I know. I liked Hellgate too, but its pretty worthless without other people playing. I've heard of a couple attempts at scraping together some networking code for it, but without any live servers to packet capture off of, I estimate that gets a little tricky.
Wait a second. Its Microsoft's fault your apps are written poorly? Granted, transparency in their fixes might make that a little easier to predict, and autopatching is the work of the devil, but that still doesn't change the fact that your apps are written poorly. As an comparison to your situation, specific versions of wine fix some applications but break others. Now, you're going to argue that wine is not a good comparison because it's not system patches or something like that, but I would say that first off, it is as much system to the applications I'm running through it as your Windows OS is to your apps, and secondly, that this example is just the first one I could think of.
Also, if within your power, you should _really_ have a dev version of your mission critical apps incorporated into your QA test. Most of the serious clients for the company I work for (faceless worldwide provider of market data) have entire dev/testing sites they apply fixes to prior to doing anything to their prod stuff. Granted, you might not be talking millions of dollars in trading, but if its important enough to complain about, its important enough to try to do something about.
That's fine. I can accept that. For some reason, the internet makes it easy to attack others based on FUD and hyperbole. One person made a comment about it affecting animals. You made a comment attacking that. I made a comment attacking your comment based on it being a zealous attack on the initial one, likening it to the kind of attack one might see in some sort of holy war. You then responded, telling me that I'm stupid enough to be a creationist. If your side is right, and I'm irrational and my fear is damaging society, why do you have to resort to insults? You still did not respond to my argument that you don't have a 200MW microwave emitter hanging off your ear.
Furthermore, according to the research linked to in the summary, there is signs of microwaves up to a certain concentration interfering with birds. This is based on one study with specific choices of species. Could there be further complications with birds more sensitive? How about other animals or plant-life? Again, I'm not saying that this shouldn't ever be done; I just hate having the feeling that this is going to be ushered in and any negative results swept under the mat for years and years to come in the name of corporate profiteering until we start to first hand observe the results when it becomes too late. If there can be enough fair and open testing between now and 2016 to prove that this does not affect species of plant and animal in a regional level, then I'm all for it. I just don't see that happening.
Oh, BTW:
Wind power kills birds and bats that fly into windmills.
Current electric cars cause more environment damage (and increased lithium depletion) than the pollution they prevent.
You're still an asshole.
Well, you get that sometimes... can't be helped, I'm the product of an US Public School system after all. Really, I should just consider myself lucky I can sign my name.
Per the cited research in the wikipedia article linked to in the summary, in order for birds not be adversely affected by it, you'd have to have it spread out below a 50mW/cm^2 area. That's in milliwatts. With some quick math (and stop me if I'm wrong. Math is hard.)
200,000 W = 200,000,000 mW
200,000,000 mW / 50 cm^2 = 4,000,000 mW/cm^2
4,000,000 mW/cm^2 / 100 = 40,000 mW/m^2
So it needs to be a rectenna greater than 40 km in diameter?
"If you're still afraid, you can cover the inside of your roof with foil to reflect the feeble level of far field microwaves. At the very least, it might prevent psychosomatic symptoms."
Nothing like dispelling concerns through sarcasm.
All that aside, from the citation that YOU PROVIDED:
"When irradiated by 50 mW/cm2 microwaves, birds began to show high levels of stress at ambient temperatures above 26C [79F] and demonstrated an inability to fly for 10 minutes at air temperatures above 32C [90F]. At air temperatures above 33C [91F], budgerigars required at least 10 minutes to recover fully after flights involving exposures of 50 mW/cm2."
Granted, the "solution" suggested further down in the document is that the bird would be fine after leaving the area of the beam, so I guess they're just making the assumption that birds will avoid them. Which brings up another good question. How wide are the beams they will send down from these power plants?
First off, directed != broadcast. Doesn't matter? Fine. It doesn't have to. Second off, show me your 200MW bluetooth device. You must have quite some range on that. I'm not an environmentalist, and I like nuclear power (when handled responsibly). With regard to your question about why arguments from the position of ignorance are allowed, I will have to contend by saying that they worked pretty well for this guy until everyone decided he must be forcefully outed and silenced. "Either get on the side of science or get away from a computer"? I draw an interesting parallel, if I don't say so myself. I don't hate science, I don't hate advancement, and I don't hate progress. I hate people who take a stance without considering all the possibilities and leap to conclusions without extensive testing. Do your cell phones and bluetooth earpieces cause cancer? Most studies say no, but after five seconds of google work, I found this and this. Are those real or are they more people "just as stupid as someone arguing against evolution.."? I don't know. Obviously there are contridictory results, so someone has to be wrong. There is an awful lot of money invested in cell phones. Which one is the disinformation coming from? I can't tell because I don't know who to trust.
