TFA *guesses* that. They don't have any proof. Thankfully, more reliable sources actually do look into these things. Check out this site for actual crash test results:
If you want to come up with a way for astronauts to cross 2000 km of rugged desert & dust plains & mountain ranges & ravines in a radioactive vacuum while wearing bulky space suits, carrying with them enough food, water and air for the return journey, plus scientific equipment, and make it reliable enough that it's guaranteed not to break down in the middle of aforementioned terrain without any hope of rescue, and you find a way of making this fantastic machine light enough to carry with you on an interplanetary journey without compromising the rest of the payload- please give NASA a ring. Their number is probably on their website.
The media is more to blame for that than the scientists.
It's great fun publishing a half-page story with sci-fi pictures and the headline "Earth-planet found in alien solar system!", but no newspaper wants to publish "Earth-planet turns out to be radio noise"- it's just not that interesting.
Unfortunately, this seems to hold true for daily newspapers and tech news sites alike.
And Apple sells iPhones with iTunes & Safari pre-installed, and Microsoft sell Windows phones with Bing search tools and probably some mobile form of IE. What's your point?
On an Android phone, I can install many different browsers (as many as anyone could care to programme). I can use Bing on it, and if Apple wanted to release an iTunes product (I don't know if they have), I'd be able to use that too.
What we're talking about here is Google funding their software with a non-standard funding model (that is, using mobile advertising revenue rather than point-of-sale prices). There's nothing stopping the others companies doing the same (not least Apple, who we're told time and time again by their fans that they're slaughtering the competition in terms of market share, or Nokia, who were number one in market share for a very long time). They're all just complaining that their business model is being trumped by someone else's business model, and they want the law of the land to fix it for them- which is not what the law of the land is for.
The only risk ever was from the obstruction tactics of the tea party - and even if they kept it up, it would not have lead to a default in the strict sense.
Yes, it would. In the "strict sense" a default is when a country (/company/etc.) doesn't make it's debt repayment obligations. If US politicians decided that they didn't want to pay their debts any more (which is basically what would have happened if Congress had dug their heels in any longer), the US would have defaulted.
It's just that "default" on its own doesn't mean anything. What matters is whether investors feel they'll have their loans paid back; even if the US had defaulted in the short term (i.e., hadn't come up with a debt ceiling deal for another week), most investors would probably have kept their cool (as you point out, the US economy is amply strong enough to repay its loans, so there's no economic reason for them to panic). However, if investors feel the disruptions were going to carry on in the long term, they'd probably start to get edgy about just how reliable the loan repayments were going to be.
In other words, the US' credit rating is fine as long as this was a one off. If Congress insist on making a habit of playing this game every 6-12 months for as long as both parties have a veto (not uncommon), investors are going to start moving to greener pastures.
All any economic activity is is exchanging money for things we need.
If I buy a car, it's because I need a car. I hand lots of money over, and lots of people are paid to make the car happen- mine the materials, process the materials, design the car, assemble the materials, test the product, transport it to me, etc. The long and short of it is that I hand over money and people do stuff to make what I need to happen, happen.
If I need a medical procedure (that is to say, a service), I hand money over (I'm British, so actually the government does, but whatever), and lots of people are paid to make the medical procedure happen- the hospital is built, the doctors are trained, the science is researched, the nurses are hired, the ambulance is manned, etc. The long and short is that I hand over money and people do stuff to make what I need to happen, happen.
The former involves metal and plastic, and the thing I end up with persists for years after purchase, while the latter involves more intangible activities. But economically they're exactly the same- money has changed hands in exchange for something I needed/wanted, and people were kept busy to make it happen. The former doesn't have more economic merit just because it involved metal and plastic.
To be fair to the authorities, they probably didn't know most of the facts from his phone call. When all you have is some loner calling you up to ask if he's allowed to build nuclear reactors, it's probably fair that they'd want to check it out properly.
Anyway, as other people have pointed out, it doesn't have to be an A-bomb to be a health hazard. Radioactive material does you no good if inhaled or ingested in even relatively small quantities, and they had no idea how safe this guy was being with his material (letting some go out the window, draining it into the water supply, etc.
