The answer is simple: you cannot protect your kids from everything, moreover you can barely protect your kids from anything. Try as you might, some random event might come hurtling through your life and wreck it up something shocking. Or it might not, but you have no say in it.
What you *can* do is teach your kids to look out for themselves, be smart, be discerning, be wise and be safe. There is nothing else you can do, in all seriousness, try what you want it wont work. I know you are talking about the internet here but I make the analogy that when you lock your children indoors they merely climb out a window.
Oh and my suggestion, and I say this for any parent: Limit your child's access to the internet, as in how many hours they are online. No kid, or adult for that matter, needs all that much time in front of the internets in all reality.
1) Im not so sure that is the case 2) This is my whole point, I'm a 3rd yr mech engineering student I know what efficiency is all about. I was kind of making a point. 3) This isnt my point - I know its inefficient, well actually it isnt. Coal plants get some 70% thermodynamic efficiency so you know, thats damn good. My point is oil is an efficient, convenient and cheap way to store and transport energy. Store and transport. 4) You can make oil from a myriad of different things. Coal is easy, but any organic matter can quite easily be converted to oil, and you can use the oil to fuel the process at a net gain. My bet is this is what we will do when we actually do hit peak oil. 5) I'm all for it. tell me how you can transfer something in the order of 6MW to your battery off the grid, cos like I said thats what bowsers do.
But how do you define efficient? Pure thermodynamic efficiency? Sure power plants win out - but what does that mean and exactly how useful is it? Power plants do not keep in line with demand - they cannot, as demand waxes and wanes the power grid supply more or less flat lines. How is that efficient?
I drive an old car, but I bet that I use less fuel than the vast majority of people and I am unashamed of driving my old car because the numbers don't lie. Now not to be combative but I say screw you and the horse you rode in on to anyone who tells me my car is worse for the environment than theirs. For the record I drive a 1970s 'pickup truck' (we call it a ute) with a 5 litre V8 engine, carburettor, 4 speed gearbox and low geared differential. It gets 15 l/100km on the highway (work it out yourselves - thats our unit) and I have no idea what in the city, I do not care. Why don't I care? Because I spend about $10 - $20 a week on petrol. And down here that amounts to about 7-15 litres a week, or something like 2-4 gallons. A week. So how much more efficient is driving my car the way I do (as in: I don't) than commuting to work in a plug in hybrid? Much more, whats even better is I love my car.
Back to my point: What electrical systems lack is an efficient means of *storing* energy, this is subtle but extremely important. It is basically THE issue when it comes to transportation. In my personal example I use bugger all fuel because I don't turn my car on: I walk, ride the train and bus, ride my bike, etc. I make less impact on the environment than feelgood hybrid driving fart sniffing hippies who plug theirs into the wall socket. Why? Because my hulking pile of metal with an oversized engine and two seats is recycled for one - its age alone means I have drawn out its embodied energy over 30 years, and my owning of it means one less new car needs to be built (another argument for another day). But most importantly it can be TURNED OFF.
The power grid can't just be turned off.
So how are we defining efficient operation? Electric vehicles are time inefficient - it takes a long time to charge them, so in a busy society how does that help us? What do trucking companies do? What do busy mums and dads do? Don't tell me they should just own two cars or two fleets of trucks: Then you double the required resources and construction energy required just to get back to the point we are at today, and the grid *still* can't be turned off like my V8 can. How efficient is that exactly?
No, none of this electric car business makes sense on a large (whole of society) scale. The reason we use oil is because in net terms it IS the most efficient means of storing energy, above all else it is the most *economically efficient* means of achieving mass scale transportation. You can't deny it and electricity won't change this fact. I predict that oil will not be replaced as an energy storage mechanism for transportation, not in the near or distant future. Barring some ridiculous breakthrough in battery technology and a power grid that allows us to charge our cars with megawatts (some 6 meagwatts is transferred to your car from a pump. 6 million joules... every second.) of electricity, it is not going to happen. Of course if we start talking about making oil driven vehicles more efficient, now we're talking - that is smart.
See I was thinking the same thing: Wouldn't a bored, unemployed person be *more* likely to kill some hours contributing to open source projects than say a tired, overworked person?
I certainly know a few people who contribute to open source projects to boost their job prospects as well. Its something that looks pretty good on a resume, better than weeks of nothing to show for yourself.
Hell me and my mates in our youth used to mod Golden axe. It turned out you could fire up XTree and switch the names of sprites around and then suddenly one of you was the a boss and the other was a hovering piece of meat!
Wrong. Come on mate seriously, I said I'm 26 not 17. Its not like the PS2 is ancient history with the PS3 being less than 2 years old.
Dunno what goes on over the pond there mate but in Australia mod chipping was rampant. And I might suggest to you that in the USA it was too, perhaps its got nothing to do with who's got a job and a lot more to do with who's got money... Think about that because they are not the same thing.
But just to put an addendum on my previous post, I'll quickly mention a story. Month ago I bought Crysis warhead, legitimately bought it, installed it on the two computers I have that run Crysis, this is fine they say, 5 installs they say. Two weeks ago the game wouldn't load and all I got was a message saying if I wanted to play to "purchase another copy" because I had exceeded my 5 installs. This was utter bullshit, I played their game (money game) and they dicked me. It took another week to resolve the issue, and I was more or less accused of being a liar by the phone staff, in the politest possible way of course.
I just want to make sure my story is repeated all over the internet as many times as possible. People DO get locked out of their games for no reason with this shit. The fact that the issue was resolved is meaningless, to me there never should have been an issue to resolve.
