I work with people with severe disabilities and the interfaces for machine access right now are very crude and difficult to use. This type of thing has tremendous therapeutic potential in addition to the scary Orwellian stuff. Imagine Stephen Hawking being able to lecture in real time instead of either prepared ahead of time or tediously composed one word at a time.
I can get behind that reasoning. If we're going to be dumping billions into aerospace pork, lets have it be space-exploration-industrial pork rather than military-industrial pork.
Whether it is a double or triple word/letter bonus is a game rule, not a stylistic expression. At most they would need to change the colors to keep from infringing. Hasbro certainly doesn't own the copyright to the 15x15 square grid.
The article in the NYTimes earlier this week actually mentioned that they wrote their version of the game when a previous one that was popular got shut down. They had to have known.
Maybe they thought that the others just caved in to Hasbro's lawyers too easily. Hasbro really doesn't have a copyright case. (The name "Scrabulous" probably is too close to the word Scrabble(TM) but the game itself doesn't infringe.)
Agreed. Twilight Princess doesn't start getting really fun until at least 10-15 hours in when it finally lets you run around and do whatever you want. The tutorial/linear part of the game is way too long.
I actually put it aside and did a complete play-through of Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Link to the Past on virtual console in the middle of Twilight Princess.
I didn't see the point of the Air when I first saw it, but once I got thinking about it, I realized that it's just not meant for me. My wife has a G4 iBook and she never leaves the house with it. She'd find the Air perfect, except that it costs about $700 more than her iBook did.
I've always thought that having automatic sunset clauses was a good idea. First, the bloat would automatically fall away and we'd lose all of those silly "It's unlawful for your shoes to be untied after 10pm" that are so much fun to laugh about but can be arbitrarily enforced for maximum unfairness. Second, having to reinstate the "murder is punishable" and similar obvious things will keep congress distracted from being able to meddle too much.
Once we add CVS and source control the next thing we need is a compiler that actually turns the bill into a final form so that the "not" and "amended to add..." gets added into the sentences so we can see them in context instead of hundreds of pages away.
The reason no one reads the PATRIOT act is because it's almost all partial-sentence amendments to existing laws that are you can't see in context without access to a law library. Compile the source code of the nation so we can read it!
I was going to moderate in this discussion, but AC troll that you are, I can't let this go.
Do we want to invest in a better future, or in things/people that have already failed and are waiting for Darwin to claim their ticket?
I've now had a lifetime of watching social programs try to help the unhelpable, and fail. I agree I'd rather not abandon them, but I've also come to feel that the money we spend on the failing is better spent on educating promising kids, making new technologies, cleaning up our environment, libraries, museums and colleges.
You don't get it, and I'm too nice a guy to wish understanding on you. I hope you don't have to get it.
If you had a kid with Down Syndrome or autism you'd understand. If you suddenly woke up and found reality slipping away from you, as many people who develop schizophrenia do in early adulthood, you'd get it. The money spent helping these people is not "waste" and the supports are not "failing" but are among the resounding successes of our civilization.
Not that I think there is not room for improvement, but I can't figure out what standard people who say the social safety net is failing are using.
We can't Darwin our way to a better future. Natural selection cannot lead to progress. Once survivability of a species is not in question, natural selection really doesn't have anything to offer.
A two-button keyboard where you press the button to scroll through input characters with one and accept them with the other can be used all day long and your hands won't get any more tired but it would NOT be effective.
Generally I agree with your points and I don't normally post to just contradict people, but I work with clients who use computers via two-button inputs (and even one-button inputs) on a daily basis.
You're asking me to spend time and money to produce an album, and then give it away? I'm all about the spread of the arts and aesthetics, but producing a good album takes A LOT of money, and time.
A lot of artists in seacoast New England thought the same thing for a long time and realized that the financial and time costs of aesthetic perfectionism were preventing them from actually creating art. RPM isn't about creating your magnum opus in a $100/hour studio with $many-thousand gear; It is about breaking inertia. The RPM Challenge provided the impetus for hundreds of bands to finally make a demo of their stuff lying around in notebooks half-finished for months or years.
No one signs any exclusive contracts to submit to RPM. Everyone is free to sell their RPM album or re-record it under better conditions later.
I know on at least three occasions in 2006 I saw bands when they were playing in Portsmouth or Dover NH because I saw a bill/poster and recognized the name from the RPM jukebox. (Of course in 2007 it was a lot bigger and less regional, but that's why the Jukebox sorts by city).
