It would look even better if the background was the right color.
Not everyone uses pure white as their default page background. I think Slashdot can probably afford the whole 22 bytes it would take to include "background-color: #FFF" in the style.
Forget taxes, be more concerned about gambling laws.
I tried out Project Entropia. When I managed to hunt a few critters I found the same kill-and-loot system that I knew from just about every other MMOG. Except the loot was convertable to real money with payouts controlled by the PE developers. How is that not online gambling?
Hate to be cynical, but 2018? Given the recent track record of NASA funding I'll believe it when I see it.
The BBC had an article also mentioning this 2018 date. My favorite quote:
Dr Griffin dismissed suggestions that reconstruction of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could derail the programme.
"When we have a hurricane, we don't cancel the Air Force. We don't cancel the Navy. And we're not going to cancel Nasa."
Of course not, silly! We only cancel NASA for budget crunches, elections, pork barrel programs, presidential whims, new episodes of Star Trek, and when we can't find the straw to our juice box. Why the fuck would we cancel for a hurricane?
If you believe NASA has the same funding priority as the Air Force and Navy then allow me to sell you some prime real estate on the moon.
Style is everything at one of these burns. Appearances count. Any idiot can pick up a tiki torch at a Home Depot and wave it around like a deranged circus clown; it takes talent and panache in abundance to dig a five-foot-wide hole in the ground, dump in an engine block from a scrapped VW bug and set it on fire, then exhort onlookers -- with bullhorns -- to "Look away from the fire; it is many times brighter than the sun, and it will destroy your eyes." Yes, kids, burning magnesium is fun, but the consequences are dire: magnesium burns at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit and reacts explosively with certain salt nitrates. Good thing, then, that our fellows at Burning Man protected onlookers from the burning block by partially burying it in an alkali lakebed.
I'll go you one better: Burn down the book publishing industry. All you need to write a book is pen and paper and you can easily distribute it world-wide from a $7.95/month web host. It's even cheaper than making a game, you don't have to spring for a copy of Code Warrior and you don't need any knowledge more specialized than literacy. What a brilliant idea, why didn't anyone think of this before?
What's that you say? Millions of people have had the same idea and couldn't make a living from it? Gee, maybe it actually helps to have things like shelf space and pretty packaging and an advertising budget when competing for mindshare with thousands of other creative works.
The present system wasn't inflicted on us out of thin air by an evil wizard. It was built by people because it WORKS.
Does anyone else get different images from the terms "Vietnam medic" and "Vietnamese doctor"? The latter is more accurate but the headline makes me think of an army medic in the Vietnam War jumping out of helicopters and shoving webcams up soldier's bums.
This perhaps offers the best insight into why the casinos are so hot to catch counters quickly. Catch a cheater and he's going to jail, and the casino can probably collect nice damages.
Catch a card counter... and do what? Ask him to leave? Not give him any more comps? He's not doing anything illegal so the casino won't be getting any money back. Better catch him quick then, before he relieves you of $50,000 at the blackjack tables.
Isn't that what started the downfall of browsers in the first place? The fact that malicious code could be executed client side by attackers through websites?
Define "downfall". Web usage isn't exactly declining, malicious code or no.
Even though companies are out to make money and occasionally have to step on the toes of another company if they want to turn a profit, it's nice to see that not all computer business is so cut-throught.
It's not indicative of Google's shiny, happy attitude so much as a symptom of their innovative strategy. Google usually doesn't get involved in a game unless they have something really unique to offer. Their innovation is truly more than just cherry-picking the best features off of competing products.
Look at Gmail, a feature-rich interface with practically unlimited storage and no annoying ad footers appended to your email. There was truly nothing like it at the time.
Hopefully this new service will be the micropayment system like people here are speculating. That wouldn't directly compete with PayPal but it would replace the last remaining feature of PayPal's that I tolerate using.
Mostly Cuban is pointing out the hypocracy of the RIAA negotiating bargain-basement deals with juggernauts like Yahoo while still trying to claim that illicit downloading is costing them millions.
The value of the product is key to the RIAA's requests for thousands of dollars in damages. The RIAA claims a value of CD cover price per song when in fact the Yahoo deal puts that value closer to $5 per month. Wal-Mart isn't likely to win $75,000 off me if I shoplift a T-shirt. Why should the RIAA be able to ask for thousands from individuals when they are willing to practically give their product away to large companies?
This logical disconnect is well known to geeks; now it's just becoming more obvious even to business-types.
Homeschooled children spend every day in society, seeing how adults value and reward work and learning. It's no wonder that they learn a very different lesson than the children in the warehouse schools.