The way I see it there is one genuine and absolute way to give a reason to purchase a game: Online play. Xbox live and err PS3 online something are basically the ONLY reason why people seem to have stopped mod chipping and pirating. Time was PS2 and Xbox games were pirated so fiercely that the PC pirate industry would blush, thats just not the case anymore.
Hell I'll fess up: I've started buying PC games again (or just started). I'm fairly old for a gamer at 26 and I'll be honest, the last thing I bought before this year was the Warcraft 2 expansion pack. Yes thats right (to be honest I didn't buy WC2 either, I used my mates disk to install it then the expansion pack disk was a cheap alternative to legitimate play). The only reason things have changed is that I want online play. Now the thing is that this feature has built in online verification and it doesn't get in your way!
All this limiting installs business, Securom rootkits, internet requirements and so on blows my mind it is so morally corrupt. The whole notion fundamentally defies market principles, any other industry would belaughed out of the room if they suggested to government they needed this kind of regulation. And most of all it DOESNT WORK. Hear this game developers, none of your methods, none of them, ever have ever worked and never will. Not even on consoles! Barring one: Online play.
Its criminal how utterly STUPID these people are that they do not realise this and do something about it, something other than swimming against the tide.
I'm not so sure about that, personally I content that only verifiable hypotheses are in realm of science, other than that its theory or mathematics. Take string theory for example, the mere act of *attempting* to describe nature doesn't mean you *are* describing nature. I maintain that string theory is not science, and I maintain that the drake equation is even further from science than string theory. When these mathematical propositions are tested and we have data to compare them to, then I will accept them as scientific, providing of course that the data matches up.
You see there is the problem, without data to compare your hypothesis against you have no idea if you have made an insightful proposition or produced something as useful to science as a Michael Chrichton novel. If it turns out to be the latter it will be rejected as a baseless and incorrect assumption, so why should it be considered science up until that point?
Despite this being an incredibly unpopular opinion in these parts, I don't think any plugin electric vehicle of any description will ever fly. It is just a silly idea that is popular because its warm and fuzzy. Even a plugin hybrid will be used mostly on fuel, not because of the plugin nature being inconvenient (although it is) but because it just does not suit the way modern societies function.
I am a 3rd yeah mechanical engineering student, and I have an interest in economics although no formal training. Combining what I understand of these things I do not believe plug in anything is a good idea for personal transport. If you want you can do simple maths, I wont bother here I'll assume everyone understands how to calculate work done by a moving electric charge. The thing is plugin electric vehicles are always going to be trickle charge, always. Thats not a limitation of technology, its a limitation of physics. The fact of the matter is that if you look at potential energy transfer as a function of a flowing fuild (somewhat abstract I know) in the form of oil, you are looking at megawatts. To do that with electricity is far more dangerous than pumping what amounts to a largely non volatile hydrocarbon. It will never happen. Battery swapping is a fools dream, logistically it is highly improbable to be successful in any scenario. Electricity only works for large scale infrastructure that is a completely fixed installation. Trains, Trams, cable cars, etc.
Now my whole argument is that people will *never* accept a trickle charge vehicle on a mass scale. Sure some hippies and feel good tech geeks might buy a few, but it wont work across the board, it wont. It does not satisfy demands, thus there will be no successful supply. Our society cannot accept it, we need instant freedom to move. And I'm not talking only about personal transport, more important even is freight and construction. But that wont change the fact that if mum can't grab the keys and run out to get some milk for the screaming kids, dad can't get to work in time because he forgot to plug in last night, cant get your pregnant wife to the hospital because shit you just got back from a trip to the beach and the car needs 12 hours of juice, and goddamn the teenager has the second one. Oh but its a hybrid I hear you say? So then you use fuel, whats the point?
My belief is that for personal transport liquid fuels are the best, safest and most practical way we have to move energy. I think it most likely that we will *never* stop using oil, and thats an honest belief. We may run out of mineral oils, sure, and we may even get some sort of carbon balance happening one day. But that does not mean we are going to be so stupid as to reject one of the most useful means of portable energy storage we have ever discovered. Oil, natural or synthetic will continue to fuel our society for many decades to come. And I predict that plugins will only ever find a niche market, hell the technology is there, if there was demand we would already have them.
I recently purchased Crysis warhead, its a good game and it was a good deal at half the usual price. I only really bought it for the online play, but thats aside from the point here.
I have two computers, both can run Crysis, I install it on both - they give you 5 activations so I'm sweet... I thought. The other day I fire up my game only to be presented with a message:
"You have exceeded your activation limit, please BUY ANOTHER COPY if you want to keep playing." (emphasis mine, not an exact quote but damn close)
WTF!! Wheres my other 3 activations, what the hell is going on?? I call a customer service rep, at $2.50 a minute no less, he tells me there is no way 'the system' (Securom) could be wrong, I have obviously exceeded my install limit. I tell him this is completely and utterly impossible, he basically tells me I'm a liar, in the politest possible way, then tells me he can check up where these activations are coming from. Screw that I figured and got onto EAs website. Five days later they fix my account with no questions asked.
The issue here is not that they screwed me out of my game, clearly they didn't, and in the end the online customer service was reasonable, but the system is plain as day *deeply* flawed. They screwed me around for nearly a week, I am a legitimate paying customer (for once) and they dicked me good. This is what I get for paying for software? The adage is absolutely correct: Pirate Bay offers a superior product at a fiercely competitive price. What is right or wrong does not come into the equation, as far as I see it I have been punished for giving them my money.
