There has never been a console that was that far ahead of its competition at the time. It's the lightsaber of consoles, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
My impression of de Toro's movies is that he rides on the coattails of his director of photography, special effects, art, etc. Visually appealing, but how much of that is because of him?
Actually I believe MIT has a nuclear reactor on site. And fine, whatever the top French engineering school is. The point still stands, this isn't the 15th century anymore, where scientists and engineers in one country keep developments secret.
Cute. We don't want your military. Really. We don't.
You sure wanted it during WW2 and the cold war. And if you don't want it now, please, vote in a government that asks the US to leave; otherwise you DO want it.
Some time ago I was having a conversation with some people about whether extrajudicial killing can ever be justified, and Nathan Myhrvold was the one person who we agreed there was really no good argument against it.
Really? Because someone is doing something you find immoral/unethical? Stealing is wrong, do you condone extrajudicial killing for thieves?
Economics, not intellect, has now convinced Americans to join the nuclear-power club. Unfortunately, for the Americans, since they deserted nuclear power for 30+ years, the most advanced nuclear-power plants are designed by French and Japanese engineers.
Are you joking? Taking for argument's sake that the technology on advanced nuclear-power plants is somehow kept hidden by the French and Japanese (which is patently false), there are several US companies, such as GE, who are working on the next generation of nuclear power plants.
France and Japan will profit immensely when their companies build plants in the USA for the science-challenged Americans.
Riiiiiiight. You think someone with a PhD in nuclear engineering from MIT is going to be somehow less qualified than someone with one from the Sorbonne or Tokyo University? First of all, the comparative "science" scores of high school students is worthless. When you correct for the fact that the US does not generally shuttle lower-performing students into vocational schools (and the fact that Japan has been known to provide incorrect data in order to bolster their country's reputation), you'll find the US really doesn't do too badly. Even without correcting, you'll find that the US tends to fall squarely within the range of first world countries (and higher than several European ones) on the more reputable of these tests.
That doesn't sound right. That sounds like a local train service not an intercity one.
Actually you're right, I just checked and it's actually LONGER from NYC to Tampa.
St Pancras (London) to Marseille is reported as 6h15 mins including crossing Paris. I'm not sure of the exact distance but it's getting on for 1000 miles (probably nearer 800). I've never actually done this journey although I have done Waterloo - Nimes and it's infinitely preferable to taking a plane.
Ahhh, you're European. We don't have trains as fast, for many reasons. One is European countries are smaller, so it's less expensive to lay all that track. A corollary of that is there's less public insistence on high-speed trains. And of course, it probably does help your transportation infrastructure budget when the U.S. taxpayers subsidize your defense spending, but I digress.
According to the geobytes web page (not swearing to its accuracy), it is exactly 623 miles. Extrapolating that, it would take your London-Marseille train 10 hours to go 1000 miles.
And most of the times I've gone from London to the continent I've used trains exclusively, but mostly because some cretin decided to put Heathrow and Luton too far from London to get back and forth easily.
There the Acela times are comparable to flying if you factor in the time needed to get to the airport / station, get through security, wait for boarding, get a cab, and get to where you're going.
True, especially now that Amtrak has lowered its Acela prices to amounts that only border on insanity rather than fall squarely over the crazytown border. But for long distance, air travel in the US tends to be far cheaper, faster, and easier.
Most people I've seen who learned to touch type 'by themselves' are just fast hunt-and-peck typists who've memorised the key locations. Sure, they'll do OK at first, but they'll struggle to get above 40wpm.
I taught myself to type, and I type at 100 wpm. I use all my fingers, just not in the ridiculously formal way touch typing is taught.
They have these crazy things in Europe called "trains" that connect city centres without having to hang around in an unfashionable suburb for a few hours waiting to be put into a metal tube. You don't even have to take your shoes off to get on them.
Silly Europeans always have such a skewed sense of geography. Newark to Tampa is 1,000 miles, exactly. It's a two and a half hour flight and a 20 hour train ride.
The length of compulsory government education for children has steadily increased since it began as it was always the intention of the creators and maintainers of it to remove the task of raising children from parents to the child rearing "experts" (aka themselves).