.And by working for free, they are stealing money from the professional artists. The more money a professional artist makes usually, the more are they stealing from him by taking part in this competiton. Hobbyist work should be strictly prohibited since it is, by its very nature, simply theft. And we aren't condoning theft, especially on a large scale like this, are we? Making music kills music, and a new copyright extension (prohibiting non-profit publications) should prevent that. Act now!
I was at the CD release party of the first RPM two years ago and many of these "hobbyists" gave me a burned copy of their work. I'm a double thief!! I stole music from amateurs who were themselves stealing from RIAA-signed professionals! I feel so guilty.
Sarcasm aside, the music scene in Portsmouth, NH is one of the reasons I loved living there and look forward to moving back when I can. That RPM has grown so much beyond its humble roots is something I find completely awesome.
No kidding about the Wii's drive. I don't know if that was an in-house Ninty invention or something they licensed, but I'd like to see that type of drive in my Mac.
Those were the first games I played at home. Parsec, Alpiner (until I got pissed off at it when it heckled me-- "Did you mean to do that?" screw you 99/4a!) and Tunnels of Doom from the cassette.
My parents refused to get an Atari because it didn't do anything other than play games. They'd also had friends who'd ruined their TV by burning in Pong permanently and they were a little hesitant. I'm glad. I learned BASIC.
I'm sure that I'd played coin-op games at the roller rink before that, but I can't remember which one was the first. Battlezone, Tempest, Star Wars, Millipede took most of my quarters.
New Hampshire law requires a human-readable paper record. The machines in question were optical scanners and the ballots in NH are fill-in-the-bubble sheets.
This was my first computer also. I hated that keyboard. Function+P to get a quotation mark? Did they realize how often you use quotation marks in BASIC?
I never saw a TI99/4. If I had, perhaps I would have appreciated the 99/4a keyboard a little more.
The Journal activity may be flawed from the start. The research that I've read suggests that preadolescent children don't conceptualize the world chronologically, at least not accurately enough that it should be the main organization structure for filing work. Although the Journal metaphor may be useful in that their most recent work is what they are most likely to want to go back to at any given moment.
Education is extremely important. All those saying "well, what they really need is better medicine, food, etc." what I have to say is: Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for the rest of his life.
medicine is an even better example than food for why OLPC is important. The way to provide healthcare in the long term is to make it so the graduates of local schools are capable of attending a university and medical school. It will be decades before the effects of this disruptive technology are visible.
I feel a LOT better about the ribbon now that I've read this. Office 2007 seems to be a so-so implementation of some really clever UI concepts.
This is what I thought about it the first time I used it as well. I could see what they were trying to do and it could work. But Microsoft's particular implementation was a mess.
I made the opposite move: Maine to central Pennsylvania.
What is up with the plows here? Do the city employees get the day off from work like the school kids do? It's like the plow drivers look out their windows and say, "I'm not driving in that, too dangerous."
Being from Maine, I actually learned to drive a stick-shift on a frozen lake when I was 12 or 13. I learned to control a skid before I learned to drive straight on dry ground (and learned how to spin cookies in a rear-wheel-drive before that). Good times!
Maine already has one laptop per child (at least from 7th-12th grade). Kids there have been using iBooks and OS X for some time now. I don't think OLPC is going to meet their needs at this point.
There are some real pockets of poverty in Maine (although nothing approaching sub-saharan Africa levels) and the laptops have been beneficial to education there.
All the "what about here at home?" people should take a look around them. There is more than enough wealth for education reform here already. It's a matter of priorities.
Portal is certainly full of win, and I can see how the delays have pushed Spore off your gaming radar, but seriously. A three or four hour puzzle minigame compared to a Wil Wright sim?
Slashdot Mirror
Aperture Science: We do what we can because we must.
I work with people with severe disabilities and the interfaces for machine access right now are very crude and difficult to use. This type of thing has tremendous therapeutic potential in addition to the scary Orwellian stuff. Imagine Stephen Hawking being able to lecture in real time instead of either prepared ahead of time or tediously composed one word at a time.
Houston to Mars mission. Do you read, over?
BILLY MAYS HERE!!!
I can get behind that reasoning. If we're going to be dumping billions into aerospace pork, lets have it be space-exploration-industrial pork rather than military-industrial pork.
Whether it is a double or triple word/letter bonus is a game rule, not a stylistic expression. At most they would need to change the colors to keep from infringing. Hasbro certainly doesn't own the copyright to the 15x15 square grid.
Maybe they thought that the others just caved in to Hasbro's lawyers too easily. Hasbro really doesn't have a copyright case. (The name "Scrabulous" probably is too close to the word Scrabble(TM) but the game itself doesn't infringe.)