All modern tablets look and feel like all modern tablets look and feel. Just because the iPad might have done it first, it doesn't mean other offerings are automatically worse.
Re:HD formats are a kind of DOS attack
on
Beyond HDTV
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· Score: 1
While you have an interesting point, it's worth remembering that hard drive space (both in bytes-per-device and bytes-per-dollar) is growing at what seems like a faster rate than video file size. A quick look at a shopping site shows me that I can but a 2TB internal SATA HDD for only £55, without shopping around- that's a whole lot of Blu-Rays. I suspect you could fit more ripped BRDs on one of those than you could fit ripped DVDs on a £50 HDD back in 1997.
It would hit the economy. If the government creates $5trillion and uses it to pay their bills (utility bills, service contracts, wages, etc.) then the money is distributed about the economy. $5trillion worth of wages being paid means $5trillion out in the wild.
TFA is stupid, as far as I can tell. Minting a trillion dollar coin is exactly the same thing as quantitave easing- QE just usually uses paper money/bonds instead. There's no need to muck around with "legal hacks" if you want to start another round of QE- you can just do it. QE devalues currencies, though, and a devalued dollar is not something that the US wants to see (for all sorts of reasons).
Has DirectTV really pain anyone much for their content?
Yes. If they are hosting things over the internet, then they will have a contract with an ISP (it's not magic- that's how things get on the internet). Their ISP will be charging them a certain amount for as much upload/download bandwidth as they want. If they find DirectTV are using "too much" bandwidth, they're free to charge them more in order to provide a better service.
You do the same, at your end.
What isn't acceptable is to say to you "yeah, you can have unlimited downloads at broadband speeds" and take your money, and to say to DirectTV "yeah, you can have [x amount] or uploads at broadband speed" and take their money, and then not do it (by throttling to a much lower speed than was promised once you cross some arbitrary mark). All parties have paid up, they should get what they've paid for.
If ISPs (at either end) are finding that their infrastructure can't cope with demand, they should either sell to fewer people, or improve their network (and charge more to cover it, if they need to), or offer the same number of customers lower speeds that they CAN cope with. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
I think you'll find any agencies with the power to issue multi-million dollar fines will probably be the last ones out of the building. And in any case, government agencies have long memories...
Just FYI, Sky Broadband uses the same infrastructure as BT Broadband (both use BT OpenReach cabling). If you find BT laggy at peak times, you'll find Sky just the same.
Also, I know exactly two people who have been Sky Broadband customers- both were happy Sky TV customers, but were furious Sky Broadband customers- terrible customer service, endless technical problems, appalling support, and one of them was ripped off somewhat with the pricing (charged for a high-sped package that their local network couldn't support- paid it for 6 months until they finally managed to squeeze a refund out of them).
My advice is that if you must use the OpenReach network, go with one of the smaller players; at least they tend to offer better tech support when things go inevitably wrong.
What I think Carmack is overlooking (or not addressing, anyway) is why indie designed tend to go for left-field creative ideas.
Big studios (like id) have huge resources to direct towards BIG games- big graphics, big sound, big plot, big level design, big everything. For the likes of id, it's perfectly viable to look at a great game like the Doom/Quake series and say "I think we can do that again- but better!", and set about making a similar game wih the bigger-everything applied.
For an indie studio, that isn't an option. A three man basement set-up is simply not going to be able to make a Quake-clone better than id; they simply can't out do them on any of those aforementioned points. If they try to churn out a marginally-improved version of what already exists, they'll be slaughtered. If the three-man-basement-dev-teams of this world are going to produce a break-through hit, their only possible hope is to out-think their bigger competitors; to come up with a better idea, or set of ideas, or something that feels so unique that the gamer feels that they're playing something truly new and original.
Darwinia (nominally an RTS) wasn't trying to compete with (say) Dawn of War (which came out a year earlier). It was trying to be it's own thing. Darwinia felt like a truly unique experience (even though, in retrospect, an awful lot of it was in-homage to something or other), so I enjoyed it immensely and have very fond memories of it. If it had just been a DoW clone (or whatever), do you think it would have gotten the mindshare that it did?
