I think you are confusing the act they play for public consumption with the real thing.
It's like lawyers: in court they will fight for their side (it's their job), but outside they might go out together for golfing on weekends.
The main difference is that lawyers have constraints which for example make it unlawfull to get together and screw one of the sides in a case for personal benefit.
Politicians and the "masters of the universe" on the other hand have no real constraints with regards to screwing the side they "represent".
The essential philosophy of Agile is that development should be done in tight cycles were small self-contained features are designed and implemented, followed by user feedback while planning for the next cycle.
This process is intended to cope with a couple of problems from the old waterfall model, such as:
End users of a system have needs but they don't know them fully and correctly up-front, so a fully defined requirements document is impossible. Tight cycles of feature-development-user-feedback facilitate user discovery of requirements and allow for small adjustments based on user feedback.
It avoids the "As soon as we give the requirements to the IT guys we stop hearing from them for a year while all they tell us is that 'they're working on it'" problem. The end users of the system being developed become part of the development process in an Agile process - that brings all sorts of benefits like keeping them happy and getting quick feedback on potential problems.
The planning stage before each cycle helps with prunning of low-value-high-cost features. By having the user-stakeholder choose the priority of the features to implement in each cycle, the important features will not be left behind just because they didn't look important to the developers
All that this has in common is the existence of end-users (which can be other systems, if your system does not have an UI), which have roughly defined needs (typically a business process) which the software being built will address.
Now look at games:
The real end-users (gamers) need entertainment. They don't have a pre-existent process which the game would automate to achieve that - in fact some of the best entertainement comes from games that do things no games ever done before.
"Having fun" is an emotional state which depends on many things that are difficult to pin-down and that even change over time and depend on the user's mind-set: a way to make users achive it cannot be discovered as part of small interactive development loops
There is no typical end user that can act as a representative of the other users. In fact a successfull game aims to entertain as many sorts of users as possible and as cannot be tunned to the wishes of only some users
Games are often one-pass entertainment: you play it once and then you never play it again. This means that any users trying the game in between the tight development cycles of Agile would quickly become useless as test-subjects (as boredom overwelmed fun)
The programming part of a game is often the least important bit of it. In fact in most modern games the code just powers the rules engines (for the mechanics of the games) and the graphics engine (that gives shape to the game world and displays the artwork) and is at it's best when it's not noticed.
So games don't usually fit in the (software development context) pattern for using Agile development methodologies wholesale.
At best, some games might have a creative person behind it with a vision which can serve as the user-stakeholder, but even then often the "vision" is vague and can change a lot over time (a "vision" is much less prone to a continuously-improving discovery process than a "business process" - in fact if the person with the "vision" is not methodical, you end up with a process where a cycle is just as likelly to take the software closer to the "vision" as it is to take it further way from it).
To repeat the often heard (but seldom heeded) motto: "There is no silver bullet!"
When I was a kid in basic school I was bullied by the school's "bad kid" for a couple of years since at the time I was the brightest kid in the class (and I was really small for my age;)).
At some point I snapped and completelly unexpectedly just attacked him in the middle of the street and kicked his ass for 5 minutes in front of the whole class.
He never bullied me again (he tried, once - I reminded him of the previous payback and he chose not to risk it again).
As a mater of fact, the thing had such a profund effect on me that I've never been bullied again (including the non-violent sorts of bullying that happen at work): I simply don't take shit anymore.
With that whole experience came the realisation of two things: - Would be bullies always have something to loose. In their minds it really doesn't mater if they can make you loose more in return or not: they're not really willing to risk themselves even if they have it in their power to pay it back to you harder. (In kids terms, if you fight back hard the bully might still win the fight, but he's going to come out of it hurting himself so he won't do it again since you'll fight back and make him hurt again). - It takes two for bulling: continued harassement (which is the definition of bulling) happens because the recipient gets into the mental state of a victim. Behaving like a victim makes you likelly to become one: this is as true of bullying at school as it is of the changes of being mugged when walking through a bad neighbourhood (guess who the thiefs go for, the person that looks scared or the person the looks confident?).
The trend is that the average age of gamers is now in the 30s.
What this has to do with DRM is the fact that, at our age (yes, I am in my 30s) what we have the least is time - at the point in your life where you do have a decent income, money is much less of an issue than when you're a teen - if all I have is 1 or 2 hours a day for gaming I don't want to have to jump through extra hoops to play a game and I sure don't want to see my gaming time wasted because my Internet connection is down or the gaming servers are down and the games requires remote authentication (something that adds no value for me).
The second point is that, when you actually work for a living you can relate the true value of money to the time it takes you to earn it. The cost of a game is then more than a mathematical figure, it's measure in how long do you have to work to pay for it.
The third point is the increased awareness of the value of things that comes with age. To put it simply, a game fulfils one's need for entertainment and escapism and bad games cost twice as much as good movies and 3 times as much as good books and yet have less entertainment value.
