Also immutable objects are 100% safe in multi-threaded environments which means they require no mutexes/locks/semaphores or any other such thread access control tricks. This makes using them much speedier.
The way to argument against it is actually to argument for more and deeper intrusions. Take the argument to it's most extreme logical conclusion. For example:
My local MP (Sarah McArthy Fry) made the argument that internet surveillance had been used to prevent a suicide, and so was entirely justified.
Easy counter argument: demand even more and deeper privacy intrusions.
For example: "I completely agree with and applaud this action: human life should be cherished and protected at all costs.
Also, lets not forget that every year hundreds of people die as a result of accident or even suicide in their own homes, including children and vulnerable senior citizens.
We cannot stand idle while this happens!
I propose that CCTV surveillance inside private homes becomes mandatory with the video streams available via the Internet to anybody that cares to watch them: let's harness the powers of technology and the crowds to prevent this needless loss of human life that is happening, right now, behind closed doors.
I proposed our esteemed MP Sarah McArthy Fry, whose understanding of the importance of human life is beyond doubt, to serve as an example to us all and be the first person enrolled in this project"
IQ measures raw mental abilities. It's a bit like measuring raw CPU power and memory in a computer.
EQ (Emotional Quotient) measures things like self-motivation abilities (including things like optimism), self-control and inter-personal abilities. They're a bit like measuring the quality of the software that runs in a computer and how well it works together with other programs in the network.
[Sorry, no car metaphors]
In real life, even though a large IQ will allow you to solve incredibly complex problems, if you have a low EQ, you might actually be incapable of doing so because, for example:
Low self-motivation means you give up too easy unless constantly rewarded
Lack of self-control means you constantly get side-tracked with other "interesting things" not directly related to solving the main problem
Difficulty with relating with others means that you will either never be assigned the big problems to solve in the first place or will have trouble communicating the solution at the end. Also if the problem is not fully and clearly defined up-front (like the vast majority of real-world problems) you will have trouble with getting more information from others
In the end, a high EQ is much more highly correlated with success than a high IQ.
Simply put, being optimistic means you're more willing to take chances (which might eventually result in a big payout), being self-motivated means that you can keep going even when things are though, having self-control means you can deny yourself a small reward now for a much bigger one later and being good with people means you can more easily find the chances and convince others to work with you.
That said, the good news is that one can change one's own EQ over one's life - most of its component are behavioral traits that can be learned.
No one has conclusively proved the case for (or against) the viability of mature games on Wii
There are almost no mature games at all for the Wii. Most games for the Wii are either targeted at kids (pretty much everything with cutesy cartoon-ish characters), families (kids games with multi-player really) or teenagers (fast reaction, trigger-happy, repetitive FPSs).
Even the RPGs (like the Zelda games) seem to have been designed to be within the mental reach of a 5 year-old (or somebody mentally retarded).
Just recently I got Deadspace for the Wii (an FPS) and it turns out you can't even control the movement of your character - the game boils down to, as your character moves on his own, moving your aiming reticule as fast as possible to aim at the head of whatever comes your way and pressing button and pressing other-button to open doors and other such "puzzles". You could train a monkey to beat that game.
In two years, the one single game I got for the Wii that can be classified as "mature" is Resident Evil 4 (which was originally released for a different console).
Maybe the problem is me: as a "mature" game, having started on the ZX Spectrum and gone through many generations of gaming on the PC, I long ago graduated beyond the "brain-dead repetitive" style of gaming: games that will satisfy a teenager or a 5 year old will just look like flat, un-challenging and done-it-already to me.
In the world of PC games, you can still find engaging and interesting games (for example: Galactic Civilizations), some of which are also console games (such as Bioshock).
For the Wii, however, it's always the same, usual, bland fare suitable only for those that haven't seen it and done it already a thousand times - only one or two ports of games from other consoles save it from total mediocrity.
The Federal Reserve does not print money. Maybe you were speaking metaphorically, but you're still wrong. The Federal Reserve can influence interest rates, and it can change the size of the the money supply by issuing and recalling treasury bills and by adjusting the reserve requirement.. Those functions allow the Fed to alter the price of money, but that's not equivalent to printing more money.
This is actually the modern version of printing money (notice the part about creating money from nothing in the Wikipedia article). Central banks have started doing it once they couldn't bring interest rates any lower (no way for them to get lower than zero).
So money is being created out of nothing which reduces the value of any money in circulation which in turn devaluates the currency. This is good for exporters since their goods look cheaper in other currencies and is good for banks because they can take cheap loans and invest that money (more on that below) and bad for consumers since any goods or which are imported and/or contain inputs which are imported (pretty much anything nowadays) will be more expensive.