To be fair, when compulsory education was first starting to be implemented, a large percentage of the population were in no condition to teach their kids much of anything. Furthermore, if you weren't white in the 19th century the chances of you being able to read were very slim. Compulsory education wasn't aimed at the educated classes; they already had educational institutions in effect. It was aimed at the working classes, and honestly in terms of social good I think it was far more helpful than harmful; I am sure there were millions of children who were spared 16 hour working days because they had to go to school.
BTW curious tidbit just crossed my mind: instead of teaching touch typing, Croatian schools recently reintroduced calligraphy. Instead of learning normal cursive script (joined-up writing), first-graders are taught old-style calligraphy. The fact that practically no-one uses a pen these days seems to have escaped the 19th century educators.
Bloody morons.
That sounds like a great idea. Seriously. The children will learn to focus on what they're doing, and I'm fairly sure 11 months of calligraphy and 1 month of cursive will produce better cursive writing than 12 months of cursive.
I don't own a gun and I'm willing to bet that I could take you out just fine on my own with no weapons. However, a show of force to get the message out how many people are sick of incompetent cowards like you might get others of your kind to leave people alone and quit crying about everything.
Haha, you are such a caricature of the typical breathless internet libertarian that it makes me laugh.
I've probably spent more time in some of the worst neighborhoods in major cities than you have, and I never felt worried (hell, I laughed at my friends who were scared going through there) because I know that I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself.
Bzzzt, sorry, grew up in NYC in the 80's during the crack epidemic and have spent plenty of time in real rough neighborhoods, and not as a tourist like you.
Not that long ago (50 years, tops) no one freaked out if you had a gun.
50 years ago people didn't just carry around guns because they could, they carried them for a purpose. They tended not to carry them openly through cities.
People fear what they do not understand - to them a gun is a scary magical thing that can kill you even if no one is holding it (kind of like how the moronic masses think that there's a magic key on the keyboard that will delete every file on your computer if you hit it while in a word processor). You do not have experience with guns and as such, they are foreign to you and you fear them. I suggest you take a class or go to a firing range and get over your phobia.
Wrong again, my young simpleton, I guarantee that I have been using firearms longer than you've been born. I just have the common sense to use them in somewhat rural areas, or at a firing range.
and if I saw you call the police just because someone was calmly walking around carrying a weapon in broad daylight (a pretty big tip off that they're not going to kill anyone),
Don't be absurd, did you even look at the picture of the gun? There's no reason to carry what looks like a sniper rifle out in public.
I might organized a lynch mob to take care of you and protect society from your kind in the future.
Awww, little guy needs a mob to back him up? Even with all his swords and guns? It's the people who feel they need to carry weapons who are the cowards. I don't carry a gun because I can handle myself without one.
Just because you're terrified of anything that moves
See above. The fact that you threaten me over the internet, and even then admit you need a "mob" to help you, tells me all I need to know about you. Some pasty, white, suburban, middle class kid who probably crosses over to the other side of the street when he sees someone who he thinks is scary.
I moved a couple months ago
To some gated community no doubt.
and was worried some idiot like you would call the cops of me because they saw me carrying my swords into the new place
If you're so profoundly stupid to equate carrying something that looks like a sniper rifle through town with carrying swords into a private home, then there's no hope for you.
The media has been stigmatizing and programming the public for decades. Sounds like its working rather well.
Right, because if someone doesn't have the same beliefs you do, they must have been "programmed." If I saw someone carrying around that thing in public, I might alert the police too.
That's funny. When we allow (no, REQUIRE) applications to go through "multiple layers" to reach fixed storage, we praise various filesystems and the VFS mechanism. By your logic, the operating system should do as little as possible to carve out sections of raw disk for applications to use and get out of the way. That's ridiculous.
Apples and oranges. Visual presentation and storage access are completely different things, with different requirements. And your analogy doesn't make sense, it should apply to you, not me; you're saying it's GOOD that X does as little as possible then gets out of the way.
Err, maybe it is the fault of the entire desktop stack? Nice way to casually dismiss a good point. X11 itself is not the reason behind the bug you're complaining about in your favorite desktop environment.
So everybody but the core X11/X.org developers is incompetent? Occam's razor, my friend; it is far more likely that something is fundamentally wrong on the X side.
X11 has nothing to do with how "easy to use" an application is, for example.
