in school, as far as I know they still do there. It required a permision slip from parents, but I'm fairly certain I saw my parents giggle with glee upon getting that slip of paper to sign every year. Then there was the whole physical education punishment schtick. Screw up and it was running laps and pushups and situps and all sorts of other things we hate, you got subjected to, if a teacher mentioned in passing to a coach that you were goofing off in their classroom. As soon as you hit PE, you were going to pay for whatever you did, normally informally without it ever hitting the office staff of the school. I don't exactly agree with the PE part of it totally, but I cannot fault the results it produced. Durring the entire time I was in school I can only remember one incident of suspension, and that was for a kid found doing pot in school. Course, 10 times out of 10 parents would back teachers while I was there. I heard grumbles from some parents about not agreeing with the punishment(normally but not always, because the punishment wasn't strict enough), but parents always had the attitude of if you did it on their time, they have complete control of whatever happens to you for it. I think the US school system would be a hell of alot better today if we went back to a system like this throughout the US. Yes, all the brutality and things that got spanking in school would happen in isolated cases again, and there would be educators who took advantage of it or got off on it. But I think it far outwieghs some of the crap going on in schools in the city I now live in.
There is no perfect system, but punishment should be punishment, and suspension is not punishment. Its a holiday that you are expected to make homework back up for. Punishment involves some right or other being inhinged; be it not being allowed to go anywhere(jailed), temporary revocation of the right to not be physically abused(spanking pushups ect), a fine of money(can't really do it to kids as they don't have any), or whatever else you can think of under the sun that is quick and immediate. Hopefully causing a person maximum discomfort without being overly cruel or unusual. Notice I say OVERLY, I have no problems with unusual punishments if it fits the crime, nor do I have any problem with cruel punishments if they fit the crime. Punishment by its definition should be both cruel and/or unusual.
Oh, I forgot to mention. if I want to walk 30 minutes. I can get on a bus stop that'll take me to work pretty much directly. Still ends up being around an hour of transit time. Simply easier to walk a mile and a half, and do an hour and 15 of transit time.
Snobbery? I live in Memphis, yes we have public transportation, yes its cheap. But I've looked at the bus lines from where I live to my job. They make no sense in how they are setup. None at all. I drive 1 block to East Parkway(Major road in Memphis), take East Parkway to Poplar(pretty much THE road in Memphis), turn left onto it, and continue till I get to work. Thats it, trip time, 10 minutes. Now, if I take the bus. I have to walk about a mile and a half to the bus stop on East Parkway, so far so good, everything is similar. From there though I go in the exact OPPOSITE direction I want to go, and get on the 240 loop near Chealsa(bus change to do that), from there I have to take the interstate around almost all of memphis to walnut grove, walnut grove to white station(another change), white station to poplar. get off the bus and walk about another mile and a half to work. round trip? about an hour and 15 minutes. Getting home is a bit easier. Walk back to the bus stop, Poplar to East Parkway(bus change), East Parkway to the bus stop near my house, round trip time? 25 minutes. Thats doable. But why in the name of all thats unholy must I go 20-25 miles OUT of my way to get TO work. When coming back from work is the exact same route I'd take in my car? By car, I can get to anywhere I would want to go in 10 minutes, if that. Everything I truely need is within walking distance(walking distance is a 5-10 minute walk to me). Resteraunts, theater, book store, grocery store, blah blah blah, hell, the zoo and a freak'n golf course is within walking distance if I wanted to expand that walk to a 15-20 minute affair. But I have to drive to work. I'd love to be able to get to work without driving, just so I wouldn't have to deal with gas costs, insurance costs, maintenance, etc, on my car. Unfortunately public transportation isn't the answer here. One day maybe it will be, but currently its a LONG way off from being so.
Nod, I understand that. Thanks for the clarification on part of that though... I was more worried about if anyone knew anything about the legality of what this means for current issues, instead of future issues. I haven't found anything on that, or anyone hazarding a guess. Oh well. Just means I'll have to move onto consulting tea leaves and praying Microsoft doesn't come knocking on my work's door anytime soon.
Does this apply to all software under GPLv2? I don't really understand everything in the GPL.. but how does this keep everything going on NOW, from being possibly illegal under patent law. Yes, in november, microsoft will be unable to file charges for patent violations for anything under GPLv3. But what does that really have to do with everything that is supposidly released right now, this instant, released under GPLv2? According to Microsoft, everyone running linux at the moment, is breaking patent law. If Microsoft actually releases a list of everything we break patent law with, all 235 patents.. and if just 1 single patent is unable to be bypassed in some manner.. we all still broke the law under GPLv2.. right? So we are fair game to be sued? Or is GPLv3 retroactive and blanket any violations made under GPLv2? If anyone understands the way this works please let me know, because I couldn't find it covered in TFA, and I'd really like to know.
