I think the main problem is that while it's unlikely you'll be struck by, much less killed by lightning, if you're in the pool and lightning strikes within 200 ft or so (ballpark figure), well, you've got a bunch of people in the pool. Stick a fork in the toaster to get the bagel out, you're in for a shock, drop the toaster into the bathtub and you're done. The current for the lightning comes from the ground and goes to the sky, so if the pool is in the vicinity, there's a good chance of shocking/electrocuting a lot of people, particularly children, which is bad PR. The shock might be enough to trigger an epileptic seizure, or knock out someone's pacemaker, or give an elderly fatty a heart attack, any of those causing the person to drown. The kids who get run over in the street leaving the pool, well that's probably for the best, they won't pass on the bad parenting skills they learned from their parents. The rest of us survive to adulthood playing in the street, keeping an eye out for traffic with zero problems.
I thought the reason why they shot these things off from an island in a sparsely populated area, over the ocean, far away from major shipping channels, was in case it glitches an explodes near the ground after flight, nobody (besides the astronauts) would be near it. It's not like Orlando is a particularly large city (famous because of Disney world, yes, large... no). Detonating a giant fucking space bomb over the ocean to "save lives" seems a bit silly. It's not like they're launching it in downtown Pittsburgh with a flight path over Manhattan.
wikipedia: A trademark is a distinctive sign (phrase) or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities.
I'll go with "phrase" here. The vader breathing noise is a pretty distinguishable noise, more or less instantly recognizable by most people, and people who've never even seen starwars. A couple of Star-Wars commercials immediately come to mind that are prefaced by the noise. I'm sure if you go look on the side of a "vader noise toy" box, somewhere on the box it says the noise is trademarked. The seeming lack of 3rd party, unlicensed "vader noise toys" would seem to confirm this. If UPS can register the color brown as a trademark, I'm pretty sure Lucas can trademark the "vader noise".
Using southpark as an example in any simile involving quality is going to end up being about as accurate as a car analogy unfortunately. It's like someone said "let's try and make a cartoon that we can compress down to less than 20mb per episode and not lose any quality" (search "psp southpark" or "video ipod southpark" all the eps are like 56k sound and 400x300px video but it all scales beautifully at h.264 due to how simple everything is. Cartman and the gang sound just as awful and earsplitting at 56kpbs as they do at 320kbps:)
I think the Darth Vader breath sound effect could be trademarked, but Lucas hasn't defended their trademark for over 30 years so it's pretty much become a genericized trademark.
At this point it's still cheaper to pay high quality voice actors than it is to replace them with software. We have the technology (heck we have software now that can decompile individual strings on a guitar (inside a chord, no less), voices and other instruments and retune the individual notes, remove, add or modify guitar riffs, choruses, bridges etc - google Melodyne or "direct note access" or just watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFCjv4_jqAY), we just need a person and time to write the program. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be convincing. Eventually it'll be cheaper to use software like that than it is to pay real voice actors - eventually 3rd rate cartoon shows will use/buy voice/vocabulary libraries for entirely new series, just the same way sitcoms have been using the Red Skeleton Laugh tracks for decades.
They have what, 100+ hours of speech recorded for Futurama, presumably the original masters as well? Probably 1,000 hours of speech for each character on The Simpsons on masters. Not to mention accurate closed captioning for the voicings. How hard would it be to write an algorithm to cut and paste the correct words (picking the correct word inflection based on word placement in the sentence/context - presumably there are angry, happy, elated, monotone versions of most words, and the sound files can be edited to convincingly make them sound in context) together? Sure, you'd have to hand-synthesize the occasional odd word or celebrity-head-in-a-jar's name, but we're probably not very far off from being able to fire the voice actors after the third season of a dialog-driven cartoon.