The US Dollar has not devaluated any further because: - It's still the reserve currency for many countries in the world. For example China still holds most of it's foreign currency reserves in USD and most Chinese exporters price their goods in US Dollars instead of Renminbi. - Most major US trading partners have either had their own currencies devaluate (such as the UK and the Euro-zone members) or keep their currencies pegged to the dollar (such as China).
A point that the GP didn't clearly made was that at the moment the US Government provides an implicit guarantee to all major US banks that they will not be allowed to go bankrupt. The way things are at the moment any bank whose failure could cause structural problems to the financial system (read: big and with many out of market long and short positions) will be saved by the US government if it ever comes close to bankruptcy.
This means that banks have been able to get cheap loans from the money markets, leveraging themselves back to the levels of 2008 (when banks invested using ratios of loaned money versus own money of 20 to 1 or worse - i.e. for every 21 million dollars they invested, only 1 million was their own money). They have used that money to play in the stock market (and other markets) which have been going up, thus making profits for even the most inept of traders.
Let me explain how investment bank works with an example: a trader for a year invests $5000 of the bank's own money and $100000 of loaned money (at an interest rate of 1.0% a year) into stocks. Said stocks went up 5% (way much less than the market did this year): he would have made $4250 profit (after loan repayment) which doesn't look that much against the full $105000, but is a staggering 85% profit margin on the $5000 of the bank's money invested.
This is how banks are announcing huge profits and giving out billions of dollars of bonuses: lots of cheap (thanks to low interest rates, quantitative easing and government guarantees on big banks) are used to amplify the results in such a way that even the most inept of traders can post huge profits.
ARM are actively trying to sell their designs - that's very much an indication of "intent to implement the idea".
Contrast this with Patent Trolls who get an idea and patent it (or just buy a patent) to then just sit on it until somebody else independently comes up with the same idea and DOES implement it, at which point they pounce.
Now imagine a patent system where ideas have to be implemented in a set time from filling the patent:
Playing for time by stalling (filling multiple versions) is a negative, since the clock is counting
The initial patent fillings will be much better simply because the clock starts ticking as of first filling: sloppy work means risking to loose the patent
Ideas will be much more developed and fleshed-out before being patented and more specific: the time limit between first filling and implementation means that you can't just patent generic wild ideas and hope for the best - ideas patented which are far from implementation are likely to quickly loose patent protection once the time-to-implementation has expired with no implementation being done.
A serious company that has an idea but cannot (say, for monetary reasons) immediately go for an implementation will either keep it a trade secret until they can implement it or patent it and sell it to somebody willing to implement it. If they do keep the idea as a trade secret they will either later patent and implement it (in effect getting more time to develop the idea than that which would be available purely from the patent) or loose it if in the meanwhile somebody else independently comes up with the same idea (meaning that the idea wasn't really that original, and thus undeserving of patent protection)
Patenting something and sitting on it will not work: you either implement it yourself, sell/license it to somebody who will or loose it.
Implementing a patent is usually the most costly bit: if you've gone to the trouble of implementing it it's much more profitable to go ahead and commercialize it than it is to sit on the patent
I can see problems with the idea and ways around it. Certainly this doesn't solve the issues with Business Methods patents (something which should never have gotten patent protection to begin with).
That said, a use it or loose it patent system would steer us away from the "race to stake claims of ownership on all ideas" which is the current way patents are used and which has resulted on a large wasteland of undeveloped potential where "nobody can go" into a system where people only stake claims ownership to those ideas they mean to develop, which would result in small active areas (of patents being explored) and plenty of free space for anybody that wants to develop an idea.
Freeing up all that unused "idea space" could actually result in a new Renaissance.
First let me say that I think that taxing a technology is the kind of thing that's born and implemented because of heavy lobbying by the competition (which uses a different technology) - there are zero public benefits from such a measure: it only creates artificial barriers to entry that protect the established telecoms and result in lower services and higher prices for the consumer.
That said, here's a couple of things that those that provide Internet services over wireless can do:
Increase the bill by the exact amount of the tax and include a separate line in the invoice for the tax. Contact local newspapers and let them know what's happening - blame your local representative to parliament for not doing enough against this, make people really pissed-off about this: elections are coming, and if you are indeed in a rural constituency, that means that each vote is much more significant in determining who gets elected to parliament, so enough votes swayed can a change which party get's a representative into parliament. The best way to prod the politicians to move is to put their sinecures at risk.
If you as a provider exist because those that wanted wireless couldn't get together from the "big boys" so they got together and set something up for having Internet access, then incorporate as an Association (instead of a Limited company). Then, instead of charging for Internet access, you charge membership costs which are used to keep the association's "activities" going. This should include an amount to cover for the salary of the people that have to keep the network going. Keep in mind that associations are not for profit, so this solution is only for those wireless ISPs that were not really setup for the profit but are really just a group of people that got together to get Internet access.