And every time this story comes up, someone makes a unverified post blasting someone's post based on fear. How sad. Please remind me, how many times have YOU subjected an ecosystem to increased concentrations of directed microwave emissions? How many times has it been completely harmless to the inhabitants? Did you allow the test to continue through several generations to verify that there was no long term damage? Where are you getting your research data from? That knife cuts both ways. Don't get me wrong, I think new tech is exciting and promising, and I love the idea of cheap plentiful energy. Pointing out the flaws in someone's beliefs is one thing, but the unnecessary snarkyness about it is uncalled for when there is no proof on your own end. Here, this is for you.
So then, since its not a real magnetic device, aren't this device and the Tesla coil actually similar devices, except one is operating on the watt level rather than the kilowatt level? Admittedly that's a rather large difference, but still.
Ameren is horrible. I remember a few years ago when they had the huge outage in the St. Louis area due to the freezing ice wrecking havoc on their undermaintained power lines (right after a summer of having the exact same thing happen during storms). During the winter, I was without power for about a week, and some were without longer than I was. I'm pretty sure people died during that. And what happened to Ameren you might ask? Some sort of sanctions or negligence charge or even an investigation? Oh, well, you know... they raised their rates. They said they couldn't afford to keep up the repairs. If they couldn't keep up repairs, why am I still now paying the inflated rates? Getting back to the topic at hand, I don't like the government getting their hands in any more than the bare minimum for people to not start killing each other, but in situations where corporations have established monopoly, municipalities == good thing.
There is a lot of places in here where people mentioning Tesla are getting modded into the dirt. Is there some Edison fanatic out there with mod points today or is there something I'm missing? Genuinely asking.
You know, this is all it takes, yet so few companies will willingly let you disable advanced options like this, instead forcing you to not be able to play a game which would otherwise probably operate just fine on older hardware. If I didn't know better, I'd almost say there was some sort of collusion between hardware companies and the gaming companies.. but then again, I'm sure people say that about Microsoft as well.
Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe one of these times it will become undeniably obvious (to people not on slashdot) that all of the above is true. I don't think the victory will be in this case. I hope the victory will be in the system no longer being able to pretend it is "for the people, by the people".
You have no idea what you are talking about, so listen, because I'll only explain once:
Ok. I'm interested.
You've made the statistical mistake of comparing one artist in a generation to every artist of our day. How many composers do you know from the classical period? Have you ever heard of Andrea Luchesi? Probably not. For every Mozart, there are hundreds of Andrea Luchesis. Just as now there are hundreds of artists like Brittany Spears.
Sure, misrepresenting a situation with an improper sample set is a common mistake, and there were lots of unknown composers for every couple famous composers, just as today.
Patronage was horrible. You had to compose, perform, or do nothing, all based on what your royal sponsor demanded of the evening. You art would be filled with things only to please your king. See the music of Haydn for an example of this. In some cases, a patron would even modify the work of art however he desired. It sucks.
Woah, wait a second. How is this any different than today? Now bands have to compose, perform, or do nothing, all based on what their corporate (who thinks of themselves as royal) sponsor demands of them for the album, who demands that their art be filled with things that makes them lots of money. At least in the old days the music was designed to be aesthetically pleasing to the person commissioning it rather than being this carefully measured, mathematically balanced formula geared toward the broadest demographic. Regarding the Royals changing songs around, I remember there was this XTC album that they remade to CD where they just dropped a bunch of shitty filler right in the middle of all the good songs. That's not a case of corporate drones changing individual songs, but it disrupts the overall flow of the music. (I'm sure that the band's members got nothing from that cd also...) For other instances of music designed to sell, see also: Anything done by Nickelback and Green Day's American Idiot. Indeed, it is even funnier to grab the copy that someone made where they take four or five modern songs and transpose them over one another. A good one was Wonderwall and Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I lost all respect for Oasis AND Green Day at that moment.
Besides, there was no one like Brittany: no one had her mix of innocence and sexual confidence. She was popular for a reason. If you don't understand why, it just shows that you are also out of touch with the tastes of modern culture.