I watched the first Transformers movie and hated it (and haven't watched the sequels). But plenty of people watched it and really liked it. Liked it enough to go to a second one, and a third one, and will probably go to a fourth one when it's inevitably cranked out.
Am I right and they are wrong? Does my opinion on movies count for more than theirs? OK, so many of them will have been 15 years old or less (and I am not), or any other number of mitigating factors; but they're still entitled to their opinions on what they like and what they don't.
People bought COD in their millions because presumably they enjoyed it. I might not have enjoyed it, you might not have enjoyed it, and to a gaming "connoisseur" it may have been mediocre or worse, but as long as each person who forked over £30 for it feels that they got £30 worth of enjoyment out of it, who are we to judge? And who are we to say that the developer shouldn't crank out another one for their fans?
Personally, I like games that give me a new experience that I've never had before- so thank you Mr Carmack, I'd like those indie developers to carry on as they are. But hey, my tastes aren't for everyone, right?
By taking that stand, you're basically saying his "art" is above criticism.
It isn't above criticism- but it's not trying to achieve "good gameplay", so criticising its gameplay seems a bit of a waste of time (it'd be like criticising Tracy Emin's "My Bed" artwork for not being a comfy night's sleep; you can criticise it for being a rubbish piece of art if you like, but its efficiency as a place to spend the night is wholly beside the point).
You can criticise him for having a rubbish idea though (which you did). Personally I think it's a nice idea, but hardly as intriguing a concept as TFA makes out. It's little more than the video game equivalent of that old forum game where everyone adds one sentence to a story before passing it on.
Interestingly, in the UK Netflix is not a big player- Amazon's LoveFilm service is the market leader. They charge only £5.99 a month (similar to Netflix's old price- but bear in mind that everything in the UK is usually more expensive, so it's an even better deal than it seems).
A 60% price hike is the move of a monopoly. Let's see what happens if Amazon/LoveFilm or someone else gets involved in the US market- we'll see what happens to their price then.
People are angry that it's an increase of about 60%. No-one really begrudges a company putting up their prices by inflation each year- and no-one would really mention it if it was inflation + a few percent. But a 60% price increase is a complete game changer for people with a tight budget.
4. I don't need to make sure that an antivirus program is installed before I so much as plug in the ethernet cable. To my knowledge there is not one single drive-by (ie: not social engineering) exploit that can p0wn my system by doing nothing more than visiting a web page.
The OS the machine runs has nothing to do with how well the hardware lasts. There are many premium brands of Windows-equipped PC which compete with Apple for the "premium" computing dollars (in addition to the dirt cheap Windows PCs of this world, which still have that market segment to themselves).
It probably has a lot to do with the fact that, in tough economic times, it tends to be the poor who suffer (the ones who would buy the cheapest PCs), while those with a lot of spare cash tend to carry on having a lot of spare cash (If someone on $150,000 a year takes a 10% pay cut, he's still a rich man; if someone on $20,000 a year takes a 10% pay cut, he can't pay the bills). Seeing as Apple have a far greater share of the premium market than they do the budget market, they'll see their overall share of the market go up as long as the budget market is shrinking.
I'm thinking the editor just had a serious "Jesus- I'm THAT old?!" moment when he realised his mistake (or will do when he will). A bit like realising your favourite music is now considered "retro", or seeing a style of clothing come "back into fashion" which you recognise from the first time round.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA *guesses* that. They don't have any proof. Thankfully, more reliable sources actually do look into these things. Check out this site for actual crash test results:
http://www.euroncap.com/
Lets do a quick comparison. A large 4x4, such as the 2002 GM/Vauxhall Frontera; they get 3 stars for safety.
http://www.euroncap.com/results/opel_vauxhall/frontera.aspx?class=89a54410-df46-4551-aa7c-f2f6f5643454
http://www.euroncap.com/tests/opel_vauxhall_frontera_2002/125.aspx
Compared to, say, the 2004 GM/Vauxhall Astra, a small and fuel efficient family car; they get 5 stars.
http://www.euroncap.com/results/opel_vauxhall/astra.aspx?class=9abf175b-92c7-4c9f-b111-b37f9369f2f7
http://www.euroncap.com/tests/opel_vauxhall_astra_2004/185.aspx
Or the 2002 GM/Vauxhall Corsa, an even smaller and more fuel efficient car; 4 stars for them.
http://www.euroncap.com/results/opel_vauxhall/corsa.aspx?class=a18a311b-f3c5-47a8-92a7-15e294350858
http://www.euroncap.com/tests/opel_vauxhall_corsa_2002/113.aspx
Obviously this can't be generalised too strongly, but it does rather go against the notion that "small cars are death traps, big cars are tanks".