By definition, homeschooled children are taught at home by themselves or in small groups by a single parent or a handful of like-minded parents. Unless they spend their spare time working in a mall they aren't interacting with anywhere near the hundreds of other kids most public schoolers see on a daily basis.
As much as I'd like to believe that most homeschooled children are taught to be open-minded world travellers, the reverse is far more likely to be true. Most homeschooled children I've met are taught by parents who want to isolate them from what the parents see as harmful influences in public schools. That's not to say they're all xenophobic extremist zealots, but the majority are.
Sorry, please do go on about how bad public schools are.
Until this week I worked at a place where we had to deal with literally hundreds of bad drives and a company hyper-paranoid about data security. Old drives were sent to a scrap yard to be shredded but the data had to be well and truly trashed first. DoD wipe works great but only for good drives, not bad ones.
Our solution for bad drives: A drill press. Drilling is fast and reasonably secure. It keeps the platters together with the serial number for easy record keeping. Drilling completely through the drive makes spot-checking a breeze. Just be sure you use 3/8" cobalt-tipped bits (that thick top plate will eat plain bits like candy) and stab them into a can of Crisco every so often to keep them lubricated.
Anyone who actually owns a TiVo knows that it's not the hardware, it's the software. They can make all the boxes they want, but without the TiVo software, and the concepts behind it, they'll never reach the same level of functionality.
Having a higher level of integration with the TV tuner provides some better functionality. My ghetto-TiVo from Brighthouse is integrated with the cable box, which is nice. I can watch and record on seperate channels and I don't have to mess with IR flashers or a seperate data connection. If I wanted these features with a TiVo I would have to switch to DirecTV (and quickly, before they drop TiVo for their own homegrown box).
I understand Penny Arcade is now the sole source of full-time employment for both of you. Presumably this wasn't always so and you both had "real" jobs to pay the bills. At what point did each of you cease to labor for The Man and start devoting your time exclusively to Penny Arcade?
This process is repeated thousands of times with the 10 designs best suited for the particular application chosen to 'breed' again." Another case of "When in doubt, use brute force"?
More like another case of computer science being fascinated by meat.
Remember when neural networks were the next big thing? Everyone was applying them to everything, whether or not it made sense to solve the problem that way. It's neural! Just like our brains! Our brains are smart, they will make our computers smart!
I'm sure genetic algorithms will eke out a useful place in the computer science toolkit, I just doubt it will be as broad as the current fashion of applying them to everything from optical fiber to race cars to compilers.
If you put voting machines in the hands of the private sector, the private sector will try to maximize profit. Corners will be cut. There simply isn't any way to avoid this, so long as the people making the machines are doing so to make money off the venture.
Somebody has to build the voting machines. Unless you're advocating a team of government employees assembling them by hand from base minerals, the private sector will have to get involved somewhere.
All the government needs is a contract that specifies rigorous standards with serious penalties for not meeting those standards. The machines don't work? Diebold doesn't get paid. Maximize THIS profit, bitches.
Don't forget massive incompatibility and upgrade hassles.
Yeah, just like that PCI bus clusterfuck. What a nightmare that was. Was ISA really so bad that we all had to buy new motherboards and expansion cards? Oh wait, yes it was.
Sometimes if you want to move forward you have to pick up your feet.
Why doesn't anyone understand this? He means that the $150,000 figure is in today's dollars. It's the present value of the future salary.
Actually he doesn't mean this. He means that an American earning $35,000 in 2050 will have the same purchasing power as one that earns $150,000 this year. It's not an entirely meaningless statement; virtually every product or service requires energy to produce, so cheaper energy makes everything cheaper.
What's silly is using the $150,000 figure as a sound byte for a pie-in-the-sky energy factory on the moon. I'm all for renewable power but there are things we can (and should) be doing to make it happen here on Earth, and sooner than 2050.
the average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person
It better be a lot more than that. By 2050 inflation alone should push a $35,000/year income to $225,000/year (assuming the inflation rates of the last 47 years stay about the same over the next 47).
Slashdot Mirror
Few Sony inventions have had the same gravitational pull as their Trinitron display technology...
That's because a Trinitron weighed as much as a small neutron star...
It would look even better if the background was the right color.
Not everyone uses pure white as their default page background. I think Slashdot can probably afford the whole 22 bytes it would take to include "background-color: #FFF" in the style.
Forget taxes, be more concerned about gambling laws.