Now the reason I replied to you is just to let you know that the 5 activations is not the end of it, when I was on the phone they told me they were "working on" some software that would recover activations after the game is uninstalled. In principle the limit is 5 simultaneous installs. Right now though they DO NOT offer this service. In Australia at least (where I am from) I believe they are in breach of fair trade practices by doing this, for one they do not advertise the install limit on the packaging, which I think is in itself illegal down here (product does not work as advertised) but most importantly they advertise a feature (covertly in random correspondence over certain websites) which as yet does not exist, again in breach of the same regulation. I believe you can at the moment get a new key, which I am curious to know: how many extra activations you get?
As a customer I am EXTREMELY pissed at this whole situation, and I would be willing to wager that if this same thing happened to oh say, slightly more than 0.2% of their customers (which I am sure it has and will) that this statistic is about as accurate as the home dentistry kit I keep in my garage...
Qantas HAD an excellent reputation for safety, but that is surely history now. What was it about 6-12 months ago they moved all of their international flights maintainance offshore. Qantas engineers went on strike etc. Lo and behold yet another outsourcing operation is falling flat on its face, unfortunately this time it could come at the expense of lives.
I'd be staying well away from Qantas international flights until they sort their shit out.
No, my whole point is that while debasing currency made it possible, that does not imply that fiat currency HAS to cause bubbles like this. It was entirely in the hands of regulators, stupid ones.
And shit dude lighten up, just look at the facts, if somebody takes on a loan they can obviously not afford, under spurious assumptions, that makes them kind of stupid right? then when millions do it, it kind of makes you wonder. As you even say, debasing currency to cause excessive inflation and asset price booms with free flowing credit is again stupid, right? Finally, you government is stupid, no? Not an insult my friend, an observation.
I'm Australian by the way, we insult people as a rule, but its all in good nature just relax man. I don't think you guys are ALL stupid.
Its not that it doesn't remember per se, I mean this is part of the problem, but the whole story is that there are something like 8 or 10 different security policies that make up 'UAC'. For the record I'm a vista user and I'm happy with vista, have been since day 1. I think if you go into secpol.msc and find the relevant security settings there is just a big convoluted mess of different policies that add up to make UAC. It asks if you want to run software from outside protected system folders, ie you run an install from a directory on a secondary partition or something, then if that installer needs elevated privileges it asks you again. I mean why can't you just elevate the privileges of the thing once and once only? It should be quite straight forward, as sudo is: Does this app need root access? Yes -> elevate to root until its done, or put it on a timeout.
I think, as always microsoft's biggest mistake was in believing too strongly in itself and its obsessive denegration of its competition. I think that admitting sudo or su is the superior method amounts to admitting to failure to them, so rather than just accept that instead of this idea being 'innovation from the competitor' it is just the most obviously simple way to do it, they think they can 'innovate' on their own and as a result, a mess ensues.
You understand it, but make exactly the wrong conclusion. The problem is complex, but there are obvious explanations to parts of it. Me I see two elephants in the room: firstly, you Americans are stupid, plain stupid, no offense but seriously the fact that such a vast number of people invested in such obviously bogus loans under the premise that "houses always go up in value" is mind boggling. Furthermore your government was too stupid to regulate this activity in the first place. But more importantly as you realise this is a problem of excessive liquidity causing a rather large asset price bubble. The excessive availability of capital is a failing of regulation again, not fiat currency. Your reserve bank under Greenspan and Bernanke thought: maybe, while the whole (sensible portion of the) world is out pursuing inflation targeting monetary policies, the USA could go on its own tangent arguing that if you take care of the stock market with free flowing liquidity that everything else would follow. Well that really turned out great.
Now all of this has nothing to do with fiat currency and everything to do with your bankers, government and general populace being plain stupid. Sorry mate but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a stupid duck...
Ron Paul is a crackpot because he advocates a commodity backed currency which history has proven is an unstable and frankly stupid idea. It is simplistic economic thinking: "Money needs inherent value, fiat money has no inherent value." Bullshit I say, if I can use it to trade it has value. What happens say when said commodity goes through a production boom? Or vice versa? Or when foreign interests manipulate this commodity, and thus your currency, outside of what is comfortable or realistic. How do you work out international currency trading when different markets won't agree on the value of your commodity?
In fact if you really think about it, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to tie the value of your economy to something shiny we dig out of the ground, or any other commodity. It makes no sense at all. Exactly what reflection of demand for currency, or gdp growth, does a commodity have?
The other crackpot theory is that fractional reserve banking is wrong, and the extension of this: creating new currency according to demand is wrong. Ron Paul would force massive deflation on the world just to save your savings accounts. It is this whole "inflation is evil, deflation is good" belief system that is the source of his crackpottery. It is a plain dumb idea that won't work.
And not only gold now but this just happened to oil too. God was it difficult for a few months there trying to convince everyone that no, this was not peak oil, just some stupid speculation that oil will be going up up up and huge over investment.
I have a funny theory that a lot of people with money are taking it out of all these plummeting markets and throwing it at other markets causing all these auxilliary mini bubbles, which are each bursting one by one. My theory is that these people own more money than really should exist and they are trying to get it out into safe markets, oil, then back to treasury bonds and gold. Eventually all this inflated amount of money will evaporate and leave us where we should be.
Best comment I've seen in this discussion. Hell of a lot of finger pointing going around, and I love how the crackpots from all sides of the spectrum come out in droves with conspiracy theories. Basically my friend, you have summed up exactly what went wrong: There is no grand conspiracy, there is no great con, this is only what it appears to be if you look at it right, that is the infinite depth of human stupidity.
I'll note I'm an Australian, and in housing at least we are in a similar situation in terms of inflated value, our banks however are still turning good profits. The belief here though is that we do not have many sub prime loans and thus our bubble may just slowly deflate as our housing prices remain stagnant. I remain skeptical, the sub prime element is a defining element but there is nothing stopping many more loans becoming sub prime if everyone starts losing their jobs, I mean hell its not like that has never happened before.