Sure it does, if X11 created a limited set of of ways on how to present information, the individual applications would be easier to use because you'd be able to carry knowledge over to new programs.
Finally, they incur the wrath of apple fanboys everywhere now determined to track them down: "Did you see how they handled those MacBooks! They might even have scratched the case!!!"
What are the fanboys going to do? Throw their frappuccinos at them? Picture a bunch of apple fanboys trying to intimidate you. You just giggled out loud, right? I mean, we're not exactly talking offensive linemen here...
You're honestly claiming that X couldn't be replaced by something significantly smaller, faster, and less-bloated? That the server-client paradigm makes sense for a software package where 99.9% of the users are running the client and the server on the same computer? That there hasn't been a meaningful advance in fundamental graphical interface programming in the TWENTY TWO YEARS since the X11 protocol was instituted? That a system that allows (no, REQUIRES) multiple layers to add functionality is automatically superior (because of its "freedom") than one that handles some higher level stuff itself at the cost of mild restrictions on developers? Then why was BeOS so much faster and responsive than the X at the time?
When I first started using X in '94 I was impressed by its speed and power, especially as compared to the Windows of the time (3.1). Fifteen years later it doesn't seem that much faster, even though I now run it on a computer exponentially faster and with greater memory.
Yes, you can blame KDE or Gnome or Adobe or even linux, but the fact remains that after tens of thousands of people developing for it, and millions of dollars invested in it, X is still a hell of a lot slower, harder to use, and buggy than it should be. If NOBODY can create an efficient, responsive GUI based on X, then maybe it's something wrong with X and not necessarily the tens of thousands of people who have been working on the desktop environments and apps and drivers? It doesn't matter how pure, beautiful and efficient the underlying code is, if nobody can figure out how to extend it then who cares?
Slashdot Mirror
There has never been a console that was that far ahead of its competition at the time. It's the lightsaber of consoles, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
My impression of de Toro's movies is that he rides on the coattails of his director of photography, special effects, art, etc. Visually appealing, but how much of that is because of him?
Should have held out for the full amount, and a nice juicy written judgment from the court detailing new line's apparent sketchiness.
Actually I believe MIT has a nuclear reactor on site. And fine, whatever the top French engineering school is. The point still stands, this isn't the 15th century anymore, where scientists and engineers in one country keep developments secret.
I was responding more to the snide "we have these things called 'trains' in Europe" rather than the specific situation he was applying it to.
Cute. We don't want your military. Really. We don't.
You sure wanted it during WW2 and the cold war. And if you don't want it now, please, vote in a government that asks the US to leave; otherwise you DO want it.
If it is a question between killing another human being, and losing all my stuff, I will go with the losing all my stuff.
Some time ago I was having a conversation with some people about whether extrajudicial killing can ever be justified, and Nathan Myhrvold was the one person who we agreed there was really no good argument against it.
Really? Because someone is doing something you find immoral/unethical? Stealing is wrong, do you condone extrajudicial killing for thieves?
Economics, not intellect, has now convinced Americans to join the nuclear-power club. Unfortunately, for the Americans, since they deserted nuclear power for 30+ years, the most advanced nuclear-power plants are designed by French and Japanese engineers.
Are you joking? Taking for argument's sake that the technology on advanced nuclear-power plants is somehow kept hidden by the French and Japanese (which is patently false), there are several US companies, such as GE, who are working on the next generation of nuclear power plants.
France and Japan will profit immensely when their companies build plants in the USA for the science-challenged Americans.
Riiiiiiight. You think someone with a PhD in nuclear engineering from MIT is going to be somehow less qualified than someone with one from the Sorbonne or Tokyo University? First of all, the comparative "science" scores of high school students is worthless. When you correct for the fact that the US does not generally shuttle lower-performing students into vocational schools (and the fact that Japan has been known to provide incorrect data in order to bolster their country's reputation), you'll find the US really doesn't do too badly. Even without correcting, you'll find that the US tends to fall squarely within the range of first world countries (and higher than several European ones) on the more reputable of these tests.
That doesn't sound right. That sounds like a local train service not an intercity one.
Actually you're right, I just checked and it's actually LONGER from NYC to Tampa.
St Pancras (London) to Marseille is reported as 6h15 mins including crossing Paris. I'm not sure of the exact distance but it's getting on for 1000 miles (probably nearer 800). I've never actually done this journey although I have done Waterloo - Nimes and it's infinitely preferable to taking a plane.
