Of course it's not news for nerds, everyone knows nerds are illiterate and so don't read anything. All those books they have on their shelves, kindles, and talk about were given to them by friends and family as decorations, and they heard a synopsis of it on a podcast, youtube, or downloaded the movie.
Now that the sarcasm-spasm is over, we don't have enough information about what the heck the real fight is over, we just have their P.R. statements. So far it could be Amazon trying to squeeze out extra profit or special favors, or it could be Hachette trying to raise it's book prices or trying to get special favors. All we really know is they are having a dispute, and both of them are trying to sway the public with sugar coated press releases.
"While the real time image recognition may not be quite ready for prime time"
It doesn't actually need image recognition. We've had systems deployed for decades that can handle identify the existence of possible collisions based on detecting obstacles and their relative vectors. It doesn't need to know that large blob on a collision course is a Ford Taurus, just that it's going to collide in 3.2 seconds on the current vectors. If you're curious what uses those types of systems in real time now, just look at military hardware, it's in more than just planes.
By the time a human realizes there is a problem if the automated system has failed, they'll be lucky to have enough time to scream. It's kind of like the people that don't want to wear seatbelts because they are afraid they'll end up in a crash and be hurt so bad they can't undo the seatbelt to get out. If you haven't figured that out, if you are so messed up you can't undo a seatbelt, there's no way in hell you'd have been able to get out of a car.
"The materials that we use on earth are plentiful enough..." except for those that we don't use because they are NOT plentiful enough on earth, like Helium 3. There are plenty of others as well. And yes, even if a resource were available on Earth, if it would be cheaper to obtain it from a non-terrestrial source, somebody will attempt to do so.
If you ever have extended occupancy a computer geek, and 8 lbs of discretionary cargo, there will be a game server on the moon. Maybe a few more pounds if you need your own power source.
To join this betting pool, donate $5 to slashdot. Declare in a post how quickly it will turn into an Anti-Microsoft rant as Microsoft was mentioned in the article. Please note the house already has the first 20 posts and 20 minutes, so if you want to win, you have to choose something after that.
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I have nothing to do with the running of slashdot, I'm just another snarky poster.:)
I remember seeing news articles about this. There have been several cases in the US where they took someone to court over an EULA. In all of them, when it looked like the corporation was going to lose, they settled out of court, thus avoiding a legal precedent they wouldn't like. I don't know if things have changed in the last few years, but I haven't heard about it. Also, the courts have very explicitly stated that they don't give a damn what the license or eula says, you haven't given up your rights, period. (ianal)
Yeah, and demand letters like that, especially when sent to bloody everybody including a whole packload of journalists are not a good sign regarding his mental health. I read the letter, and it's not as bad as some of the 'letters', rants, and 'manifestos' dangerous nutbags have used, but it's close enough to the earlier ones to be worrying.
To abuse an old quote, "Get thee to a nuttery!". No, seriously, get this guy some mental healthcare before he does something totally psycho and irrevocable.
Ubisofts you can't play your offline single player game unless it's in constant online contact with the mothership drm wasn't broken, for about a month I think.
Not really. He is using a unique pseudonym, so his written statements and reputation can be tracked. If a criminal investigation in necessitated, it's pretty easy to find out who the real person is that uses that pseudonym.
He's not "hiding behind a pseudonym", rather he is using it to create his own identity in the slashdot community while putting enough separation between himself and those things outside of slashdot that each must be judged on it's own merits, and he won't have his boss breathing down his neck if his opinions differ from those of management.
The 'market' is trying to destroy the internet by owning it all under one umbrella and dole out tiny bits to consumers for as absolutely much money as they can squeeze out of us. I have to wonder, do you actually know what a free market is? The ISP market is nothing like a free market situation. Neither is cable television, but although that is a different subject, it is still related due to the cable companies being major broadband players in this water sprinkler. (Not extensive enough to be called a pool.)
There's basically a few ways to handle this. One: Let the companies do what they want. That will be an utter nightmare for consumers, and due to the growing necessity of the internet and all it's related data services, it would totally screw all of the populace of this country. Dumbest choice possible. Two: Regulate the companies properly. Let's face it, they are really providing a necessary utility these days, just like power and water. Make them toe the line. The companies would hate this, but they get to stay in the game. Three: Since it is a utility that the corporations have already shown they can't be trusted to manage, have it become ran by the government. Although the government isn't the most efficient organization, they also aren't trying to suck every last cent out of your cash anemic self as they don't have a profit motive. Expansion and improvement are likely to be slow, but then again, the corporations were already given massive bonuses in tax exemptions or write offs and many other ways by the government, and they still haven't delivered the very things they agreed to as a requirement for receiving that aid. For that matter, they've demanded several more times the previous largesses just to do what they were already supposed to have done. Looks like the government won't do any worse for the consumer than the companies are already screwing up.