I don't know about others but when I download a pirated game, try it, like it and subsequently buy the game I never install the one bought.
The truth is, the pirated version is simply more convenient (no phone home, no funky drivers that can ruin my CD-writter, no refusal to run if Daemon Tools is installed, no "CD/DVD must be in drive" demands). [Yes, I really do BUY good games even though I have a full working pirated version: Right in front of me are 5 boxes of games I purchased this way and never installed. Many more are stored in a box somewhere]
I do NOT buy games which I did not like or which are too short (low value for money scams). I also NEVER buy games which are too much hassle to pirate - I have no way to know if they are any good and will run stable in my system, so I'm not going to risk money on them when I can use it on other forms of entertainment.
That said, the try and buy crowd might be common in a forum like Slashdot because most posters here are self-sufficient adults with (often) strong opinions about fairness, honesty and rewarding good work (certainly, that's why I personally do actually buy those games). Don't expect your average teenager to do the same.
Actually common usage outside Nederland (the proper name in dutch) is that Holland = The Netherlands. This is despite the fact that Holland is basically the area defined by the Noord-Holland (North-Holland) and Zuid-Holland (South Holland) regions in Nederland.
Disclaimer: IANDBIUTLT (I am not Dutch but I used to live there)
For the last 5 years the evolution in mainstream PC gaming has been all around fancy new graphics.
The only new original gaming style that poped-up was MMORPGs (not really new, but it did became mass-market in the meanwhile).
[This point was really hammered down for me when "Supreme Commander", highly hailed as innovative, came out and it turns out it's an almost 1-to-1 copy of the old "Total Annihilation" from 10 years ago only with better graphics]
The other grand "evolutions" have been the not releasing of demos anymore, the crazy DRM + phone home features, the rise of the "major game publisher" and the death of the small independent software house.
A couple of considerations need to be taken into account before announcing the "end of Nvidia" because their graphics chipset is not integrated into the CPU:
How many PC gamers upgrade their systems as a whole (i.e. by buying a complete new system) versus piecemeal (i.e. upgrade Graphics Cards standalone)? As a PC gamer that usually upgrades his system bit by bit, I can tell you from experience that the upgrade cycle for Graphics Cards is a lot faster than that for CPUs: for most new games that come out, the GPU is much more likely to be the bottleneck than the CPU. Also often CPU upgrades are much more painful/expensive (i.e. when a new CPU architecture comes out and you have to upgrade the CPU, motherboard and memory all at the same time).
Current systems with integrated graphics (in the motherboard) are inferior to systems with separate Graphics Cards. This is mostly because integrated systems have the graphics card sharing the main memory with the CPU and because, since the upgrade cycle for Graphics Card architecture is faster than that for CPU architectures, things like the memory architecture are much more frequently upgraded than for motherboards: which is why often the memory in a Graphics Card is one generation beyond the memory in the motherboard.
Measured in terms of sales, because there are plenty of people out there which are non-gamers and will just buy a PC to access the Internet, the "PC with integrated-graphics" is a very large market segment. However at the moment systems with integrated graphics are sold mostly on price so they are a low-margins, commoditised market segment: margins are a lot bigger for "Gaming PCs". In terms of profit a lot more money is made by GPU manufacturers from Gaming PCs and standalone mid/high-level Graphics Card sales than in integrated graphics systems.
If they manage to solve the problems with performance in a shared CPU/GPU architecture and convince people to upgrade their motherboards as often as they nowadays upgrade their graphics cards, AMD/ATI might capture a slice of the higher margins mid/high-end PC market from Nvidia. If not, all that they will achieve is capture a slice of the low margin low-end PC market from Intel.
Actually as long as most impoverished nations keep having birth-rates of 6+ per family, simply giving food to starving populations will only postpone the problem.
In some of the worst places like parts of Somalia and Ethiopia, the problem is that the land has been divided so many times (as each generation inherited it from the previous one) that many families don't have big enough plots for their own subsistence.
Better put the money in education and development (as a nation becomes more developed, birth rates fall) and birth-control (and ignore the American-right's "every sperm is sacred" approach) so that in 15 years time instead of having twice as many poor and starving subsistence farmers we have the same number of people as today only using better farming techniques and working in higher value occupations.
Obviously the engine will not work on weekends, so that's 2 days out of 7, roughly 24 in total.
Then there are religious holidays for the astronauts, not to mention national holidays for each nationality represented in the team. I reckon that's about 3 days a month, or roughly 9 days in total.
Then there's mandatory vacation time, about 25 days a year or roughly 8 days for the trip.
Assuming everybody is working really hard, coffee, cigarette and bathroom breaks will probably only add up to 3 days in total.
Of the remaining 45 days, one is preparation before the trip, one to really get going and one is basically wasted on the whole "arrival, get the luggage out and unpack it". Same thing on the Mars side. That's another 6 days.