Ahhh, you're European. We don't have trains as fast, for many reasons. One is European countries are smaller, so it's less expensive to lay all that track. A corollary of that is there's less public insistence on high-speed trains. And of course, it probably does help your transportation infrastructure budget when the U.S. taxpayers subsidize your defense spending, but I digress.
According to the geobytes web page (not swearing to its accuracy), it is exactly 623 miles. Extrapolating that, it would take your London-Marseille train 10 hours to go 1000 miles.
And most of the times I've gone from London to the continent I've used trains exclusively, but mostly because some cretin decided to put Heathrow and Luton too far from London to get back and forth easily.
There the Acela times are comparable to flying if you factor in the time needed to get to the airport / station, get through security, wait for boarding, get a cab, and get to where you're going.
True, especially now that Amtrak has lowered its Acela prices to amounts that only border on insanity rather than fall squarely over the crazytown border. But for long distance, air travel in the US tends to be far cheaper, faster, and easier.
I don't type very fast, but I also don't really have anything too interesting to say.
Well you have certainly come to the right place.
Most people I've seen who learned to touch type 'by themselves' are just fast hunt-and-peck typists who've memorised the key locations. Sure, they'll do OK at first, but they'll struggle to get above 40wpm.
I taught myself to type, and I type at 100 wpm. I use all my fingers, just not in the ridiculously formal way touch typing is taught.
They have these crazy things in Europe called "trains" that connect city centres without having to hang around in an unfashionable suburb for a few hours waiting to be put into a metal tube. You don't even have to take your shoes off to get on them.
Silly Europeans always have such a skewed sense of geography. Newark to Tampa is 1,000 miles, exactly. It's a two and a half hour flight and a 20 hour train ride.
Why does the summary talk about "Precedent from the Jammie Thomas" when this case is in Mexico, while Jammie Thomas was in USA?
Because most slashdotters aren't very knowledgeable about the law.
You just know they'll find some way to weasel out of it...
Right, because a company as small and underfunded as Sony could never afford to spend a few million dollars for a problem to go away.
The length of compulsory government education for children has steadily increased since it began as it was always the intention of the creators and maintainers of it to remove the task of raising children from parents to the child rearing "experts" (aka themselves).
To be fair, when compulsory education was first starting to be implemented, a large percentage of the population were in no condition to teach their kids much of anything. Furthermore, if you weren't white in the 19th century the chances of you being able to read were very slim. Compulsory education wasn't aimed at the educated classes; they already had educational institutions in effect. It was aimed at the working classes, and honestly in terms of social good I think it was far more helpful than harmful; I am sure there were millions of children who were spared 16 hour working days because they had to go to school.
BTW curious tidbit just crossed my mind: instead of teaching touch typing, Croatian schools recently reintroduced calligraphy. Instead of learning normal cursive script (joined-up writing), first-graders are taught old-style calligraphy. The fact that practically no-one uses a pen these days seems to have escaped the 19th century educators. Bloody morons.
That sounds like a great idea. Seriously. The children will learn to focus on what they're doing, and I'm fairly sure 11 months of calligraphy and 1 month of cursive will produce better cursive writing than 12 months of cursive.
I don't own a gun and I'm willing to bet that I could take you out just fine on my own with no weapons. However, a show of force to get the message out how many people are sick of incompetent cowards like you might get others of your kind to leave people alone and quit crying about everything.
Haha, you are such a caricature of the typical breathless internet libertarian that it makes me laugh.
I've probably spent more time in some of the worst neighborhoods in major cities than you have, and I never felt worried (hell, I laughed at my friends who were scared going through there) because I know that I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself.
Bzzzt, sorry, grew up in NYC in the 80's during the crack epidemic and have spent plenty of time in real rough neighborhoods, and not as a tourist like you.
Not that long ago (50 years, tops) no one freaked out if you had a gun.
50 years ago people didn't just carry around guns because they could, they carried them for a purpose. They tended not to carry them openly through cities.
People fear what they do not understand - to them a gun is a scary magical thing that can kill you even if no one is holding it (kind of like how the moronic masses think that there's a magic key on the keyboard that will delete every file on your computer if you hit it while in a word processor). You do not have experience with guns and as such, they are foreign to you and you fear them. I suggest you take a class or go to a firing range and get over your phobia.