What's the right choice? I couldn't really say, but the status quo of #1 has already proven it's a failure, so it at least is NOT the right choice. For the other two, I guess it really depends on how it's done.
Contip: That still doesn't return the wasted bandwidth, nor does it give you the random access ability of a page of text. Additionally, if the subtitles are not hardcoded, jumping the video or increasing the playback speed will usually make the subtitles go away. For that matter, depending on what playback device you use, your options for increasing or reducing playback speeds tend to be very limited, especially at the higher speeds where they tend to skip over entire segments resulting in lost text. And that's not even mentioning that you need a good subtitler to keep the timing reasonable and readable, something that is rather lacking in a large number of those that do subtitles. Maybe you mean for them to hire a professional subtitler, though that would massively increase the cost. (Yes, I watch a lot of subtitled videos.)
Sorry AC, but your 'protip' doesn't work worth a damn.
Some things are better for video, some for text, and some for audio. Too bad there's a lot of idiots that think everything should be video. I'm dreading the day I find a video of some baka reading a book, magazine, or newspaper. I'm sure they exist, but fortunately I haven't been forced to view them yet.
They increased the price to $71 million. From what? If it was previously $70 million, so what. Sure that's a lot of money to use, but maybe it was justified. On the other hand, if it was from something like $22 million, then some big flags should have been raised in the fraud dept.
Actually in 2006 is was $22 million, but if the article is going to use the new prices as a point, it needs to mention what the previous price was, otherwise it's just an unqualified statement. Speaking of which, why didn't anyone start yelling when they more than tripled the price?
There has already been one case where a federal judge declared that no eula can take away your rights, no matter what the text of the eula says. It was a few years back and I'm not going to waste the time to try and look it up, but for those of you that don't get headaches looking at legalese, feel free to find a link to it.
Simple. There will never be a zombie attack. On the other hand, being able to train for extreme situations without making the obvious mistake of assigning a real world group as the 'bad guys' because everybody knows zombies don't exist.
If they had used a real world opponent, there would be two problems. The first, is the diplomatic problems that would arise from them planning conflicts with that group. How do you think China, or The United Kingdom, or any other country would respond to something like that. Second, there's the whole problem with mindset. You get everybody training to fight someone in the real world, and that's the opponent they think about fighting. If that actually ends up being your real foe, see the first issue, then that's not so bad, but if it ends up being someone else, then you have the problem of people using the wrong strategies since they are mentally locked on the one they trained for. If you always know your opponent is non-existent, and not just a renamed nazi/soviet/scientologists/whatever, then you concentrate more on the fundamentals rather than your training analogs.
It's a good idea to train against a completely fictional opponent that will never be mistaken for anyone in the real world for various reasons. Too bad you don't understand that.
The city I live in has lots of bikes in use. It's often called the bike capital of the northwest. If you go around looking at the bicyclists for a period of time, you will probably notice that around 90% of them are in violation of the laws. Around 2/3rds of that is going the wrong way in the lane. They also will fail to follow traffic signals, ride at night in dark cloths without sufficient light devices or even without any reflectors having removed the ones that originally came on the bikes. In short the vast majority of them are suicidal morons. Ironically, I love riding my bicycle here as we have great places to do so, when the weather isn't crap, and have been doing so since I was a kid.
On a side note, the whole idea of getting through an intersection faster is great when you have a green light, but trying to go against the light is stupid no matter how fast you do it.
The Bering Strait isn't "in the middle of fucking nowhere", it's the least water between two distinct and useful somewheres. The problem is you don't see the value of that location. There has been talk of building bridges or tunnels across that span for at least a century. Though ships are cheaper than planes, they are more expensive than trains. A railway across the Bering Strait would instantly become a big hit with shipping between North America and Eurasia. After all the USA gets a lot of products from China. Come to think of it, I do believe that particular route by train would even be faster than the usual sea route by ship for the China-USA trade.
Although to be honest about it, I doubt anything will happen. This would probably be the most extensive and expensive engineering project ever attempted. Then there's a whole thing about China running the hype machine like usual. In exercising their control over the media, China sometimes forgets that the latest musings of a powerful or educated person is not the same thing as a realistic plan.
In this current economy with crap for job prospects, as long as they aren't breaking the law, the clear and real threat of starvation and homelessness is a pretty damn effective 'gun' to your head.
On a measurement level, they are 3 dimensional as nothing in our universe lacks having those 3 dimensions. Of course, you could never discern that thickness without some highly specialized super sensitive devices.