That said I still pirate games, and in the end it boils down to 1 reason: - There is no more try-before-you-buy for most games anymore - the age of Game Demos is gone. I don't want to waste my hard earned money (and I do know how hard it was to earn that money) in a game just to take it home and discover that it sucks, it has too many bugs or it refuses to run in my system due to DRM. I've had plenty of situations where I would buy a game and it would either not work properly, turn out to be little fun or exceptionally short even though gaming sites had been hyping it to no end. At this point (after 20! years of gaming) the gaming industry and the gaming press have shown me again and again that they are not to be trusted...
So what I do nowadays is I download the game, try it and if it works ok and I like it, I buy it. Just recently I got X3:TC and bought it as soon as I found out that the game maker had removed DRM in the latest patch (in fact I even got the Gold edition since I trully believe they deserve the money).
Heathrow was recently voted as one of the worst airports in the world by frequent flyers (on the upside it makes other crummy airports look positivelly paradisiacal by comparisson).
I'm sure the mandatory body scans will really make it even more pleasant to go through it...
Not to worry though, I'm sure that at least one of the following terrorist-favoring outcomes will come out of all this: a) Due to the child "protection" laws in the UK (where seing pictures of an 18 year minus 1 day old person naked can carry a heavier sentence than raping an 18 year plus one day old one) they will be excluded, by which point the terrorists will start using teens as bomb carriers (or even better, have fake passports with dates of birth made up to have them listed as teens). b) Terrorists will start blowing up the bombs before the security checks, since the extended lines you get mean that there are more people waiting in that confined space than you could ever have in a plane.
An even more interesting outcome would be if attractive people became the most frequent targets for the mandatory body scans and if (unauthorized) body-scan naked pictures of attractive men and women started circulating in the Internet, especially if the persons in question are recognizable (I wonder if fake lips/boobs stand out in the pictures): the likelly outcry might actually kill this one.
From my experience (I speak 5 languages, only one of which is my mother-tongue), past the very beginning, the best way to learn a language is to go live in a place where people speak it.
Second best is to go there on long (at least 1 month) vacations and try to speak the language all the time (the natives usually appreciate the effort).
Third best is to expose yourself to that language is a day-to-day spoken form. For example, watch non-dubbed TV and/or listen to radio in that language. (For a while, most of my English vocabulary was learned from Satellite TV)
Fourth best is reading books/newspapers in that language.
Both of the last two can be done using the Internet (using things like YouTube clips in different languages, foreign TV channels online, foreign newspapers and such).
Being taught a language is only really worth it when bootstraping your learning, after that being taught a language is highly inneficient simply because, unless you're doing a high intensity course (i.e. several hours a day, everyday for several weeks), in between lessons you forget most of the words you learned in each lesson. This was my experience when learning Dutch while living in Holland - the 1h-lessons twice a week were only really effective for the first 2 or 3 months: beyond that you really need to learn the language by speaking it in your day-to-day. (that said, Dutch is considered a difficult language, toch!!? ).
The good news is that once you learn a language from a given family it's a lot easier to learn other languages of the same family due to the similarities in the grammar, words and even whole expressions. I can now understand some German because of knowing Dutch.
If the man and women they intend to put on the moon need not to be "living and breathing" (i.e. if they're aiming at "Moon burials") it would save tremendous amounts of payload in Life-Support, plus Landing & Return vehicle.
Actually, now that I think about it, the market for Moon burials could probably lower the barrier to entry for a startup aiming at actually sending living and breathing humans to the Moon and back - how many people out there would be willing to pay, sau $200.000 to be buried on the Moon!???
At the end of the day, the value of having a degree depends very much on which area of employment you are in.
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and yet I work as a Software Engineer. In practical terms my degree only really helps me in two ways: - The one major thing I learned from University was how to learn things fast. This can be used with anything - just recently I managed to learn ski from total newbie to intermediate/advanced level in 1 week - since the observational and analytical skills to do this are generic. - It gives me a large pool of background knowledge which can help me deduce things faster in other areas: many patterns of "the way people make things" are applicable to all areas of human engineering.
However, 95% of the information I learned for my degree is worthless for what I do now (with the notable exception of CPU design, things like Queue theory and some areas of Mathematics like statistics and numerical analysis).
The diploma itself was only usefull in getting me my first job: from then onwards my CV and the knowledge I display in interviews have been the things that matter.
The reason for this is that I work in IT. This area is still very much an Artisanship - it's practice is missing the predictability and repeatability which are the essential fundations for robust Engineering practices - and as such (outside Academia) proven hands-on experience is vastly more important than scholastic knowledge.
That said for many areas a degree is very important: how many of us would knowingly put the health of their children or the safety of their bridges to people that do not have a degree in the appropriate area?
"Jaywalking is a dangerous crime, were the lives of the innocents close to the criminal - mothers, fathers, children - are at risk from the reckless actions of the criminal: there are many examples of people killed when cars swerved out of control to avoid people jaywalking.
