Why are you pretending as though a lack of nuclear fuel will mean insufficient energy?
Do you know exactly how much energy can be harvested with even inefficient solar cells?
Is this just because I lived in the desert? Is that the only reason I know these things? You can power the entire United States on solar power alone if you're willing to build enough troughs, and it will require but a small percentage of unwanted shit land in the middle of nowhere.
Some nuclear waste is greater than none. Obviously nuclear is vastly superior to coal, and by comparison its emissions may as well be zero.
The author effectively compared non-polluting sources to polluting sources, and nuclear is unfortunately a polluting source (albeit less so than coal).
Nonsense - if you were to only use solar troughs (ie concentrated solar) you could generate enough electricity to power the entire country by only situating them in the American southwest, in vast areas that are essentially unwanted tracts of dirt.
A single HVDC line from there can run across the country, which coupled with geothermal and nuclear essentially eliminates the need to have any coal power at all.
That's exactly how it happened. There was essentially a spark that went through a helium container, causing the helium to vaporize (from its liquid state).
Liquid helium is what is being used to keep the magnets cooled. When the helium vaporized, it heated up. Thus, the helium vaporization caused several magnets to heat up.
There is no way for a superconducting magnet to heat up on its own because it's a superconductor; no power is ever lost to heat as there is no resistance in the wiring!
We don't need to rewire the whole system, only a small batch of magnets that received the bad soldering job. The rest are fine, and we now have better ways of checking the soldering points remotely (ie without having to heat up the other 7 sectors of the LHC).
The $21M covers all repair costs, including replacing some of the wiring in a batch of magnets in a particular sector. Actually, part of the plan is to use backup magnets (obviously double checked for this flaw) so as to save some time, but we don't have enough backup magnets to replace all of the ones that need to be fixed.
This isn't Blizzard, this is Activision. The core Blizzard team isn't involved with Guitar Hero, CoD, etc. at all.
When Vivendi acquired Activision, they decided to attach Blizzard (also owned by Vivendi) to the end of Activision's name.
Activision's expertise is with console titles. Blizzard's expertise is with PC games. Blizzard still acts like it has been acting for years, as a small developer for the PC that focuses on quality, not quantity.
They're selling 3 single player campaigns. Each one is the length of a full game (30+ missions).
If you only want to play multiplayer, you only have to buy one of them to receive all of the multiplayer content.
I don't see a problem here. If anything, they're being gracious by NOT including unique multiplayer content in each one. If they had, it would practically be a requirement for a complete multiplayer experience.
In other words, they're only charging you for the first $50, for which you receive a complete campaign and full multiplayer. You don't need to buy the other two games if you're only interested in multiplayer.
If they had offered special multiplayer features for buying the others, you would have had a real argument for Blizzard 'milking' you. As it stands, you're retarded.
As for advertising... yeah, it sucks, and I won't buy those games. I'll tolerate the occasional billboard or ads in chat lobbies. I will not tolerate advertisements while a game loads, since this decreases the load time and is ripe for abuse. What happens when the advertisers start demanding longer load times so that the player receives more exposure? What about larger video ads? For now, ads in games have been pretty tame, but we have to be on the lookout for this type of abuse.
You've just made a slippery slope argument, and those are always poor arguments.
Let's think about whether this is realistic. Do you watch 29 minutes of ads for 1 minute of television? No, of course you don't. There is a certain amount of ads that is optimal before people start changing the channel.
Similarly, 20 pages of ads on a test would mean 20 pages that students immediately skip without looking at.
And no, I don't mean full on advertising like blaring announcements between classes with videos to boot, but maybe corporate funded text books, yes I know historically they are inaccurate, that only allow for example problems to use their product/brand.
If they're inaccurate, why would you even consider them for education? How did you even come to the conclusion that this is acceptable?
I'm sorry, but the public education system is, by design, not a business. There's no such thing as "not operating in the red" because public education is about education, not profit. To even consider the use of "inaccurate" textbooks in order to make a few bucks is an atrocity, at best.
Are there better ways to keep a publicly funded school system funded well? Yes, of course there's a better way: increased funding! The public education system is our most vital government program, why shouldn't it be well-funded?