Coding a 3D engine does require quite a lot of mathematical and domain knowledge. Not only do you have to understand the mathematics behind things like geometry and vectors, but you also have to understand domain specific subjects like z-buffers and alpha channels.
I would recommend that you either aim for a 2D game (that's how I started myself, by doing a mine-sweeper clone for the ZX Spectrum while still in high-school) or get a pre-existing 3D engine (like one of the Unreal engines) to deal with the 3D rendering and building on top of it (which means looking at the procedural side of things - how objects/entities act/react/behave - and graphics).
An e-book doesn't look the same, doesn't smell the same and doesn't feel the same as a paper book.
It's the same reason why those that can afford it have fireplaces at home: a good wood fire in a fireplace is a pleasure to one's senses.
E-books are likely to sooner or latter dominate the utility space of literature (reference manuals, newspapers, magazines) provided they're cheaper than what they replace (which isn't happening at the moment). This is the same space where the Internet has already significantly displaced paper-books (hands up anybody that still uses paper encyclopedias...) so we might bypass the e-book stage altogether.
What is more doubtful is if they will ever replace paper books in the pleasure space of literature (those books you read for the pleasure of it while lying in our sofa with a nice cappuccino, put down in your bookshelf when you're done and pull out a year or two later to read again) much less the home decoration space of literature (hardcover books with fancy covers for looking pretty in a bookshelf).
I don't understand North American business and advertising in general.
When you want nothing to do with them, they call you during dinner with things you don't want and don't need. When you do need them, because something is wrong with their product, they let you talk to machines until you get fed up.
In the first case they don't have your money yet.
In the second case they already have your money.
This sudden transition from star to looser for the customer happens less frequently in most places in Western Europe because stronger consumer laws mean that as a consumer you can much more easily claw back your money without spending a penny in lawyers.
The problem, for admirers of this system such as yourself, anyway, is that Europe itself is starting to question such an arrangement. People are beginning to wonder why they can't have a good medical care system without massive government expenditures.
Where do you get your information about what us in Europe think about our health care systems?
I live in Europe and have lived in (and still have friends in) 3 countries and you can be pretty damn sure nobody wants universal coverage to be dropped or have the health care system fully privatized like in the US.
As a mater of fact, of late there has been a backslash against the moves some governments were making towards more privatization of health care after it became clear just how much of a fuck-up the US system was (highest expenditure per-head for worse results than most other rich nations) and just how risky it is for the private sector to manage anything important (just recently, we all saw just how well the banking sector works).
In the UK (where I live now), people will bitch and moan about the low value-for-money of our health care system (just like in most other countries I lived in before: people always want more for less). This does not mean that anybody around here wants the NHS to be privatized (except maybe for one or two of obscure politicians who are trying to climb to fame by giving interviews to Fox telling they're audience what they want to hear - those guys are seen as a bit of a joke around here) - all the arguments I heard go around how the government need to improve and do a better job with nary a hint that anybody thinks that the private sector should replace the government.
I'm afraid that on this side of the pond, the political ideology that says that "Any Government Is Bad" simply does not exist.
One of the most essential reason why organized forms of government evolved is the need manage shared resources so as to avoid situations of Tragedy of the Commons.
These can be something as simple as allocating grazing rights in communal grazing land to something as complex determining when does one person's need to say what they think outweighs the need of another person to have some silence.
Another reason why organized forms of government evolved was to minimized internal conflict within "the tribe". To put it simply, tribes were people went around killing each other due to small disagreements didn't last long.
Any form of government you can think of which has actually been tried in reality and managed to form a society that didn't in short order collapsed on it's own or due to external forces has fulfilled these two needs (the only societal form that does not does this is Anarchy, which is unstable and quickly transforms into Warlordism). Just look around: everything from Fascism to Communism to Capitalism to Socialism share the features of managing shared resources and trying to minimize internal conflict - what distinguishes them is the way by which they go around determining who is entitled to what (which is where, in some societies, concepts as "rights" pop-up).
All this to say that: - There will always be people that think (rightly or wrongly) that they deserve more than what they got and use arguments like saying that "Government forces some citizens to provide for others" because they would rather be the ones choosing what their "fair share" is. [Seeing how everybody choosing their own "fair share" would end in tragedy of the commons situations and/or widespread internal conflict is an exercise left to the reader]
The argument used by the court to claim jurisdiction over this is that said comment can be viewed by a person in the UK.
Any website can be viewed from any physical location in the world via the Internet, so the court is basically claiming jurisdiction over any potentially libelous comments posted on the Internet anywhere in the world.
If you add into the mix things like extradition agreements (with the UK) and some of the tools created after 9/11 to freeze bank accounts anywhere in the world, the implications are staggering...
