We have DSL but don't bother plugging in the phone. It's mostly redundant with our cell phones, no one is there to answer it usually, and when we are, we frequently get robocalls and collection agencies calling the recycled number. I'm aware there are steps which can be taken to stop the collections agencies, but its easier to keep the phone unplugged, that wouldn't stop the robocalls, and again, with no advantage to the landline I'm not sure why I would bother.
This seems to be pretty common too. Most of my friends who have DSL don't bother plugging in phones to the landline. So I'd guess that of the remaining landline subscribers, fewer actually use the line, and newer customers increasingly don't bother with them. I'd also wonder if those few people who use their landlines aren't predominantly people who have lived in the same house since before they had or regularly used cell phones.
Specifically you mean the United States world... Other developed nations do not have our problem for one reason or another.
Since we're talking about a report in the -american- journal of preventive medicine about the average -US- gamer, I have to ask why you're discussing japanese or european diets.
(er, food, not the japanese legislature, which would be just as off-topic)
No, I don't think that was an offensive joke at all. I didn't say anything about the victims, just made a pun about the dam itself. And I thought it was funny if I do say so myself. Others appear to agree. If you're saying a joke is tasteless, say it's tasteless. Don't say it's not funny, because it usually is, and that's not relevant to your whine anyway./. is unquestionably american and european centric. The chances that any of the victims' families read that are pretty low. So I didn't feel bad about making it
Are you a family member of one of the victims? If so, I'm sorry, but you're not, and you have no right to be offended by jokes on this subject.
Whole genome replication seems to mostly center around Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). PCR is an incredibly versitile technology. PCR machines cycle test tubes through specific temperatures, the thermal cyclers are cheap compared to a lot of lab equipment but still in the thousands of dollars. To do a PCR also requires some type of polymerase, nucleotides, some solutions, and short primer oligonucleotides. These are all items that aren't prohibitively expensive but aren't household items either.
Maybe I'm being too ACLU/tinfoil hat, but I'm getting a sinking feeling that someone eventually is going to try to slap some regulations on PCR, or at some point in the future, having access to a thermal cycler and PCR materials is going to be seen by law enforcement as a reason to be suspicious of you. And I think that would be a real crime. I could see a future where thermal cyclers come down in price even more, maybe high school kids will start tinkering around with PCR as kids from yesteryear played with chemistry sets before we decided they could be used to make bombs and should be banned.
Maybe not. Anyway, I think we should nip it in the bud if there's any hint that law enforcement starts thinking you need to have a good reason to manipulate DNA, just so they can keep their evidence unquestionably true.
This doesn't change much, it's still much easier for "them" to frame you by drugging you and leaving you at the scene of a murder, then anonymously tipping the authorities off. Just like they did to OJ to try to prevent another "Naked Gun" from being made.
("They" may be completely evil, but you can't fault their sense of humor.)
The chips aren't self-aware now, or even really thinking on their own presumably, and they aren't designed to do so. To go from unthinking chips to self awareness on the level of humans would likely be more inefficient and unlikely as our evolution has been. Also given restrictions on the system, it's more unlikely that the computer would continue to function as the thing started changing, not to mention it would have to evolve with much fewer resources in a much more closed space. So yeah, I think it's a false analogy: the computer evolving intelligence is far less likely and would take a lot longer probably.
I think there's a big difference between Vista's bad word of mouth and the Ipod's "my friend got one, IT'S SO COOL!"
I sometimes like to pretend that browsing/. while I'm supposed to be working makes me more knowledgeable about computing than the average user, but probably not by much if at all. I couldn't tell you what people don't like about vista, but whenever people do rant about how bad vista is, they clearly know more about it than I do. I don't remember getting an option of sticking with windows ME when I bought my computer, and I don't remember hearing anything negative about XP. The one thing I know about Vista is that a lot of people don't like it and I have the option of not getting it.
An ipod on the other hand has a lot more going for it than being the newest, hippest thing. At this point, I think everyone in the country has played around with one at some point, and there is base appeal. The wheel was pretty appealing, the touch is too.