For a right-leaning place, Slashdot has funny expectations.
/. isn't a right-leaning place. It isn't a left-leaning place either. But, of course, it's easy to see an opposing bias where there's none if all you look for is a flamefest to take part in.
It's also easy to miss a bias that actually exists. I'm not saying that it does, just that your comment doesn't make any sense. How can you say for certain which way/. leans on average?
I remember Channel One. That was probably one of the worst crimes of our generation; we wasted what, half an hour each day watching that garbage? We would have been much better off watching the local news than that garbage, but then the school wouldn't make any money from that delicious guaranteed ad revenue.
It was a welcome break from classes at the time, but looking back I realize how much could have been done with that time. Still, that's a lot more covert than what the teacher is doing with this test, which is why this test made slashdot and Channel One did/does not
I was writing an exam a year ago, lamenting my poor salary, and thought about ad revenue on exams.
However, I considered something far more subliminal than outright "This test is brought to you by..." and it doesn't have to be on exams-only. It can be on quizzes, homework questions, etc. I'm a Physics teacher, so this is really more for my field than others.
Just work businesses and pop culture icons into the problem wording. I often will write problem sets with my favorite superheroes in mind (ie rather than a projectile motion problem with a man playing baseball, Batman is the one playing baseball), but I don't get paid to do this. It's trivial to add this sort of fluff to all of your problems, and it wouldn't change the educational content at all. If anything, students seem more able to grasp concepts and solve problems correctly when there are icons that are easily identifiable. When I write problems involving superheroes, for instance, those quiz scores often have a much higher average than problems where "Superhero XX" is replaced by "A man" or "A woman"
How much could I get a political party to pay me for working their candidate into at least one of my problems on every problem set/quiz/test? "George Bush is snowboarding down a mountain at velocity v, etc."
Who says GM wasn't making a profit? GM certainly never said that.
The problem was that they weren't profitable ENOUGH. Gas prices were cheap. Thus, demand wasn't spectacular.
If the people at GM had any vision, they would have continued producing/selling these cars (at profit, just not great profit) and then raked in the cash during the INEVITABLE price hike in gas last summer, which took place after years of steadily rising gas prices (which steadily drives demand for electric vehicles upward).
This is the fault of a lack of vision at GM, not a lack of profit.
You're truly full of it if you think the unions are responsible for this.
Yes, they have to pay their workers well, and this is more expensive than paying them dirt. However, the cost above minimum wage for ALL automotive workers is a tiny fraction of the shortfall being experienced by automotive companies. In other words, even if UAW worker made minimum wage with no benefits, these companies would still be asking for enormous bailout checks.
The cause for this is a poor economy. Anyone who claims otherwise is trying to spoon feed you bullshit.
Yeah, the potential for exhuming heavy metals and toxins is high if you don't regulate a plant like this (which it would be). However, we love our coal power plants, and they're absolutely disgusting. It's pathetic that we're still building new ones, yet we haven't built a new power plant in over 20 years (but this is supposed to change by 2010).
Furthermore, landfill trash isn't exactly a valuable resource. I'd much rather pay a little extra and burn away trash then burn coal. Plants like this one (they don't have to use plasma) would be great for helping us transition toward more nuclear and geothermal/wind/solar power.
I disagree. Once you've made the single hardware modification, you never need to jump through that hoop ever again. Also, the people who sell the hardware to you provide enough instructions so that even a 10 year-old who has played with legos can successfully mod their xbox. Anyone who knows how to torrent a game is going to have the mental capacity to successfully modify their xbox.
PC games, on the other hand, require a different software patch depending on the copy protection scheme that you need to get around. This can be something simple like copy-pasting a crack, or you may have to install other software packages. And this needs to be done for EVERY game.
Pirating an xbox game is just as easy as pirating a PC game the first time. After that, pirating an xbox game is MUCH EASIER than pirating PC games. The people who think otherwise have never actually tried both.
And in many states (at least California), driving 30 MPH in a 45 MPH zone is illegal. You must maintain your speed so that it matches the flow of traffic. If all of the other cars are going 30 MPH, then it's fine.