Considering the lack of moon-based science we've done since the 70's, that number doesn't really surprise me. I grew up in the 80's, and when I found out as a kid that we'd not just sent one group of men to the moon, but several, I got excited wanting to know how I could go visit the moon myself. I was crushed, upon learning that less than 30 people had ever been to the moon, and nobody ever planned to go back again. It's been almost 20 years since I learned the awful truth, and nobody still yet has a firm launch date for sending a manned orbiter to the moon, let alone an idea of what it would look like. If you're under 30 - the idea of putting a man on the moon sounds damn cool - but it might as well be Arthurian Legend or a story out of an H.G. Wells book written long before you were born. I think people under 30 are highly supportive of putting a man on the moon, and a man on the mars (seriously, what government agency do I write a check to?) but they're skeptical of it ever happening in our lifetime.
As this story grows, I can see e-bay piling up with Kindles.
Hard to sell items deemed to have no value. I guess you could still use it as a PDF viewer, but who's to say Amazon will decide that's against your EULA at some later point and do daily wipes of your PDF folder? I guess you could manually disable the antenna with some wire cutters, or convert it into a Very Expensive SD Reader. I have to say I'm pretty disappointed in this turn of events.
I was looking (rather seriously looking) at using my bonus to get one of these (to read the newspaper, mostly) but my wallet is staying shut until Amazon resolves this in an appropriate manner. Not in moral opposition to what they did to others, but because the idea that Amazon can selectively delete stuff off MY $500 device without my permission just infuriates me to no end.
Considering how porous our borders are (not that porous borders in America are a bad thing) it wouldn't be terribly difficult for Iran's government to to kidnap Twitter employees on their way home from work and put them on a private jet back to Iran. There wouldn't be any record of him leaving the country (I doubt Iran's customs records are open for review by the international community and we don't track people leaving the country on Private Jets) and there wouldn't be any US response since it would likely be a secret, Bush Style "military tribunal" far away from the public view. People might become concerned though, when half of Twitter's employees don't show up for work the following monday... everyone put on your tinfoil hats!
Are you running a recent version of your steam client? I'm trying to figure out how to enable the "start steam at boot" feature. Its probably under "options". If you play online multiplayer games (particulalry the same 5-10 servers) you will probably find its more useful to leave it on than try and turn it off. Its replaced AIM and gchat as my primary IM client for me and my gaming buddies - being able to join their server/game right from the chat window is invaluable IMO
potentially exposing individual employees to a variety of criminal sanctions
Meaning if you were a Twitter employee, you could be sued or sentenced to a prison term by Iranian officials? I doubt the US would honor an extradition request from a country it's cut off political ties with, but Pakistan or North Korea might.
Take a look at what "Association" the Obama administration keeps pulling people from to fill top posts. Plus the Obama administration said they were going to try and include more republicans anyways.
Yeah, you can. The game is lag compensated so even if your ping is 130 you're still competitive. I've seen people play spy on laggy computers with a terrible connection and still get kills. They weren't at the top of the scoreboard, but we were all having fun (it's hard to not have fun playing TF2)
I browse the Steam weekend deals. Usually once a month there's something worth buying for $10-$20 and I never have to worry about losing the disc (Half-Life 1 + Blue Shift - where hath you gone?) as long as the Steam servers don't roll over one day.
No one in their right mind would want to run a chain, unless they are actually in the business of that and have high efficiencies in that area. I would hazard to say that even investing in such an operation would be a bad idea compared to the relatively high margins you get (minus piracy and used sales) by simply being a game developer.
That's why you would contract someone who already has experience in the field, like gamestop to manage the chain for you. Which is exactly what I said in the GP.
Creating their own chain of stores allows them to legitimately resell their (and other publisher's) games, giving them a fair, competitive chance at that share of revenue, without resorting to bribing legislators into introducing new laws that might infringe on first sale doctrine.
There's nothing stopping major game publishers from creating their own chain of used game stores, and contracting (or just buy a majority share in) gamestop to manage them for the publishers. This seems like a pretty easy fix.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm having a visual from those nature documentaries, where the walruses all flop onto the rocks out of the water.