If you want to come up with a way for astronauts to cross 2000 km of rugged desert & dust plains & mountain ranges & ravines in a radioactive vacuum while wearing bulky space suits, carrying with them enough food, water and air for the return journey, plus scientific equipment, and make it reliable enough that it's guaranteed not to break down in the middle of aforementioned terrain without any hope of rescue, and you find a way of making this fantastic machine light enough to carry with you on an interplanetary journey without compromising the rest of the payload- please give NASA a ring. Their number is probably on their website.
The media is more to blame for that than the scientists.
It's great fun publishing a half-page story with sci-fi pictures and the headline "Earth-planet found in alien solar system!", but no newspaper wants to publish "Earth-planet turns out to be radio noise"- it's just not that interesting.
Unfortunately, this seems to hold true for daily newspapers and tech news sites alike.
And Apple sells iPhones with iTunes & Safari pre-installed, and Microsoft sell Windows phones with Bing search tools and probably some mobile form of IE. What's your point?
On an Android phone, I can install many different browsers (as many as anyone could care to programme). I can use Bing on it, and if Apple wanted to release an iTunes product (I don't know if they have), I'd be able to use that too.
What we're talking about here is Google funding their software with a non-standard funding model (that is, using mobile advertising revenue rather than point-of-sale prices). There's nothing stopping the others companies doing the same (not least Apple, who we're told time and time again by their fans that they're slaughtering the competition in terms of market share, or Nokia, who were number one in market share for a very long time). They're all just complaining that their business model is being trumped by someone else's business model, and they want the law of the land to fix it for them- which is not what the law of the land is for.
The only risk ever was from the obstruction tactics of the tea party - and even if they kept it up, it would not have lead to a default in the strict sense.
Yes, it would. In the "strict sense" a default is when a country (/company/etc.) doesn't make it's debt repayment obligations. If US politicians decided that they didn't want to pay their debts any more (which is basically what would have happened if Congress had dug their heels in any longer), the US would have defaulted.
It's just that "default" on its own doesn't mean anything. What matters is whether investors feel they'll have their loans paid back; even if the US had defaulted in the short term (i.e., hadn't come up with a debt ceiling deal for another week), most investors would probably have kept their cool (as you point out, the US economy is amply strong enough to repay its loans, so there's no economic reason for them to panic). However, if investors feel the disruptions were going to carry on in the long term, they'd probably start to get edgy about just how reliable the loan repayments were going to be.
In other words, the US' credit rating is fine as long as this was a one off. If Congress insist on making a habit of playing this game every 6-12 months for as long as both parties have a veto (not uncommon), investors are going to start moving to greener pastures.
All any economic activity is is exchanging money for things we need.
If I buy a car, it's because I need a car. I hand lots of money over, and lots of people are paid to make the car happen- mine the materials, process the materials, design the car, assemble the materials, test the product, transport it to me, etc. The long and short of it is that I hand over money and people do stuff to make what I need to happen, happen.
If I need a medical procedure (that is to say, a service), I hand money over (I'm British, so actually the government does, but whatever), and lots of people are paid to make the medical procedure happen- the hospital is built, the doctors are trained, the science is researched, the nurses are hired, the ambulance is manned, etc. The long and short is that I hand over money and people do stuff to make what I need to happen, happen.
The former involves metal and plastic, and the thing I end up with persists for years after purchase, while the latter involves more intangible activities. But economically they're exactly the same- money has changed hands in exchange for something I needed/wanted, and people were kept busy to make it happen. The former doesn't have more economic merit just because it involved metal and plastic.
To be fair to the authorities, they probably didn't know most of the facts from his phone call. When all you have is some loner calling you up to ask if he's allowed to build nuclear reactors, it's probably fair that they'd want to check it out properly.