If EA came up with an MMO, could you really trust them not to make it Pay-to-Play and:
At a latter date add some for of micro-transactions selling the kind on in-game kit that massively unbalances the end-of-game in favor of those that actually buy that kit?
Add in-game advertising after release?
Prioritize frequent development of new expansions over fixing known bugs?
If my previous experience with Online PvP gaming using EA products (Battlefield series on the PC) is any indication of their behavior, I expect them to release the game buggy (yet strangely with great reviews from certain well-known gaming websites), have a 6 month period with a couple of bug-fixes while they "hook as many players as they can into the game" and then proceed to do all the "returns enhancing" ideas listed above.
I know this will come as a shock to a collectivist who thinks that business owners are the enemy, but business owners create jobs
Actually it's entrepreneurs that create jobs.
When they don't grow their business, business owners don't create jobs. At most they keep jobs since that keeps their business running (and often they destroy jobs when it's possible to replace the people with machines).
The actual state of "owning a business" does nothing to improve society or increase employment. Growing a business (preferably from the ground-up) is what makes a difference.
One needs to distinguish between those whose wealth is the product of their own efforts (typical example: Bill Gates) and those who inherited their wealth and made no effort to expand it (typical example: Paris Hilton).
That said even entrepreneurs do not deserve our gratitude - they did it for themselves, just like we would do in their shoes. Some of them even deserve our contempt, such as those that got rich during the dot.com boom by creating companies with no business plan, selling them (to the suckers, which included plenty of pension funds and old ladies) for millions/billions after which said companies dully went bankrupt, often without having made a day of profit during their existence.
I postulate that of the "contempt for wealth" that you sometimes observe here in/. comes from the observation that far too many individuals have gotten their wealth "as a gift" (inherited) or by deceit (no-future dot.com companies, CEOs getting fat bonuses for achieving targets of "not loosing too much money").
There comes a point in one's career as a Software Engineer when just doing code is not challenging anymore (no mater how big the application is). At that point, there really aren't any interesting things you can do on your own at home as a hobby.
To appropriate your metaphor, replace a ski instructor with somebody that actually designs ski pistes - how exactly can they do something like it as a hobby outside work?
Slashdot Mirror
Also immutable objects are 100% safe in multi-threaded environments which means they require no mutexes/locks/semaphores or any other such thread access control tricks. This makes using them much speedier.
Just use ROT13 on the website name to generate the hash.
For extra safety, use ROT13 twice.
The way to argument against it is actually to argument for more and deeper intrusions. Take the argument to it's most extreme logical conclusion. For example:
Easy counter argument: demand even more and deeper privacy intrusions.
For example:
"I completely agree with and applaud this action: human life should be cherished and protected at all costs.
Also, lets not forget that every year hundreds of people die as a result of accident or even suicide in their own homes, including children and vulnerable senior citizens.
We cannot stand idle while this happens!
I propose that CCTV surveillance inside private homes becomes mandatory with the video streams available via the Internet to anybody that cares to watch them: let's harness the powers of technology and the crowds to prevent this needless loss of human life that is happening, right now, behind closed doors.
I proposed our esteemed MP Sarah McArthy Fry, whose understanding of the importance of human life is beyond doubt, to serve as an example to us all and be the first person enrolled in this project"
IQ measures raw mental abilities. It's a bit like measuring raw CPU power and memory in a computer.
EQ (Emotional Quotient) measures things like self-motivation abilities (including things like optimism), self-control and inter-personal abilities. They're a bit like measuring the quality of the software that runs in a computer and how well it works together with other programs in the network.
[Sorry, no car metaphors]
In real life, even though a large IQ will allow you to solve incredibly complex problems, if you have a low EQ, you might actually be incapable of doing so because, for example:
In the end, a high EQ is much more highly correlated with success than a high IQ.
Simply put, being optimistic means you're more willing to take chances (which might eventually result in a big payout), being self-motivated means that you can keep going even when things are though, having self-control means you can deny yourself a small reward now for a much bigger one later and being good with people means you can more easily find the chances and convince others to work with you.
That said, the good news is that one can change one's own EQ over one's life - most of its component are behavioral traits that can be learned.
There are almost no mature games at all for the Wii. Most games for the Wii are either targeted at kids (pretty much everything with cutesy cartoon-ish characters), families (kids games with multi-player really) or teenagers (fast reaction, trigger-happy, repetitive FPSs).
Even the RPGs (like the Zelda games) seem to have been designed to be within the mental reach of a 5 year-old (or somebody mentally retarded).
Just recently I got Deadspace for the Wii (an FPS) and it turns out you can't even control the movement of your character - the game boils down to, as your character moves on his own, moving your aiming reticule as fast as possible to aim at the head of whatever comes your way and pressing button and pressing other-button to open doors and other such "puzzles". You could train a monkey to beat that game.