I'm a relatively young person, well old enough to own a house but I'm a mature aged university student so thats out of the question. But I find myself in the interesting position of having been on the sidelines through this whole land value boom over the past decade, and I can say it makes madmen of everyone. The common perceptions the average domestic individual holds of the housing market are to my mind a complete trap. For the most part most people are wrong about housing as an investment. The biggest myth is that houses never goes down in value. In the short term people admit that yes it fluctuates, but always the claim that the trend is up. Well friends the trend of inflation is also always up. If you look at plots of real dollar adjusted housing value in the worlds oldest cities the trend is flat. In the long term housing *never* goes up in real terms, there is no historical evidence to suggest it does. Think on this, you are a young family man/woman who just wants a roof over their heads and you want *equity*, the whole: 'I'm not paying off someone else's mortgage' yadda yadda yadda. Ok so you buy a house, it goes up in value over a period, but the rising tide lifts all boats, you sell and have to buy into the same damn market you just sold out of. You win nothing but the expense of interest and government fees for selling and buying, ie: you lose. Tally up those fees and interest rate losses and you probably find yourself being able to afford to have rented anyway.
I reckon barely anyone accounts for their losses when working out how much they "made" on a house. Bought it for $200k, sold for $400, sweet! Of course you bought it for $300k when all is said and done, and oh yes the current value of the dollar means the extra $100k has evaporated too. Yay!
The only way you make money on housing is to do one of two things: Own at least two houses and when they both go up in value you sell the second and wait till the market falls to buy another. Then capital gains tax eats your profits but you know you probably cleaned up anyway. The other option is to own two houses and rent one. And here I note that by 'two houses' I really mean 'n houses'.
So to me I figure all this insanity to leverage yourself to the eyeballs just to 'get in' on what is really a pretty shit market is just that: insanity. Home ownership is not the be all and end all, it is possible to rent a damn house and invest in something else you know. Chances are you'll probably end up better off this way. Oh and saving money (in inflation beating investment funds) is a really good thing. Debt is bad, mmkay, sometimes necessary but still bad, and always expensive, very expensive.
I would say take the rent... Its a massive urban myth that renting is the bad option. Housing is a spurious way to make money unless you are particularly good at it and own many houses. If all you intend to do is own a single house to have a roof over your head then don't think along these lines.
All things being equal, no you typically can't play a pc game without the disc in the drive, that is unless of course you crack it as you point out. But then as I said all things being equal you can do the same with a 360 or ps3 by just ripping the game to your hard drive and cracking it. So while you make a good point you are not really comparing apples with apples.
I don't buy that argument about console DRM. Sure, its hard(er) to burn games on consoles but there is one stark difference with more or less all console games: I can eject my disc, take it to my mates house, pop it in his console and play it there. I can also re sell my used games and there is an avid market for this, hell the two biggest ps3 titles this year have been available for swap for "6 used ps2 games" at many stores around the place.
DRM on the PC exists explicitly to prevent you from doing any of this. I don't see why. I don't see why you can re sell a console game and not a pc game? I don't see why you can share your console games with your friends and not your pc games? Plus there is little if any difference with the levels of piracy on consoles, I'm not exactly up to speed with current gen mod chipping but last gen was ridiculous. It was EASIER to pirate games on the ps2 and xbox than on a pc, if you got a mod chip, which everyone did, especially the non geeks. Seems everyone knew someone who would install that chip for $100, and everyone did it, and everyone had a stupidly large stack of ripped games.
There is an elephant i nthe room that nobody seems to bring up in these debates. This DRM stuff is not about controlling piracy, this is about controlling your purchasing decisions. They should call it 'digital revenue mangement'.
Tablets have caught on, they certainly have their place too but they are not laptop slayers for a few good reasons. Firstly, they are widely used in education by both students and teachers, especially in engineering. I have a convertible, and there is no way I would sacrifice my keyboard simply to avoid a seemingly delicate hinge, it is far too important to me to be able to type my assignments. They are actually quite robust, the hinges, you'd be suprised, and to that I'll add that normal laptop hinges are really quite weak to begin with. As an engineering/maths student, a normal laptop was going to be a burden, a tablet is perfect for what I do. Absolutely all of my notes are now organised perfectly and in one place at all times, I can pdf my work and send it to students with a few clicks, at any point I can flip between working on some maths to actually writing up some code to implement that maths. I couldn't have hoped for better, it is the perfect device for me and it just works, all the time.
Tablets are exclusively used by couriers these days for signatures, touchscreens widely used at checkouts in all manner of stores. I hear tablets are also a hit in the medical industry - slate tablets too so there you go. They are really really fantastic devices, its just that most people these days have no use for handwriting capabilities. Nobody writes anymore, thats what I put it down to. Hell when I decided to go back to university it took me a few weeks to get my handwriting back on form.
Just trust me - tablets have taken off, its just that it is a niche device to begin with. You may see more and more students using them in future as the prices come down, but while they hover around $2-3k those who need them most cannot afford them. Oh and tablet pc features are implemented incredibly well in vista, its about one of the only things that works and works well. I see nothing on the apple platform that is even remotely close to the capabilities of windows for handwriting. Honestly I feel this is why they don't release a tablet device - they won't be able to compete with MS on quality for once. I'm not an MS fanboy by the way, no chance, I just recognise when something does just work.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is simple: you cannot protect your kids from everything, moreover you can barely protect your kids from anything. Try as you might, some random event might come hurtling through your life and wreck it up something shocking. Or it might not, but you have no say in it.
