It's the kind of thing that is legally almost certainly true, but to actually verify it you would literally have to take them to court over it. At best you could document your attempts to return it and the reasons why and then dispute the charges on your credit card. Consumer protection laws in the US have very few, very dull teeth.
Their list of rights is about 50/50 reasonable and ridiculous. Half of it is undefinable (what makes a "finished game" with DLC vs a "unfinished game" for instance) but the other half is what any consumer anywhere should expect. Really though a gamers bill of rights should only have 2 items:
The game should work. If the game doesn't work, the customer is entitled to a full refund.
I disagree. Having a requirement to connect to their servers does not and should not imply that those servers will be unavailable for extended lengths of time. You might argue caveat emptor, but the fact of the matter is that there is no legal recourse in many places when a game is unplayable. If I take the shrink wrap off a game and through no fault of my own the game is unplayable, I should be entitled to a refund. It doesn't matter if the cause of that is undocumented requirements, an unstable game, or lack of server capacity.
All that Miller–Urey showed was that it's really pretty easy to get the basic ingredients to life, heck, more recently we've found huge clouds of amino acids floating free in space. There are a lot of open questions about how you go from amino acids to self replicating bacteria though, enough so that it doesn't necessarily make sense to dismiss panspermia out of hand, to do so would limit our thinking to only those conditions that could existed on primordial earth.
Because it's a lot harder to get approval for an animal trial than a human trial? Especially when said trial involves injecting things into your molars? And for a more science centric reason, it maybe be that the environment of the kidneys is essentially to the actual regrowing teeth part.
Article does mention that they scanned the patient's skull and made an as close to possible replica of it. I don't think that'd be an option if the guy got hit by a bus.
I came here to point out that Card doesn't, in fact, keep his views out of his writing, he just inserts them in ways that aren't incredibly obvious at first glance; only to find that not only has someone made the point, but they made it in my own words from 5 (!?) years ago. I'm actually extremely flattered that someone remembered something that I wrote from so long ago and had it come to mind after so much time.
So what you're saying is that we won't want real human interaction, until it can be automated. Because that's the only way you're ever going to get most large companies to provide what you're asking for, if it costs less than paying someone minimum wage to plaster a fake smile on their face and ask for the 325th time that day "did you find everything ok?".
Incidentally, what would a world look like where the cashier at the grocery store has a fundamentally stronger theory of mind than the average human?
I don't understand... if you're doing any analysis at all that has to be the easiest thing you could possibly try to determine. Pregnancy test gets purchased and the following month feminine supplies and/or birth control stop getting purchased. That's trivial, and worth coding in specific rules for simply because of the amount of potential sales a pregnancy will generate.
About 1% of military is 10 years ahead of civilian tech, the remaining 99% is a cobbled together mess of decades old systems, "tried and true" designs, and things that are just too expensive to update.
Company X is our patent troll, decides to sue someone. Company X's owners establish Company Y with just enough money to litigate their side of the case Company X sells the rights to a patent to Company Y for a pittance Company Y Sues and loses Compnay Y Has no holdings beyond the now largely useless bogus patent so it dissolves Company X loses nothing except the patent, which again, is now largely useless
If Company Y wins, they sell the patent back to Company X and the owners cash out.
Matter speeds up as the black hole collapses because it moves toward the center of gravity, trading potential energy for kinetic. There's no (practical) limit to the amount of kinetic energy a piece of mass can have, if I have a baseball moving at 99.99999999% the speed of light, I can continue to accelerate that baseball to my heart's content. Though it's acceleration will appear, to an outside observer, to slow down, a baseball's energy will continue to climb at the same rate. The same is true for the particles falling into a black hole.
If conservation of momentum is preserved (and arguing that it isn't would... well, quite an extraordinary claim) black holes, and the stuff falling into them, are going to be rotating. Unless, I suppose if everything collapsed absolutely, completely, perfectly symmetrically; to an accuracy 1 part in several millions of billions). And even then, as soon as matter starts flowing in the rotational momentum is going to start climbing.
People have it in their heads that since science is wrong in the past, science will be just as wrong in the future. But there are certain things that just aren't going to change, and the laws of conservation of mass/energy and momentum are one of them.
More like you speed and get a ticket for felony reckless driving.
The point isn't that he was prosecuted, it was that A) he was prosecuted beyond any reasonable interpretation of the wrongdoing B) the prosecutor drew up a huge list of charges to try and scare him into taking a plea C) the reasons for A and B, it has just been admitted by the DOJ, were political. That shouldn't happen in the US, it just shouldn't. There shouldn't even be the shadow of a possibility that it could possibly have happened.