In two years, the one single game I got for the Wii that can be classified as "mature" is Resident Evil 4 (which was originally released for a different console).
Maybe the problem is me: as a "mature" game, having started on the ZX Spectrum and gone through many generations of gaming on the PC, I long ago graduated beyond the "brain-dead repetitive" style of gaming: games that will satisfy a teenager or a 5 year old will just look like flat, un-challenging and done-it-already to me.
In the world of PC games, you can still find engaging and interesting games (for example: Galactic Civilizations), some of which are also console games (such as Bioshock).
For the Wii, however, it's always the same, usual, bland fare suitable only for those that haven't seen it and done it already a thousand times - only one or two ports of games from other consoles save it from total mediocrity.
Two words:
Quantitative Easing
This is actually the modern version of printing money (notice the part about creating money from nothing in the Wikipedia article). Central banks have started doing it once they couldn't bring interest rates any lower (no way for them to get lower than zero).
So money is being created out of nothing which reduces the value of any money in circulation which in turn devaluates the currency. This is good for exporters since their goods look cheaper in other currencies and is good for banks because they can take cheap loans and invest that money (more on that below) and bad for consumers since any goods or which are imported and/or contain inputs which are imported (pretty much anything nowadays) will be more expensive.
The US Dollar has not devaluated any further because:
- It's still the reserve currency for many countries in the world. For example China still holds most of it's foreign currency reserves in USD and most Chinese exporters price their goods in US Dollars instead of Renminbi.
- Most major US trading partners have either had their own currencies devaluate (such as the UK and the Euro-zone members) or keep their currencies pegged to the dollar (such as China).
A point that the GP didn't clearly made was that at the moment the US Government provides an implicit guarantee to all major US banks that they will not be allowed to go bankrupt. The way things are at the moment any bank whose failure could cause structural problems to the financial system (read: big and with many out of market long and short positions) will be saved by the US government if it ever comes close to bankruptcy.
This means that banks have been able to get cheap loans from the money markets, leveraging themselves back to the levels of 2008 (when banks invested using ratios of loaned money versus own money of 20 to 1 or worse - i.e. for every 21 million dollars they invested, only 1 million was their own money). They have used that money to play in the stock market (and other markets) which have been going up, thus making profits for even the most inept of traders.
Let me explain how investment bank works with an example: a trader for a year invests $5000 of the bank's own money and $100000 of loaned money (at an interest rate of 1.0% a year) into stocks. Said stocks went up 5% (way much less than the market did this year): he would have made $4250 profit (after loan repayment) which doesn't look that much against the full $105000, but is a staggering 85% profit margin on the $5000 of the bank's money invested.
This is how banks are announcing huge profits and giving out billions of dollars of bonuses: lots of cheap (thanks to low interest rates, quantitative easing and government guarantees on big banks) are used to amplify the results in such a way that even the most inept of traders can post huge profits.
ARM are actively trying to sell their designs - that's very much an indication of "intent to implement the idea".
Contrast this with Patent Trolls who get an idea and patent it (or just buy a patent) to then just sit on it until somebody else independently comes up with the same idea and DOES implement it, at which point they pounce.
Now imagine a patent system where ideas have to be implemented in a set time from filling the patent:
I can see problems with the idea and ways around it. Certainly this doesn't solve the issues with Business Methods patents (something which should never have gotten patent protection to begin with).
That said, a use it or loose it patent system would steer us away from the "race to stake claims of ownership on all ideas" which is the current way patents are used and which has resulted on a large wasteland of undeveloped potential where "nobody can go" into a system where people only stake claims ownership to those ideas they mean to develop, which would result in small active areas (of patents being explored) and plenty of free space for anybody that wants to develop an idea.
Freeing up all that unused "idea space" could actually result in a new Renaissance.
First let me say that I think that taxing a technology is the kind of thing that's born and implemented because of heavy lobbying by the competition (which uses a different technology) - there are zero public benefits from such a measure: it only creates artificial barriers to entry that protect the established telecoms and result in lower services and higher prices for the consumer.
That said, here's a couple of things that those that provide Internet services over wireless can do:
I don't know about others but when I download a pirated game, try it, like it and subsequently buy the game I never install the one bought.
The truth is, the pirated version is simply more convenient (no phone home, no funky drivers that can ruin my CD-writter, no refusal to run if Daemon Tools is installed, no "CD/DVD must be in drive" demands).
[Yes, I really do BUY good games even though I have a full working pirated version: Right in front of me are 5 boxes of games I purchased this way and never installed. Many more are stored in a box somewhere]
I do NOT buy games which I did not like or which are too short (low value for money scams). I also NEVER buy games which are too much hassle to pirate - I have no way to know if they are any good and will run stable in my system, so I'm not going to risk money on them when I can use it on other forms of entertainment.
