"Avatar now seems the high-point of 3D movie-making, with little since 2009 to challenge its achievement" is not a statement that 3D is winding down, it's at best a claim that 3D isn't improving any more. Mature technologies don't improve. It's been a while since we've had much noticeable improvement in 2D film quality or techniques, but 3D film hasn't died. We should expect that at some point--maybe even Avatar--3D should stop improving. But that doesn't mean it's dead.
Also, notice that the current 3D film trend has already been going on much longer than the 1950's and 1980's ones.
It's safer if you're there to use the gun in self-defense, but a lot of people don't take their guns with them when they go to work and the gun becomes a target for someone who wants to rob the house.
Unlike being a sex offender, gun ownership is not something that is considered shameful or abhorrent by society, so one cannot really say that gun owners are "outed".
Owning valuable jewelry isn't considered shameful or abhorrent by society, but publishing a list of people who own valuable jewelry is a bad idea and encourages crime.
(Besides, there are some segments of society who do consider gun ownership abhorrent. In this regard it's like publishing a list of known homosexuals. It shouldn't be considered abhorrent, but it sometimes is, and the list makes people a target for prejudice.)
The problem with political games is that... they're still political.
Imagine that instead of making a game about the conflict, the same group had simply put out an editorial saying "Here is what we think about the war in Syria, and exactly what is happening there."
If they did that, and it was promoted as much as a game was, and it was typical media quality, everyone here would jump on it in a minute, pointing out that the editorial oversimplifies the war, and that most editorials are made by people with strong opinions on the subject who may be biased. Or the writer of the editorial may have based it on news reports but been a bit too trusting of them. Perhaps the editorial, while supposedly summarizing the war, leaves out important events. (And that's assuming all the facts in it are literally true.)
But package your editorial as a game, and everyone eats it up, as a "unique gamification approach" which "reports the news in the most entertaining fashion possible". As if a contentious subject suddenly turns into a completely objective analysis just because it was put in something that has cards and a score. Please.
You didn't think that once they started going after the Second Amendment because of school shootings, they'd leave the other amendments alone, did you? Thow one out, throw all of them out.
A bad user interface doesn't necessarily mean that the option isn't there. If the option exists, but is difficult to discover or presented in such an unintuitive way that people will miss it, that's the fault of the user interface, not the fault of the user for not noticing it.
If Wikileaks were sitting in another country lobbing physical missiles at the US, they also wouldn't be charged. "Never been charged" is meaningless when it comes to operations within one country against another, because charges are not how such things are handled.
Asking why it would be hard to work for them is the manager equivalent to "tell me your biggest flaw". Since answering the question truthfully probably won't get you the job, the question turns into a test of how well you can BS.
Presumably the cap is not to prevent unlucky investors from losing their life's savings, since the law already allows multiple ways to do that, by betting on volatile stocks in the stock market.
Oh, please. Presumably, Bennett is just not thinking things through, and the cap is to prevent unlucky investors from losing their life's savings.
It was probably before a lot of people here were around, but in 1999 Slashdot ran a story about someone who couldn't participate in Red Hat's IPO because he didn't have enough financial background or investment experience. In other words, to prevent him from losing his life's savings.
Of course, soon after that was the dot.com bust. I bet that guy stopped complaining at that point.
If you suddenly got a great investment idea, are planning using a large portion of your personal wealth to buy stocks, and have no experience in the stock market, the organizations involved will try to stop you from losing your life's savings, even if the barrier isn't perfect.
Somalia doesn't have a government that controls the whole territory, but it does have government. "Warlord" is just another term for "dictatorial government that isn't a member of the United Nations".
Why does society owe you compensation for you choosing a shitty job?
Because you're retroactively making it shittier. The fact that there's a pension of a certain size was part of their pay--they received some of their pay in salary and some in pension benefits. Retroactively deciding that they don't get it the pension is no better than retroactively taking $25 out of their salary every month, except that since the salary is already in their pocket and the pension isn't it's a heck of a lot easier to take away the pension.
Its far, far, easier to design a better weapon than it is to design a better piece of armor. It doesn't matter what new type of DRM you come up with, somebody will come up with a way to break it.
Cool, tell me how to run unsigned code on my PS3 without having obsolete firmware or a hardware flasher.
(Hint: the hacks that "completely" cracked the PS3 didn't.)
The point of DRM is to stop unauthorized people from using or copying or distributing your software.
The *stated* point of DRM is to keep people from pirating your software. The actual purpose of DRM is to maintain control over the user, thus using it to prevent used games sales, format shifting, playing on unauthorized devices, etc.