I think the main problem is that while it's unlikely you'll be struck by, much less killed by lightning, if you're in the pool and lightning strikes within 200 ft or so (ballpark figure), well, you've got a bunch of people in the pool. Stick a fork in the toaster to get the bagel out, you're in for a shock, drop the toaster into the bathtub and you're done. The current for the lightning comes from the ground and goes to the sky, so if the pool is in the vicinity, there's a good chance of shocking/electrocuting a lot of people, particularly children, which is bad PR. The shock might be enough to trigger an epileptic seizure, or knock out someone's pacemaker, or give an elderly fatty a heart attack, any of those causing the person to drown. The kids who get run over in the street leaving the pool, well that's probably for the best, they won't pass on the bad parenting skills they learned from their parents. The rest of us survive to adulthood playing in the street, keeping an eye out for traffic with zero problems.
I will enjoy my Double Trim Grande Latte while chomping on my Big Mac and Freedom Fries.
I thought the reason why they shot these things off from an island in a sparsely populated area, over the ocean, far away from major shipping channels, was in case it glitches an explodes near the ground after flight, nobody (besides the astronauts) would be near it. It's not like Orlando is a particularly large city (famous because of Disney world, yes, large... no). Detonating a giant fucking space bomb over the ocean to "save lives" seems a bit silly. It's not like they're launching it in downtown Pittsburgh with a flight path over Manhattan.
wikipedia: A trademark is a distinctive sign (phrase) or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities.
I'll go with "phrase" here. The vader breathing noise is a pretty distinguishable noise, more or less instantly recognizable by most people, and people who've never even seen starwars. A couple of Star-Wars commercials immediately come to mind that are prefaced by the noise. I'm sure if you go look on the side of a "vader noise toy" box, somewhere on the box it says the noise is trademarked. The seeming lack of 3rd party, unlicensed "vader noise toys" would seem to confirm this. If UPS can register the color brown as a trademark, I'm pretty sure Lucas can trademark the "vader noise".
What season/episode now I'm curious
Using southpark as an example in any simile involving quality is going to end up being about as accurate as a car analogy unfortunately. It's like someone said "let's try and make a cartoon that we can compress down to less than 20mb per episode and not lose any quality" (search "psp southpark" or "video ipod southpark" all the eps are like 56k sound and 400x300px video but it all scales beautifully at h.264 due to how simple everything is. Cartman and the gang sound just as awful and earsplitting at 56kpbs as they do at 320kbps :)
I think the Darth Vader breath sound effect could be trademarked, but Lucas hasn't defended their trademark for over 30 years so it's pretty much become a genericized trademark.
At this point it's still cheaper to pay high quality voice actors than it is to replace them with software. We have the technology (heck we have software now that can decompile individual strings on a guitar (inside a chord, no less), voices and other instruments and retune the individual notes, remove, add or modify guitar riffs, choruses, bridges etc - google Melodyne or "direct note access" or just watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFCjv4_jqAY), we just need a person and time to write the program. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be convincing. Eventually it'll be cheaper to use software like that than it is to pay real voice actors - eventually 3rd rate cartoon shows will use/buy voice/vocabulary libraries for entirely new series, just the same way sitcoms have been using the Red Skeleton Laugh tracks for decades.
Protip: Only buy/play games with high replay value.
They have what, 100+ hours of speech recorded for Futurama, presumably the original masters as well? Probably 1,000 hours of speech for each character on The Simpsons on masters. Not to mention accurate closed captioning for the voicings. How hard would it be to write an algorithm to cut and paste the correct words (picking the correct word inflection based on word placement in the sentence/context - presumably there are angry, happy, elated, monotone versions of most words, and the sound files can be edited to convincingly make them sound in context) together? Sure, you'd have to hand-synthesize the occasional odd word or celebrity-head-in-a-jar's name, but we're probably not very far off from being able to fire the voice actors after the third season of a dialog-driven cartoon.
