I have to ask (afraid to hear the depressing answer) even if there are links to something for sale, what's the point? Are there honestly people out there who get an e-mail that is gibberish, a link, and then more gibberish, they click on the link, see "Hey, it's selling viagra! I need viagra!" and enter their credit card, and there are enough of these people that you can make more money preying on them than you can working at McDonalds?
Okay, but can we agree that in general, holding up a pundit as representative of anything more than what that pundit thought they could say to get attention and eventually money, is beneath even slashdot's standards?
You should sue east texas as a co-conspirator in your patentented patent trolling violation. After all, without their help, trolling wouldn't be as profitable.
Your point is what? That liberals say stupid things? Anne Coulter said several widows whose husbands died in the 9/11 attacks were "witches" who "act as if 9/11 only happened to them" and implied they were happy to have been victimized. If we start acting as if pundits speak for anything more than themselves, we should just speed things up and start flinging our poo at each other right now.
(By the way, my purpose here isn't to equate Michael Moore to Anne Coulter, I think they're different in many ways, but neither of them have any place in rational discussions)
I hate loud commercials too, but this is just too much government IMHO.
On the other hand, we already have too much government regulation in so many areas, we're not going to get it to shrink back down, probably ever. May as well get some good out of it. I say introduce all types of regulations on advertising noise levels.
Then they can move onto regulating the general crappiness of ads in movie theaters before the previews. I mean, good lord, those are the most annoying commercials EVER, and it's not just because of the whole "I paid for a ticket and you're STILL advertising to me?!?"
Yeah, we're looking at a crash. It may not be as total as the 1983 crash, but the market can't exist at the level of shovelware being pushed.
How exactly is that? Too much shovelware and the gaming crash dragon gets woken up and destroys the bank accounts of game makers? The 1983 shovelware-related crash occurred because the entire market was casual gamers. It would have been hard to describe yourself as a serious gamer before the atari. The current casual gaming market could easily crash because of shovelware, mom buys a wii, likes wii sports, buys wii fit, likes it, gets tired of both, buys something like "ninjabread man" hates it as all sane people would, doesn't buy any more games, wii collects dust on the shelf.
Today though, in addition to the casual market, there is a sizeable group of gamers who won't be turned away from shovelware. As long as I've been gaming, there has been shovelware, I'm immune to it because I learned long ago to not buy it in the first place, and in the off chance that I do end up with shovelware, I see it for what it is and realize that not all games are that crappy.
So maybe nintendo will be stung a little by too much shovelware, but I don't see amount of shovelware being capable of crashing the industry this time. If the number of good games stays constant, but you increase the shovelware by a hundredfold, that might strain gamestop, but most of us still aren't going to buy the crap, it won't affect anything.
Since everybody has a computer anyway, a $100 graphics card will get you better graphics than a console at a lower price than a console. Gaming with Steam is just a better experience at a better price.
Man, I don't think they even sell graphics cards for my 7 year old dell laptop anymore, I know I don't have the space or the memory. And even if they did, my wife wouldn't let me. She's still mad that I installed noscript and use the 360 on the TV.
I get annoyed every time someone suggests that the only reason one wouldn't be PC gaming is that they aren't aware of a cheap fix. There are many reasons I and others don't game on PC. The cost of getting a completely new computer, one I don't need, is only one of those reasons.
The next question is: what exactly would the mechanism of "console gaming dying" be anyway? I would argue that the death of console gaming would/will have look like one of the following scenarios:
1. Most of the "major" games will be released for the PC and not the consoles. 2. New major consoles will not be released, eventually the consoles out there would lag so far behind PC that 1 would happen 3. All major consoles will become so PC like that they will be indistinguishable and it will be pointless to talk about PC vs console
1 doesn't seem to be happening, and I don't really see many signs that it will happen any time soon, there seem to be more releases of significant games for consoles than PC. I think everyone but the most ridiculous fanboys of a given console would agree that games -should- be released on all platforms that can support the game. I want to choose what platform to game on based on my needs and equipment, being denied a gaming experience because I don't have the right hardware, or having to choose hardware based on -artificial- game availability is not a good situation. (Emphasis on artificial. Obviously MS isn't going to release their Halo games on a nintendo console, and obviously I'm not expecting to run Crysis 2 on an NES.) So I hope that more games continue to be released on all platforms, PC and console.