Anyway, as other people have pointed out, it doesn't have to be an A-bomb to be a health hazard. Radioactive material does you no good if inhaled or ingested in even relatively small quantities, and they had no idea how safe this guy was being with his material (letting some go out the window, draining it into the water supply, etc.
All modern tablets look and feel like all modern tablets look and feel. Just because the iPad might have done it first, it doesn't mean other offerings are automatically worse.
You've got robo-fever, boy!
While you have an interesting point, it's worth remembering that hard drive space (both in bytes-per-device and bytes-per-dollar) is growing at what seems like a faster rate than video file size. A quick look at a shopping site shows me that I can but a 2TB internal SATA HDD for only £55, without shopping around- that's a whole lot of Blu-Rays. I suspect you could fit more ripped BRDs on one of those than you could fit ripped DVDs on a £50 HDD back in 1997.
It would hit the economy. If the government creates $5trillion and uses it to pay their bills (utility bills, service contracts, wages, etc.) then the money is distributed about the economy. $5trillion worth of wages being paid means $5trillion out in the wild.
TFA is stupid, as far as I can tell. Minting a trillion dollar coin is exactly the same thing as quantitave easing- QE just usually uses paper money/bonds instead. There's no need to muck around with "legal hacks" if you want to start another round of QE- you can just do it. QE devalues currencies, though, and a devalued dollar is not something that the US wants to see (for all sorts of reasons).
Has DirectTV really pain anyone much for their content?
Yes. If they are hosting things over the internet, then they will have a contract with an ISP (it's not magic- that's how things get on the internet). Their ISP will be charging them a certain amount for as much upload/download bandwidth as they want. If they find DirectTV are using "too much" bandwidth, they're free to charge them more in order to provide a better service.
You do the same, at your end.
What isn't acceptable is to say to you "yeah, you can have unlimited downloads at broadband speeds" and take your money, and to say to DirectTV "yeah, you can have [x amount] or uploads at broadband speed" and take their money, and then not do it (by throttling to a much lower speed than was promised once you cross some arbitrary mark). All parties have paid up, they should get what they've paid for.
If ISPs (at either end) are finding that their infrastructure can't cope with demand, they should either sell to fewer people, or improve their network (and charge more to cover it, if they need to), or offer the same number of customers lower speeds that they CAN cope with. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
I think you'll find any agencies with the power to issue multi-million dollar fines will probably be the last ones out of the building. And in any case, government agencies have long memories...
I would LOVE to be throttled!
Kinky.
Just FYI, Sky Broadband uses the same infrastructure as BT Broadband (both use BT OpenReach cabling). If you find BT laggy at peak times, you'll find Sky just the same.
Also, I know exactly two people who have been Sky Broadband customers- both were happy Sky TV customers, but were furious Sky Broadband customers- terrible customer service, endless technical problems, appalling support, and one of them was ripped off somewhat with the pricing (charged for a high-sped package that their local network couldn't support- paid it for 6 months until they finally managed to squeeze a refund out of them).
My advice is that if you must use the OpenReach network, go with one of the smaller players; at least they tend to offer better tech support when things go inevitably wrong.
What I think Carmack is overlooking (or not addressing, anyway) is why indie designed tend to go for left-field creative ideas.
Big studios (like id) have huge resources to direct towards BIG games- big graphics, big sound, big plot, big level design, big everything. For the likes of id, it's perfectly viable to look at a great game like the Doom/Quake series and say "I think we can do that again- but better!", and set about making a similar game wih the bigger-everything applied.
For an indie studio, that isn't an option. A three man basement set-up is simply not going to be able to make a Quake-clone better than id; they simply can't out do them on any of those aforementioned points. If they try to churn out a marginally-improved version of what already exists, they'll be slaughtered. If the three-man-basement-dev-teams of this world are going to produce a break-through hit, their only possible hope is to out-think their bigger competitors; to come up with a better idea, or set of ideas, or something that feels so unique that the gamer feels that they're playing something truly new and original.
