How in hell is it accepted that the Olympics, perhaps one of the longest standing symbols of solidarity and friendly competition among countries, is sold whole to single providers? Here, there are two cable providers covering the Olympics and they're doing a pathetically bad job at it, so much so that you can effectively say I might as well not know there are Olympics going on.
I think it is utterly pathetic that such a thing is allowed to happen. If anything, the Olympics should be open to any network (be it TV or otherwise) that wishes to cover it, with no restrictions on "official broadcasters".
Read up on the Quebec 1998 freezing rain crisis. Most people were cut off for a week, some as long as a month and a half (tens of thousands, not a couple hundreds). It was quite the chaos because right after the rain stopped it got really cold and the vast majority of people here depend on electricity for heating, but I'd say what happened was the opposite of barbarism. There was a huge movement towards helping each other, large community centers were created to provide shelter for those without power who had nowhere else to go, I don't recall any higher incidence of crime (burglary or otherwise).
Perhaps the response from the population is very dependent on the source of the outage. It's easily understandable to lose power in such a storm, but if there is no apparent reason I can understand people being pissed off about it. Going as far as mass protests or riots would be stretching it however, and I doubt we'd see that in first world countries; we're way too mellow by now.
I don't know about you, but I had courses in high school that were supposed to cover such things as making a budget all the way to cooking. Whether they were effective is another matter, but it's not as if it were entirely absent, it's merely not prevalent enough and perhaps misdirected (we wasted a lot of time on trying to learn how to cook and only ended up making cookies).
However, teaching math is not easy. In fact, I'd say it's fucking hard. The problem is that it's possible to "teach" math in a way that requires a lot less effort, but also ends up giving not a whole lot of knowledge. Just pile in a ton of memorization and rote formulas and ask the students to learn everything and vomit it back on the test, then forget it until the final exam.
I'd even go as far as to say that there exists no easy subject to teach. If you find it easy, it's because you're not actually teaching.
Why should being an expert of a field have to come in opposition of knowing a bit of everything? What's wrong with striving to have both?
You may not need math in your career, but to say that you don't need it at all is blatantly false. The problem is that currently people don't know maths, so they don't realize what they're missing out on. Just think about the number of times people get fooled by basic probabilities or simple statistics. It's not because they can live their life without it that it becomes useless!
In the case I'm not sure about a game, I wait until it's cheap and get it. At worst, I'm $5-10 down, which is identical to what you had, except I still get to keep the game on top of that.
I'm sorry, but that's false. Publishers shifted towards consoles because of control. Even if piracy was impossible, they'd still have shifted to consoles because then they have you locked in, with no possibility of you escaping. PC games have mods, which extend the life of games and compete with DLC. PC gamers are used to getting patches (and in a timely manner). PC gamers have a different mentality, for instance by clamoring for dedicated servers when console gamers are content with oft-unfair P2P matchmaking. PC games have a host of configuration possibilities, which cost more to develop for. That all comes down to control: control of the market, control of the platform, control of the hardware.
There's a host of reasons why publishers have desired consoles, but piracy really isn't one of the largest. If it were, the Nintendo DS would have been a disaster (it has one of the highest piracy rates of all platforms, PC included), when it's one of the most successful consoles around.
Yeah, because evidently the motherboard can't be designed to only give out as much power as is available, and to scale such power down if other components of the computer require more.
You won't be able to daisy chain laptops charging one another, but charging a phone (which won't be necessarily using 100W, that's just the maximum) on a laptop or a laptop on a desktop is not out of scope.
Arguably, they were submitted prior to this entire patent wars mess. There was a time where patents were considered primarily to protect complex implementations from being copied wholesale all while allowing competitors to eventually take advantage of them, thus fostering innovation by making it profitable and then allowing everyone to build on those foundations.
You know, as opposed to stopping anyone from using slide to unlock for 5/10/15 years/however long patents last in your country/time.