I tried out Project Entropia. When I managed to hunt a few critters I found the same kill-and-loot system that I knew from just about every other MMOG. Except the loot was convertable to real money with payouts controlled by the PE developers. How is that not online gambling?
If you read closely into the article there's a secret message! It says "B-E S-U-R-E T-O D-R-I-N-K Y-O-U-R O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E"
Son of a bitch...
Hate to be cynical, but 2018? Given the recent track record of NASA funding I'll believe it when I see it.
The BBC had an article also mentioning this 2018 date. My favorite quote:
Dr Griffin dismissed suggestions that reconstruction of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina could derail the programme.
"When we have a hurricane, we don't cancel the Air Force. We don't cancel the Navy. And we're not going to cancel Nasa."
Of course not, silly! We only cancel NASA for budget crunches, elections, pork barrel programs, presidential whims, new episodes of Star Trek, and when we can't find the straw to our juice box. Why the fuck would we cancel for a hurricane?
If you believe NASA has the same funding priority as the Air Force and Navy then allow me to sell you some prime real estate on the moon.
Style is everything at one of these burns. Appearances count. Any idiot can pick up a tiki torch at a Home Depot and wave it around like a deranged circus clown; it takes talent and panache in abundance to dig a five-foot-wide hole in the ground, dump in an engine block from a scrapped VW bug and set it on fire, then exhort onlookers -- with bullhorns -- to "Look away from the fire; it is many times brighter than the sun, and it will destroy your eyes." Yes, kids, burning magnesium is fun, but the consequences are dire: magnesium burns at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit and reacts explosively with certain salt nitrates. Good thing, then, that our fellows at Burning Man protected onlookers from the burning block by partially burying it in an alkali lakebed.
Shamelessly stolen from Pigdog.
I'll go you one better: Burn down the book publishing industry. All you need to write a book is pen and paper and you can easily distribute it world-wide from a $7.95/month web host. It's even cheaper than making a game, you don't have to spring for a copy of Code Warrior and you don't need any knowledge more specialized than literacy. What a brilliant idea, why didn't anyone think of this before?
What's that you say? Millions of people have had the same idea and couldn't make a living from it? Gee, maybe it actually helps to have things like shelf space and pretty packaging and an advertising budget when competing for mindshare with thousands of other creative works.
The present system wasn't inflicted on us out of thin air by an evil wizard. It was built by people because it WORKS.
Does anyone else get different images from the terms "Vietnam medic" and "Vietnamese doctor"? The latter is more accurate but the headline makes me think of an army medic in the Vietnam War jumping out of helicopters and shoving webcams up soldier's bums.
card counting is NOT cheating
This perhaps offers the best insight into why the casinos are so hot to catch counters quickly. Catch a cheater and he's going to jail, and the casino can probably collect nice damages.
Catch a card counter... and do what? Ask him to leave? Not give him any more comps? He's not doing anything illegal so the casino won't be getting any money back. Better catch him quick then, before he relieves you of $50,000 at the blackjack tables.
Isn't that what started the downfall of browsers in the first place? The fact that malicious code could be executed client side by attackers through websites?
Define "downfall". Web usage isn't exactly declining, malicious code or no.
...and there is no software for users to install.
Except for, maybe, a web browser?
It doesn't come from browser elves, you know...
Even though companies are out to make money and occasionally have to step on the toes of another company if they want to turn a profit, it's nice to see that not all computer business is so cut-throught.
It's not indicative of Google's shiny, happy attitude so much as a symptom of their innovative strategy. Google usually doesn't get involved in a game unless they have something really unique to offer. Their innovation is truly more than just cherry-picking the best features off of competing products.
Look at Gmail, a feature-rich interface with practically unlimited storage and no annoying ad footers appended to your email. There was truly nothing like it at the time.
Hopefully this new service will be the micropayment system like people here are speculating. That wouldn't directly compete with PayPal but it would replace the last remaining feature of PayPal's that I tolerate using.
Mostly Cuban is pointing out the hypocracy of the RIAA negotiating bargain-basement deals with juggernauts like Yahoo while still trying to claim that illicit downloading is costing them millions.
The value of the product is key to the RIAA's requests for thousands of dollars in damages. The RIAA claims a value of CD cover price per song when in fact the Yahoo deal puts that value closer to $5 per month. Wal-Mart isn't likely to win $75,000 off me if I shoplift a T-shirt. Why should the RIAA be able to ask for thousands from individuals when they are willing to practically give their product away to large companies?
This logical disconnect is well known to geeks; now it's just becoming more obvious even to business-types.