Darwinia (nominally an RTS) wasn't trying to compete with (say) Dawn of War (which came out a year earlier). It was trying to be it's own thing. Darwinia felt like a truly unique experience (even though, in retrospect, an awful lot of it was in-homage to something or other), so I enjoyed it immensely and have very fond memories of it. If it had just been a DoW clone (or whatever), do you think it would have gotten the mindshare that it did?
I watched the first Transformers movie and hated it (and haven't watched the sequels). But plenty of people watched it and really liked it. Liked it enough to go to a second one, and a third one, and will probably go to a fourth one when it's inevitably cranked out.
Am I right and they are wrong? Does my opinion on movies count for more than theirs? OK, so many of them will have been 15 years old or less (and I am not), or any other number of mitigating factors; but they're still entitled to their opinions on what they like and what they don't.
People bought COD in their millions because presumably they enjoyed it. I might not have enjoyed it, you might not have enjoyed it, and to a gaming "connoisseur" it may have been mediocre or worse, but as long as each person who forked over £30 for it feels that they got £30 worth of enjoyment out of it, who are we to judge? And who are we to say that the developer shouldn't crank out another one for their fans?
Personally, I like games that give me a new experience that I've never had before- so thank you Mr Carmack, I'd like those indie developers to carry on as they are. But hey, my tastes aren't for everyone, right?
By taking that stand, you're basically saying his "art" is above criticism.
It isn't above criticism- but it's not trying to achieve "good gameplay", so criticising its gameplay seems a bit of a waste of time (it'd be like criticising Tracy Emin's "My Bed" artwork for not being a comfy night's sleep; you can criticise it for being a rubbish piece of art if you like, but its efficiency as a place to spend the night is wholly beside the point).
You can criticise him for having a rubbish idea though (which you did). Personally I think it's a nice idea, but hardly as intriguing a concept as TFA makes out. It's little more than the video game equivalent of that old forum game where everyone adds one sentence to a story before passing it on.
Interestingly, in the UK Netflix is not a big player- Amazon's LoveFilm service is the market leader. They charge only £5.99 a month (similar to Netflix's old price- but bear in mind that everything in the UK is usually more expensive, so it's an even better deal than it seems).
A 60% price hike is the move of a monopoly. Let's see what happens if Amazon/LoveFilm or someone else gets involved in the US market- we'll see what happens to their price then.
People are angry that it's an increase of about 60%. No-one really begrudges a company putting up their prices by inflation each year- and no-one would really mention it if it was inflation + a few percent. But a 60% price increase is a complete game changer for people with a tight budget.
4. I don't need to make sure that an antivirus program is installed before I so much as plug in the ethernet cable. To my knowledge there is not one single drive-by (ie: not social engineering) exploit that can p0wn my system by doing nothing more than visiting a web page.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=drive-by+mac+exploit
First result seems interesting. I might consider using antivirus software if I were you.
The OS the machine runs has nothing to do with how well the hardware lasts. There are many premium brands of Windows-equipped PC which compete with Apple for the "premium" computing dollars (in addition to the dirt cheap Windows PCs of this world, which still have that market segment to themselves).
It probably has a lot to do with the fact that, in tough economic times, it tends to be the poor who suffer (the ones who would buy the cheapest PCs), while those with a lot of spare cash tend to carry on having a lot of spare cash (If someone on $150,000 a year takes a 10% pay cut, he's still a rich man; if someone on $20,000 a year takes a 10% pay cut, he can't pay the bills). Seeing as Apple have a far greater share of the premium market than they do the budget market, they'll see their overall share of the market go up as long as the budget market is shrinking.
I'm thinking the editor just had a serious "Jesus- I'm THAT old?!" moment when he realised his mistake (or will do when he will). A bit like realising your favourite music is now considered "retro", or seeing a style of clothing come "back into fashion" which you recognise from the first time round.
My second post in this thread with the same links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Republic_of_China_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Delivery_Systems_Estimates
The Chinese already have ICBMs, and have had them for a very long time. They also already have anti-satellite weapons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
Manned space flight is not a pre-requisite for these things. If there's going to be an arm race, it will happen with or without a space programme.
They already can (as can most nuke-wielding nations):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Republic_of_China_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Delivery_Systems_Estimates
We've been able to move bombs into orbit for half a century and more; space bombs have been around longer than manned space flight.