What you *can* do is teach your kids to look out for themselves, be smart, be discerning, be wise and be safe. There is nothing else you can do, in all seriousness, try what you want it wont work. I know you are talking about the internet here but I make the analogy that when you lock your children indoors they merely climb out a window.
Oh and my suggestion, and I say this for any parent: Limit your child's access to the internet, as in how many hours they are online. No kid, or adult for that matter, needs all that much time in front of the internets in all reality.
1) Im not so sure that is the case
2) This is my whole point, I'm a 3rd yr mech engineering student I know what efficiency is all about. I was kind of making a point.
3) This isnt my point - I know its inefficient, well actually it isnt. Coal plants get some 70% thermodynamic efficiency so you know, thats damn good. My point is oil is an efficient, convenient and cheap way to store and transport energy. Store and transport.
4) You can make oil from a myriad of different things. Coal is easy, but any organic matter can quite easily be converted to oil, and you can use the oil to fuel the process at a net gain. My bet is this is what we will do when we actually do hit peak oil.
5) I'm all for it. tell me how you can transfer something in the order of 6MW to your battery off the grid, cos like I said thats what bowsers do.
But how do you define efficient? Pure thermodynamic efficiency? Sure power plants win out - but what does that mean and exactly how useful is it? Power plants do not keep in line with demand - they cannot, as demand waxes and wanes the power grid supply more or less flat lines. How is that efficient?
I drive an old car, but I bet that I use less fuel than the vast majority of people and I am unashamed of driving my old car because the numbers don't lie. Now not to be combative but I say screw you and the horse you rode in on to anyone who tells me my car is worse for the environment than theirs. For the record I drive a 1970s 'pickup truck' (we call it a ute) with a 5 litre V8 engine, carburettor, 4 speed gearbox and low geared differential. It gets 15 l/100km on the highway (work it out yourselves - thats our unit) and I have no idea what in the city, I do not care. Why don't I care? Because I spend about $10 - $20 a week on petrol. And down here that amounts to about 7-15 litres a week, or something like 2-4 gallons. A week. So how much more efficient is driving my car the way I do (as in: I don't) than commuting to work in a plug in hybrid? Much more, whats even better is I love my car.
Back to my point: What electrical systems lack is an efficient means of *storing* energy, this is subtle but extremely important. It is basically THE issue when it comes to transportation. In my personal example I use bugger all fuel because I don't turn my car on: I walk, ride the train and bus, ride my bike, etc. I make less impact on the environment than feelgood hybrid driving fart sniffing hippies who plug theirs into the wall socket. Why? Because my hulking pile of metal with an oversized engine and two seats is recycled for one - its age alone means I have drawn out its embodied energy over 30 years, and my owning of it means one less new car needs to be built (another argument for another day). But most importantly it can be TURNED OFF.
The power grid can't just be turned off.
So how are we defining efficient operation? Electric vehicles are time inefficient - it takes a long time to charge them, so in a busy society how does that help us? What do trucking companies do? What do busy mums and dads do? Don't tell me they should just own two cars or two fleets of trucks: Then you double the required resources and construction energy required just to get back to the point we are at today, and the grid *still* can't be turned off like my V8 can. How efficient is that exactly?
No, none of this electric car business makes sense on a large (whole of society) scale. The reason we use oil is because in net terms it IS the most efficient means of storing energy, above all else it is the most *economically efficient* means of achieving mass scale transportation. You can't deny it and electricity won't change this fact. I predict that oil will not be replaced as an energy storage mechanism for transportation, not in the near or distant future. Barring some ridiculous breakthrough in battery technology and a power grid that allows us to charge our cars with megawatts (some 6 meagwatts is transferred to your car from a pump. 6 million joules... every second.) of electricity, it is not going to happen. Of course if we start talking about making oil driven vehicles more efficient, now we're talking - that is smart.
See I was thinking the same thing: Wouldn't a bored, unemployed person be *more* likely to kill some hours contributing to open source projects than say a tired, overworked person?
I certainly know a few people who contribute to open source projects to boost their job prospects as well. Its something that looks pretty good on a resume, better than weeks of nothing to show for yourself.
Hell me and my mates in our youth used to mod Golden axe. It turned out you could fire up XTree and switch the names of sprites around and then suddenly one of you was the a boss and the other was a hovering piece of meat!
Wrong. Come on mate seriously, I said I'm 26 not 17. Its not like the PS2 is ancient history with the PS3 being less than 2 years old.
Dunno what goes on over the pond there mate but in Australia mod chipping was rampant. And I might suggest to you that in the USA it was too, perhaps its got nothing to do with who's got a job and a lot more to do with who's got money... Think about that because they are not the same thing.
All right guys I get it... mentioning that I'm younger than all of your chumps has got your neck hairs up. Quit ribbing me!
I just figured that the average gamer is like 15... sure seems that way to me.
Wow.
Ok so I'm a young gamer (Aussie by the way).
But just to put an addendum on my previous post, I'll quickly mention a story. Month ago I bought Crysis warhead, legitimately bought it, installed it on the two computers I have that run Crysis, this is fine they say, 5 installs they say. Two weeks ago the game wouldn't load and all I got was a message saying if I wanted to play to "purchase another copy" because I had exceeded my 5 installs. This was utter bullshit, I played their game (money game) and they dicked me. It took another week to resolve the issue, and I was more or less accused of being a liar by the phone staff, in the politest possible way of course.
I just want to make sure my story is repeated all over the internet as many times as possible. People DO get locked out of their games for no reason with this shit. The fact that the issue was resolved is meaningless, to me there never should have been an issue to resolve.