I actually put it aside and did a complete play-through of Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Link to the Past on virtual console in the middle of Twilight Princess.
I didn't see the point of the Air when I first saw it, but once I got thinking about it, I realized that it's just not meant for me. My wife has a G4 iBook and she never leaves the house with it. She'd find the Air perfect, except that it costs about $700 more than her iBook did.
Just as long as they make sure to use a ship with 6001 hulls.
I've always thought that having automatic sunset clauses was a good idea. First, the bloat would automatically fall away and we'd lose all of those silly "It's unlawful for your shoes to be untied after 10pm" that are so much fun to laugh about but can be arbitrarily enforced for maximum unfairness. Second, having to reinstate the "murder is punishable" and similar obvious things will keep congress distracted from being able to meddle too much.
The reason no one reads the PATRIOT act is because it's almost all partial-sentence amendments to existing laws that are you can't see in context without access to a law library. Compile the source code of the nation so we can read it!
You don't get it, and I'm too nice a guy to wish understanding on you. I hope you don't have to get it.
If you had a kid with Down Syndrome or autism you'd understand. If you suddenly woke up and found reality slipping away from you, as many people who develop schizophrenia do in early adulthood, you'd get it. The money spent helping these people is not "waste" and the supports are not "failing" but are among the resounding successes of our civilization.
Not that I think there is not room for improvement, but I can't figure out what standard people who say the social safety net is failing are using.
We can't Darwin our way to a better future. Natural selection cannot lead to progress. Once survivability of a species is not in question, natural selection really doesn't have anything to offer.
Generally I agree with your points and I don't normally post to just contradict people, but I work with clients who use computers via two-button inputs (and even one-button inputs) on a daily basis.
No one signs any exclusive contracts to submit to RPM. Everyone is free to sell their RPM album or re-record it under better conditions later.
I know on at least three occasions in 2006 I saw bands when they were playing in Portsmouth or Dover NH because I saw a bill/poster and recognized the name from the RPM jukebox. (Of course in 2007 it was a lot bigger and less regional, but that's why the Jukebox sorts by city).
Sarcasm aside, the music scene in Portsmouth, NH is one of the reasons I loved living there and look forward to moving back when I can. That RPM has grown so much beyond its humble roots is something I find completely awesome.
No kidding about the Wii's drive. I don't know if that was an in-house Ninty invention or something they licensed, but I'd like to see that type of drive in my Mac.
Those were the first games I played at home. Parsec, Alpiner (until I got pissed off at it when it heckled me-- "Did you mean to do that?" screw you 99/4a!) and Tunnels of Doom from the cassette. My parents refused to get an Atari because it didn't do anything other than play games. They'd also had friends who'd ruined their TV by burning in Pong permanently and they were a little hesitant. I'm glad. I learned BASIC. I'm sure that I'd played coin-op games at the roller rink before that, but I can't remember which one was the first. Battlezone, Tempest, Star Wars, Millipede took most of my quarters.
New Hampshire law requires a human-readable paper record. The machines in question were optical scanners and the ballots in NH are fill-in-the-bubble sheets.
I never saw a TI99/4. If I had, perhaps I would have appreciated the 99/4a keyboard a little more.
The Journal activity may be flawed from the start. The research that I've read suggests that preadolescent children don't conceptualize the world chronologically, at least not accurately enough that it should be the main organization structure for filing work. Although the Journal metaphor may be useful in that their most recent work is what they are most likely to want to go back to at any given moment.
(Typing this post on an XO)
This is what I thought about it the first time I used it as well. I could see what they were trying to do and it could work. But Microsoft's particular implementation was a mess.
What is up with the plows here? Do the city employees get the day off from work like the school kids do? It's like the plow drivers look out their windows and say, "I'm not driving in that, too dangerous."
Being from Maine, I actually learned to drive a stick-shift on a frozen lake when I was 12 or 13. I learned to control a skid before I learned to drive straight on dry ground (and learned how to spin cookies in a rear-wheel-drive before that). Good times!
Maine already has one laptop per child (at least from 7th-12th grade). Kids there have been using iBooks and OS X for some time now. I don't think OLPC is going to meet their needs at this point. There are some real pockets of poverty in Maine (although nothing approaching sub-saharan Africa levels) and the laptops have been beneficial to education there. All the "what about here at home?" people should take a look around them. There is more than enough wealth for education reform here already. It's a matter of priorities.
Portal is certainly full of win, and I can see how the delays have pushed Spore off your gaming radar, but seriously. A three or four hour puzzle minigame compared to a Wil Wright sim?