Well, sort of. When I search for information on this it seems that he was listed on websites as a hitman as a result of being shot rather than the listing as a hitman being the cause of him being shot. Still not good, but not as bad as implied by the other way around.
Also, ironically, we recently had a Slashdot story about Google's unseen human raters. If Google actually does have human beings deciding what to show, it's a lot harder to justify not using those human beings to remove obviously defamatory material.
Betteridge's Law only applies to questions that actually appear in headlines. It works partly because it's a constraint on how headlines are written in the first place. So you can't pick an arbitrary question and ask "what if this is a headline"--Betteridge's Law would probably prevent that question from being a headline at all, rather than making the answer "no".
The point is that common anti-death-penalty arguments claim that it's wrong to have even one irreversible punishment. No allowances are made for frequency--if it happens at all, the death penalty is bad.
If so, then you need to apply this to other irreversible punishments as well. It is contradictory to say "even one irreversible punishment is wrong", and "it's okay because they have a chance of being reversed". A chance of being reversed means that some won't be reversed, so there will be at least one.
The problem isn't the distance to go to get to the boss, it's that if you go up against a boss and don't win, your resources are gone because of the penalty for dying (or in this one case, because even if you survived and was told the boss is immortal, you used up your items). This means that you can't keep going straight to the boss no matter how close the spawn point is. You have to waste time getting back everything you lost first. In games with saves, you could reload from a save instead.
It's true that once you've "killed" the boss and been told that he won't die, you can leave, but you'll have used up your resources in fighting the boss (particularly healing items, also weapon/armor damage to some extent) and you have to go back to grind for some more of them. Same effect--you need to use trial and error to win the fight, but you can't just restore from a save from before the fight to do the trial and error.
Also, the fact that you can't save means that any sane player would be very reluctant to kill non-hostile NPCs during the process of trial and error--for all you know, killing the NPC could permanently affect your game, and you can't just think "well, I'll kill the NPC and see if it lets me defeat the boss, if not I'll restore from a save from before I killed the NPC".
That argument would apply to prison as well. "If you cannot understand that kidnapping is wrong no matter who does it...." It would even apply to fines ("If you cannot understand that robbery is wrong....")
Slashdot Mirror
"Avatar now seems the high-point of 3D movie-making, with little since 2009 to challenge its achievement" is not a statement that 3D is winding down, it's at best a claim that 3D isn't improving any more. Mature technologies don't improve. It's been a while since we've had much noticeable improvement in 2D film quality or techniques, but 3D film hasn't died. We should expect that at some point--maybe even Avatar--3D should stop improving. But that doesn't mean it's dead.
Also, notice that the current 3D film trend has already been going on much longer than the 1950's and 1980's ones.
It's safer if you're there to use the gun in self-defense, but a lot of people don't take their guns with them when they go to work and the gun becomes a target for someone who wants to rob the house.
Owning valuable jewelry isn't considered shameful or abhorrent by society, but publishing a list of people who own valuable jewelry is a bad idea and encourages crime.
(Besides, there are some segments of society who do consider gun ownership abhorrent. In this regard it's like publishing a list of known homosexuals. It shouldn't be considered abhorrent, but it sometimes is, and the list makes people a target for prejudice.)
The problem with political games is that... they're still political.
Imagine that instead of making a game about the conflict, the same group had simply put out an editorial saying "Here is what we think about the war in Syria, and exactly what is happening there."
If they did that, and it was promoted as much as a game was, and it was typical media quality, everyone here would jump on it in a minute, pointing out that the editorial oversimplifies the war, and that most editorials are made by people with strong opinions on the subject who may be biased. Or the writer of the editorial may have based it on news reports but been a bit too trusting of them. Perhaps the editorial, while supposedly summarizing the war, leaves out important events. (And that's assuming all the facts in it are literally true.)
But package your editorial as a game, and everyone eats it up, as a "unique gamification approach" which "reports the news in the most entertaining fashion possible". As if a contentious subject suddenly turns into a completely objective analysis just because it was put in something that has cards and a score. Please.
You didn't think that once they started going after the Second Amendment because of school shootings, they'd leave the other amendments alone, did you? Thow one out, throw all of them out.
"The guy didn't even notice that"?
A bad user interface doesn't necessarily mean that the option isn't there. If the option exists, but is difficult to discover or presented in such an unintuitive way that people will miss it, that's the fault of the user interface, not the fault of the user for not noticing it.
B-- but he got a Nobel Prize for his achievements. (Said achievements being that the Europeans all love him, of course.)