The first targets would be the assembly lines, reactors, processing plants, and launch sites. In fact, the first that Iran would know that an attack had begun would probably be those sites winking away off their communications networks, especially if a nation with a modern stealthed air force was involved. Unless you have all your facilities under 100m of solid bedrock there's nothing you can realistically do to stop it. And even if you are under 100m, you have to be able to maintain air superiority for those several months, otherwise you'll have a 20,000lb bunker buster being dropped out of a cargo plane to deal with.
What has the world come to when thinking nuclear weapons and war are bad things is considered being an "activist" and raises suspicions that you are probably biased.
Did an 'article' about a blog post by misleading, ambulance chasing, grief abusing malpractice attorney really survive the firehose? Seriously? Or did an editor just tack that on for fun on his own? I love Slashdot, I really do. But this is messed up to the point of being downright disturbing.
That's what I was thinking. They claim that a Google win would devastate the industry, I claim an Oracle win would do the same. Do they have any idea how much of the world's technology is built on common API's? Their own included?
Crime is as low as it's been in 30 years, violent crime even more so. This image that our society is crumbing is one that is produced by the media and backed up by the human instinct to remember 'the good old days'.
There's a big difference between building a test nuke in an underground chamber and building a nuke that is light and yet durable enough to launch on an ICBM, especially the types of rockets that NK has available. Not to mention heat shields and guidance systems and the fact that NK has no way of doing any of the preparation in any way that is hidden from US spy satellites. The risk is non-zero, but at this point insignificant.
Example: you walk into a hospital and glance at the directory, the glasses automatically spot the QR barcode in the bottom corner and follow the link it gives to a downloadable copy of the map. You say "Glasses, find room 203", the map hovers over your field of view along with your current location. The glasses ask if you want navigation so you say yes, and a line appears on the floor directing you were to go. As you walk, the glasses build up a 3d model of the hospital and use it to keep the map up to date for others.
Could you do something similar with a smartphone? Probably, but the result wouldn't be the same.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the kind of thing that is legally almost certainly true, but to actually verify it you would literally have to take them to court over it. At best you could document your attempts to return it and the reasons why and then dispute the charges on your credit card. Consumer protection laws in the US have very few, very dull teeth.
Their list of rights is about 50/50 reasonable and ridiculous. Half of it is undefinable (what makes a "finished game" with DLC vs a "unfinished game" for instance) but the other half is what any consumer anywhere should expect. Really though a gamers bill of rights should only have 2 items:
The game should work.
If the game doesn't work, the customer is entitled to a full refund.
I disagree. Having a requirement to connect to their servers does not and should not imply that those servers will be unavailable for extended lengths of time. You might argue caveat emptor, but the fact of the matter is that there is no legal recourse in many places when a game is unplayable. If I take the shrink wrap off a game and through no fault of my own the game is unplayable, I should be entitled to a refund. It doesn't matter if the cause of that is undocumented requirements, an unstable game, or lack of server capacity.
All that Miller–Urey showed was that it's really pretty easy to get the basic ingredients to life, heck, more recently we've found huge clouds of amino acids floating free in space. There are a lot of open questions about how you go from amino acids to self replicating bacteria though, enough so that it doesn't necessarily make sense to dismiss panspermia out of hand, to do so would limit our thinking to only those conditions that could existed on primordial earth.
Money.
Because it's a lot harder to get approval for an animal trial than a human trial? Especially when said trial involves injecting things into your molars? And for a more science centric reason, it maybe be that the environment of the kidneys is essentially to the actual regrowing teeth part.
Article does mention that they scanned the patient's skull and made an as close to possible replica of it. I don't think that'd be an option if the guy got hit by a bus.
I came here to point out that Card doesn't, in fact, keep his views out of his writing, he just inserts them in ways that aren't incredibly obvious at first glance; only to find that not only has someone made the point, but they made it in my own words from 5 (!?) years ago. I'm actually extremely flattered that someone remembered something that I wrote from so long ago and had it come to mind after so much time.
So what you're saying is that we won't want real human interaction, until it can be automated. Because that's the only way you're ever going to get most large companies to provide what you're asking for, if it costs less than paying someone minimum wage to plaster a fake smile on their face and ask for the 325th time that day "did you find everything ok?".
Incidentally, what would a world look like where the cashier at the grocery store has a fundamentally stronger theory of mind than the average human?
I don't understand... if you're doing any analysis at all that has to be the easiest thing you could possibly try to determine. Pregnancy test gets purchased and the following month feminine supplies and/or birth control stop getting purchased. That's trivial, and worth coding in specific rules for simply because of the amount of potential sales a pregnancy will generate.