Maybe if everyone had been exposed to vista and it had a cool gimmicky feature, I'd agree that the only difference there was that one was trendy and the other wasn't, but that's not how it is, you're drawing a false comparison.
This is nonsense. "Consumers should change" is sth you should never have to say, or it shows you are having a very big problem. Consumer is NEVER the problem. No industry has ANY right of sales that consumers should abide to. If consumers don't buy your product, obviously the industry is the problem.
Yeah, I'm not the videogame industry, I AM a consumer. We are, in fact, a big part of the problem. I'm not making any products and blaming the consumer. I think I have every right to say "A lot of my fellow consumers are making stupid purchases and that encourages stupid games."
It would be nice if economic troubles caused gamers themselves to be more selective about which games they bought. A few years ago when I worked at gamestop, most of the customers (children especially) seemed to buy games based ENTIRELY OFF THE BOXART. "Hey, I have a PS2. Hey, I enjoyed the movie 'fight club". Hey, this box which appears to have been the first game I picked up is Fight club for the PS2. That's GOT to be a good one!" Many people are apparently buying wii games at random, the effect being that most of the games for the wii are barely playable. Developers wouldn't make movie-tie in games if they didn't sell. It would be great if the economic troubles really put a damper on people buying games on impulse without reading a single review to tell if the game was halfway decent, or shovelware.
Then again, I'm pretty sure even if that 29% decrease were entirely due to throwaway games, the industry would still follow the path of least resistance. Maybe they'd just make ONLY worthless games.
While I'm making demands of millions of people who wouldn't change even if they did read this post, it would be nice if gamers were more supportive, or at least more forgiving, of games that try to do new things. A lot of "hardcore" gamers get very entrenched opinions about what a game should and should not be according to genre. It's like if moviegoers complained that a movie wasn't formulaic enough.
I think actually the actual small nugget of truth these tests are going to be based off of is going to be something very similar to the following:
The little bit of DNA they sequenced, once through, was more similar to a musician's and most dissimilar to an architect, so that "indicates" he would be best as a musician. Over the course of the summer camp, he was told repeatedly that he wanted to play music rather than draw buildings, and rewarded for learning to play a little something to convince his parents that he actually had talent and they didn't waste their money.
The whole genome will not be sequenced in any case, and there obviously won't be any attempt to do anything besides correlation. They haven't identified anything like a "musical talent" gene, it's all pure correlations.
It's going to be a slightly more technical version of Japan's blood type = personality fortunetelling or good old fashioned phrenology. Although, anyone I talked to about it in Tokyo regarded the blood types as we would regard horoscopes: with a grain of salt. It seems to really continue as a novelty, and only is around because it's so cheap to identify your blood type. Shelling out $880 for the equivalent? I doubt this pseudoscience crap is going to take off, at least until they offer sequencing and comparisons for cheaper.
Perhaps we have a communication problem here. From TFA, "And privately, some companies are griping about conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule " From the summar, "And privately, some companies are griping about conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule "
I would say we do have a communication problem. I think. Either you're being sarcastic or I am, I sincerely thought it was me.
Maybe that did factor into their decision, but I have to think that while there's plenty of hate for telecos among certain dark corners of the internets, like here, it's not going to resonate with the unwashed masses like the auto or bank bailouts did. Maybe I'm wrong, never looked at any polling data on it. My impression though is that net neutrality is fairly low to under the radar for most people.
No. Among other things they don't like the idea of Net Neutrality which is one stipulation of taking the money.
If ONLY there had been some reference to that in TFA. Or, dare I say it, the summary. I'm imagining a fictional world in which this story had been posted to/. and it had mentioned the net neutrality hangup somewhere in the 6th line of the summary.
Ah... so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye that it can never be...
I would have made a clever reference to the game resistance: fall of man but I got bored before I made it, just as I got bored with the game before getting far enough to have anything to reference.
"If you've paid for your software, you can usually [expect] that they wont fuck you over with that crap" So why are there ads in some PC games that cost over fifty bucks to buy?