That said, the try and buy crowd might be common in a forum like Slashdot because most posters here are self-sufficient adults with (often) strong opinions about fairness, honesty and rewarding good work (certainly, that's why I personally do actually buy those games). Don't expect your average teenager to do the same.
Actually common usage outside Nederland (the proper name in dutch) is that Holland = The Netherlands. This is despite the fact that Holland is basically the area defined by the Noord-Holland (North-Holland) and Zuid-Holland (South Holland) regions in Nederland.
Disclaimer: IANDBIUTLT (I am not Dutch but I used to live there)
For the last 5 years the evolution in mainstream PC gaming has been all around fancy new graphics.
The only new original gaming style that poped-up was MMORPGs (not really new, but it did became mass-market in the meanwhile).
[This point was really hammered down for me when "Supreme Commander", highly hailed as innovative, came out and it turns out it's an almost 1-to-1 copy of the old "Total Annihilation" from 10 years ago only with better graphics]
The other grand "evolutions" have been the not releasing of demos anymore, the crazy DRM + phone home features, the rise of the "major game publisher" and the death of the small independent software house.
A couple of considerations need to be taken into account before announcing the "end of Nvidia" because their graphics chipset is not integrated into the CPU:
Measured in terms of sales, because there are plenty of people out there which are non-gamers and will just buy a PC to access the Internet, the "PC with integrated-graphics" is a very large market segment. However at the moment systems with integrated graphics are sold mostly on price so they are a low-margins, commoditised market segment: margins are a lot bigger for "Gaming PCs". In terms of profit a lot more money is made by GPU manufacturers from Gaming PCs and standalone mid/high-level Graphics Card sales than in integrated graphics systems.
If they manage to solve the problems with performance in a shared CPU/GPU architecture and convince people to upgrade their motherboards as often as they nowadays upgrade their graphics cards, AMD/ATI might capture a slice of the higher margins mid/high-end PC market from Nvidia. If not, all that they will achieve is capture a slice of the low margin low-end PC market from Intel.
Actually as long as most impoverished nations keep having birth-rates of 6+ per family, simply giving food to starving populations will only postpone the problem.
In some of the worst places like parts of Somalia and Ethiopia, the problem is that the land has been divided so many times (as each generation inherited it from the previous one) that many families don't have big enough plots for their own subsistence.
Better put the money in education and development (as a nation becomes more developed, birth rates fall) and birth-control (and ignore the American-right's "every sperm is sacred" approach) so that in 15 years time instead of having twice as many poor and starving subsistence farmers we have the same number of people as today only using better farming techniques and working in higher value occupations.
I think they mean 39 work-days, 89 days in total.
Obviously the engine will not work on weekends, so that's 2 days out of 7, roughly 24 in total.
Then there are religious holidays for the astronauts, not to mention national holidays for each nationality represented in the team. I reckon that's about 3 days a month, or roughly 9 days in total.
Then there's mandatory vacation time, about 25 days a year or roughly 8 days for the trip.
Assuming everybody is working really hard, coffee, cigarette and bathroom breaks will probably only add up to 3 days in total.
Of the remaining 45 days, one is preparation before the trip, one to really get going and one is basically wasted on the whole "arrival, get the luggage out and unpack it". Same thing on the Mars side. That's another 6 days.
This is the reason for the difference.
Coding a 3D engine does require quite a lot of mathematical and domain knowledge. Not only do you have to understand the mathematics behind things like geometry and vectors, but you also have to understand domain specific subjects like z-buffers and alpha channels.
I would recommend that you either aim for a 2D game (that's how I started myself, by doing a mine-sweeper clone for the ZX Spectrum while still in high-school) or get a pre-existing 3D engine (like one of the Unreal engines) to deal with the 3D rendering and building on top of it (which means looking at the procedural side of things - how objects/entities act/react/behave - and graphics).
Good luck!
An e-book doesn't look the same, doesn't smell the same and doesn't feel the same as a paper book.
It's the same reason why those that can afford it have fireplaces at home: a good wood fire in a fireplace is a pleasure to one's senses.
E-books are likely to sooner or latter dominate the utility space of literature (reference manuals, newspapers, magazines) provided they're cheaper than what they replace (which isn't happening at the moment). This is the same space where the Internet has already significantly displaced paper-books (hands up anybody that still uses paper encyclopedias...) so we might bypass the e-book stage altogether.
What is more doubtful is if they will ever replace paper books in the pleasure space of literature (those books you read for the pleasure of it while lying in our sofa with a nice cappuccino, put down in your bookshelf when you're done and pull out a year or two later to read again) much less the home decoration space of literature (hardcover books with fancy covers for looking pretty in a bookshelf).
Half of mankind is below average intelligence ... and the average ain't that great either.
In the first case they don't have your money yet.
In the second case they already have your money.