Hrm, I wonder. I haven't looked at the scripting language for wow, but isn't this problem solvable by a mod? When I played wow, there were mods that interacted with databases on a net forum. Couldn't someone write a community mod that allows people to rank the level of crap coming from each and every single player on a server, and then put all of that information on an online database? Then everyone can simply choose the level of crap they are willing to put up with and moderate general chat themselves to that level? Though, thinking about it, it would probably break alot of game functionality and whatever poor SOB ran the server would have to make it a pay per use service once the landslide of "but I didn't" started rolling into his inbox...
Oh well, I guess we'll all just have to grow thicker skins, and learn to deal with hearing and seeing things we don't agree with.
There is nothing wrong with the system. Don't like general chat? don't read it! Don't like Dumb-b***ard's views, ignore him. It is not Blizzard's job to make sure we all feel warm and fuzzy about how different people discuss things in game. Nor is it our jobs as gamers to censor other gamers simply because they are being assholes, I'm personally busy playing the game. If you have a problem with it, yet the mass majority of players playing the game(wow is 7million now right?) don't have a problem with it. Then maybe, just going out on a limb here, maybe the problem is you?
Really, how did this article end up in slashdot of all places? I expect this to be an "breaking news story" on one of the major stations. "Oh no, little Timmy could learn the word "Fuck" from playing wow, news at 11"
Slashdot Mirror
"Police Ratio" is an artificially high number in the US Military. The actual number of MP's and MA's is very low in reality, what makes up that huge number is people who are detached for Gate Guard Duty or Internal Patrol. Both are acting as police during those duties, while not actually being attached to the MP at all. Hell, Internal Patrols of bases aren't even there to stop problems from breaking out for the most part, its a duty thats only reason for being is to keep a person in the mindset of a normal Patrol, increased base security is a byproduct. As for trusting the man beside me who's been drafted over someone who chose to join, bah. I don't really trust half the grunts in the military as is. Example, we all know the almost cliche'd guy who joins the military with the idea he's going to get to kill someone; one way or another we all know someone who joined just for that reason. Do I trust this guy beside me? Nope. I'd rather go in with a guy I know may turn tail and run than go in with a guy I have no accurate idea of what he's going to do. At least with the Drafted guy I'm going to be somewhat prepared for it happening(Oversimplification, yes). And for the record, I was in the military. Non-combat engineer, kept everything in working order for the people who wanted to go get themselves shot at. Which btw, is another perfectly good thing to do with draftees. They don't have to fight, but if they can fix a hum-ve, cook, or for the slashdot crowd... keep windows running. They are a perfectly good addition to the military, no matter how they got there.
I don't know. To build anything like this in US cities, you have to add in costs of elevating the line, or sinking it into the ground. None of the infrastructure exists here. To make matters worse, you can't just drop in lines as you go along. Everything needs to be deployed at the same time to make it usable. I'm all for public transportation, if it works. But the cost of converting the major cities in the US isn't billions, its trillions once you add all the cities involved and the amount of track/cars needed to be built. I just don't know if I'll ever see public transportation take off in my lifetime regardless of what sort of prices we see at the pump. The problems facing it are huge, and while its gains are probably larger than the investment made, no politician is going to sign off on that sort of investment of resources because Presidents, Congressmen, and Mayors don't worry about the future, they only worry about now. Maybe if you privatize it, we'd see real growth in the market. Add in subs for companies willing to put in the investment, in turn for a limited monopoly(5-10 years) to make a return on the investment, give the company a chance to retain the monopoly in exchange for another large chunk of capital used for upgrading the line. I don't know, I just don't see the government ever building anything as extensive as the nations highway system ever again.
Actually, here in TN, you can't sell a M rated game to anyone under the age of 18. Even though the box says 17.
Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal mind numbingly hard that one. The first thing I always do with every linux distro I've ever ran, was copy that to the desktop/hotbar. On windows the first thing I do is move the start bar to the left of the screen instead of the bottom. Very uncomplicated tasks for anyone who frequents slashdot. I liken it to getting in a car for the first time and then complaining because you have to adjust the mirrors.