Probably because the average gamer is less likely to notice shenanigans and get upset by them. Wipeout had ads added, they were pulled because of gamer outrage, but most of that was likely because the ads noticeably slowed down the loading times. I suspect if there wasn't a slowdown, gamers wouldn't have enough of a problem with it.
Keep in mind that most gamers are young not to realize that advertising shouldn't be something you can't help breathing constantly, and many just don't care. I admit I still play burnout paradise even though there are in-game ads.
It also has me thinking about a boss I had who went nuts when he found out I could read his email. He wanted his own email server (and like who is going admin it?).
And see, had he asked that question (maybe not in front of slashdot, but at least someone who had a clue) that would have been better than what he did.
In any case I have to wonder about the future of this startup is the people involved are so inexperienced.
It sounds to me like he's trying to become at least a little less inexperienced. And we're calling him an idiot for it.
Don't heap abuse on someone asking a question you happen to think is obvious, asking questions is what people are supposed to do. Admitting you're ignorant in an area, even one you should be informed of ideally, to me is noble, or at least a much better path than that which most people would take: assuming. I'm guessing there are tons of manager out there who would just assume they're not trustworthy and work on convincing whoever they are accountable to that it's the admin's fault everything is falling apart, not the managers because he wouldn't trust the admin with access to information essential for the job.
You, on the other hand, are doing your best to further the stereotype and make more non-computer literate people afraid to correct their own ignorance. "I don't want to ask the IT department what I should do, they usually try to make me feel stupid. I'm just going to assume the computer virus will clean itself up."
Slashdot Mirror
Not true: If you're seeing a girl who won't quite give it up in your senior year, sometimes giving her your class ring will put her over the edge.
Thanks again, jostens!
We have DSL but don't bother plugging in the phone. It's mostly redundant with our cell phones, no one is there to answer it usually, and when we are, we frequently get robocalls and collection agencies calling the recycled number. I'm aware there are steps which can be taken to stop the collections agencies, but its easier to keep the phone unplugged, that wouldn't stop the robocalls, and again, with no advantage to the landline I'm not sure why I would bother.
This seems to be pretty common too. Most of my friends who have DSL don't bother plugging in phones to the landline. So I'd guess that of the remaining landline subscribers, fewer actually use the line, and newer customers increasingly don't bother with them. I'd also wonder if those few people who use their landlines aren't predominantly people who have lived in the same house since before they had or regularly used cell phones.
Specifically you mean the United States world... Other developed nations do not have our problem for one reason or another.
Since we're talking about a report in the -american- journal of preventive medicine about the average -US- gamer, I have to ask why you're discussing japanese or european diets.
(er, food, not the japanese legislature, which would be just as off-topic)
No, I don't think that was an offensive joke at all. I didn't say anything about the victims, just made a pun about the dam itself. And I thought it was funny if I do say so myself. Others appear to agree. If you're saying a joke is tasteless, say it's tasteless. Don't say it's not funny, because it usually is, and that's not relevant to your whine anyway. /. is unquestionably american and european centric. The chances that any of the victims' families read that are pretty low. So I didn't feel bad about making it
Are you a family member of one of the victims? If so, I'm sorry, but you're not, and you have no right to be offended by jokes on this subject.
In soviet russia, hydroelectric damns YOU.
Oh good, I'm glad someone actually took that as an opportunity to inform us for the hundredth time as to the benefits of PC gaming. ~
Why exactly are PC gamers so intent on informing us of how much better in every way PCs are to consoles? I don't care, none of us console gamers do.
Or actually thinks ferraris are the only car to drive, and is upset that he brought them into that.
Whole genome replication seems to mostly center around Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). PCR is an incredibly versitile technology. PCR machines cycle test tubes through specific temperatures, the thermal cyclers are cheap compared to a lot of lab equipment but still in the thousands of dollars. To do a PCR also requires some type of polymerase, nucleotides, some solutions, and short primer oligonucleotides. These are all items that aren't prohibitively expensive but aren't household items either.