Considering the lack of moon-based science we've done since the 70's, that number doesn't really surprise me. I grew up in the 80's, and when I found out as a kid that we'd not just sent one group of men to the moon, but several, I got excited wanting to know how I could go visit the moon myself. I was crushed, upon learning that less than 30 people had ever been to the moon, and nobody ever planned to go back again. It's been almost 20 years since I learned the awful truth, and nobody still yet has a firm launch date for sending a manned orbiter to the moon, let alone an idea of what it would look like. If you're under 30 - the idea of putting a man on the moon sounds damn cool - but it might as well be Arthurian Legend or a story out of an H.G. Wells book written long before you were born. I think people under 30 are highly supportive of putting a man on the moon, and a man on the mars (seriously, what government agency do I write a check to?) but they're skeptical of it ever happening in our lifetime.
Hard to sell items deemed to have no value. I guess you could still use it as a PDF viewer, but who's to say Amazon will decide that's against your EULA at some later point and do daily wipes of your PDF folder? I guess you could manually disable the antenna with some wire cutters, or convert it into a Very Expensive SD Reader. I have to say I'm pretty disappointed in this turn of events.
I was looking (rather seriously looking) at using my bonus to get one of these (to read the newspaper, mostly) but my wallet is staying shut until Amazon resolves this in an appropriate manner. Not in moral opposition to what they did to others, but because the idea that Amazon can selectively delete stuff off MY $500 device without my permission just infuriates me to no end.
[citation needed]
Considering how porous our borders are (not that porous borders in America are a bad thing) it wouldn't be terribly difficult for Iran's government to to kidnap Twitter employees on their way home from work and put them on a private jet back to Iran. There wouldn't be any record of him leaving the country (I doubt Iran's customs records are open for review by the international community and we don't track people leaving the country on Private Jets) and there wouldn't be any US response since it would likely be a secret, Bush Style "military tribunal" far away from the public view. People might become concerned though, when half of Twitter's employees don't show up for work the following monday... everyone put on your tinfoil hats!
Are you running a recent version of your steam client? I'm trying to figure out how to enable the "start steam at boot" feature. Its probably under "options". If you play online multiplayer games (particulalry the same 5-10 servers) you will probably find its more useful to leave it on than try and turn it off. Its replaced AIM and gchat as my primary IM client for me and my gaming buddies - being able to join their server/game right from the chat window is invaluable IMO
Meaning if you were a Twitter employee, you could be sued or sentenced to a prison term by Iranian officials? I doubt the US would honor an extradition request from a country it's cut off political ties with, but Pakistan or North Korea might.
Yeah there's even a noticable difference between 50 and 130, but you can play pyro, soldier or heavy with little "ping handicap".
Take a look at what "Association" the Obama administration keeps pulling people from to fill top posts. Plus the Obama administration said they were going to try and include more republicans anyways.
Neat! Thanks for the heads up! I'll give it a shot
Yeah, you can. The game is lag compensated so even if your ping is 130 you're still competitive. I've seen people play spy on laggy computers with a terrible connection and still get kills. They weren't at the top of the scoreboard, but we were all having fun (it's hard to not have fun playing TF2)
I browse the Steam weekend deals. Usually once a month there's something worth buying for $10-$20 and I never have to worry about losing the disc (Half-Life 1 + Blue Shift - where hath you gone?) as long as the Steam servers don't roll over one day.
That's why you would contract someone who already has experience in the field, like gamestop to manage the chain for you. Which is exactly what I said in the GP.
Creating their own chain of stores allows them to legitimately resell their (and other publisher's) games, giving them a fair, competitive chance at that share of revenue, without resorting to bribing legislators into introducing new laws that might infringe on first sale doctrine.
There's nothing stopping major game publishers from creating their own chain of used game stores, and contracting (or just buy a majority share in) gamestop to manage them for the publishers. This seems like a pretty easy fix.
I know if I leave google maps on in the background on my blackberry, the batter life is pretty much cut in half. I notice that pretty quickly.