Good thing Double Fine Adventure has kicked up a bit of a frenzy then! On top of that, I've also seen a new Leisure Suit Larry and a new Tex Murphy game, plus something from the guys behind Space Quest. Also, Jane Jensen, the creator of the Gabriel Knight series, has successfully funded Moebius, which is a spiritual successor to the beloved franchise.
And need I remind you that DFA is made by Ron Gilbert, of Monkey Island fame, and Tim Schafer, the brains behind Grim Fandango?
They exist, you just need to look a little further.
If you want harder, more challenging, more interactive games, you have many choices: spectacle fighter Bayonetta comes to mind, or precise platformer Super Meat Boy, or ridiculously tough action game Dark Souls, or even SpaceChem if puzzles are your thing. There's the extremely unforgiving strategy game AI War: Fleet Command. There's indie turn-based tactics game Frozen Synapse. There's hard as nails tower defence game Revenge of the Titans. There's unforgiving tactics game Atom Zombie Smasher. There's Dungeons of Dredmor, with its typical roguelike difficulty. There's "embodiment of a steep learning curve" EVE Online.
If all you're looking at is the top 5 console games, then yes, chances are people who play those games are not necessarily looking for a tough and complex experience. That doesn't mean there exists no game catering to that.
Borderlands 2. Far Cry 3. Team Fortress 2. Left 4 Dead. DayZ/ArmA. Crysis.
There's still plenty of solid FPS, you just need to dig a little further than your local GameStop (which, I'll agree, gives a depressing perspective of the gaming landscape in general).
If you want indie titles, look at ArmA again, then perhaps Hard Reset, which has a lengthy demo. The genre's not as developed because it takes a lot more resources than 2D/2.5D platformers and puzzle games.
Seeing how that turned out for a legitimate use, I don't exactly see what terrorist would think this to be a good idea, and please don't bring up some backwards reverse psychology explanation.
Terrorism is the new "think of the children", even though the latter's never disappeared.
The way the GP describes it, G+ can act as an aggregator for all of this. Instead of individually visiting their blog, watching their Twitter feeds and subscribing to their podcast, you follow them on G+ where they'll link to all the stuff you've listed, and perhaps some more.
This obviously assumes that whoever is the "their" is using G+ to direct their followers to all of their other content, though. This may not be a correct assumption all the time, but if it reaches a certain critical mass, it could be fairly good.
Except this is invisible. If you'd watched the video linked in TFA, you'd have noticed that the implant itself is entirely hidden in the eye (and is smaller than a penny) and uses a specially modified but otherwise plain-looking pair of eyeglasses to get power.
If you get assaulted for wearing glasses, well, we have really big problems.
Need it be pointed out that DX9 is getting rather long in the tooth and should thus not be considered as a basis for a future platform?
In order to work, it'd have to support DX11, otherwise it won't be future-proofed enough and would fall apart with the next console generation just around the corner.
Having a cap on the number of patents that are actually issued doesn't fix the problem of the patent office being overloaded by the number of applications.
Instead, each patent filed in a certain time span (a year perhaps) should be progressively more expensive to file. This wouldn't harm the little guy, who only files a few things a year, but the large corporation would have to trim down its portfolio or pay very high fees to get the patents to the office. The smaller number of applications would help ease the burden on the examiners, who could then more carefully review each to actually properly respect the "non-obvious to one skilled in the art" part of a patent.
Combined with varying patent duration and patent invalidation if commercialization is not achieved within a certain time frame, that would at least be a good first step towards fixing the ridiculously broken system we have now.
This isn't about the federal government growing, it's about institutionalizing corruption. The US has basically bowed to lobbyists and let them control everything.
Or do you really think the states would do a better job than the federal government?
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How in hell is it accepted that the Olympics, perhaps one of the longest standing symbols of solidarity and friendly competition among countries, is sold whole to single providers? Here, there are two cable providers covering the Olympics and they're doing a pathetically bad job at it, so much so that you can effectively say I might as well not know there are Olympics going on.
I think it is utterly pathetic that such a thing is allowed to happen. If anything, the Olympics should be open to any network (be it TV or otherwise) that wishes to cover it, with no restrictions on "official broadcasters".