It depends on the collection methods employed, as well as what band the energy is beamed down on. But either way, this is a pie in the sky answer to a problem that will never solve the problem unless you overbuild the system to the Nth power. Energy usage peaks and valleys too much during a 24 hour period and batteries do not have the charge life to make them an alternative to fuel. The best case scenario is that you use the energy from the sats, so that energy can be converted to hydrogen, which can easily be stored in comparison to flat electricity. But then the waste points become absolutely huge. You have the waste at the point of collection in space, the waste of the beam used to beam it down, the waste at the collection point for the beam on ground, the waste turning it into hydrogen, and finally the waste at actual point of use. And thats just my napkin doodling. Sure, batteries could come a long way in 10-15 years before this gets off the ground. But they aren't going to come that far.
Even for military usage this isn't going to start to solve anything. An M1 Abrams for instance requires 11 gallons of gas just to crank the engine up, and electric motors are seriously lacking in torque compared to their oil powered cousins. Sure, there are some nice proof of concepts out there in the world of sports cars, but they are all placed in very light chassis because of the under powered characteristic of the power plant on a power/weight/volume ratio. And that doesn't even begin to solve the logistical nightmare of refueling an electric powered tank, its faster and simpler to replace the batteries with a fully new set of charged batteries in a race than to wait for the recharge time. Could you even imagine doing that on a tank? Or the size of the batteries which would have to be moved around? The logistics train for a tank is already staggering.
Sure, a tank is on the extreme side of things, but every problem arising with a tank, comes up with every other platform in the military. To give you a real world military example of what this would do to things. The Israeli Airforce has for many years, been considered the best airforce in the world, and the reason is simple, turn around time. A plane goes out, comes back in, refuels and refits and is back out in the air for another mission faster in their airforce than any other airforce in the world. That means each plane is doing the maximum amount of work possible in a given period of time. The entire force, from the ground up, is built upon that hallmark. From the planes they fly, to the weapons they use, to the height requirements of pilots. Everything is to keep the plane in the air as long as possible. They use planes which have better fuel efficiency to save refueling time, they use weapons platforms which are quick and easy to add and remove from the plane, they use pilots with the same basic build so they can swap pilots out on the tarmac with minimum reconfiguration of the cockpit on the tarmac so no one gets overly fatigued. And they do it all because those few minutes shaved off here and there, add up to tens of minutes, and hours, and days, and then years of extra time in the air.
Adding something with performance characteristics as flat as a batteries and electric motors to a military machine doesn't just hurt performance, it cripples it.
Who knows, she's guilty. We all know that. We could inject a lot of FUD into a jury case of this sort if we wanted to very easily because of our knowledge on the subject. I doubt it would have made any difference though, unless the /.'er in question is one hell of a charismatic person. We could talk about how making available isn't sharing under the law, explain away how the usr/pwd issue is able to be sidestepped, explain how wireless works even if she wasn't using it, how DHCP works, and a ton of other things which would add alot of doubt into the case. We're all skilled at BSing a normal person under with vague or completely made up information. But in the end, I don't think it would have made much difference because of the amount of circumstantial evidence. I can snow under or explain away everything on the RIAAs list, but the more things I explain away, the more it seems I'm trying to vindicate my view, and am not solely interested in justice being done to the rest of a jury.
She didn't wipe the drive. She had a hard-drive go bad. She had full documentation by an outside source(bestbuy) that the drive had in fact died. Bestbuy then replaced the drive and kept the old one for whatever reason bestbuy does things like this. The Juror in question has no idea of what he speaks of. While I admit with the defense she took, for the case as a whole, she is guilty as sin. She is not guilty of fraudulently giving the RIAA a different drive, it is convenient as far as this case is concerned, but it does happen. That fact, more than anything else, made me think Mr Hegg is an idiot.
I'm not the brightest bulb in the box by any means. I always thought the law was there as a guideline for what is legal and illegal, as far as jury trials were concerned. And that it was the job of the jury to decide if those guidelines applied, and to what extent, if at all. If the jury isn't able to decide what the guidelines are, how are they able to rule on the facts. Maybe my logic is flawed.
because I was already taken. Can't name it I-office. or I-apps.
I think what the earlier poster was getting at, is HP started out of someones garage. So'd AMD. So'd MS in some respects. All of the big companies that control the market now, other than IBM... Started out as a bunch of geeks sitting around a table sharing beers and talking about pie in the sky dreams. Unfortunately the computer market has grown up. You can't enter manufacturing of chips anymore because its no longer thousands of dollars, its millions. You can't enter software development for the sake of software development because someone else already has that market covered, with normally some competition on the free side of the street. Sure, there are some people who will make it in software development. But even then, it seems like the goal is to become successful enough to be bought out by a larger well established company, and then simply becoming part of their portfolio.