It's dangerous for one car to be going a speed that does not match the flow of traffic, whether that's too slow or too fast is irrelevant.
And to top things off, we know that driving 30MPH is definitely not getting you better gas mileage anyway. Thus, there's no reason to do it (unless you're coasting to a red light, of course, but then you're not exactly maintaining that speed).
There are stories of laptops being stolen out of checked luggage, yes. Whether this has anything to do with legitimate searches, I can't say.
Most of us always take laptops as carry-ons anyway. It's much safer that way, but you can still be stopped and have your laptop searched. If they suspect anything or are just having a bad day, they can seize your laptop. Typically people either never get their laptops back or get it back after a very long time (months)
That means that there will definitely be a PC version, perhaps up to a year after the console version's release.
There's no reason to keep it 360 exclusive when they'll earn more profit by also releasing it on the PC. That's obvious.
Their strategy of delaying the PC release is also obvious. There are consoles to sell after all, and more hot exclusives = more sold consoles. A year after the game's release, no one will care about GoW2 anymore and that's when the PC version will be released.
1) Piracy is commonplace on consoles, too, you just don't hear about it as much
2) Very few game developers have completely abandoned PC - these developers were gemerally butt-hurt from poor sales after producing a few shitty titles. See Valve, Blizzard, and Stardock, for a few big names
3) If porting the game generates some profit, it will be done. Since porting the game costs effectively nothing, doing so will churn an enormous profit.
Yes, it is completely logical to have a game that's no longer making any money ported to another platform where it can generate additional profit.
It is completely ILLOGICAL to not port the game.
As we've seen time and time again, 360 exclusive games are eventually ported to PC 90% of the time
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you pretending as though a lack of nuclear fuel will mean insufficient energy?
Do you know exactly how much energy can be harvested with even inefficient solar cells?
Is this just because I lived in the desert? Is that the only reason I know these things? You can power the entire United States on solar power alone if you're willing to build enough troughs, and it will require but a small percentage of unwanted shit land in the middle of nowhere.
Some nuclear waste is greater than none. Obviously nuclear is vastly superior to coal, and by comparison its emissions may as well be zero.
The author effectively compared non-polluting sources to polluting sources, and nuclear is unfortunately a polluting source (albeit less so than coal).
Nonsense - if you were to only use solar troughs (ie concentrated solar) you could generate enough electricity to power the entire country by only situating them in the American southwest, in vast areas that are essentially unwanted tracts of dirt.
A single HVDC line from there can run across the country, which coupled with geothermal and nuclear essentially eliminates the need to have any coal power at all.
Right now all of the detectors are calibrating with cosmic rays.
I'll consider it an act of Divine Intervention when God uses cosmic rays to spell "TURN THIS SHIT OFF" on every detector.
Until then, let's fix this black hole device!
That's exactly how it happened. There was essentially a spark that went through a helium container, causing the helium to vaporize (from its liquid state).
Liquid helium is what is being used to keep the magnets cooled. When the helium vaporized, it heated up. Thus, the helium vaporization caused several magnets to heat up.
There is no way for a superconducting magnet to heat up on its own because it's a superconductor; no power is ever lost to heat as there is no resistance in the wiring!
We don't need to rewire the whole system, only a small batch of magnets that received the bad soldering job. The rest are fine, and we now have better ways of checking the soldering points remotely (ie without having to heat up the other 7 sectors of the LHC).
The $21M covers all repair costs, including replacing some of the wiring in a batch of magnets in a particular sector. Actually, part of the plan is to use backup magnets (obviously double checked for this flaw) so as to save some time, but we don't have enough backup magnets to replace all of the ones that need to be fixed.
Particle physicists mourn its loss, especially those of us that really dislike having to go to Geneva every summer (damned French language barrier!!!)
This isn't Blizzard, this is Activision. The core Blizzard team isn't involved with Guitar Hero, CoD, etc. at all.
When Vivendi acquired Activision, they decided to attach Blizzard (also owned by Vivendi) to the end of Activision's name.