The way I see it there is one genuine and absolute way to give a reason to purchase a game: Online play. Xbox live and err PS3 online something are basically the ONLY reason why people seem to have stopped mod chipping and pirating. Time was PS2 and Xbox games were pirated so fiercely that the PC pirate industry would blush, thats just not the case anymore.
Hell I'll fess up: I've started buying PC games again (or just started). I'm fairly old for a gamer at 26 and I'll be honest, the last thing I bought before this year was the Warcraft 2 expansion pack. Yes thats right (to be honest I didn't buy WC2 either, I used my mates disk to install it then the expansion pack disk was a cheap alternative to legitimate play). The only reason things have changed is that I want online play. Now the thing is that this feature has built in online verification and it doesn't get in your way!
All this limiting installs business, Securom rootkits, internet requirements and so on blows my mind it is so morally corrupt. The whole notion fundamentally defies market principles, any other industry would belaughed out of the room if they suggested to government they needed this kind of regulation. And most of all it DOESNT WORK. Hear this game developers, none of your methods, none of them, ever have ever worked and never will. Not even on consoles! Barring one: Online play.
Its criminal how utterly STUPID these people are that they do not realise this and do something about it, something other than swimming against the tide.
I'm not so sure about that, personally I content that only verifiable hypotheses are in realm of science, other than that its theory or mathematics. Take string theory for example, the mere act of *attempting* to describe nature doesn't mean you *are* describing nature. I maintain that string theory is not science, and I maintain that the drake equation is even further from science than string theory. When these mathematical propositions are tested and we have data to compare them to, then I will accept them as scientific, providing of course that the data matches up.
You see there is the problem, without data to compare your hypothesis against you have no idea if you have made an insightful proposition or produced something as useful to science as a Michael Chrichton novel. If it turns out to be the latter it will be rejected as a baseless and incorrect assumption, so why should it be considered science up until that point?
Come on guys the ONLY reason to buy a mac these days is because they look good... And the new macbooks do not look good.
So theres no reason to even buy one of these toys any more! Its all OK!
Despite this being an incredibly unpopular opinion in these parts, I don't think any plugin electric vehicle of any description will ever fly. It is just a silly idea that is popular because its warm and fuzzy. Even a plugin hybrid will be used mostly on fuel, not because of the plugin nature being inconvenient (although it is) but because it just does not suit the way modern societies function.
I am a 3rd yeah mechanical engineering student, and I have an interest in economics although no formal training. Combining what I understand of these things I do not believe plug in anything is a good idea for personal transport. If you want you can do simple maths, I wont bother here I'll assume everyone understands how to calculate work done by a moving electric charge. The thing is plugin electric vehicles are always going to be trickle charge, always. Thats not a limitation of technology, its a limitation of physics. The fact of the matter is that if you look at potential energy transfer as a function of a flowing fuild (somewhat abstract I know) in the form of oil, you are looking at megawatts. To do that with electricity is far more dangerous than pumping what amounts to a largely non volatile hydrocarbon. It will never happen. Battery swapping is a fools dream, logistically it is highly improbable to be successful in any scenario. Electricity only works for large scale infrastructure that is a completely fixed installation. Trains, Trams, cable cars, etc.
Now my whole argument is that people will *never* accept a trickle charge vehicle on a mass scale. Sure some hippies and feel good tech geeks might buy a few, but it wont work across the board, it wont. It does not satisfy demands, thus there will be no successful supply. Our society cannot accept it, we need instant freedom to move. And I'm not talking only about personal transport, more important even is freight and construction. But that wont change the fact that if mum can't grab the keys and run out to get some milk for the screaming kids, dad can't get to work in time because he forgot to plug in last night, cant get your pregnant wife to the hospital because shit you just got back from a trip to the beach and the car needs 12 hours of juice, and goddamn the teenager has the second one. Oh but its a hybrid I hear you say? So then you use fuel, whats the point?
My belief is that for personal transport liquid fuels are the best, safest and most practical way we have to move energy. I think it most likely that we will *never* stop using oil, and thats an honest belief. We may run out of mineral oils, sure, and we may even get some sort of carbon balance happening one day. But that does not mean we are going to be so stupid as to reject one of the most useful means of portable energy storage we have ever discovered. Oil, natural or synthetic will continue to fuel our society for many decades to come. And I predict that plugins will only ever find a niche market, hell the technology is there, if there was demand we would already have them.
These days I have a console that lets me get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of the least possible time investment.
I agree, Wii is boring as shit and gets there fast.
I recently purchased Crysis warhead, its a good game and it was a good deal at half the usual price. I only really bought it for the online play, but thats aside from the point here.
I have two computers, both can run Crysis, I install it on both - they give you 5 activations so I'm sweet... I thought. The other day I fire up my game only to be presented with a message:
"You have exceeded your activation limit, please BUY ANOTHER COPY if you want to keep playing." (emphasis mine, not an exact quote but damn close)
WTF!! Wheres my other 3 activations, what the hell is going on?? I call a customer service rep, at $2.50 a minute no less, he tells me there is no way 'the system' (Securom) could be wrong, I have obviously exceeded my install limit. I tell him this is completely and utterly impossible, he basically tells me I'm a liar, in the politest possible way, then tells me he can check up where these activations are coming from. Screw that I figured and got onto EAs website. Five days later they fix my account with no questions asked.
The issue here is not that they screwed me out of my game, clearly they didn't, and in the end the online customer service was reasonable, but the system is plain as day *deeply* flawed. They screwed me around for nearly a week, I am a legitimate paying customer (for once) and they dicked me good. This is what I get for paying for software? The adage is absolutely correct: Pirate Bay offers a superior product at a fiercely competitive price. What is right or wrong does not come into the equation, as far as I see it I have been punished for giving them my money.