The days of seeing startups in true hardware and software development, take off as it did in the past, is well and gone. The net is really the only place left to try and build the sort of success that other companies have made in the computer field, and its fast becoming hard to compete there as well for a small guy. Think about it, 10 years ago everyone was competing for "portal space". No one is competing for it now, and the victors are pretty much set in stone. Yahoo, MSN, Google, and AOL pretty much own the game, and all the rest got bought out, or went the way of the dodo. Now we have a war for who will allow users the most access with creating, uploading, and displaying content. All of the big 4 have players in the game, and so far, it looks like the big four are going to win there as well. They control the 'portal', and can add links directly to their horse.
This doesn't mean that others can't do well in this market, look at wikipedia for instance. But it means its much harder to actually get something successful of the ground than it was only a few short years ago, and its only going to get harder as the players continue to solidify their hold on it.
I am in dire fear for the Live Action Evangelion. Too many problems surround it. They want to do a trilogy of films first up, with child actors who are going to grow between each film. Which means all three films need to be shot all at once in a whirl wind. ADV owns sole rights to such an enterprise, and while they have stated they're consulting with Gainax, they have veto power over its original creators. Find me a director who can treat the religious symbolism in NGE with any amount of respect and not totally mess it up by the numbers. They still haven't finished funding for it after a decade of shopping it around, this project first started being whispered about not long after the completion of the series in the US. Thats certainly when ADV bought the rights to doing a live action version. I simply don't know if it will ever be made, and even if it does, I cannot see it being any good. I already think Anno and crew are starting to suffer from George Lucas Syndrome. So far the ending has been re-written and re-packaged 2 times, with a 3rd "Official Ending" coming this year or next. A live action movie would constitute as a 4th, official ending. At what point will everyone just leave Eva alone as the masterpiece that it was and quit trying to improve the wheel.
I think most people who support Ron Paul, myself included, aren't supporting him on hope of him getting elected. When the primary hits, I'm not voting for him, I don't want him in office. What I DO want to happen, is for a lot of the things he is talking about, to get more press. He may not have fully formed ideas, or workable solutions. But no one else is even entertaining some of the ideas he is, for fear of voter backlash.
Do I like his answer to the national budget problem? Nope, but no one else is really exploring some of the ideas he's talking about, they are just spouting the same party line that won't fix anything because that stance is popular with voters. Do I like his stance on abortion? Not so much, but I'm a guy, and my vote on that will never count as much as a woman saying "Its my body!!". No matter how much I had to do with the state of things, I don't get a true vote if it were to come up(yes, I an sue after the fact, but after the fact is a bit too late, isn't it?). So, meh. Do I like his stance on Iraq? Not really, once we committed to it, we're kinda stuck there for awhile, his answer is just as bad as everyone else's. But no other candidate is saying, to paraphrase, "We shouldn't be involved in any of these wars at all, its not our job to nanny the world". Nor do I like his answer to education, or a hundred other things. The only thing I can agree with him on, is that the idea of a "police action" has gotten totally out of control. It should be impossible for a President to put us in a state of war through "police action" for half a decade, with the decade mark coming up, without the 2/3rds majority vote from Congress on it. I know the whole problem of it started almost 60 years ago with the advent of the cold war, but come on!
I'll jump on a soap box, write letters, picket; anything and everything simply to get his views out there. But, I actually don't want the man in office. Everything with him is a binary solution. That doesn't help a whole lot for running things, but in todays media polarity gets time slots. If I have to endorse a man I can't see myself voting for, just to get some of his ideas and views out in a way thats taken as a viable option.... Instead of my retarded cousin Eddie's crack pot ranting... So be it.
This doesn't say a whole lot about our political process, but this is where we are.
Yes, DX for 360 and Windows are similar. Not the exact same, but close enough for most uses. But that really stops to be a selling point once you take into account that the PS3, and Wii, use close cousins of OpenGL. Its really a choice of what standard developers want to develop for. There are more really good DX coders out there than OpenGL, because back in the day, DX had a larger feature set, and was much easier to code for. Creating a larger pool of development houses that went that direction. Now though, the two are relatively matched for the most part. There is just not the pool of coders knowledgeable in using it. This could change in a few years, who knows?
