Violent and sexual movies are not subject to any legal regulation, with the exception of outright pornography.
Pedantically speaking, I said "rules", not "laws". There exist regulations for films, even if they're strictly voluntary.
This is not the case. The MPAA rating system is an entirely voluntary system of self regulation by the movie industry- the government has nothing to do with it.
The difference is that the theatre's self-regulation is effective. That's NOT the case for videogames. Most stores will be perfectly happy to sell GTA3 to a 10 year old, without glancing at the ESRB rating. Perhaps the law is necessary only because videogame retailers have not shown adaquate responsibility.
I want to be the one to choose what my kids can and cannot play.
That's what they're doing, you moron. They're saying that YOU as the parent have to make this decision, and not the kids themselves.
Apply the same logic to alcohol, cigarettes, or hardcore porn. Should the government not "be the parent of your kids" with respect to any of those products? All they're doing is moving videogames into the same category of "stuff that parents have to review and decide whether their kids can have it".
But what if the Gov't bans the sale of games to minors? That decision places a lot of weight on me that I don't need.
Oh, please. A lot of weight? You're saying you don't want the government to take care of your kids, and at the same time you're too lazy to do it yourself.
The law sounds like it's going to be too absolute to allow for things like their parents okaying it.
Wrong. You can easily "OK" it by buying the game for them.
I can just feel the stupidity congealing around this topic.
Look, they are just proposing that videogames be subject to the same rules that violent/sexual movies are ALREADY subject to. There's nothing unreasonable about this. They're not banning them, they're not preventing kids from playing them. They're just saying that kids have to get their parents to consent and buy the games for them.
We know that sometimes kids who are never exposed to alcohol until they are 19 or 21 can go way overboard the first time... is there a possibility of the same thing happening with violent video games?
That's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever read on slashdot. Period. There's not even a crazy way to interpret that statement so it makes sense in bizarro world.
Unfortunately, going after AOL for usenet postings is like hitting out at the poor geek in the corner when one gets bullied.
That's nothing. Last year he was ranting about how it should be illegal to write software like gnutella. Not "use for illegal purposes". Write.
I think Ellison is gradually transitioning from his traditional role as the "outspoken grumpy curmudgeon" of the SF world, to being the "crazy homeless man shouting at the parking meter" of the SF world.
Their lower margins will be accounted for by their boom in sales.
No amount of sales will account for a negative profit margin in the case that HP, Epson, et al are selling printers at a loss to clean up on cartridges.
The only way to sell a cheaper-than-cost printer with recyclable cartridges would be to package it with a bundle of more profitable components, as suggested here that Dell could do.
I paid CAN$410 to get a GF1-DDR card in Toronto, right after it got here. Granted, it was from a small PC shop, not an electronics store with a %50 markup.
It needn't be an "invisibility" suit that reproduces the exact scene behind the wearer relative to the viewer, but rather "adaptive camoflage" that changes according to surroundings. A regular camo suit doesn't have a lifelike tree painted on it after all, merely a mess of forest-colors that generally blend into forest surroundings.
It would be enough to sample the scene around the user, and reproduce some perturbation of the image or image colours on the whole suit. If you wanted to be fancy, you could divide the suit into, say, 4 quadrants, and reproduce the sampled colours onto the opposite quadrant of the suit so you get more effective blending from viewers all around the subject.
If the generation gap between machines is large enough (and console life cycles generally are), then you generally only really have to be backwards compatible with the media. Anything else you can probably accomplish with emulation. If your machines use a standard media like CD or DVD, this isn't a huge undertaking.
No kidding. If you're aware of email viruses at all, especially to the point of configuring a server to defend against them, then you're a damn fool for getting infected with or without a virus scanner / firewall running.
That's like saying that the reading on the radar gun isn't indicative of the real speed of the car, but rather it's the engine, the suspension, the aerodynamics...
Speed is a nicely defined simple measurement. "Cornering" is not.
Consider a car with lots of body roll, but otherwise very good characteristics. That car might have high G numbers if you eeease it into a turn. But it would throw its weight and lose traction if you snapped the car into a fast turn.
If you're desperate for discrete measurements, then slalom times are probably a better measure of "cornering".
Hardly. Lateral Gs are just that -- maximum lateral acceleration. Cornering is the general ability of the car to perform in turns. It involves a host of other factors: weight transfer, body roll, balance, over/understeer, etc. in addition to the simple lateral Gs.
It seems that the mentioned games do support ingame DTS/DD. That is a testament to clever programmers writing software audio encoders. If you can afford to give up that CPU, that's cool.
The PS2 itself has no support for ingame DD/DTS whatsoever.
"SPECIAL PRE-ORDER! 129.99 $200 SAVINGS!!" is most obviously not a typo.
It makes it harder to swallow, but it is still concievable that it was a data entry typo. If the prices on the flyer/website were driven from a database, including a "$SAVINGS = $PRICE - $SALEPRICE" calculation, a single typo on the sale price could be the root cause.
Re:Is slashdot looking over my shoulder?
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
·
· Score: 2
There is something really cool about your cordless phone being plugged in to your computer and dialing 192#168#1#1
Cool! That's a great dialing mechanism -- and it would be backwards-compatible with your phone's speed dial.
Now, the cool hack will be to add Caller ID support to the VB, so you can see what IP your incoming call is coming from. And of course the Caller Name feature will be the DNS reverse-lookup!
Slashdot Mirror
"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late."
"Late?" said Arthur. "What for?"
"What is your name, human?"
"Dent. Arthur Dent," said Arthur.
"Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly. "It's a sort of threat you see."
Why do you proxy filter RTSP streaming media, while ignoring HTTPS traffic?
Pedantically speaking, I said "rules", not "laws". There exist regulations for films, even if they're strictly voluntary.
This is not the case. The MPAA rating system is an entirely voluntary system of self regulation by the movie industry- the government has nothing to do with it.
The difference is that the theatre's self-regulation is effective. That's NOT the case for videogames. Most stores will be perfectly happy to sell GTA3 to a 10 year old, without glancing at the ESRB rating. Perhaps the law is necessary only because videogame retailers have not shown adaquate responsibility.
That's not what you said at all. You said you want your kids to make their own decisions, because the "weight" of doing it yourself was too onerous.
That's what they're doing, you moron. They're saying that YOU as the parent have to make this decision, and not the kids themselves. Apply the same logic to alcohol, cigarettes, or hardcore porn. Should the government not "be the parent of your kids" with respect to any of those products? All they're doing is moving videogames into the same category of "stuff that parents have to review and decide whether their kids can have it".
But what if the Gov't bans the sale of games to minors? That decision places a lot of weight on me that I don't need.
Oh, please. A lot of weight? You're saying you don't want the government to take care of your kids, and at the same time you're too lazy to do it yourself.
The law sounds like it's going to be too absolute to allow for things like their parents okaying it.
Wrong. You can easily "OK" it by buying the game for them.
Look, they are just proposing that videogames be subject to the same rules that violent/sexual movies are ALREADY subject to. There's nothing unreasonable about this. They're not banning them, they're not preventing kids from playing them. They're just saying that kids have to get their parents to consent and buy the games for them.
We know that sometimes kids who are never exposed to alcohol until they are 19 or 21 can go way overboard the first time... is there a possibility of the same thing happening with violent video games?
That's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever read on slashdot. Period. There's not even a crazy way to interpret that statement so it makes sense in bizarro world.
That's nothing. Last year he was ranting about how it should be illegal to write software like gnutella. Not "use for illegal purposes". Write.
I think Ellison is gradually transitioning from his traditional role as the "outspoken grumpy curmudgeon" of the SF world, to being the "crazy homeless man shouting at the parking meter" of the SF world.
Tell the captain you can't possibly get any more out of the ship, then magically deliver an extra 10% so you look like a genius.
No amount of sales will account for a negative profit margin in the case that HP, Epson, et al are selling printers at a loss to clean up on cartridges.
The only way to sell a cheaper-than-cost printer with recyclable cartridges would be to package it with a bundle of more profitable components, as suggested here that Dell could do.
I wonder how long the hardware will last in extremes like that.
Are you joking? The "extremes" that hardware has to deal with are in the -80C (-112F) range.
A typical webcam has no moving parts to be affected by the cold. If you can keep a radio transmitter running, you can keep the camera going.
I paid CAN$410 to get a GF1-DDR card in Toronto, right after it got here. Granted, it was from a small PC shop, not an electronics store with a %50 markup.
It would be enough to sample the scene around the user, and reproduce some perturbation of the image or image colours on the whole suit. If you wanted to be fancy, you could divide the suit into, say, 4 quadrants, and reproduce the sampled colours onto the opposite quadrant of the suit so you get more effective blending from viewers all around the subject.
Actually, for every 2.75 minutes of show that you skip, you're allowed to skip 1 minute of commercials. Keep a calculator handy when you watch.
Yeah, I love how the LEDs on Apple displays resize themselves whenever you switch resolutions!
If the generation gap between machines is large enough (and console life cycles generally are), then you generally only really have to be backwards compatible with the media. Anything else you can probably accomplish with emulation. If your machines use a standard media like CD or DVD, this isn't a huge undertaking.
No kidding. If you're aware of email viruses at all, especially to the point of configuring a server to defend against them, then you're a damn fool for getting infected with or without a virus scanner / firewall running.
Actually, it was just plain old makeup against a bluescreen for the backdrop.
Do you pay more for a ticket, or do they just expect to make it back from your bar tab?
Which is nice if said stuff isn't core to most every game on the platform. 3D audio should probably be supported in hardware.
Speed is a nicely defined simple measurement. "Cornering" is not.
Consider a car with lots of body roll, but otherwise very good characteristics. That car might have high G numbers if you eeease it into a turn. But it would throw its weight and lose traction if you snapped the car into a fast turn.
If you're desperate for discrete measurements, then slalom times are probably a better measure of "cornering".
Of course, the 'Vette owns at that too.
Hardly. Lateral Gs are just that -- maximum lateral acceleration. Cornering is the general ability of the car to perform in turns. It involves a host of other factors: weight transfer, body roll, balance, over/understeer, etc. in addition to the simple lateral Gs.
The PS2 itself has no support for ingame DD/DTS whatsoever.
The PS2's "support" for Dolby Digital consists of playing canned 5.1 audio samples. It's the audio equivalent of FMV.
The Xbox on the other hand has a built-in Dolby Digital *encoder*, so that the realtime ingame 3D audio is placed using all the DD channels.
It makes it harder to swallow, but it is still concievable that it was a data entry typo. If the prices on the flyer/website were driven from a database, including a "$SAVINGS = $PRICE - $SALEPRICE" calculation, a single typo on the sale price could be the root cause.
Cool! That's a great dialing mechanism -- and it would be backwards-compatible with your phone's speed dial.
Now, the cool hack will be to add Caller ID support to the VB, so you can see what IP your incoming call is coming from. And of course the Caller Name feature will be the DNS reverse-lookup!