Now the reason I replied to you is just to let you know that the 5 activations is not the end of it, when I was on the phone they told me they were "working on" some software that would recover activations after the game is uninstalled. In principle the limit is 5 simultaneous installs. Right now though they DO NOT offer this service. In Australia at least (where I am from) I believe they are in breach of fair trade practices by doing this, for one they do not advertise the install limit on the packaging, which I think is in itself illegal down here (product does not work as advertised) but most importantly they advertise a feature (covertly in random correspondence over certain websites) which as yet does not exist, again in breach of the same regulation. I believe you can at the moment get a new key, which I am curious to know: how many extra activations you get?
As a customer I am EXTREMELY pissed at this whole situation, and I would be willing to wager that if this same thing happened to oh say, slightly more than 0.2% of their customers (which I am sure it has and will) that this statistic is about as accurate as the home dentistry kit I keep in my garage...
Qantas HAD an excellent reputation for safety, but that is surely history now. What was it about 6-12 months ago they moved all of their international flights maintainance offshore. Qantas engineers went on strike etc. Lo and behold yet another outsourcing operation is falling flat on its face, unfortunately this time it could come at the expense of lives.
I'd be staying well away from Qantas international flights until they sort their shit out.
No, my whole point is that while debasing currency made it possible, that does not imply that fiat currency HAS to cause bubbles like this. It was entirely in the hands of regulators, stupid ones.
And shit dude lighten up, just look at the facts, if somebody takes on a loan they can obviously not afford, under spurious assumptions, that makes them kind of stupid right? then when millions do it, it kind of makes you wonder. As you even say, debasing currency to cause excessive inflation and asset price booms with free flowing credit is again stupid, right? Finally, you government is stupid, no? Not an insult my friend, an observation.
I'm Australian by the way, we insult people as a rule, but its all in good nature just relax man. I don't think you guys are ALL stupid.
Its not that it doesn't remember per se, I mean this is part of the problem, but the whole story is that there are something like 8 or 10 different security policies that make up 'UAC'. For the record I'm a vista user and I'm happy with vista, have been since day 1. I think if you go into secpol.msc and find the relevant security settings there is just a big convoluted mess of different policies that add up to make UAC. It asks if you want to run software from outside protected system folders, ie you run an install from a directory on a secondary partition or something, then if that installer needs elevated privileges it asks you again. I mean why can't you just elevate the privileges of the thing once and once only? It should be quite straight forward, as sudo is: Does this app need root access? Yes -> elevate to root until its done, or put it on a timeout.
I think, as always microsoft's biggest mistake was in believing too strongly in itself and its obsessive denegration of its competition. I think that admitting sudo or su is the superior method amounts to admitting to failure to them, so rather than just accept that instead of this idea being 'innovation from the competitor' it is just the most obviously simple way to do it, they think they can 'innovate' on their own and as a result, a mess ensues.
You understand it, but make exactly the wrong conclusion. The problem is complex, but there are obvious explanations to parts of it. Me I see two elephants in the room: firstly, you Americans are stupid, plain stupid, no offense but seriously the fact that such a vast number of people invested in such obviously bogus loans under the premise that "houses always go up in value" is mind boggling. Furthermore your government was too stupid to regulate this activity in the first place. But more importantly as you realise this is a problem of excessive liquidity causing a rather large asset price bubble. The excessive availability of capital is a failing of regulation again, not fiat currency. Your reserve bank under Greenspan and Bernanke thought: maybe, while the whole (sensible portion of the) world is out pursuing inflation targeting monetary policies, the USA could go on its own tangent arguing that if you take care of the stock market with free flowing liquidity that everything else would follow. Well that really turned out great.
Now all of this has nothing to do with fiat currency and everything to do with your bankers, government and general populace being plain stupid. Sorry mate but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a stupid duck...
Ron Paul is a crackpot because he advocates a commodity backed currency which history has proven is an unstable and frankly stupid idea. It is simplistic economic thinking: "Money needs inherent value, fiat money has no inherent value." Bullshit I say, if I can use it to trade it has value. What happens say when said commodity goes through a production boom? Or vice versa? Or when foreign interests manipulate this commodity, and thus your currency, outside of what is comfortable or realistic. How do you work out international currency trading when different markets won't agree on the value of your commodity?
In fact if you really think about it, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to tie the value of your economy to something shiny we dig out of the ground, or any other commodity. It makes no sense at all. Exactly what reflection of demand for currency, or gdp growth, does a commodity have?
The other crackpot theory is that fractional reserve banking is wrong, and the extension of this: creating new currency according to demand is wrong. Ron Paul would force massive deflation on the world just to save your savings accounts. It is this whole "inflation is evil, deflation is good" belief system that is the source of his crackpottery. It is a plain dumb idea that won't work.
And not only gold now but this just happened to oil too. God was it difficult for a few months there trying to convince everyone that no, this was not peak oil, just some stupid speculation that oil will be going up up up and huge over investment.
I have a funny theory that a lot of people with money are taking it out of all these plummeting markets and throwing it at other markets causing all these auxilliary mini bubbles, which are each bursting one by one. My theory is that these people own more money than really should exist and they are trying to get it out into safe markets, oil, then back to treasury bonds and gold. Eventually all this inflated amount of money will evaporate and leave us where we should be.
I know its not really that simple but you know.
Best comment I've seen in this discussion. Hell of a lot of finger pointing going around, and I love how the crackpots from all sides of the spectrum come out in droves with conspiracy theories. Basically my friend, you have summed up exactly what went wrong: There is no grand conspiracy, there is no great con, this is only what it appears to be if you look at it right, that is the infinite depth of human stupidity.