Such reckless risking of other people's life can only be the product of derranged, even evil individuals and a speedy, painfull and highly visible punishment that removes them from society for good is the only way to ensure the safetty of all of us"
This kind of spin work for drugs, and it certainly is being tried for Copyright Infrigement, so I'm sure it would work for jaywalking (although maybe not if the sentence is impalement). As long as a not too big proportion of the population is affected (for example, I believe 12% of people in the US heve been convicted at one point or other of drug related charges???) a proper level of demonisation will be enough to keep the unthinking masses from rebeling.
I guess what would be worse would be if they confiscated someone's equipment, sat on it for a year, and found nothing.
Actually this is likelly much worse. I suspect they didn't found anything real and they probably just grabbed the Simpsons erotica from the browser cache in order to land a conviction.
I vaguelly remember some website or other (I believe it was one of the P2P search engines) where at least once I got an advert where members of the Simpsons family where doing some hardcore acts on camera: quite possible one of the pictures had Bart or Lisa.
If I lived in Australia this would probably be enough to get me convicted as a sex offender.
More essentially: - Why are victimless "crimes" crimes at all?
If it doesn't harm anybody and has no negative side effects for others than the perpetrator then there's no reason for it to be a crime. Ramblings about an activity "showing pre-disposition to"/"inducing the person to"/"making possible that a person does" commit a "real" crime are just that: ramblings - until the actual "real" crime is commited, there is no crime.
This applies just as much to erotic images/texts/words about children (no actual children involved in making them = no "real" crime) as it does to taking drugs (which really only harm the one that takes them).
A society that imprisions people for doing things that harm nobody or worse, for doing things in which they only harm themselfs is a society where the barbarians are winning.
I live in Europe (UK at the moment) and took my (unlocked) GSM phone to Canada when I went on vacations there. Since I was going to be there for almost a month, I bought a SIM card from Rogers to use in Canada and avoid roaming costs.
My experience: - A Pay-As-You-Ggo (i.e. no contract) SIM is ridiculously expensive (C$50 with no included minutes). For comparisson sake, £35 (about C$60) in the UK with no contract gets me a SIM card, a mobile network dongle (really!) and includes £15 in credit (and the UK is hardly the cheapest mobile phone market in Europe, in Holland I got a SIM card for 5 EUR). - In Canada you pay to receive calls (wtf!) - Top-ups expire after a while: in other words, you load money into the phone and if you don't use it before a set deadline date then Rogers just takes it away. - Making calls does cost about 2/3 of what it costs in the UK. Again, please note that the UK is far from the cheapest mobile market in Europe. - Checking your voicemail is free in the UK but costs money with Rogers in Canada.
To top it all up, they assigned me a mobile number which was re-used from somebody else and came subscribed to some "pay-to-receive one SMS joke a day" scam - this required a call to Rogers support where they first tried to deny all responsability and finally relented and repayed the money taken from my account only after I got angry, mentioned that number re-use was not my choice - their problem not mine - and mentioned something about "deceitfull sales practices" and that maybe it should be escalated to the local regulatory entities. I had to demand a block be put on all SMSs to that number to avoid further such issues.
All in all I'm happy this was only for a month and I don't see how you Canadians take it.
The natural conclusion from the article is that Game Distribution Platforms seem to be affected by networking effects - buyers gravitate to the one with the most games, sellers gravitate to the one where most buyers go to. This means that the market will move towards a situation where there are only one or two winners.
This might seem like a good thing (fewer random background tasks running in people's PCs) until you think about those people that bought games in what turned out not to be one of the winning platforms: the games that they bought in that/those platforms typically will stop working when the servers are turned off (or, at best, you won't be able to do a new install ever again due to online activation).
This is a bit like VHS vs Betamax (or HD-DVD vs Blueray) only much worse: anybody that bought movies in Betamax format can still play them as long as their Betamax player works, but anybody that buys a game that authenticates with a platform that later goes down will quite likelly be unable to play that game ever again once the authentication servers are stopped.
Considering that the really good games are still played 5 or 10 years later (pretty much any gamer over 30 will be well aquainted with the experience of rediscovering an "oldy but goody" and playing it again), and that the game publishers rarelly have any interest in keeping the game going once they stop selling it, even those whose games which where bought in a platform that is still going 5 of 10 years in the future still run the risk of having their games killed by after-sale, arbitrary planned obsolescence.
Me, I vote with my wallet and refuse to buy any games that have online activation and/or authentication for single player gaming (currently playing "X3:Terran Conflict" on the PC, bought after they removed DRM with patch 2.5): if others did the same the industry would give up on this.
As I said in another post, the free downloading of maps for offline use in Nokia phones is something that has been out for at least a year (that I know off). It's the free "navigation" bit that's new.
Actually Nokia already provided a free Maps application supporting GPS and with free offline Maps for their phones for quite a while now.