Wrong again, my young simpleton, I guarantee that I have been using firearms longer than you've been born. I just have the common sense to use them in somewhat rural areas, or at a firing range.
The basic fantasy world was so derivative of Tolkien
Nah, it was derivative of Dune.
and if I saw you call the police just because someone was calmly walking around carrying a weapon in broad daylight (a pretty big tip off that they're not going to kill anyone),
Don't be absurd, did you even look at the picture of the gun? There's no reason to carry what looks like a sniper rifle out in public.
I might organized a lynch mob to take care of you and protect society from your kind in the future.
Awww, little guy needs a mob to back him up? Even with all his swords and guns? It's the people who feel they need to carry weapons who are the cowards. I don't carry a gun because I can handle myself without one.
Just because you're terrified of anything that moves
See above. The fact that you threaten me over the internet, and even then admit you need a "mob" to help you, tells me all I need to know about you. Some pasty, white, suburban, middle class kid who probably crosses over to the other side of the street when he sees someone who he thinks is scary.
I moved a couple months ago
To some gated community no doubt.
and was worried some idiot like you would call the cops of me because they saw me carrying my swords into the new place
If you're so profoundly stupid to equate carrying something that looks like a sniper rifle through town with carrying swords into a private home, then there's no hope for you.
The media has been stigmatizing and programming the public for decades. Sounds like its working rather well.
Right, because if someone doesn't have the same beliefs you do, they must have been "programmed." If I saw someone carrying around that thing in public, I might alert the police too.
That's funny. When we allow (no, REQUIRE) applications to go through "multiple layers" to reach fixed storage, we praise various filesystems and the VFS mechanism. By your logic, the operating system should do as little as possible to carve out sections of raw disk for applications to use and get out of the way. That's ridiculous.
Apples and oranges. Visual presentation and storage access are completely different things, with different requirements. And your analogy doesn't make sense, it should apply to you, not me; you're saying it's GOOD that X does as little as possible then gets out of the way.
Err, maybe it is the fault of the entire desktop stack? Nice way to casually dismiss a good point. X11 itself is not the reason behind the bug you're complaining about in your favorite desktop environment.
So everybody but the core X11/X.org developers is incompetent? Occam's razor, my friend; it is far more likely that something is fundamentally wrong on the X side.
X11 has nothing to do with how "easy to use" an application is, for example.
Sure it does, if X11 created a limited set of of ways on how to present information, the individual applications would be easier to use because you'd be able to carry knowledge over to new programs.
Finally, they incur the wrath of apple fanboys everywhere now determined to track them down: "Did you see how they handled those MacBooks! They might even have scratched the case!!!"
What are the fanboys going to do? Throw their frappuccinos at them? Picture a bunch of apple fanboys trying to intimidate you. You just giggled out loud, right? I mean, we're not exactly talking offensive linemen here...
You're honestly claiming that X couldn't be replaced by something significantly smaller, faster, and less-bloated? That the server-client paradigm makes sense for a software package where 99.9% of the users are running the client and the server on the same computer? That there hasn't been a meaningful advance in fundamental graphical interface programming in the TWENTY TWO YEARS since the X11 protocol was instituted? That a system that allows (no, REQUIRES) multiple layers to add functionality is automatically superior (because of its "freedom") than one that handles some higher level stuff itself at the cost of mild restrictions on developers? Then why was BeOS so much faster and responsive than the X at the time?
When I first started using X in '94 I was impressed by its speed and power, especially as compared to the Windows of the time (3.1). Fifteen years later it doesn't seem that much faster, even though I now run it on a computer exponentially faster and with greater memory.
Yes, you can blame KDE or Gnome or Adobe or even linux, but the fact remains that after tens of thousands of people developing for it, and millions of dollars invested in it, X is still a hell of a lot slower, harder to use, and buggy than it should be. If NOBODY can create an efficient, responsive GUI based on X, then maybe it's something wrong with X and not necessarily the tens of thousands of people who have been working on the desktop environments and apps and drivers? It doesn't matter how pure, beautiful and efficient the underlying code is, if nobody can figure out how to extend it then who cares?