I'll note I'm an Australian, and in housing at least we are in a similar situation in terms of inflated value, our banks however are still turning good profits. The belief here though is that we do not have many sub prime loans and thus our bubble may just slowly deflate as our housing prices remain stagnant. I remain skeptical, the sub prime element is a defining element but there is nothing stopping many more loans becoming sub prime if everyone starts losing their jobs, I mean hell its not like that has never happened before.
I'm a relatively young person, well old enough to own a house but I'm a mature aged university student so thats out of the question. But I find myself in the interesting position of having been on the sidelines through this whole land value boom over the past decade, and I can say it makes madmen of everyone. The common perceptions the average domestic individual holds of the housing market are to my mind a complete trap. For the most part most people are wrong about housing as an investment. The biggest myth is that houses never goes down in value. In the short term people admit that yes it fluctuates, but always the claim that the trend is up. Well friends the trend of inflation is also always up. If you look at plots of real dollar adjusted housing value in the worlds oldest cities the trend is flat. In the long term housing *never* goes up in real terms, there is no historical evidence to suggest it does. Think on this, you are a young family man/woman who just wants a roof over their heads and you want *equity*, the whole: 'I'm not paying off someone else's mortgage' yadda yadda yadda. Ok so you buy a house, it goes up in value over a period, but the rising tide lifts all boats, you sell and have to buy into the same damn market you just sold out of. You win nothing but the expense of interest and government fees for selling and buying, ie: you lose. Tally up those fees and interest rate losses and you probably find yourself being able to afford to have rented anyway.
I reckon barely anyone accounts for their losses when working out how much they "made" on a house. Bought it for $200k, sold for $400, sweet! Of course you bought it for $300k when all is said and done, and oh yes the current value of the dollar means the extra $100k has evaporated too. Yay!
The only way you make money on housing is to do one of two things: Own at least two houses and when they both go up in value you sell the second and wait till the market falls to buy another. Then capital gains tax eats your profits but you know you probably cleaned up anyway. The other option is to own two houses and rent one. And here I note that by 'two houses' I really mean 'n houses'.
So to me I figure all this insanity to leverage yourself to the eyeballs just to 'get in' on what is really a pretty shit market is just that: insanity. Home ownership is not the be all and end all, it is possible to rent a damn house and invest in something else you know. Chances are you'll probably end up better off this way. Oh and saving money (in inflation beating investment funds) is a really good thing. Debt is bad, mmkay, sometimes necessary but still bad, and always expensive, very expensive.
I would say take the rent... Its a massive urban myth that renting is the bad option. Housing is a spurious way to make money unless you are particularly good at it and own many houses. If all you intend to do is own a single house to have a roof over your head then don't think along these lines.
All things being equal, no you typically can't play a pc game without the disc in the drive, that is unless of course you crack it as you point out. But then as I said all things being equal you can do the same with a 360 or ps3 by just ripping the game to your hard drive and cracking it. So while you make a good point you are not really comparing apples with apples.
I don't buy that argument about console DRM. Sure, its hard(er) to burn games on consoles but there is one stark difference with more or less all console games: I can eject my disc, take it to my mates house, pop it in his console and play it there. I can also re sell my used games and there is an avid market for this, hell the two biggest ps3 titles this year have been available for swap for "6 used ps2 games" at many stores around the place.
DRM on the PC exists explicitly to prevent you from doing any of this. I don't see why. I don't see why you can re sell a console game and not a pc game? I don't see why you can share your console games with your friends and not your pc games? Plus there is little if any difference with the levels of piracy on consoles, I'm not exactly up to speed with current gen mod chipping but last gen was ridiculous. It was EASIER to pirate games on the ps2 and xbox than on a pc, if you got a mod chip, which everyone did, especially the non geeks. Seems everyone knew someone who would install that chip for $100, and everyone did it, and everyone had a stupidly large stack of ripped games.
There is an elephant i nthe room that nobody seems to bring up in these debates. This DRM stuff is not about controlling piracy, this is about controlling your purchasing decisions. They should call it 'digital revenue mangement'.
Tablets have caught on, they certainly have their place too but they are not laptop slayers for a few good reasons. Firstly, they are widely used in education by both students and teachers, especially in engineering. I have a convertible, and there is no way I would sacrifice my keyboard simply to avoid a seemingly delicate hinge, it is far too important to me to be able to type my assignments. They are actually quite robust, the hinges, you'd be suprised, and to that I'll add that normal laptop hinges are really quite weak to begin with. As an engineering/maths student, a normal laptop was going to be a burden, a tablet is perfect for what I do. Absolutely all of my notes are now organised perfectly and in one place at all times, I can pdf my work and send it to students with a few clicks, at any point I can flip between working on some maths to actually writing up some code to implement that maths. I couldn't have hoped for better, it is the perfect device for me and it just works, all the time.
Tablets are exclusively used by couriers these days for signatures, touchscreens widely used at checkouts in all manner of stores. I hear tablets are also a hit in the medical industry - slate tablets too so there you go. They are really really fantastic devices, its just that most people these days have no use for handwriting capabilities. Nobody writes anymore, thats what I put it down to. Hell when I decided to go back to university it took me a few weeks to get my handwriting back on form.
Just trust me - tablets have taken off, its just that it is a niche device to begin with. You may see more and more students using them in future as the prices come down, but while they hover around $2-3k those who need them most cannot afford them. Oh and tablet pc features are implemented incredibly well in vista, its about one of the only things that works and works well. I see nothing on the apple platform that is even remotely close to the capabilities of windows for handwriting. Honestly I feel this is why they don't release a tablet device - they won't be able to compete with MS on quality for once. I'm not an MS fanboy by the way, no chance, I just recognise when something does just work.