I've been using this on my E51 (using an external bluetooth GPS device) for almost a year now including for things like summer vacations in North America and ski-vacations in Europe.
What's new here is that the "Navigation" bit of it (i.e. the route planning and direction instructions) are now free - before these features where paid for and only the maps and position finding features came free.
It lists plenty of venues of attack for a suficiently willing and knowledgeable attacker which state agencies would be.
I wouldn't so easilly dismiss attacks delivered via source code if I was you: the GP was talking about attacks by state security services - these guys usually employ full time some pretty clever people who can usually make their own code they're no just a bunch of script kiddies downloading tools from the Internet (although from the Google attacks I suspect that, like in many other things, the Chinese went for quantity over quality and a lot of their "State Hackers" are little more than script-kiddies). Understanding and subtly altering a code base is not that hard if you're an good and experienced programmer.
State agents thus have both the resources and the willingness for impersonating a friendly interested party, providing free machines that are actually compromised at the BIOS or even hardware level and subtly compromise TOR via the source code once the Source Control repository gets put in one of the trojaned machines - some of them might even have a wise enough leadership that they're willing to go slowly and carefully infiltrate and take over the TOR system using techniques like this.
The biguest competition against Oracle Weblogic (formerly BEA Weblogic) in the J2EE Application Server space is Websphere by IBM, not GlassFish.
The mostly widelly used IDE for Java development is Eclipse (which is open source), NetBeans is not even a second, maybe a far 3rd or worse.
I've been working professionally with Java for 12 years and I can't see how anybody can see GlassFish or NetBeans as at all important in the Java space: the truth is that while Sun's Java language and standard libraries are quite successfull their tools and framework implementations never do take off (even though they keep pushing them year-in-year-out by offering them bundled with the Java SE and Java EE SDKs).
With regards to the article title ("Correlation Found Between Brain Structure and Video Game Success"), after seeing that this article seems to be missing posts with the adequate meme, in the interest of completness and as per Slashdot tradition I would like to remind everybody that:
Removing of Mod Tools is all about controlling shelf-life for games and monopolising the market for extensions/enhancements for those game.
It's all a business decision - outside MMOs, the current way that Game Producers (want to) do business is:
Milk a franchise for as long as you can by periodically releasing newer versions of the same game
Have extra post-sale revenue by selling extras for the game (DLC)
In that sense, user mods are "bad for business" since they:
Extend the life of an existing version of a game with free content, thus reducing the appeal for gamers to buy newer versions
Provide free new content for the game which competes with the paid for content that the Game Produces wants to sell
Games having more RPG elements does relate to the decision of removing Mod Tools in the sense that for RPGs the enjoyement of the game is also related to it's content (as in, zones to explore, items to collect, monsters to fight and levels/abilities to unlock), and thus:
In single-player/social-light games, user enjoyment decreases fast once all content has been explored. Without user mods, this means that the lifetime of a game is solelly under the control of the Game Producer
A more content heavy type of game is also a game with more opportunity for things like sales of game items, zones and levels. No user mods mean that the Game Producer has a monopoly on this
So I do agree with the TFA that no Mod Tools and more RPG elements are correlated, although maybe not in the way they see it.
Just because a lot of US created entertainment is a nice and pleasent "chewing-gum for the brain" doesn't mean that American culture is somehow superior and beyond reproach.
Whatever the quality of the entertainment factor provided by, say, "Saving Private Ryan", it does not put beyond criticism things like the incorrect belief of most Americans that the US contribution in D-day was much larger than it really was or their unawareness that the US army at the time was heavilly racially segregated (two pick just two interesting examples that films usually distort).
The US culture provides for pleasent entertainment, period. This does not mean it is in any way a better or superior culture: it just means it has better marketting.
No, the extra $300 is what you pay for ordering all those parts and preparing an assembly line to make computers but in quantities of less than millions.
Or maybe they could've just have them assembled in China. For an item at this price point, most manufacturers in there will hapilly run you a batch of 1000 and even print your logo on it for about 10% of the cost (add about 5% on top for a local 3rd party to do quality control).
Shipping a full container (size 20) from Shenzhen to Europe will set you back about $10000 (including insurance for $200k and paying for a customs clearence broker) for it all (so $10 each), plus maybe 10% in duty tax (depends on the country) and another 15% in VAT (again depends on the country).
Assume the parts were $200 (I'm being pessimistic here, since we're talking about parts bought in bulk) and add a 40% markup on the final price for profit margin and your're still at about $400 per item (this with European style taxes and a 40% profit margin).