Activision's expertise is with console titles. Blizzard's expertise is with PC games. Blizzard still acts like it has been acting for years, as a small developer for the PC that focuses on quality, not quantity.
They're selling 3 single player campaigns. Each one is the length of a full game (30+ missions).
If you only want to play multiplayer, you only have to buy one of them to receive all of the multiplayer content.
I don't see a problem here. If anything, they're being gracious by NOT including unique multiplayer content in each one. If they had, it would practically be a requirement for a complete multiplayer experience.
In other words, they're only charging you for the first $50, for which you receive a complete campaign and full multiplayer. You don't need to buy the other two games if you're only interested in multiplayer.
If they had offered special multiplayer features for buying the others, you would have had a real argument for Blizzard 'milking' you. As it stands, you're retarded.
As for advertising... yeah, it sucks, and I won't buy those games. I'll tolerate the occasional billboard or ads in chat lobbies. I will not tolerate advertisements while a game loads, since this decreases the load time and is ripe for abuse. What happens when the advertisers start demanding longer load times so that the player receives more exposure? What about larger video ads? For now, ads in games have been pretty tame, but we have to be on the lookout for this type of abuse.
You've just made a slippery slope argument, and those are always poor arguments.
Let's think about whether this is realistic. Do you watch 29 minutes of ads for 1 minute of television? No, of course you don't. There is a certain amount of ads that is optimal before people start changing the channel.
Similarly, 20 pages of ads on a test would mean 20 pages that students immediately skip without looking at.
And no, I don't mean full on advertising like blaring announcements between classes with videos to boot, but maybe corporate funded text books, yes I know historically they are inaccurate, that only allow for example problems to use their product/brand.
If they're inaccurate, why would you even consider them for education? How did you even come to the conclusion that this is acceptable?
I'm sorry, but the public education system is, by design, not a business. There's no such thing as "not operating in the red" because public education is about education, not profit. To even consider the use of "inaccurate" textbooks in order to make a few bucks is an atrocity, at best.
Are there better ways to keep a publicly funded school system funded well? Yes, of course there's a better way: increased funding! The public education system is our most vital government program, why shouldn't it be well-funded?
It's also easy to miss a bias that actually exists. I'm not saying that it does, just that your comment doesn't make any sense. How can you say for certain which way /. leans on average?
What's unethical is the unwillingness of the American public to adequately fund our public schools.
I remember Channel One. That was probably one of the worst crimes of our generation; we wasted what, half an hour each day watching that garbage? We would have been much better off watching the local news than that garbage, but then the school wouldn't make any money from that delicious guaranteed ad revenue.
It was a welcome break from classes at the time, but looking back I realize how much could have been done with that time. Still, that's a lot more covert than what the teacher is doing with this test, which is why this test made slashdot and Channel One did/does not
I was writing an exam a year ago, lamenting my poor salary, and thought about ad revenue on exams.
However, I considered something far more subliminal than outright "This test is brought to you by..." and it doesn't have to be on exams-only. It can be on quizzes, homework questions, etc. I'm a Physics teacher, so this is really more for my field than others.
Just work businesses and pop culture icons into the problem wording. I often will write problem sets with my favorite superheroes in mind (ie rather than a projectile motion problem with a man playing baseball, Batman is the one playing baseball), but I don't get paid to do this. It's trivial to add this sort of fluff to all of your problems, and it wouldn't change the educational content at all. If anything, students seem more able to grasp concepts and solve problems correctly when there are icons that are easily identifiable. When I write problems involving superheroes, for instance, those quiz scores often have a much higher average than problems where "Superhero XX" is replaced by "A man" or "A woman"
How much could I get a political party to pay me for working their candidate into at least one of my problems on every problem set/quiz/test? "George Bush is snowboarding down a mountain at velocity v, etc."
Who says GM wasn't making a profit? GM certainly never said that.
The problem was that they weren't profitable ENOUGH. Gas prices were cheap. Thus, demand wasn't spectacular.