Read up on the Quebec 1998 freezing rain crisis. Most people were cut off for a week, some as long as a month and a half (tens of thousands, not a couple hundreds). It was quite the chaos because right after the rain stopped it got really cold and the vast majority of people here depend on electricity for heating, but I'd say what happened was the opposite of barbarism. There was a huge movement towards helping each other, large community centers were created to provide shelter for those without power who had nowhere else to go, I don't recall any higher incidence of crime (burglary or otherwise).
Perhaps the response from the population is very dependent on the source of the outage. It's easily understandable to lose power in such a storm, but if there is no apparent reason I can understand people being pissed off about it. Going as far as mass protests or riots would be stretching it however, and I doubt we'd see that in first world countries; we're way too mellow by now.
Google answers customers, not consumers.
I don't know about you, but I had courses in high school that were supposed to cover such things as making a budget all the way to cooking. Whether they were effective is another matter, but it's not as if it were entirely absent, it's merely not prevalent enough and perhaps misdirected (we wasted a lot of time on trying to learn how to cook and only ended up making cookies).
However, teaching math is not easy. In fact, I'd say it's fucking hard. The problem is that it's possible to "teach" math in a way that requires a lot less effort, but also ends up giving not a whole lot of knowledge. Just pile in a ton of memorization and rote formulas and ask the students to learn everything and vomit it back on the test, then forget it until the final exam.
I'd even go as far as to say that there exists no easy subject to teach. If you find it easy, it's because you're not actually teaching.
Why should being an expert of a field have to come in opposition of knowing a bit of everything? What's wrong with striving to have both?
You may not need math in your career, but to say that you don't need it at all is blatantly false. The problem is that currently people don't know maths, so they don't realize what they're missing out on. Just think about the number of times people get fooled by basic probabilities or simple statistics. It's not because they can live their life without it that it becomes useless!
In the case I'm not sure about a game, I wait until it's cheap and get it. At worst, I'm $5-10 down, which is identical to what you had, except I still get to keep the game on top of that.
As soon as Apple puts its own Maps app up, I wouldn't be surprised to see "duplicate functionality" apps get axed from the store.
You know, the usual Apple MO.
I'm sorry, but that's false. Publishers shifted towards consoles because of control. Even if piracy was impossible, they'd still have shifted to consoles because then they have you locked in, with no possibility of you escaping. PC games have mods, which extend the life of games and compete with DLC. PC gamers are used to getting patches (and in a timely manner). PC gamers have a different mentality, for instance by clamoring for dedicated servers when console gamers are content with oft-unfair P2P matchmaking. PC games have a host of configuration possibilities, which cost more to develop for. That all comes down to control: control of the market, control of the platform, control of the hardware.
There's a host of reasons why publishers have desired consoles, but piracy really isn't one of the largest. If it were, the Nintendo DS would have been a disaster (it has one of the highest piracy rates of all platforms, PC included), when it's one of the most successful consoles around.
Yeah, because evidently the motherboard can't be designed to only give out as much power as is available, and to scale such power down if other components of the computer require more.
You won't be able to daisy chain laptops charging one another, but charging a phone (which won't be necessarily using 100W, that's just the maximum) on a laptop or a laptop on a desktop is not out of scope.
Arguably, they were submitted prior to this entire patent wars mess. There was a time where patents were considered primarily to protect complex implementations from being copied wholesale all while allowing competitors to eventually take advantage of them, thus fostering innovation by making it profitable and then allowing everyone to build on those foundations.
You know, as opposed to stopping anyone from using slide to unlock for 5/10/15 years/however long patents last in your country/time.
Yes, because it's surprising that the debt would increase during a worldwide recession.
If you believe your arguments mean nothing, why are you even living in a democracy?
Good thing Double Fine Adventure has kicked up a bit of a frenzy then! On top of that, I've also seen a new Leisure Suit Larry and a new Tex Murphy game, plus something from the guys behind Space Quest. Also, Jane Jensen, the creator of the Gabriel Knight series, has successfully funded Moebius, which is a spiritual successor to the beloved franchise.