Up to a point, a lot of the costs do grow slowly as the number of units you're having assembled and imported grows, but that only happens up to certain limits, beyond which the costs more or less grow linearly: - Loads less than a container in size (LCL - Less-than-container loads) are much more expensive to ship than full container loads (FCL). In fact, anything smaller than a pallet (around 1 cubic meter) will cost the same as a whole pallet. However moving 2 containers simply costs you twice as much as moving 1. - Shipping insurance grows linearly with the costs of the goods being transported. - When importing to Europe, some of the most significant costs (duty tax, VAT) grow lineraly with the value of the goods. - Customs clearence costs remain roughly the same independently of the size (they're per-shipment, although there is a variable component with regards to storage costs). - Road transport in both sides is a lot cheaper if you're moving full containers. In fact you'll be hard pressed to find a shipping and transport company that is setup to move around anything less than a full container (if you need a pallet or two worth of goods they'll just send around a big truck - the kind used to move containers - loaded with them).
That said, for goods the size of a mini-PC, the 1000 units mark is enough to fill a container and enter into the economies of scale side of things - no need for "millions" of units.
Everybody knows that Unicorn horn introduces subtle color leakage and timing delays.
A real videophile would know that true video nirvana can only be achieved by using Fossilized T-Rex Turd connectors: only posers go with Platinum and Unicorn Horn.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are confusing the act they play for public consumption with the real thing.
It's like lawyers: in court they will fight for their side (it's their job), but outside they might go out together for golfing on weekends.
The main difference is that lawyers have constraints which for example make it unlawfull to get together and screw one of the sides in a case for personal benefit.
Politicians and the "masters of the universe" on the other hand have no real constraints with regards to screwing the side they "represent".
The essential philosophy of Agile is that development should be done in tight cycles were small self-contained features are designed and implemented, followed by user feedback while planning for the next cycle.
This process is intended to cope with a couple of problems from the old waterfall model, such as:
All that this has in common is the existence of end-users (which can be other systems, if your system does not have an UI), which have roughly defined needs (typically a business process) which the software being built will address.
Now look at games:
So games don't usually fit in the (software development context) pattern for using Agile development methodologies wholesale.
At best, some games might have a creative person behind it with a vision which can serve as the user-stakeholder, but even then often the "vision" is vague and can change a lot over time (a "vision" is much less prone to a continuously-improving discovery process than a "business process" - in fact if the person with the "vision" is not methodical, you end up with a process where a cycle is just as likelly to take the software closer to the "vision" as it is to take it further way from it).
To repeat the often heard (but seldom heeded) motto: "There is no silver bullet!"
When I was a kid in basic school I was bullied by the school's "bad kid" for a couple of years since at the time I was the brightest kid in the class (and I was really small for my age ;)).
At some point I snapped and completelly unexpectedly just attacked him in the middle of the street and kicked his ass for 5 minutes in front of the whole class.
He never bullied me again (he tried, once - I reminded him of the previous payback and he chose not to risk it again).
As a mater of fact, the thing had such a profund effect on me that I've never been bullied again (including the non-violent sorts of bullying that happen at work): I simply don't take shit anymore.
With that whole experience came the realisation of two things:
- Would be bullies always have something to loose. In their minds it really doesn't mater if they can make you loose more in return or not: they're not really willing to risk themselves even if they have it in their power to pay it back to you harder. (In kids terms, if you fight back hard the bully might still win the fight, but he's going to come out of it hurting himself so he won't do it again since you'll fight back and make him hurt again).
- It takes two for bulling: continued harassement (which is the definition of bulling) happens because the recipient gets into the mental state of a victim. Behaving like a victim makes you likelly to become one: this is as true of bullying at school as it is of the changes of being mugged when walking through a bad neighbourhood (guess who the thiefs go for, the person that looks scared or the person the looks confident?).
The trend is that the average age of gamers is now in the 30s.
What this has to do with DRM is the fact that, at our age (yes, I am in my 30s) what we have the least is time - at the point in your life where you do have a decent income, money is much less of an issue than when you're a teen - if all I have is 1 or 2 hours a day for gaming I don't want to have to jump through extra hoops to play a game and I sure don't want to see my gaming time wasted because my Internet connection is down or the gaming servers are down and the games requires remote authentication (something that adds no value for me).
The second point is that, when you actually work for a living you can relate the true value of money to the time it takes you to earn it. The cost of a game is then more than a mathematical figure, it's measure in how long do you have to work to pay for it.
The third point is the increased awareness of the value of things that comes with age. To put it simply, a game fulfils one's need for entertainment and escapism and bad games cost twice as much as good movies and 3 times as much as good books and yet have less entertainment value.
That said I still pirate games, and in the end it boils down to 1 reason: ...
- There is no more try-before-you-buy for most games anymore - the age of Game Demos is gone. I don't want to waste my hard earned money (and I do know how hard it was to earn that money) in a game just to take it home and discover that it sucks, it has too many bugs or it refuses to run in my system due to DRM. I've had plenty of situations where I would buy a game and it would either not work properly, turn out to be little fun or exceptionally short even though gaming sites had been hyping it to no end. At this point (after 20! years of gaming) the gaming industry and the gaming press have shown me again and again that they are not to be trusted
So what I do nowadays is I download the game, try it and if it works ok and I like it, I buy it. Just recently I got X3:TC and bought it as soon as I found out that the game maker had removed DRM in the latest patch (in fact I even got the Gold edition since I trully believe they deserve the money).