If the people at GM had any vision, they would have continued producing/selling these cars (at profit, just not great profit) and then raked in the cash during the INEVITABLE price hike in gas last summer, which took place after years of steadily rising gas prices (which steadily drives demand for electric vehicles upward).
This is the fault of a lack of vision at GM, not a lack of profit.
You're truly full of it if you think the unions are responsible for this.
Yes, they have to pay their workers well, and this is more expensive than paying them dirt. However, the cost above minimum wage for ALL automotive workers is a tiny fraction of the shortfall being experienced by automotive companies. In other words, even if UAW worker made minimum wage with no benefits, these companies would still be asking for enormous bailout checks.
The cause for this is a poor economy. Anyone who claims otherwise is trying to spoon feed you bullshit.
Tesla Motors is probably the most important car company we have, since they've stepped up and are trying to make electric cars affordable.
Last I heard, they were working on a sedan. In other words, they don't just develop cars for 'the rich'
Either bail out Tesla Motors or don't bail out any of the car companies. This is a binary decision.
Yeah, the potential for exhuming heavy metals and toxins is high if you don't regulate a plant like this (which it would be). However, we love our coal power plants, and they're absolutely disgusting. It's pathetic that we're still building new ones, yet we haven't built a new power plant in over 20 years (but this is supposed to change by 2010).
Furthermore, landfill trash isn't exactly a valuable resource. I'd much rather pay a little extra and burn away trash then burn coal. Plants like this one (they don't have to use plasma) would be great for helping us transition toward more nuclear and geothermal/wind/solar power.
I disagree. Once you've made the single hardware modification, you never need to jump through that hoop ever again. Also, the people who sell the hardware to you provide enough instructions so that even a 10 year-old who has played with legos can successfully mod their xbox. Anyone who knows how to torrent a game is going to have the mental capacity to successfully modify their xbox.
PC games, on the other hand, require a different software patch depending on the copy protection scheme that you need to get around. This can be something simple like copy-pasting a crack, or you may have to install other software packages. And this needs to be done for EVERY game.
Pirating an xbox game is just as easy as pirating a PC game the first time. After that, pirating an xbox game is MUCH EASIER than pirating PC games. The people who think otherwise have never actually tried both.
And in many states (at least California), driving 30 MPH in a 45 MPH zone is illegal. You must maintain your speed so that it matches the flow of traffic. If all of the other cars are going 30 MPH, then it's fine.
It's dangerous for one car to be going a speed that does not match the flow of traffic, whether that's too slow or too fast is irrelevant.
And to top things off, we know that driving 30MPH is definitely not getting you better gas mileage anyway. Thus, there's no reason to do it (unless you're coasting to a red light, of course, but then you're not exactly maintaining that speed).
There are stories of laptops being stolen out of checked luggage, yes. Whether this has anything to do with legitimate searches, I can't say.
Most of us always take laptops as carry-ons anyway. It's much safer that way, but you can still be stopped and have your laptop searched. If they suspect anything or are just having a bad day, they can seize your laptop. Typically people either never get their laptops back or get it back after a very long time (months)
Searching laptops at all is bullshit, but at least this will quell some of the horror stories (if it passes)
That means that there will definitely be a PC version, perhaps up to a year after the console version's release.
There's no reason to keep it 360 exclusive when they'll earn more profit by also releasing it on the PC. That's obvious.
Their strategy of delaying the PC release is also obvious. There are consoles to sell after all, and more hot exclusives = more sold consoles. A year after the game's release, no one will care about GoW2 anymore and that's when the PC version will be released.
It's a great strategy
You are wrong on so many levels.
1) Piracy is commonplace on consoles, too, you just don't hear about it as much
2) Very few game developers have completely abandoned PC - these developers were gemerally butt-hurt from poor sales after producing a few shitty titles. See Valve, Blizzard, and Stardock, for a few big names
3) If porting the game generates some profit, it will be done. Since porting the game costs effectively nothing, doing so will churn an enormous profit.
Yes, it is completely logical to have a game that's no longer making any money ported to another platform where it can generate additional profit.
It is completely ILLOGICAL to not port the game.
As we've seen time and time again, 360 exclusive games are eventually ported to PC 90% of the time