I don't think its that Eve is the only space based game. I think its that Eve is the only true PVP game. I don't remember one bad night in a game destroying weeks, if not months, of work for hundreds of players like in Eve. And after that sort of risk, all other PVP seems boring and pointless. Sure, I can PVP in WoW, but why would I want to? What sort of reward do I get? Do I get the thrill of living through a battle and knowing the corp avoided a setback of weeks in equipment and funds? Or the little giddy feeling of knowing I just cost the other side exactly the same thing?
Sure, I'd like another game to take Eves place, it has its problems, and CCP has their problems as well. But in the current market of it taking 10s of millions to develop a AAA title, no-one is going to put the time into making a game like Eve. The subset of players it appeals to is simply too small of a market. But, for those of us this type of game does appeal to.. Eve is the only game in town.
Lots of games evoke emotions via gameplay itself. For instance, anyone who played Ninja Gaiden on Xbox jumped up and down several times in absolute joy once finally beating the very first boss in the game after getting thier asses handed to them 20-30 times in a row. Who hasn't went on a rapid fire killing spree in a multiplayer fps match and thought "I'm the man!"? Or the other end of the spectrum, and died 5-6 times in a row and been angery or upset? Games evoke emotion, and the emotions games evoke are often more powerful than any book or movie because you are the person doing it. The life of the protaganist is directly in your hands, something books and movies cannot do. I read alot of books, no other medium but books engage you in thought about 'life the universe and everything' as you go over the material presented. Movies are good for instant gratification, rarely do I walk out of a movie thinking about what went on in them beyond "that was pretty cool". And games do a good job of bridging those two mediums, while throwing a few other oddball mediums into the mix.
Um, Evangelion was a masterpiece, and while wierd and warped, is easily in the top 5 of best anime of all time. While FFVII is um.. the game that came after FFVI, and before FFTactics. Not much more I can say about it. But, I'm also the guy who owns NGE 5 times over because it kept being released on a new medium, or a bug got fixed in the video or translation.. so I need to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Your forgetting to factor in game sales. Project Gothem, Forza, freak'n Halo, etc etc etc. All of these fall under the Xbox letterhead, and they make the company millions because they are all first party, and some of the best selling games on the platform, and that doesn't even factor in subscription costs from Xbox Live. If the Xbox is going to become profitable its not going to be on the console alone, its going to be on game sales and subscriptions. And heck, Halo 3 alone had the chance of making the console profitable by 2008. Halo 2 was the most played game on the 360 untill gears came out, and its still pegging in the top 10. As soon as 3 hits you'll have thousands of consumers rushing to by a 360, plus halo 3, plus subscription costs. Thats a massive influx of cash to the Xbox brand.
I dunno. I'm went to school in a rural area, Iowa, and teachers regularly spanked kids in school, as far as I know they still do there. It required a permision slip from parents, but I'm fairly certain I saw my parents giggle with glee upon getting that slip of paper to sign every year. Then there was the whole physical education punishment schtick. Screw up and it was running laps and pushups and situps and all sorts of other things we hate, you got subjected to, if a teacher mentioned in passing to a coach that you were goofing off in their classroom. As soon as you hit PE, you were going to pay for whatever you did, normally informally without it ever hitting the office staff of the school. I don't exactly agree with the PE part of it totally, but I cannot fault the results it produced. Durring the entire time I was in school I can only remember one incident of suspension, and that was for a kid found doing pot in school. Course, 10 times out of 10 parents would back teachers while I was there. I heard grumbles from some parents about not agreeing with the punishment(normally but not always, because the punishment wasn't strict enough), but parents always had the attitude of if you did it on their time, they have complete control of whatever happens to you for it. I think the US school system would be a hell of alot better today if we went back to a system like this throughout the US. Yes, all the brutality and things that got spanking in school would happen in isolated cases again, and there would be educators who took advantage of it or got off on it. But I think it far outwieghs some of the crap going on in schools in the city I now live in. There is no perfect system, but punishment should be punishment, and suspension is not punishment. Its a holiday that you are expected to make homework back up for. Punishment involves some right or other being inhinged; be it not being allowed to go anywhere(jailed), temporary revocation of the right to not be physically abused(spanking pushups ect), a fine of money(can't really do it to kids as they don't have any), or whatever else you can think of under the sun that is quick and immediate. Hopefully causing a person maximum discomfort without being overly cruel or unusual. Notice I say OVERLY, I have no problems with unusual punishments if it fits the crime, nor do I have any problem with cruel punishments if they fit the crime. Punishment by its definition should be both cruel and/or unusual.