Then there's the whole effective or design thing going on there. That map you look at when you get lost, it's considered 2d. Not because the ink and paper is composed of atoms and are actually 3d, but rather because the information and design of it's display is only on 2 dimensions. Ever see a 3 dimensional map? Sure, they exist, but you don't carry them around. If you really need 3d info of the terrain, you usually use a topographical map that displays info about the 3d, but in a 2d method.
Sure these new electronic components physically have a 3rd dimension, but it's not part of their functional design. They are laid out like the information on a piece of paper, something generally considered to be 2 dimensional.
So yes, technically your statement of them being 3d is factual, and yet it is completely worthless. Much like most Microsoft technical advice. To quote part of the old joke, "You are in a Helicopter.". If you want to read the whole joke, there are lots of copies of it, here's one: http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/microsoft-helicopter-joke-t3245996.html
Slashdot Mirror
He's working hard to justify that bribe he received.
They've only gotten 12% of those eligible.
So, what's the 'discounted' price, and how many of them have even heard about the 'discount'?
Of course it's not news for nerds, everyone knows nerds are illiterate and so don't read anything. All those books they have on their shelves, kindles, and talk about were given to them by friends and family as decorations, and they heard a synopsis of it on a podcast, youtube, or downloaded the movie.
Now that the sarcasm-spasm is over, we don't have enough information about what the heck the real fight is over, we just have their P.R. statements.
So far it could be Amazon trying to squeeze out extra profit or special favors, or it could be Hachette trying to raise it's book prices or trying to get special favors.
All we really know is they are having a dispute, and both of them are trying to sway the public with sugar coated press releases.
"While the real time image recognition may not be quite ready for prime time"
It doesn't actually need image recognition. We've had systems deployed for decades that can handle identify the existence of possible collisions based on detecting obstacles and their relative vectors. It doesn't need to know that large blob on a collision course is a Ford Taurus, just that it's going to collide in 3.2 seconds on the current vectors.
If you're curious what uses those types of systems in real time now, just look at military hardware, it's in more than just planes.
By the time you know that 'shit' is happening, you won't have time to do anything unless you are The Flash right out of the DC universe.
By the time a human realizes there is a problem if the automated system has failed, they'll be lucky to have enough time to scream.
It's kind of like the people that don't want to wear seatbelts because they are afraid they'll end up in a crash and be hurt so bad they can't undo the seatbelt to get out.
If you haven't figured that out, if you are so messed up you can't undo a seatbelt, there's no way in hell you'd have been able to get out of a car.
"The materials that we use on earth are plentiful enough..." except for those that we don't use because they are NOT plentiful enough on earth, like Helium 3. There are plenty of others as well. And yes, even if a resource were available on Earth, if it would be cheaper to obtain it from a non-terrestrial source, somebody will attempt to do so.
If you ever have extended occupancy a computer geek, and 8 lbs of discretionary cargo, there will be a game server on the moon. Maybe a few more pounds if you need your own power source.
Just to clarify AC, 'They' is not NASA. You must be referring to the government.
To join this betting pool, donate $5 to slashdot.
:)
Declare in a post how quickly it will turn into an Anti-Microsoft rant as Microsoft was mentioned in the article.
Please note the house already has the first 20 posts and 20 minutes, so if you want to win, you have to choose something after that.
Obviously you will never win, but you can be assured that Slashdot appreciates your money. Hosting this site ain't free.
I have nothing to do with the running of slashdot, I'm just another snarky poster.
I remember seeing news articles about this. There have been several cases in the US where they took someone to court over an EULA. In all of them, when it looked like the corporation was going to lose, they settled out of court, thus avoiding a legal precedent they wouldn't like. I don't know if things have changed in the last few years, but I haven't heard about it.
Also, the courts have very explicitly stated that they don't give a damn what the license or eula says, you haven't given up your rights, period.
(ianal)
Yeah, and demand letters like that, especially when sent to bloody everybody including a whole packload of journalists are not a good sign regarding his mental health. I read the letter, and it's not as bad as some of the 'letters', rants, and 'manifestos' dangerous nutbags have used, but it's close enough to the earlier ones to be worrying.
To abuse an old quote, "Get thee to a nuttery!". No, seriously, get this guy some mental healthcare before he does something totally psycho and irrevocable.
Ubisofts you can't play your offline single player game unless it's in constant online contact with the mothership drm wasn't broken, for about a month I think.
Not really. He is using a unique pseudonym, so his written statements and reputation can be tracked.
If a criminal investigation in necessitated, it's pretty easy to find out who the real person is that uses that pseudonym.