Hurray!
We found the one slashdotter in a millions that both knowns how to use rations and thinks he knows how to use ratios!!!
Heathrow was recently voted as one of the worst airports in the world by frequent flyers (on the upside it makes other crummy airports look positivelly paradisiacal by comparisson).
I'm sure the mandatory body scans will really make it even more pleasant to go through it ...
Not to worry though, I'm sure that at least one of the following terrorist-favoring outcomes will come out of all this:
a) Due to the child "protection" laws in the UK (where seing pictures of an 18 year minus 1 day old person naked can carry a heavier sentence than raping an 18 year plus one day old one) they will be excluded, by which point the terrorists will start using teens as bomb carriers (or even better, have fake passports with dates of birth made up to have them listed as teens).
b) Terrorists will start blowing up the bombs before the security checks, since the extended lines you get mean that there are more people waiting in that confined space than you could ever have in a plane.
An even more interesting outcome would be if attractive people became the most frequent targets for the mandatory body scans and if (unauthorized) body-scan naked pictures of attractive men and women started circulating in the Internet, especially if the persons in question are recognizable (I wonder if fake lips/boobs stand out in the pictures): the likelly outcry might actually kill this one.
From my experience (I speak 5 languages, only one of which is my mother-tongue), past the very beginning, the best way to learn a language is to go live in a place where people speak it.
Second best is to go there on long (at least 1 month) vacations and try to speak the language all the time (the natives usually appreciate the effort).
Third best is to expose yourself to that language is a day-to-day spoken form. For example, watch non-dubbed TV and/or listen to radio in that language. (For a while, most of my English vocabulary was learned from Satellite TV)
Fourth best is reading books/newspapers in that language.
Both of the last two can be done using the Internet (using things like YouTube clips in different languages, foreign TV channels online, foreign newspapers and such).
Being taught a language is only really worth it when bootstraping your learning, after that being taught a language is highly inneficient simply because, unless you're doing a high intensity course (i.e. several hours a day, everyday for several weeks), in between lessons you forget most of the words you learned in each lesson. This was my experience when learning Dutch while living in Holland - the 1h-lessons twice a week were only really effective for the first 2 or 3 months: beyond that you really need to learn the language by speaking it in your day-to-day. (that said, Dutch is considered a difficult language, toch!!? ).
The good news is that once you learn a language from a given family it's a lot easier to learn other languages of the same family due to the similarities in the grammar, words and even whole expressions. I can now understand some German because of knowing Dutch.
If the man and women they intend to put on the moon need not to be "living and breathing" (i.e. if they're aiming at "Moon burials") it would save tremendous amounts of payload in Life-Support, plus Landing & Return vehicle.
Actually, now that I think about it, the market for Moon burials could probably lower the barrier to entry for a startup aiming at actually sending living and breathing humans to the Moon and back - how many people out there would be willing to pay, sau $200.000 to be buried on the Moon!???
At the end of the day, the value of having a degree depends very much on which area of employment you are in.
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and yet I work as a Software Engineer. In practical terms my degree only really helps me in two ways:
- The one major thing I learned from University was how to learn things fast. This can be used with anything - just recently I managed to learn ski from total newbie to intermediate/advanced level in 1 week - since the observational and analytical skills to do this are generic.
- It gives me a large pool of background knowledge which can help me deduce things faster in other areas: many patterns of "the way people make things" are applicable to all areas of human engineering.
However, 95% of the information I learned for my degree is worthless for what I do now (with the notable exception of CPU design, things like Queue theory and some areas of Mathematics like statistics and numerical analysis).
The diploma itself was only usefull in getting me my first job: from then onwards my CV and the knowledge I display in interviews have been the things that matter.
The reason for this is that I work in IT. This area is still very much an Artisanship - it's practice is missing the predictability and repeatability which are the essential fundations for robust Engineering practices - and as such (outside Academia) proven hands-on experience is vastly more important than scholastic knowledge.
That said for many areas a degree is very important: how many of us would knowingly put the health of their children or the safety of their bridges to people that do not have a degree in the appropriate area?
"Jaywalking is a dangerous crime, were the lives of the innocents close to the criminal - mothers, fathers, children - are at risk from the reckless actions of the criminal: there are many examples of people killed when cars swerved out of control to avoid people jaywalking.
Such reckless risking of other people's life can only be the product of derranged, even evil individuals and a speedy, painfull and highly visible punishment that removes them from society for good is the only way to ensure the safetty of all of us"
This kind of spin work for drugs, and it certainly is being tried for Copyright Infrigement, so I'm sure it would work for jaywalking (although maybe not if the sentence is impalement). As long as a not too big proportion of the population is affected (for example, I believe 12% of people in the US heve been convicted at one point or other of drug related charges???) a proper level of demonisation will be enough to keep the unthinking masses from rebeling.