2. Consoles obviously aren't as powerful as PCs, but again, 1 seems far from happening. Already, the idea with MS at least seems to be delaying the next console for longer. If the next generation (and I mean the -actual- next generation, not the current xbox 360/PS3/wii generation which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as "next gen") is still a loss for the console makers, I suppose they might decide to not release another one. Games would continue coming out for them for a while, but eventually enough customers would migrate away from the PC to where the consoles become obsolete. Games are to this day coming out for the PS2, and the next generation of consoles is undoubtedly going to be released, so it will be quite a few years before console gaming dries up completely.
3. Doesn't seem very likely to me. Consoles are aimed squarely at people who want to plug in and play immediately, without messing around with hardware or software configurations. I think MS is having enough headaches with the optional hard-drive in the 360 that they're going to move away from even that, back to "one console, one hardware configuration." I don't see any signs from nintendo that they'll start making games that can run on both their hardware and other hardware, and given the sales of the wii, even with this recent decrease, they'd be nuts to do so any time soon.
So I don't really see -how- console gaming could be dying. Slowing down temporarily, sure, but it's not like console gaming is a living thing, where if it's vitals (sales) drop low enough, the beast is going to die and not be revived.
For the next next question I'd like to propose one of the following: do game journalists feel the need to declare "X is dying" -entirely- because it gets attention they're not getting otherwise? Do even they think that a trend like "sales declining" should be extrapolated to ridiculous extremes like "IT'S GOING TO DIE COMPLETELY!!!" Is rational commentary on videogames dying or did it ever even exist in the first place?
It's probably a non-paying, volunteer position. However, I doubt you'd go a week before coming home to find a ferrari in your driveway with the license plate "MCAFEE 1" and a note that says "From an old friend." in the driver's seat, under the key.
And there you have the actual use for the position: appointments for help during the campaign to positions that themselves have their own kickbacks.
Oh, also for Obama et al to hold up and say they strengthened security.
Note that I voted for Obama, this is not bias. All politicians do bullshit moves like this, and I didn't vote for him because of anything related to cybersecurity (it was to get an appointment to department of interior.)
Was using the term "rapped" in the summary of the article necessary? It gets rather old watching the word used so flippantly. Good Job bhagwad, you just surpassed Kdawson as the worse/. editor.
Ooooh! You rapped kdawson AND bhagwad there! Niiiiice!
I think it has something to do with the fact that we have a lot of xenophobic paranoid people here who don't think much of our own government and think even less of other world governments. They see the UN at best as a useless organization and at worst a way for "evildoers" to usurp our independence. Some probably think it has something to do with jealousy over our "freedom," some think it's communists/atheists trying to destroy america.
Keep in mind we don't ALL think that way, and not ALL of the opposition to the UN is based off of crap like this, but I think your average American opposed to the UN has reasons along these lines.
Anyway, I'm not exactly well informed on international matters, but I've gotten the impression that we don't shirk our responsibilities on international peacekeeping missions... although a lot of that is actually cleaning up our own messes...
The problem is, everybody has their own ideas about what to teach the children, and the vast majority of those ideas will turn little Lisa into an imbecile, a sociopath, or a robot.
Can we combine the ideas that will turn her into a robot AND a sociopath? That sounds like it would make for an interesting reality show.
who in his novel "Little Brother" had an obvious axe to grind against Homeland Security and law enforcement
Him and millions of other people who realize that a posted sign saying "Don't hijack the plane" would be about as effective and far less annoying than homeland security.
It also seems to me that the quality of moderation have been down and we've seen a lot more people using negative mods to punish those they disagree with than we did in the past
That's odd, recently I've noticed a lot more comments deserving negative mods to re-educate, including a lot from some user.... shaka-something... Shakira? No wait, that's someone else.
Judge Roberts and Attorney Smith are no longer friends, they've changed their relationship to "It's complicated. (See Florida ethics board 'Opinion Number: 2009-20' for futher clarification)"
I think we should keep in mind that this is a purely hypothetical situation. No one is proposing that we cure paralysis by causing cells to overexpress cancer-causing proteins and just hope for the best! From the abstract:
Together, our results suggest that compromised responsiveness to injury-induced growth factors in mature neurons contributes significantly to regeneration failure. Thus, developing strategies to modulate negative signaling regulators may be an efficient strategy of promoting axon regeneration after CNS injury.