Oh, I forgot to mention. if I want to walk 30 minutes. I can get on a bus stop that'll take me to work pretty much directly. Still ends up being around an hour of transit time. Simply easier to walk a mile and a half, and do an hour and 15 of transit time.
Snobbery? I live in Memphis, yes we have public transportation, yes its cheap. But I've looked at the bus lines from where I live to my job. They make no sense in how they are setup. None at all. I drive 1 block to East Parkway(Major road in Memphis), take East Parkway to Poplar(pretty much THE road in Memphis), turn left onto it, and continue till I get to work. Thats it, trip time, 10 minutes. Now, if I take the bus. I have to walk about a mile and a half to the bus stop on East Parkway, so far so good, everything is similar. From there though I go in the exact OPPOSITE direction I want to go, and get on the 240 loop near Chealsa(bus change to do that), from there I have to take the interstate around almost all of memphis to walnut grove, walnut grove to white station(another change), white station to poplar. get off the bus and walk about another mile and a half to work. round trip? about an hour and 15 minutes. Getting home is a bit easier. Walk back to the bus stop, Poplar to East Parkway(bus change), East Parkway to the bus stop near my house, round trip time? 25 minutes. Thats doable. But why in the name of all thats unholy must I go 20-25 miles OUT of my way to get TO work. When coming back from work is the exact same route I'd take in my car? By car, I can get to anywhere I would want to go in 10 minutes, if that. Everything I truely need is within walking distance(walking distance is a 5-10 minute walk to me). Resteraunts, theater, book store, grocery store, blah blah blah, hell, the zoo and a freak'n golf course is within walking distance if I wanted to expand that walk to a 15-20 minute affair. But I have to drive to work. I'd love to be able to get to work without driving, just so I wouldn't have to deal with gas costs, insurance costs, maintenance, etc, on my car. Unfortunately public transportation isn't the answer here. One day maybe it will be, but currently its a LONG way off from being so.
Nod, I understand that. Thanks for the clarification on part of that though... I was more worried about if anyone knew anything about the legality of what this means for current issues, instead of future issues. I haven't found anything on that, or anyone hazarding a guess. Oh well. Just means I'll have to move onto consulting tea leaves and praying Microsoft doesn't come knocking on my work's door anytime soon.
Does this apply to all software under GPLv2? I don't really understand everything in the GPL.. but how does this keep everything going on NOW, from being possibly illegal under patent law. Yes, in november, microsoft will be unable to file charges for patent violations for anything under GPLv3. But what does that really have to do with everything that is supposidly released right now, this instant, released under GPLv2? According to Microsoft, everyone running linux at the moment, is breaking patent law. If Microsoft actually releases a list of everything we break patent law with, all 235 patents.. and if just 1 single patent is unable to be bypassed in some manner.. we all still broke the law under GPLv2.. right? So we are fair game to be sued? Or is GPLv3 retroactive and blanket any violations made under GPLv2? If anyone understands the way this works please let me know, because I couldn't find it covered in TFA, and I'd really like to know.
Its legal for me to buy an actual pirated DVD from hong-kong.. yet I can't upload a BT file in hong-kong? wtf mate!
Hrm, I wonder. I haven't looked at the scripting language for wow, but isn't this problem solvable by a mod? When I played wow, there were mods that interacted with databases on a net forum. Couldn't someone write a community mod that allows people to rank the level of crap coming from each and every single player on a server, and then put all of that information on an online database? Then everyone can simply choose the level of crap they are willing to put up with and moderate general chat themselves to that level? Though, thinking about it, it would probably break alot of game functionality and whatever poor SOB ran the server would have to make it a pay per use service once the landslide of "but I didn't" started rolling into his inbox... Oh well, I guess we'll all just have to grow thicker skins, and learn to deal with hearing and seeing things we don't agree with.
There is nothing wrong with the system. Don't like general chat? don't read it! Don't like Dumb-b***ard's views, ignore him. It is not Blizzard's job to make sure we all feel warm and fuzzy about how different people discuss things in game. Nor is it our jobs as gamers to censor other gamers simply because they are being assholes, I'm personally busy playing the game. If you have a problem with it, yet the mass majority of players playing the game(wow is 7million now right?) don't have a problem with it. Then maybe, just going out on a limb here, maybe the problem is you?
Really, how did this article end up in slashdot of all places? I expect this to be an "breaking news story" on one of the major stations. "Oh no, little Timmy could learn the word "Fuck" from playing wow, news at 11"