Your original assumptions are wrong and I'm afraid you just spent 100 lines of comment fighting Windmills, not Giants.
Actually this is likelly much worse. I suspect they didn't found anything real and they probably just grabbed the Simpsons erotica from the browser cache in order to land a conviction.
I vaguelly remember some website or other (I believe it was one of the P2P search engines) where at least once I got an advert where members of the Simpsons family where doing some hardcore acts on camera: quite possible one of the pictures had Bart or Lisa.
If I lived in Australia this would probably be enough to get me convicted as a sex offender.
More essentially:
- Why are victimless "crimes" crimes at all?
If it doesn't harm anybody and has no negative side effects for others than the perpetrator then there's no reason for it to be a crime. Ramblings about an activity "showing pre-disposition to"/"inducing the person to"/"making possible that a person does" commit a "real" crime are just that: ramblings - until the actual "real" crime is commited, there is no crime.
This applies just as much to erotic images/texts/words about children (no actual children involved in making them = no "real" crime) as it does to taking drugs (which really only harm the one that takes them).
A society that imprisions people for doing things that harm nobody or worse, for doing things in which they only harm themselfs is a society where the barbarians are winning.
My experience too.
I live in Europe (UK at the moment) and took my (unlocked) GSM phone to Canada when I went on vacations there. Since I was going to be there for almost a month, I bought a SIM card from Rogers to use in Canada and avoid roaming costs.
My experience:
- A Pay-As-You-Ggo (i.e. no contract) SIM is ridiculously expensive (C$50 with no included minutes). For comparisson sake, £35 (about C$60) in the UK with no contract gets me a SIM card, a mobile network dongle (really!) and includes £15 in credit (and the UK is hardly the cheapest mobile phone market in Europe, in Holland I got a SIM card for 5 EUR).
- In Canada you pay to receive calls (wtf!)
- Top-ups expire after a while: in other words, you load money into the phone and if you don't use it before a set deadline date then Rogers just takes it away.
- Making calls does cost about 2/3 of what it costs in the UK. Again, please note that the UK is far from the cheapest mobile market in Europe.
- Checking your voicemail is free in the UK but costs money with Rogers in Canada.
To top it all up, they assigned me a mobile number which was re-used from somebody else and came subscribed to some "pay-to-receive one SMS joke a day" scam - this required a call to Rogers support where they first tried to deny all responsability and finally relented and repayed the money taken from my account only after I got angry, mentioned that number re-use was not my choice - their problem not mine - and mentioned something about "deceitfull sales practices" and that maybe it should be escalated to the local regulatory entities. I had to demand a block be put on all SMSs to that number to avoid further such issues.
All in all I'm happy this was only for a month and I don't see how you Canadians take it.
The natural conclusion from the article is that Game Distribution Platforms seem to be affected by networking effects - buyers gravitate to the one with the most games, sellers gravitate to the one where most buyers go to. This means that the market will move towards a situation where there are only one or two winners.
This might seem like a good thing (fewer random background tasks running in people's PCs) until you think about those people that bought games in what turned out not to be one of the winning platforms: the games that they bought in that/those platforms typically will stop working when the servers are turned off (or, at best, you won't be able to do a new install ever again due to online activation).
This is a bit like VHS vs Betamax (or HD-DVD vs Blueray) only much worse: anybody that bought movies in Betamax format can still play them as long as their Betamax player works, but anybody that buys a game that authenticates with a platform that later goes down will quite likelly be unable to play that game ever again once the authentication servers are stopped.
Considering that the really good games are still played 5 or 10 years later (pretty much any gamer over 30 will be well aquainted with the experience of rediscovering an "oldy but goody" and playing it again), and that the game publishers rarelly have any interest in keeping the game going once they stop selling it, even those whose games which where bought in a platform that is still going 5 of 10 years in the future still run the risk of having their games killed by after-sale, arbitrary planned obsolescence.
Me, I vote with my wallet and refuse to buy any games that have online activation and/or authentication for single player gaming (currently playing "X3:Terran Conflict" on the PC, bought after they removed DRM with patch 2.5): if others did the same the industry would give up on this.
As I said in another post, the free downloading of maps for offline use in Nokia phones is something that has been out for at least a year (that I know off). It's the free "navigation" bit that's new.
Actually Nokia already provided a free Maps application supporting GPS and with free offline Maps for their phones for quite a while now.
I've been using this on my E51 (using an external bluetooth GPS device) for almost a year now including for things like summer vacations in North America and ski-vacations in Europe.
What's new here is that the "Navigation" bit of it (i.e. the route planning and direction instructions) are now free - before these features where paid for and only the maps and position finding features came free.
You don't seem to have read the GGP post at all.
It lists plenty of venues of attack for a suficiently willing and knowledgeable attacker which state agencies would be.