Much more likely is that someone will find a drug, if it hasn't already been found, that can be transiently applied to the broken axons. That wouldn't "increase one's risk of cancer tremendously."
...somehow I'm not seeing trees as being that easily modified on a commercial scale (mostly because it takes so damned long to grow them and test the results by comparison).
I don't know much about plant science, but I would assume they could measure sprout growth speeds in a reasonable time span. They're also likely able to apply lessons learned in faster-growing plants, like corn, to trees.
I think it's a given that auxins = plants grow. I would bet that a tree engineered to express more of auxin-whatever near the shoot apical meristem would grow faster. Get that strain in however, and plant it next to a normal tree and in a month you should have a pretty good answer. Maybe not. Either way, it's not like tree growth is a big black box and you wouldn't need to wait until the tree is full grown to know it goes faster.
Oops. No, I didn't mean to imply that it was. I suppose letting yourself be photographed while drinking by someone who would put those pictures up for all to see could be construed as a lapse in judgment when future employers do sometimes use that as a reason not to employ you.
Really? I don't doubt you have an example, but what's the example?
A google search will get you some hits, but something similar did happened to a friend of mine. Idiot HR guy interviewing him said "Would you care to explain... THIS?!?" and swiveled his computer screen around to my friend. It was a picture of him holding a beer.
"Well, that's me on my 21st birthday drinking a beer."
Granted, he did get employed, so not the best example, but I don't think its unreasonable to assume that had it been on his 20th birthday, the guy wouldn't have hired him.
Slashdot Mirror
Gmail strips most of the links.
I have to ask (afraid to hear the depressing answer) even if there are links to something for sale, what's the point? Are there honestly people out there who get an e-mail that is gibberish, a link, and then more gibberish, they click on the link, see "Hey, it's selling viagra! I need viagra!" and enter their credit card, and there are enough of these people that you can make more money preying on them than you can working at McDonalds?
Okay, but can we agree that in general, holding up a pundit as representative of anything more than what that pundit thought they could say to get attention and eventually money, is beneath even slashdot's standards?
You should sue east texas as a co-conspirator in your patentented patent trolling violation. After all, without their help, trolling wouldn't be as profitable.
Your point is what? That liberals say stupid things? Anne Coulter said several widows whose husbands died in the 9/11 attacks were "witches" who "act as if 9/11 only happened to them" and implied they were happy to have been victimized. If we start acting as if pundits speak for anything more than themselves, we should just speed things up and start flinging our poo at each other right now.
(By the way, my purpose here isn't to equate Michael Moore to Anne Coulter, I think they're different in many ways, but neither of them have any place in rational discussions)
OK, so you have an old PC, so it doesn't work. Nobody said that applied to everyone.
I guess he didn't say "everyone" but Lord Ender, to whom I was responding, did say "everybody." As in
Since everybody has a computer anyway, a $100 graphics card will get you better graphics than a console at a lower price than a console.
I hate loud commercials too, but this is just too much government IMHO.
On the other hand, we already have too much government regulation in so many areas, we're not going to get it to shrink back down, probably ever. May as well get some good out of it. I say introduce all types of regulations on advertising noise levels.
Then they can move onto regulating the general crappiness of ads in movie theaters before the previews. I mean, good lord, those are the most annoying commercials EVER, and it's not just because of the whole "I paid for a ticket and you're STILL advertising to me?!?"
Yeah, we're looking at a crash. It may not be as total as the 1983 crash, but the market can't exist at the level of shovelware being pushed.
How exactly is that? Too much shovelware and the gaming crash dragon gets woken up and destroys the bank accounts of game makers? The 1983 shovelware-related crash occurred because the entire market was casual gamers. It would have been hard to describe yourself as a serious gamer before the atari. The current casual gaming market could easily crash because of shovelware, mom buys a wii, likes wii sports, buys wii fit, likes it, gets tired of both, buys something like "ninjabread man" hates it as all sane people would, doesn't buy any more games, wii collects dust on the shelf.
Today though, in addition to the casual market, there is a sizeable group of gamers who won't be turned away from shovelware. As long as I've been gaming, there has been shovelware, I'm immune to it because I learned long ago to not buy it in the first place, and in the off chance that I do end up with shovelware, I see it for what it is and realize that not all games are that crappy.