This sudden transition from star to looser for the customer happens less frequently in most places in Western Europe because stronger consumer laws mean that as a consumer you can much more easily claw back your money without spending a penny in lawyers.
Where do you get your information about what us in Europe think about our health care systems?
I live in Europe and have lived in (and still have friends in) 3 countries and you can be pretty damn sure nobody wants universal coverage to be dropped or have the health care system fully privatized like in the US.
As a mater of fact, of late there has been a backslash against the moves some governments were making towards more privatization of health care after it became clear just how much of a fuck-up the US system was (highest expenditure per-head for worse results than most other rich nations) and just how risky it is for the private sector to manage anything important (just recently, we all saw just how well the banking sector works).
In the UK (where I live now), people will bitch and moan about the low value-for-money of our health care system (just like in most other countries I lived in before: people always want more for less). This does not mean that anybody around here wants the NHS to be privatized (except maybe for one or two of obscure politicians who are trying to climb to fame by giving interviews to Fox telling they're audience what they want to hear - those guys are seen as a bit of a joke around here) - all the arguments I heard go around how the government need to improve and do a better job with nary a hint that anybody thinks that the private sector should replace the government.
I'm afraid that on this side of the pond, the political ideology that says that "Any Government Is Bad" simply does not exist.
One of the most essential reason why organized forms of government evolved is the need manage shared resources so as to avoid situations of Tragedy of the Commons.
These can be something as simple as allocating grazing rights in communal grazing land to something as complex determining when does one person's need to say what they think outweighs the need of another person to have some silence.
Another reason why organized forms of government evolved was to minimized internal conflict within "the tribe". To put it simply, tribes were people went around killing each other due to small disagreements didn't last long.
Any form of government you can think of which has actually been tried in reality and managed to form a society that didn't in short order collapsed on it's own or due to external forces has fulfilled these two needs (the only societal form that does not does this is Anarchy, which is unstable and quickly transforms into Warlordism). Just look around: everything from Fascism to Communism to Capitalism to Socialism share the features of managing shared resources and trying to minimize internal conflict - what distinguishes them is the way by which they go around determining who is entitled to what (which is where, in some societies, concepts as "rights" pop-up).
All this to say that:
- There will always be people that think (rightly or wrongly) that they deserve more than what they got and use arguments like saying that "Government forces some citizens to provide for others" because they would rather be the ones choosing what their "fair share" is.
[Seeing how everybody choosing their own "fair share" would end in tragedy of the commons situations and/or widespread internal conflict is an exercise left to the reader]
Everything is outside British soil.
The argument used by the court to claim jurisdiction over this is that said comment can be viewed by a person in the UK.
Any website can be viewed from any physical location in the world via the Internet, so the court is basically claiming jurisdiction over any potentially libelous comments posted on the Internet anywhere in the world.
If you add into the mix things like extradition agreements (with the UK) and some of the tools created after 9/11 to freeze bank accounts anywhere in the world, the implications are staggering ...
If EA came up with an MMO, could you really trust them not to make it Pay-to-Play and:
If my previous experience with Online PvP gaming using EA products (Battlefield series on the PC) is any indication of their behavior, I expect them to release the game buggy (yet strangely with great reviews from certain well-known gaming websites), have a 6 month period with a couple of bug-fixes while they "hook as many players as they can into the game" and then proceed to do all the "returns enhancing" ideas listed above.
Nah, oranges and apples here: the gaming is much more tightly regulated.
Actually it's entrepreneurs that create jobs.
When they don't grow their business, business owners don't create jobs. At most they keep jobs since that keeps their business running (and often they destroy jobs when it's possible to replace the people with machines).
The actual state of "owning a business" does nothing to improve society or increase employment. Growing a business (preferably from the ground-up) is what makes a difference.
One needs to distinguish between those whose wealth is the product of their own efforts (typical example: Bill Gates) and those who inherited their wealth and made no effort to expand it (typical example: Paris Hilton).
That said even entrepreneurs do not deserve our gratitude - they did it for themselves, just like we would do in their shoes. Some of them even deserve our contempt, such as those that got rich during the dot.com boom by creating companies with no business plan, selling them (to the suckers, which included plenty of pension funds and old ladies) for millions/billions after which said companies dully went bankrupt, often without having made a day of profit during their existence.
I postulate that of the "contempt for wealth" that you sometimes observe here in /. comes from the observation that far too many individuals have gotten their wealth "as a gift" (inherited) or by deceit (no-future dot.com companies, CEOs getting fat bonuses for achieving targets of "not loosing too much money").
There comes a point in one's career as a Software Engineer when just doing code is not challenging anymore (no mater how big the application is). At that point, there really aren't any interesting things you can do on your own at home as a hobby.
To appropriate your metaphor, replace a ski instructor with somebody that actually designs ski pistes - how exactly can they do something like it as a hobby outside work?