And need I remind you that DFA is made by Ron Gilbert, of Monkey Island fame, and Tim Schafer, the brains behind Grim Fandango?
They exist, you just need to look a little further.
If you want harder, more challenging, more interactive games, you have many choices: spectacle fighter Bayonetta comes to mind, or precise platformer Super Meat Boy, or ridiculously tough action game Dark Souls, or even SpaceChem if puzzles are your thing. There's the extremely unforgiving strategy game AI War: Fleet Command. There's indie turn-based tactics game Frozen Synapse. There's hard as nails tower defence game Revenge of the Titans. There's unforgiving tactics game Atom Zombie Smasher. There's Dungeons of Dredmor, with its typical roguelike difficulty. There's "embodiment of a steep learning curve" EVE Online.
If all you're looking at is the top 5 console games, then yes, chances are people who play those games are not necessarily looking for a tough and complex experience. That doesn't mean there exists no game catering to that.
You've forgotten perhaps one of the best-written games in a long time: The Witcher 2. One of the best RPGs of the last five years for sure.
You play the game for the story. Saying story doesn't matter is ridiculously shortsighted.
Borderlands 2. Far Cry 3. Team Fortress 2. Left 4 Dead. DayZ/ArmA. Crysis.
There's still plenty of solid FPS, you just need to dig a little further than your local GameStop (which, I'll agree, gives a depressing perspective of the gaming landscape in general).
If you want indie titles, look at ArmA again, then perhaps Hard Reset, which has a lengthy demo. The genre's not as developed because it takes a lot more resources than 2D/2.5D platformers and puzzle games.
If you want him away, you call the police. Wearing a McDo's t-shirt does not imbue you with the power to enforce the law.
Seeing how that turned out for a legitimate use, I don't exactly see what terrorist would think this to be a good idea, and please don't bring up some backwards reverse psychology explanation.
Terrorism is the new "think of the children", even though the latter's never disappeared.
The way the GP describes it, G+ can act as an aggregator for all of this. Instead of individually visiting their blog, watching their Twitter feeds and subscribing to their podcast, you follow them on G+ where they'll link to all the stuff you've listed, and perhaps some more.
This obviously assumes that whoever is the "their" is using G+ to direct their followers to all of their other content, though. This may not be a correct assumption all the time, but if it reaches a certain critical mass, it could be fairly good.
And then the average reader of Metacritic doesn't understand how the score is calculated and cries foul every single time.
Yeah, that'll work.
Except this is invisible. If you'd watched the video linked in TFA, you'd have noticed that the implant itself is entirely hidden in the eye (and is smaller than a penny) and uses a specially modified but otherwise plain-looking pair of eyeglasses to get power.
If you get assaulted for wearing glasses, well, we have really big problems.
Need it be pointed out that DX9 is getting rather long in the tooth and should thus not be considered as a basis for a future platform?
In order to work, it'd have to support DX11, otherwise it won't be future-proofed enough and would fall apart with the next console generation just around the corner.
Having a cap on the number of patents that are actually issued doesn't fix the problem of the patent office being overloaded by the number of applications.
Instead, each patent filed in a certain time span (a year perhaps) should be progressively more expensive to file. This wouldn't harm the little guy, who only files a few things a year, but the large corporation would have to trim down its portfolio or pay very high fees to get the patents to the office. The smaller number of applications would help ease the burden on the examiners, who could then more carefully review each to actually properly respect the "non-obvious to one skilled in the art" part of a patent.
Combined with varying patent duration and patent invalidation if commercialization is not achieved within a certain time frame, that would at least be a good first step towards fixing the ridiculously broken system we have now.
This isn't about the federal government growing, it's about institutionalizing corruption. The US has basically bowed to lobbyists and let them control everything.
Or do you really think the states would do a better job than the federal government?
As a Nexus S owner, I don't know what you're talking about. I believe the Galaxy Nexus was available mid-November, correct?
Well I updated to ICS in mid-December. A month's wait is honestly quite acceptable and was well worth it.