I wouldn't so easilly dismiss attacks delivered via source code if I was you: the GP was talking about attacks by state security services - these guys usually employ full time some pretty clever people who can usually make their own code they're no just a bunch of script kiddies downloading tools from the Internet (although from the Google attacks I suspect that, like in many other things, the Chinese went for quantity over quality and a lot of their "State Hackers" are little more than script-kiddies). Understanding and subtly altering a code base is not that hard if you're an good and experienced programmer.
State agents thus have both the resources and the willingness for impersonating a friendly interested party, providing free machines that are actually compromised at the BIOS or even hardware level and subtly compromise TOR via the source code once the Source Control repository gets put in one of the trojaned machines - some of them might even have a wise enough leadership that they're willing to go slowly and carefully infiltrate and take over the TOR system using techniques like this.
The biguest competition against Oracle Weblogic (formerly BEA Weblogic) in the J2EE Application Server space is Websphere by IBM, not GlassFish.
The mostly widelly used IDE for Java development is Eclipse (which is open source), NetBeans is not even a second, maybe a far 3rd or worse.
I've been working professionally with Java for 12 years and I can't see how anybody can see GlassFish or NetBeans as at all important in the Java space: the truth is that while Sun's Java language and standard libraries are quite successfull their tools and framework implementations never do take off (even though they keep pushing them year-in-year-out by offering them bundled with the Java SE and Java EE SDKs).
With regards to the article title ("Correlation Found Between Brain Structure and Video Game Success"), after seeing that this article seems to be missing posts with the adequate meme, in the interest of completness and as per Slashdot tradition I would like to remind everybody that:
Correlation is not Causation
Thank you for your time.
So how exactly is it surprising that a fuel-air explosion will scare, hurt and even kill people depending on the distance?
Removing of Mod Tools is all about controlling shelf-life for games and monopolising the market for extensions/enhancements for those game.
It's all a business decision - outside MMOs, the current way that Game Producers (want to) do business is:
In that sense, user mods are "bad for business" since they:
Games having more RPG elements does relate to the decision of removing Mod Tools in the sense that for RPGs the enjoyement of the game is also related to it's content (as in, zones to explore, items to collect, monsters to fight and levels/abilities to unlock), and thus:
So I do agree with the TFA that no Mod Tools and more RPG elements are correlated, although maybe not in the way they see it.
Just because a lot of US created entertainment is a nice and pleasent "chewing-gum for the brain" doesn't mean that American culture is somehow superior and beyond reproach.
Whatever the quality of the entertainment factor provided by, say, "Saving Private Ryan", it does not put beyond criticism things like the incorrect belief of most Americans that the US contribution in D-day was much larger than it really was or their unawareness that the US army at the time was heavilly racially segregated (two pick just two interesting examples that films usually distort).
The US culture provides for pleasent entertainment, period. This does not mean it is in any way a better or superior culture: it just means it has better marketting.
Or maybe they could've just have them assembled in China. For an item at this price point, most manufacturers in there will hapilly run you a batch of 1000 and even print your logo on it for about 10% of the cost (add about 5% on top for a local 3rd party to do quality control).
Shipping a full container (size 20) from Shenzhen to Europe will set you back about $10000 (including insurance for $200k and paying for a customs clearence broker) for it all (so $10 each), plus maybe 10% in duty tax (depends on the country) and another 15% in VAT (again depends on the country).
Assume the parts were $200 (I'm being pessimistic here, since we're talking about parts bought in bulk) and add a 40% markup on the final price for profit margin and your're still at about $400 per item (this with European style taxes and a 40% profit margin).
Up to a point, a lot of the costs do grow slowly as the number of units you're having assembled and imported grows, but that only happens up to certain limits, beyond which the costs more or less grow linearly:
- Loads less than a container in size (LCL - Less-than-container loads) are much more expensive to ship than full container loads (FCL). In fact, anything smaller than a pallet (around 1 cubic meter) will cost the same as a whole pallet. However moving 2 containers simply costs you twice as much as moving 1.
- Shipping insurance grows linearly with the costs of the goods being transported.
- When importing to Europe, some of the most significant costs (duty tax, VAT) grow lineraly with the value of the goods.
- Customs clearence costs remain roughly the same independently of the size (they're per-shipment, although there is a variable component with regards to storage costs).
- Road transport in both sides is a lot cheaper if you're moving full containers. In fact you'll be hard pressed to find a shipping and transport company that is setup to move around anything less than a full container (if you need a pallet or two worth of goods they'll just send around a big truck - the kind used to move containers - loaded with them).
That said, for goods the size of a mini-PC, the 1000 units mark is enough to fill a container and enter into the economies of scale side of things - no need for "millions" of units.
Unicorn horn!???
No!No!No!
Everybody knows that Unicorn horn introduces subtle color leakage and timing delays.
A real videophile would know that true video nirvana can only be achieved by using Fossilized T-Rex Turd connectors: only posers go with Platinum and Unicorn Horn.