Homeschooled children spend every day in society, seeing how adults value and reward work and learning. It's no wonder that they learn a very different lesson than the children in the warehouse schools.
By definition, homeschooled children are taught at home by themselves or in small groups by a single parent or a handful of like-minded parents. Unless they spend their spare time working in a mall they aren't interacting with anywhere near the hundreds of other kids most public schoolers see on a daily basis.
As much as I'd like to believe that most homeschooled children are taught to be open-minded world travellers, the reverse is far more likely to be true. Most homeschooled children I've met are taught by parents who want to isolate them from what the parents see as harmful influences in public schools. That's not to say they're all xenophobic extremist zealots, but the majority are.
Sorry, please do go on about how bad public schools are.
Until this week I worked at a place where we had to deal with literally hundreds of bad drives and a company hyper-paranoid about data security. Old drives were sent to a scrap yard to be shredded but the data had to be well and truly trashed first. DoD wipe works great but only for good drives, not bad ones.
Our solution for bad drives: A drill press. Drilling is fast and reasonably secure. It keeps the platters together with the serial number for easy record keeping. Drilling completely through the drive makes spot-checking a breeze. Just be sure you use 3/8" cobalt-tipped bits (that thick top plate will eat plain bits like candy) and stab them into a can of Crisco every so often to keep them lubricated.
Note: This may void your warranty.
Anyone who actually owns a TiVo knows that it's not the hardware, it's the software. They can make all the boxes they want, but without the TiVo software, and the concepts behind it, they'll never reach the same level of functionality.
Having a higher level of integration with the TV tuner provides some better functionality. My ghetto-TiVo from Brighthouse is integrated with the cable box, which is nice. I can watch and record on seperate channels and I don't have to mess with IR flashers or a seperate data connection. If I wanted these features with a TiVo I would have to switch to DirecTV (and quickly, before they drop TiVo for their own homegrown box).
I understand Penny Arcade is now the sole source of full-time employment for both of you. Presumably this wasn't always so and you both had "real" jobs to pay the bills. At what point did each of you cease to labor for The Man and start devoting your time exclusively to Penny Arcade?
This process is repeated thousands of times with the 10 designs best suited for the particular application chosen to 'breed' again." Another case of "When in doubt, use brute force"?
More like another case of computer science being fascinated by meat.
Remember when neural networks were the next big thing? Everyone was applying them to everything, whether or not it made sense to solve the problem that way. It's neural! Just like our brains! Our brains are smart, they will make our computers smart!
I'm sure genetic algorithms will eke out a useful place in the computer science toolkit, I just doubt it will be as broad as the current fashion of applying them to everything from optical fiber to race cars to compilers.
Note that HP and Intel are playing both ends against the middle on this one.
I'm all for having big tough friends against the DCMA, I just wish the big tough friends could decide whether or not they're my friends.
People who are cheap can still get a PSOne for about $79-$100
I'm hoping you live in Australia, otherwise you got robbed.
If you put voting machines in the hands of the private sector, the private sector will try to maximize profit. Corners will be cut. There simply isn't any way to avoid this, so long as the people making the machines are doing so to make money off the venture.
Somebody has to build the voting machines. Unless you're advocating a team of government employees assembling them by hand from base minerals, the private sector will have to get involved somewhere.
All the government needs is a contract that specifies rigorous standards with serious penalties for not meeting those standards. The machines don't work? Diebold doesn't get paid. Maximize THIS profit, bitches.
Don't forget massive incompatibility and upgrade hassles.
Yeah, just like that PCI bus clusterfuck. What a nightmare that was. Was ISA really so bad that we all had to buy new motherboards and expansion cards? Oh wait, yes it was.
Sometimes if you want to move forward you have to pick up your feet.
We previously reported rumored plans to this effect a few days back.
Where "previously reported" means "we linked to the article on news.com".
Credit where credit is due?
Why doesn't anyone understand this? He means that the $150,000 figure is in today's dollars. It's the present value of the future salary.
Actually he doesn't mean this. He means that an American earning $35,000 in 2050 will have the same purchasing power as one that earns $150,000 this year. It's not an entirely meaningless statement; virtually every product or service requires energy to produce, so cheaper energy makes everything cheaper.
What's silly is using the $150,000 figure as a sound byte for a pie-in-the-sky energy factory on the moon. I'm all for renewable power but there are things we can (and should) be doing to make it happen here on Earth, and sooner than 2050.
the average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person
It better be a lot more than that. By 2050 inflation alone should push a $35,000/year income to $225,000/year (assuming the inflation rates of the last 47 years stay about the same over the next 47).