Maybe I'm being too ACLU/tinfoil hat, but I'm getting a sinking feeling that someone eventually is going to try to slap some regulations on PCR, or at some point in the future, having access to a thermal cycler and PCR materials is going to be seen by law enforcement as a reason to be suspicious of you. And I think that would be a real crime. I could see a future where thermal cyclers come down in price even more, maybe high school kids will start tinkering around with PCR as kids from yesteryear played with chemistry sets before we decided they could be used to make bombs and should be banned.
Maybe not. Anyway, I think we should nip it in the bud if there's any hint that law enforcement starts thinking you need to have a good reason to manipulate DNA, just so they can keep their evidence unquestionably true.
This doesn't change much, it's still much easier for "them" to frame you by drugging you and leaving you at the scene of a murder, then anonymously tipping the authorities off. Just like they did to OJ to try to prevent another "Naked Gun" from being made.
("They" may be completely evil, but you can't fault their sense of humor.)
The chips aren't self-aware now, or even really thinking on their own presumably, and they aren't designed to do so. To go from unthinking chips to self awareness on the level of humans would likely be more inefficient and unlikely as our evolution has been. Also given restrictions on the system, it's more unlikely that the computer would continue to function as the thing started changing, not to mention it would have to evolve with much fewer resources in a much more closed space. So yeah, I think it's a false analogy: the computer evolving intelligence is far less likely and would take a lot longer probably.
Also I was being facetious.
I think there's a big difference between Vista's bad word of mouth and the Ipod's "my friend got one, IT'S SO COOL!"
I sometimes like to pretend that browsing /. while I'm supposed to be working makes me more knowledgeable about computing than the average user, but probably not by much if at all. I couldn't tell you what people don't like about vista, but whenever people do rant about how bad vista is, they clearly know more about it than I do. I don't remember getting an option of sticking with windows ME when I bought my computer, and I don't remember hearing anything negative about XP. The one thing I know about Vista is that a lot of people don't like it and I have the option of not getting it.
An ipod on the other hand has a lot more going for it than being the newest, hippest thing. At this point, I think everyone in the country has played around with one at some point, and there is base appeal. The wheel was pretty appealing, the touch is too.
Maybe if everyone had been exposed to vista and it had a cool gimmicky feature, I'd agree that the only difference there was that one was trendy and the other wasn't, but that's not how it is, you're drawing a false comparison.
DNA seems to have been in use for 4 billion years. Humans arose 200k years ago, some humans can be described as "self-aware."
So we have at most 3.8 billion years to decide if we are going to fight or welcome our self-aware DNA computer overlords.
This is nonsense. "Consumers should change" is sth you should never have to say, or it shows you are having a very big problem. Consumer is NEVER the problem. No industry has ANY right of sales that consumers should abide to.
If consumers don't buy your product, obviously the industry is the problem.
Yeah, I'm not the videogame industry, I AM a consumer. We are, in fact, a big part of the problem. I'm not making any products and blaming the consumer. I think I have every right to say "A lot of my fellow consumers are making stupid purchases and that encourages stupid games."
No no, his mother has already received numerous citations for the not free kind of sex.
It would be nice if economic troubles caused gamers themselves to be more selective about which games they bought. A few years ago when I worked at gamestop, most of the customers (children especially) seemed to buy games based ENTIRELY OFF THE BOXART. "Hey, I have a PS2. Hey, I enjoyed the movie 'fight club". Hey, this box which appears to have been the first game I picked up is Fight club for the PS2. That's GOT to be a good one!" Many people are apparently buying wii games at random, the effect being that most of the games for the wii are barely playable. Developers wouldn't make movie-tie in games if they didn't sell. It would be great if the economic troubles really put a damper on people buying games on impulse without reading a single review to tell if the game was halfway decent, or shovelware.
Then again, I'm pretty sure even if that 29% decrease were entirely due to throwaway games, the industry would still follow the path of least resistance. Maybe they'd just make ONLY worthless games.
While I'm making demands of millions of people who wouldn't change even if they did read this post, it would be nice if gamers were more supportive, or at least more forgiving, of games that try to do new things. A lot of "hardcore" gamers get very entrenched opinions about what a game should and should not be according to genre. It's like if moviegoers complained that a movie wasn't formulaic enough.