At the risk of me being snarky, I'll say that you say all that as if its a bad thing. Furthermore, I contend that she had nothing except the ability to sing. The corporate marketing department gave her that finely honed, well measured, bland, "just provocative enough to be alluring, but not so much to alienate parents" touch.
Think that would this mean that, theoretically speaking, if you set your Kazaa (or whatever) to download, but not share what you downloaded, then you could possibly skirt past everything going on here, with maybe a slap on the wrist "cost of stealing" fine? I suppose that might not even make you trackable to the RIAA, since they wouldn't see the file available from you to begin with. They would have to share up the song to catch you.
Obviously there are games with large worlds in existance for the Wii. I think that No More Heroes was a fairly open world, though I only remember that from reviews. Maybe someone else can confirm. This brings me up to the two reasons why they would think this then:
Bad programming on their part.
Limitations of control system.
Other political reasons they're excusing.
Since I've seen all kinds of lukewarm vanilla platformers released for the Wii, I can only assume that controls aren't a factor. Unless they've added some gimmick that relies on joysticks you can click down, they should be fine with controls. Thus, I can conclude its either politics or a general lack of programming ability. I'm kind of bitter I think though because I was generally disappointed by all of the recent Price of Persia games. I guess I was hoping a little too much for something like the original, or at least something a little less blatantly like a Legacy of Kain knockoff.
This article should be considered flamebait for Wii fanboys and should be tagged as such and forgotten. Just my 0.02 USD.
I think that the tally of damages should be assessed in the spirit with which that they tallied the damages to begin with. Since according to RIAA math, $1.00 = $1000.00, I think that they owe the world approximately everything. Everything they're worth, most of which they're not worth, pretty much the sum value of everything in existence. Alternatively, see my response about the reaction of the head of that Indian virtualization shop from the other day.
Slashdot Mirror
I know. I liked Hellgate too, but its pretty worthless without other people playing. I've heard of a couple attempts at scraping together some networking code for it, but without any live servers to packet capture off of, I estimate that gets a little tricky.
I was all about the Starcraft 2 until hearing this. I wish them all the success that Hellgate: London had.
Blizzard stopped needing to care about gamers after they got popular with WoW. Fuck 'em.
Wait a second. Its Microsoft's fault your apps are written poorly? Granted, transparency in their fixes might make that a little easier to predict, and autopatching is the work of the devil, but that still doesn't change the fact that your apps are written poorly. As an comparison to your situation, specific versions of wine fix some applications but break others. Now, you're going to argue that wine is not a good comparison because it's not system patches or something like that, but I would say that first off, it is as much system to the applications I'm running through it as your Windows OS is to your apps, and secondly, that this example is just the first one I could think of.
Also, if within your power, you should _really_ have a dev version of your mission critical apps incorporated into your QA test. Most of the serious clients for the company I work for (faceless worldwide provider of market data) have entire dev/testing sites they apply fixes to prior to doing anything to their prod stuff. Granted, you might not be talking millions of dollars in trading, but if its important enough to complain about, its important enough to try to do something about.
That's fine. I can accept that. For some reason, the internet makes it easy to attack others based on FUD and hyperbole. One person made a comment about it affecting animals. You made a comment attacking that. I made a comment attacking your comment based on it being a zealous attack on the initial one, likening it to the kind of attack one might see in some sort of holy war. You then responded, telling me that I'm stupid enough to be a creationist. If your side is right, and I'm irrational and my fear is damaging society, why do you have to resort to insults? You still did not respond to my argument that you don't have a 200MW microwave emitter hanging off your ear.
Furthermore, according to the research linked to in the summary, there is signs of microwaves up to a certain concentration interfering with birds. This is based on one study with specific choices of species. Could there be further complications with birds more sensitive? How about other animals or plant-life? Again, I'm not saying that this shouldn't ever be done; I just hate having the feeling that this is going to be ushered in and any negative results swept under the mat for years and years to come in the name of corporate profiteering until we start to first hand observe the results when it becomes too late. If there can be enough fair and open testing between now and 2016 to prove that this does not affect species of plant and animal in a regional level, then I'm all for it. I just don't see that happening.
Oh, BTW:
Wind power kills birds and bats that fly into windmills.
Current electric cars cause more environment damage (and increased lithium depletion) than the pollution they prevent.
You're still an asshole.
Well, you get that sometimes... can't be helped, I'm the product of an US Public School system after all. Really, I should just consider myself lucky I can sign my name.