So maybe nintendo will be stung a little by too much shovelware, but I don't see amount of shovelware being capable of crashing the industry this time. If the number of good games stays constant, but you increase the shovelware by a hundredfold, that might strain gamestop, but most of us still aren't going to buy the crap, it won't affect anything.
Since everybody has a computer anyway, a $100 graphics card will get you better graphics than a console at a lower price than a console. Gaming with Steam is just a better experience at a better price.
Man, I don't think they even sell graphics cards for my 7 year old dell laptop anymore, I know I don't have the space or the memory. And even if they did, my wife wouldn't let me. She's still mad that I installed noscript and use the 360 on the TV.
I get annoyed every time someone suggests that the only reason one wouldn't be PC gaming is that they aren't aware of a cheap fix. There are many reasons I and others don't game on PC. The cost of getting a completely new computer, one I don't need, is only one of those reasons.
The next question is: what exactly would the mechanism of "console gaming dying" be anyway? I would argue that the death of console gaming would/will have look like one of the following scenarios:
1. Most of the "major" games will be released for the PC and not the consoles.
2. New major consoles will not be released, eventually the consoles out there would lag so far behind PC that 1 would happen
3. All major consoles will become so PC like that they will be indistinguishable and it will be pointless to talk about PC vs console
1 doesn't seem to be happening, and I don't really see many signs that it will happen any time soon, there seem to be more releases of significant games for consoles than PC. I think everyone but the most ridiculous fanboys of a given console would agree that games -should- be released on all platforms that can support the game. I want to choose what platform to game on based on my needs and equipment, being denied a gaming experience because I don't have the right hardware, or having to choose hardware based on -artificial- game availability is not a good situation. (Emphasis on artificial. Obviously MS isn't going to release their Halo games on a nintendo console, and obviously I'm not expecting to run Crysis 2 on an NES.) So I hope that more games continue to be released on all platforms, PC and console.
2. Consoles obviously aren't as powerful as PCs, but again, 1 seems far from happening. Already, the idea with MS at least seems to be delaying the next console for longer. If the next generation (and I mean the -actual- next generation, not the current xbox 360/PS3/wii generation which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as "next gen") is still a loss for the console makers, I suppose they might decide to not release another one. Games would continue coming out for them for a while, but eventually enough customers would migrate away from the PC to where the consoles become obsolete. Games are to this day coming out for the PS2, and the next generation of consoles is undoubtedly going to be released, so it will be quite a few years before console gaming dries up completely.
3. Doesn't seem very likely to me. Consoles are aimed squarely at people who want to plug in and play immediately, without messing around with hardware or software configurations. I think MS is having enough headaches with the optional hard-drive in the 360 that they're going to move away from even that, back to "one console, one hardware configuration." I don't see any signs from nintendo that they'll start making games that can run on both their hardware and other hardware, and given the sales of the wii, even with this recent decrease, they'd be nuts to do so any time soon.
So I don't really see -how- console gaming could be dying. Slowing down temporarily, sure, but it's not like console gaming is a living thing, where if it's vitals (sales) drop low enough, the beast is going to die and not be revived.
For the next next question I'd like to propose one of the following: do game journalists feel the need to declare "X is dying" -entirely- because it gets attention they're not getting otherwise? Do even they think that a trend like "sales declining" should be extrapolated to ridiculous extremes like "IT'S GOING TO DIE COMPLETELY!!!" Is rational commentary on videogames dying or did it ever even exist in the first place?
It's probably a non-paying, volunteer position. However, I doubt you'd go a week before coming home to find a ferrari in your driveway with the license plate "MCAFEE 1" and a note that says "From an old friend." in the driver's seat, under the key.
And there you have the actual use for the position: appointments for help during the campaign to positions that themselves have their own kickbacks.
Oh, also for Obama et al to hold up and say they strengthened security.
Note that I voted for Obama, this is not bias. All politicians do bullshit moves like this, and I didn't vote for him because of anything related to cybersecurity (it was to get an appointment to department of interior.)
Was using the term "rapped" in the summary of the article necessary? It gets rather old watching the word used so flippantly. Good Job bhagwad, you just surpassed Kdawson as the worse /. editor.