Shockingly, I've seen books devoted to PHP, Apache, and C - books which cost money to buy. But get this - those things are free!
To add to that, I've seen books about sex for sale, and sex is occasionally free.
I think actually the actual small nugget of truth these tests are going to be based off of is going to be something very similar to the following:
The little bit of DNA they sequenced, once through, was more similar to a musician's and most dissimilar to an architect, so that "indicates" he would be best as a musician. Over the course of the summer camp, he was told repeatedly that he wanted to play music rather than draw buildings, and rewarded for learning to play a little something to convince his parents that he actually had talent and they didn't waste their money.
The whole genome will not be sequenced in any case, and there obviously won't be any attempt to do anything besides correlation. They haven't identified anything like a "musical talent" gene, it's all pure correlations.
It's going to be a slightly more technical version of Japan's blood type = personality fortunetelling or good old fashioned phrenology. Although, anyone I talked to about it in Tokyo regarded the blood types as we would regard horoscopes: with a grain of salt. It seems to really continue as a novelty, and only is around because it's so cheap to identify your blood type. Shelling out $880 for the equivalent? I doubt this pseudoscience crap is going to take off, at least until they offer sequencing and comparisons for cheaper.
Perhaps we have a communication problem here. From TFA, "And privately, some companies are griping about conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule " From the summar, "And privately, some companies are griping about conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule "
I would say we do have a communication problem. I think. Either you're being sarcastic or I am, I sincerely thought it was me.
Maybe that did factor into their decision, but I have to think that while there's plenty of hate for telecos among certain dark corners of the internets, like here, it's not going to resonate with the unwashed masses like the auto or bank bailouts did. Maybe I'm wrong, never looked at any polling data on it. My impression though is that net neutrality is fairly low to under the radar for most people.
No. Among other things they don't like the idea of Net Neutrality which is one stipulation of taking the money.
If ONLY there had been some reference to that in TFA. Or, dare I say it, the summary. I'm imagining a fictional world in which this story had been posted to /. and it had mentioned the net neutrality hangup somewhere in the 6th line of the summary.
Ah... so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye that it can never be...
I would have made a clever reference to the game resistance: fall of man but I got bored before I made it, just as I got bored with the game before getting far enough to have anything to reference.
If it's all dead, the only thing left to do is sort through it's pockets for loose change.
"If you've paid for your software, you can usually [expect] that they wont fuck you over with that crap"
So why are there ads in some PC games that cost over fifty bucks to buy?
Probably because the average gamer is less likely to notice shenanigans and get upset by them. Wipeout had ads added, they were pulled because of gamer outrage, but most of that was likely because the ads noticeably slowed down the loading times. I suspect if there wasn't a slowdown, gamers wouldn't have enough of a problem with it.
Keep in mind that most gamers are young not to realize that advertising shouldn't be something you can't help breathing constantly, and many just don't care. I admit I still play burnout paradise even though there are in-game ads.
It also has me thinking about a boss I had who went nuts when he found out I could read his email. He wanted his own email server (and like who is going admin it?).
And see, had he asked that question (maybe not in front of slashdot, but at least someone who had a clue) that would have been better than what he did.
In any case I have to wonder about the future of this startup is the people involved are so inexperienced.
It sounds to me like he's trying to become at least a little less inexperienced. And we're calling him an idiot for it.
Don't heap abuse on someone asking a question you happen to think is obvious, asking questions is what people are supposed to do. Admitting you're ignorant in an area, even one you should be informed of ideally, to me is noble, or at least a much better path than that which most people would take: assuming. I'm guessing there are tons of manager out there who would just assume they're not trustworthy and work on convincing whoever they are accountable to that it's the admin's fault everything is falling apart, not the managers because he wouldn't trust the admin with access to information essential for the job.
You, on the other hand, are doing your best to further the stereotype and make more non-computer literate people afraid to correct their own ignorance. "I don't want to ask the IT department what I should do, they usually try to make me feel stupid. I'm just going to assume the computer virus will clean itself up."