Per the cited research in the wikipedia article linked to in the summary, in order for birds not be adversely affected by it, you'd have to have it spread out below a 50mW/cm^2 area. That's in milliwatts. With some quick math (and stop me if I'm wrong. Math is hard.)
200,000 W = 200,000,000 mW
200,000,000 mW / 50 cm^2 = 4,000,000 mW/cm^2
4,000,000 mW/cm^2 / 100 = 40,000 mW/m^2
So it needs to be a rectenna greater than 40 km in diameter?
I like citations that end with comments like:
"If you're still afraid, you can cover the inside of your roof with foil to reflect the feeble level of far field microwaves. At the very least, it might prevent psychosomatic symptoms."
Nothing like dispelling concerns through sarcasm.
All that aside, from the citation that YOU PROVIDED:
"When irradiated by 50 mW/cm2 microwaves, birds began to show high levels of stress at ambient temperatures above 26C [79F] and demonstrated an inability to fly for 10 minutes at air temperatures above 32C [90F]. At air temperatures above 33C [91F], budgerigars required at least 10 minutes to recover fully after flights involving exposures of 50 mW/cm2."
Granted, the "solution" suggested further down in the document is that the bird would be fine after leaving the area of the beam, so I guess they're just making the assumption that birds will avoid them. Which brings up another good question. How wide are the beams they will send down from these power plants?
First off, directed != broadcast. Doesn't matter? Fine. It doesn't have to. Second off, show me your 200MW bluetooth device. You must have quite some range on that. I'm not an environmentalist, and I like nuclear power (when handled responsibly). With regard to your question about why arguments from the position of ignorance are allowed, I will have to contend by saying that they worked pretty well for this guy until everyone decided he must be forcefully outed and silenced. "Either get on the side of science or get away from a computer"? I draw an interesting parallel, if I don't say so myself. I don't hate science, I don't hate advancement, and I don't hate progress. I hate people who take a stance without considering all the possibilities and leap to conclusions without extensive testing. Do your cell phones and bluetooth earpieces cause cancer? Most studies say no, but after five seconds of google work, I found this and this. Are those real or are they more people "just as stupid as someone arguing against evolution.."? I don't know. Obviously there are contridictory results, so someone has to be wrong. There is an awful lot of money invested in cell phones. Which one is the disinformation coming from? I can't tell because I don't know who to trust.
[Citation Needed]
And every time this story comes up, someone makes a unverified post blasting someone's post based on fear. How sad. Please remind me, how many times have YOU subjected an ecosystem to increased concentrations of directed microwave emissions? How many times has it been completely harmless to the inhabitants? Did you allow the test to continue through several generations to verify that there was no long term damage? Where are you getting your research data from? That knife cuts both ways. Don't get me wrong, I think new tech is exciting and promising, and I love the idea of cheap plentiful energy. Pointing out the flaws in someone's beliefs is one thing, but the unnecessary snarkyness about it is uncalled for when there is no proof on your own end. Here, this is for you.
My sky wizard casts magic missile.
That's something I've been thinking about lately. Why is that?
So then, since its not a real magnetic device, aren't this device and the Tesla coil actually similar devices, except one is operating on the watt level rather than the kilowatt level? Admittedly that's a rather large difference, but still.
Ameren is horrible. I remember a few years ago when they had the huge outage in the St. Louis area due to the freezing ice wrecking havoc on their undermaintained power lines (right after a summer of having the exact same thing happen during storms). During the winter, I was without power for about a week, and some were without longer than I was. I'm pretty sure people died during that. And what happened to Ameren you might ask? Some sort of sanctions or negligence charge or even an investigation? Oh, well, you know... they raised their rates. They said they couldn't afford to keep up the repairs. If they couldn't keep up repairs, why am I still now paying the inflated rates? Getting back to the topic at hand, I don't like the government getting their hands in any more than the bare minimum for people to not start killing each other, but in situations where corporations have established monopoly, municipalities == good thing.
If she doesn't get my "Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?" t-shirt, then I don't wanna know her.
Wow... that's the best t-shirt idea I've ever come up with.
We love the nanny state when it protects us from ourselves, but we don't want them watching.
No, actually, I'm pretty sure I don't love the nanny state no matter what it does.
There is a lot of places in here where people mentioning Tesla are getting modded into the dirt. Is there some Edison fanatic out there with mod points today or is there something I'm missing? Genuinely asking.
Its okay AC; Though they're counted, the don't actually count for anything.