Ooooh! You rapped kdawson AND bhagwad there! Niiiiice!
The USA is for the Corporations and by the Corporations....Anyone saying otherwise is either blind or watches Fox News too much.
I object! Blind people have a physical handicap, not a mental handicap, and should not be lumped together with Fox News viewers!
I think it has something to do with the fact that we have a lot of xenophobic paranoid people here who don't think much of our own government and think even less of other world governments. They see the UN at best as a useless organization and at worst a way for "evildoers" to usurp our independence. Some probably think it has something to do with jealousy over our "freedom," some think it's communists/atheists trying to destroy america.
Keep in mind we don't ALL think that way, and not ALL of the opposition to the UN is based off of crap like this, but I think your average American opposed to the UN has reasons along these lines.
Anyway, I'm not exactly well informed on international matters, but I've gotten the impression that we don't shirk our responsibilities on international peacekeeping missions... although a lot of that is actually cleaning up our own messes...
The problem is, everybody has their own ideas about what to teach the children, and the vast majority of those ideas will turn little Lisa into an imbecile, a sociopath, or a robot.
Can we combine the ideas that will turn her into a robot AND a sociopath? That sounds like it would make for an interesting reality show.
This is what real conspiracies look like. Note the distinct lack of "CIA", "Masons", "NSA" or other such favorites.
That's only because the illuminati killed their contacts in those organizations to hide the truth.
It was meant to sound as a joke, sorry for that.
who in his novel "Little Brother" had an obvious axe to grind against Homeland Security and law enforcement
Him and millions of other people who realize that a posted sign saying "Don't hijack the plane" would be about as effective and far less annoying than homeland security.
I hate to admit it but I usually skim the summary and dig straight into the comments section of any particular article. I almost never RTFA.
You must be old here.
It also seems to me that the quality of moderation have been down and we've seen a lot more people using negative mods to punish those they disagree with than we did in the past
That's odd, recently I've noticed a lot more comments deserving negative mods to re-educate, including a lot from some user.... shaka-something... Shakira? No wait, that's someone else.
Judge Roberts and Attorney Smith are no longer friends, they've changed their relationship to "It's complicated. (See Florida ethics board 'Opinion Number: 2009-20' for futher clarification)"
I think we should keep in mind that this is a purely hypothetical situation. No one is proposing that we cure paralysis by causing cells to overexpress cancer-causing proteins and just hope for the best! From the abstract:
Together, our results suggest that compromised responsiveness to injury-induced growth factors in mature neurons contributes significantly to regeneration failure. Thus, developing strategies to modulate negative signaling regulators may be an efficient strategy of promoting axon regeneration after CNS injury.
Much more likely is that someone will find a drug, if it hasn't already been found, that can be transiently applied to the broken axons. That wouldn't "increase one's risk of cancer tremendously."
...somehow I'm not seeing trees as being that easily modified on a commercial scale (mostly because it takes so damned long to grow them and test the results by comparison).
I don't know much about plant science, but I would assume they could measure sprout growth speeds in a reasonable time span. They're also likely able to apply lessons learned in faster-growing plants, like corn, to trees.
I think it's a given that auxins = plants grow. I would bet that a tree engineered to express more of auxin-whatever near the shoot apical meristem would grow faster. Get that strain in however, and plant it next to a normal tree and in a month you should have a pretty good answer. Maybe not. Either way, it's not like tree growth is a big black box and you wouldn't need to wait until the tree is full grown to know it goes faster.
Drinking beer in college is a lapse in judgment?
Oops. No, I didn't mean to imply that it was. I suppose letting yourself be photographed while drinking by someone who would put those pictures up for all to see could be construed as a lapse in judgment when future employers do sometimes use that as a reason not to employ you.
Really? I don't doubt you have an example, but what's the example?
A google search will get you some hits, but something similar did happened to a friend of mine. Idiot HR guy interviewing him said "Would you care to explain... THIS?!?" and swiveled his computer screen around to my friend. It was a picture of him holding a beer.
"Well, that's me on my 21st birthday drinking a beer."
Granted, he did get employed, so not the best example, but I don't think its unreasonable to assume that had it been on his 20th birthday, the guy wouldn't have hired him.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to work for any place that turned me down because of some brief Google image search.
I can believe there are some good places to work that happen to have complete idiots in HR.