About 1% of military is 10 years ahead of civilian tech, the remaining 99% is a cobbled together mess of decades old systems, "tried and true" designs, and things that are just too expensive to update.
Call me crazy, but I think the joke may have been the fact that Portal isn't owned by Blizzard.
My question is what prevents this:
Company X is our patent troll, decides to sue someone.
Company X's owners establish Company Y with just enough money to litigate their side of the case
Company X sells the rights to a patent to Company Y for a pittance
Company Y Sues and loses
Compnay Y Has no holdings beyond the now largely useless bogus patent so it dissolves
Company X loses nothing except the patent, which again, is now largely useless
If Company Y wins, they sell the patent back to Company X and the owners cash out.
Matter speeds up as the black hole collapses because it moves toward the center of gravity, trading potential energy for kinetic. There's no (practical) limit to the amount of kinetic energy a piece of mass can have, if I have a baseball moving at 99.99999999% the speed of light, I can continue to accelerate that baseball to my heart's content. Though it's acceleration will appear, to an outside observer, to slow down, a baseball's energy will continue to climb at the same rate. The same is true for the particles falling into a black hole.
If conservation of momentum is preserved (and arguing that it isn't would... well, quite an extraordinary claim) black holes, and the stuff falling into them, are going to be rotating. Unless, I suppose if everything collapsed absolutely, completely, perfectly symmetrically; to an accuracy 1 part in several millions of billions). And even then, as soon as matter starts flowing in the rotational momentum is going to start climbing.
People have it in their heads that since science is wrong in the past, science will be just as wrong in the future. But there are certain things that just aren't going to change, and the laws of conservation of mass/energy and momentum are one of them.
In some mediums, light moves faster than it does through a vacuum.
No, it doesn't. Not only does such a material not exist, it is proven beyond any reasonable doubt to be impossible.
c is the speed of light in a vacuumm
Hey! You got something right!
not the "theoretical maximum speed of light"
And right back to wrong. Nothing can travel through space (empty or otherwise) at faster than c, that is the central concept of relativity.
More like you speed and get a ticket for felony reckless driving.
The point isn't that he was prosecuted, it was that A) he was prosecuted beyond any reasonable interpretation of the wrongdoing B) the prosecutor drew up a huge list of charges to try and scare him into taking a plea C) the reasons for A and B, it has just been admitted by the DOJ, were political. That shouldn't happen in the US, it just shouldn't. There shouldn't even be the shadow of a possibility that it could possibly have happened.
So this is the online equivilent of:
"I'll have a Pepsi"
"Sorry, all we have is Coke, is that ok?"
The first targets would be the assembly lines, reactors, processing plants, and launch sites. In fact, the first that Iran would know that an attack had begun would probably be those sites winking away off their communications networks, especially if a nation with a modern stealthed air force was involved. Unless you have all your facilities under 100m of solid bedrock there's nothing you can realistically do to stop it. And even if you are under 100m, you have to be able to maintain air superiority for those several months, otherwise you'll have a 20,000lb bunker buster being dropped out of a cargo plane to deal with.
What has the world come to when thinking nuclear weapons and war are bad things is considered being an "activist" and raises suspicions that you are probably biased.
Did an 'article' about a blog post by misleading, ambulance chasing, grief abusing malpractice attorney really survive the firehose? Seriously? Or did an editor just tack that on for fun on his own? I love Slashdot, I really do. But this is messed up to the point of being downright disturbing.
That's what I was thinking. They claim that a Google win would devastate the industry, I claim an Oracle win would do the same. Do they have any idea how much of the world's technology is built on common API's? Their own included?
Crime is as low as it's been in 30 years, violent crime even more so. This image that our society is crumbing is one that is produced by the media and backed up by the human instinct to remember 'the good old days'.
There's a big difference between building a test nuke in an underground chamber and building a nuke that is light and yet durable enough to launch on an ICBM, especially the types of rockets that NK has available. Not to mention heat shields and guidance systems and the fact that NK has no way of doing any of the preparation in any way that is hidden from US spy satellites. The risk is non-zero, but at this point insignificant.
Example: you walk into a hospital and glance at the directory, the glasses automatically spot the QR barcode in the bottom corner and follow the link it gives to a downloadable copy of the map. You say "Glasses, find room 203", the map hovers over your field of view along with your current location. The glasses ask if you want navigation so you say yes, and a line appears on the floor directing you were to go. As you walk, the glasses build up a 3d model of the hospital and use it to keep the map up to date for others.
Could you do something similar with a smartphone? Probably, but the result wouldn't be the same.