You know, this is all it takes, yet so few companies will willingly let you disable advanced options like this, instead forcing you to not be able to play a game which would otherwise probably operate just fine on older hardware. If I didn't know better, I'd almost say there was some sort of collusion between hardware companies and the gaming companies.. but then again, I'm sure people say that about Microsoft as well.
Sickest thing is that its all this for a handful of mediocre songs.
Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe one of these times it will become undeniably obvious (to people not on slashdot) that all of the above is true. I don't think the victory will be in this case. I hope the victory will be in the system no longer being able to pretend it is "for the people, by the people".
You have no idea what you are talking about, so listen, because I'll only explain once:
Ok. I'm interested.
You've made the statistical mistake of comparing one artist in a generation to every artist of our day. How many composers do you know from the classical period? Have you ever heard of Andrea Luchesi? Probably not. For every Mozart, there are hundreds of Andrea Luchesis. Just as now there are hundreds of artists like Brittany Spears.
Sure, misrepresenting a situation with an improper sample set is a common mistake, and there were lots of unknown composers for every couple famous composers, just as today.
Patronage was horrible. You had to compose, perform, or do nothing, all based on what your royal sponsor demanded of the evening. You art would be filled with things only to please your king. See the music of Haydn for an example of this. In some cases, a patron would even modify the work of art however he desired. It sucks.
Woah, wait a second. How is this any different than today? Now bands have to compose, perform, or do nothing, all based on what their corporate (who thinks of themselves as royal) sponsor demands of them for the album, who demands that their art be filled with things that makes them lots of money. At least in the old days the music was designed to be aesthetically pleasing to the person commissioning it rather than being this carefully measured, mathematically balanced formula geared toward the broadest demographic. Regarding the Royals changing songs around, I remember there was this XTC album that they remade to CD where they just dropped a bunch of shitty filler right in the middle of all the good songs. That's not a case of corporate drones changing individual songs, but it disrupts the overall flow of the music. (I'm sure that the band's members got nothing from that cd also...) For other instances of music designed to sell, see also: Anything done by Nickelback and Green Day's American Idiot. Indeed, it is even funnier to grab the copy that someone made where they take four or five modern songs and transpose them over one another. A good one was Wonderwall and Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I lost all respect for Oasis AND Green Day at that moment.
Besides, there was no one like Brittany: no one had her mix of innocence and sexual confidence. She was popular for a reason. If you don't understand why, it just shows that you are also out of touch with the tastes of modern culture.
At the risk of me being snarky, I'll say that you say all that as if its a bad thing. Furthermore, I contend that she had nothing except the ability to sing. The corporate marketing department gave her that finely honed, well measured, bland, "just provocative enough to be alluring, but not so much to alienate parents" touch.
Aren't you forgetting a third way: neither single-player nor online?
Doesn't matter. Everyone else forgot it too. :(
Think that would this mean that, theoretically speaking, if you set your Kazaa (or whatever) to download, but not share what you downloaded, then you could possibly skirt past everything going on here, with maybe a slap on the wrist "cost of stealing" fine? I suppose that might not even make you trackable to the RIAA, since they wouldn't see the file available from you to begin with. They would have to share up the song to catch you.
Well, the question should be:
Why not?
Obviously there are games with large worlds in existance for the Wii. I think that No More Heroes was a fairly open world, though I only remember that from reviews. Maybe someone else can confirm. This brings me up to the two reasons why they would think this then:
Bad programming on their part.
Limitations of control system.
Other political reasons they're excusing.
Since I've seen all kinds of lukewarm vanilla platformers released for the Wii, I can only assume that controls aren't a factor. Unless they've added some gimmick that relies on joysticks you can click down, they should be fine with controls. Thus, I can conclude its either politics or a general lack of programming ability. I'm kind of bitter I think though because I was generally disappointed by all of the recent Price of Persia games. I guess I was hoping a little too much for something like the original, or at least something a little less blatantly like a Legacy of Kain knockoff.
This article should be considered flamebait for Wii fanboys and should be tagged as such and forgotten. Just my 0.02 USD.
I think that the tally of damages should be assessed in the spirit with which that they tallied the damages to begin with. Since according to RIAA math, $1.00 = $1000.00, I think that they owe the world approximately everything. Everything they're worth, most of which they're not worth, pretty much the sum value of everything in existence. Alternatively, see my response about the reaction of the head of that Indian virtualization shop from the other day.