The fact that the Weekly World News ceased publication in 2007 could also have something to do with it.
If Wikileaks were sitting in another country lobbing physical missiles at the US, they also wouldn't be charged. "Never been charged" is meaningless when it comes to operations within one country against another, because charges are not how such things are handled.
Asking why it would be hard to work for them is the manager equivalent to "tell me your biggest flaw". Since answering the question truthfully probably won't get you the job, the question turns into a test of how well you can BS.
I *still* do not understand what an Ouya is going to be good for that cannot be done by buying an Android tablet with an HDMI port.
There is a reason why "gaming the system" is a negative term. The skills to play the game are never quite the same as the skills to do the job.
Oh, please. Presumably, Bennett is just not thinking things through, and the cap is to prevent unlucky investors from losing their life's savings.
It was probably before a lot of people here were around, but in 1999 Slashdot ran a story about someone who couldn't participate in Red Hat's IPO because he didn't have enough financial background or investment experience. In other words, to prevent him from losing his life's savings.
Of course, soon after that was the dot.com bust. I bet that guy stopped complaining at that point.
If you suddenly got a great investment idea, are planning using a large portion of your personal wealth to buy stocks, and have no experience in the stock market, the organizations involved will try to stop you from losing your life's savings, even if the barrier isn't perfect.
Somalia doesn't have a government that controls the whole territory, but it does have government. "Warlord" is just another term for "dictatorial government that isn't a member of the United Nations".
Because you're retroactively making it shittier. The fact that there's a pension of a certain size was part of their pay--they received some of their pay in salary and some in pension benefits. Retroactively deciding that they don't get it the pension is no better than retroactively taking $25 out of their salary every month, except that since the salary is already in their pocket and the pension isn't it's a heck of a lot easier to take away the pension.
Cool, tell me how to run unsigned code on my PS3 without having obsolete firmware or a hardware flasher.
(Hint: the hacks that "completely" cracked the PS3 didn't.)
The *stated* point of DRM is to keep people from pirating your software. The actual purpose of DRM is to maintain control over the user, thus using it to prevent used games sales, format shifting, playing on unauthorized devices, etc.
If you emigrate, the IRS still requires you to pay taxes.
Well, sort of. When I search for information on this it seems that he was listed on websites as a hitman as a result of being shot rather than the listing as a hitman being the cause of him being shot. Still not good, but not as bad as implied by the other way around.
Also, ironically, we recently had a Slashdot story about Google's unseen human raters. If Google actually does have human beings deciding what to show, it's a lot harder to justify not using those human beings to remove obviously defamatory material.
But when you said it for the death penalty, you didn't add a clause about it being intentional. Why do you limit it to intentional cases here?
Betteridge's Law only applies to questions that actually appear in headlines. It works partly because it's a constraint on how headlines are written in the first place. So you can't pick an arbitrary question and ask "what if this is a headline"--Betteridge's Law would probably prevent that question from being a headline at all, rather than making the answer "no".
Maybe more awesome than you think.
The point is that common anti-death-penalty arguments claim that it's wrong to have even one irreversible punishment. No allowances are made for frequency--if it happens at all, the death penalty is bad.
If so, then you need to apply this to other irreversible punishments as well. It is contradictory to say "even one irreversible punishment is wrong", and "it's okay because they have a chance of being reversed". A chance of being reversed means that some won't be reversed, so there will be at least one.
The problem isn't the distance to go to get to the boss, it's that if you go up against a boss and don't win, your resources are gone because of the penalty for dying (or in this one case, because even if you survived and was told the boss is immortal, you used up your items). This means that you can't keep going straight to the boss no matter how close the spawn point is. You have to waste time getting back everything you lost first. In games with saves, you could reload from a save instead.
It's true that once you've "killed" the boss and been told that he won't die, you can leave, but you'll have used up your resources in fighting the boss (particularly healing items, also weapon/armor damage to some extent) and you have to go back to grind for some more of them. Same effect--you need to use trial and error to win the fight, but you can't just restore from a save from before the fight to do the trial and error.
Also, the fact that you can't save means that any sane player would be very reluctant to kill non-hostile NPCs during the process of trial and error--for all you know, killing the NPC could permanently affect your game, and you can't just think "well, I'll kill the NPC and see if it lets me defeat the boss, if not I'll restore from a save from before I killed the NPC".
That argument would apply to prison as well. "If you cannot understand that kidnapping is wrong no matter who does it...." It would even apply to fines ("If you cannot understand that robbery is wrong....")