He's not "hiding behind a pseudonym", rather he is using it to create his own identity in the slashdot community while putting enough separation between himself and those things outside of slashdot that each must be judged on it's own merits, and he won't have his boss breathing down his neck if his opinions differ from those of management.
You on the other hand...
The 'market' is trying to destroy the internet by owning it all under one umbrella and dole out tiny bits to consumers for as absolutely much money as they can squeeze out of us. I have to wonder, do you actually know what a free market is? The ISP market is nothing like a free market situation. Neither is cable television, but although that is a different subject, it is still related due to the cable companies being major broadband players in this water sprinkler. (Not extensive enough to be called a pool.)
There's basically a few ways to handle this.
One: Let the companies do what they want. That will be an utter nightmare for consumers, and due to the growing necessity of the internet and all it's related data services, it would totally screw all of the populace of this country. Dumbest choice possible.
Two: Regulate the companies properly. Let's face it, they are really providing a necessary utility these days, just like power and water. Make them toe the line. The companies would hate this, but they get to stay in the game.
Three: Since it is a utility that the corporations have already shown they can't be trusted to manage, have it become ran by the government. Although the government isn't the most efficient organization, they also aren't trying to suck every last cent out of your cash anemic self as they don't have a profit motive. Expansion and improvement are likely to be slow, but then again, the corporations were already given massive bonuses in tax exemptions or write offs and many other ways by the government, and they still haven't delivered the very things they agreed to as a requirement for receiving that aid. For that matter, they've demanded several more times the previous largesses just to do what they were already supposed to have done. Looks like the government won't do any worse for the consumer than the companies are already screwing up.
What's the right choice? I couldn't really say, but the status quo of #1 has already proven it's a failure, so it at least is NOT the right choice. For the other two, I guess it really depends on how it's done.
Contip: That still doesn't return the wasted bandwidth, nor does it give you the random access ability of a page of text. Additionally, if the subtitles are not hardcoded, jumping the video or increasing the playback speed will usually make the subtitles go away. For that matter, depending on what playback device you use, your options for increasing or reducing playback speeds tend to be very limited, especially at the higher speeds where they tend to skip over entire segments resulting in lost text. And that's not even mentioning that you need a good subtitler to keep the timing reasonable and readable, something that is rather lacking in a large number of those that do subtitles. Maybe you mean for them to hire a professional subtitler, though that would massively increase the cost. (Yes, I watch a lot of subtitled videos.)
Sorry AC, but your 'protip' doesn't work worth a damn.
Some things are better for video, some for text, and some for audio. Too bad there's a lot of idiots that think everything should be video. I'm dreading the day I find a video of some baka reading a book, magazine, or newspaper. I'm sure they exist, but fortunately I haven't been forced to view them yet.
They increased the price to $71 million.
From what?
If it was previously $70 million, so what. Sure that's a lot of money to use, but maybe it was justified.
On the other hand, if it was from something like $22 million, then some big flags should have been raised in the fraud dept.
Actually in 2006 is was $22 million, but if the article is going to use the new prices as a point, it needs to mention what the previous price was, otherwise it's just an unqualified statement. Speaking of which, why didn't anyone start yelling when they more than tripled the price?
There has already been one case where a federal judge declared that no eula can take away your rights, no matter what the text of the eula says. It was a few years back and I'm not going to waste the time to try and look it up, but for those of you that don't get headaches looking at legalese, feel free to find a link to it.
Aren't you supposed to "make light of the matter", and not the other way around?
Simple. There will never be a zombie attack.
On the other hand, being able to train for extreme situations without making the obvious mistake of assigning a real world group as the 'bad guys' because everybody knows zombies don't exist.
If they had used a real world opponent, there would be two problems.
The first, is the diplomatic problems that would arise from them planning conflicts with that group. How do you think China, or The United Kingdom, or any other country would respond to something like that.
Second, there's the whole problem with mindset. You get everybody training to fight someone in the real world, and that's the opponent they think about fighting. If that actually ends up being your real foe, see the first issue, then that's not so bad, but if it ends up being someone else, then you have the problem of people using the wrong strategies since they are mentally locked on the one they trained for. If you always know your opponent is non-existent, and not just a renamed nazi/soviet/scientologists/whatever, then you concentrate more on the fundamentals rather than your training analogs.
It's a good idea to train against a completely fictional opponent that will never be mistaken for anyone in the real world for various reasons. Too bad you don't understand that.
I'm pretty sick of all this crapware trying to out think me and second guess everything I do. That includes Googles F'd up searches.
The city I live in has lots of bikes in use. It's often called the bike capital of the northwest. If you go around looking at the bicyclists for a period of time, you will probably notice that around 90% of them are in violation of the laws. Around 2/3rds of that is going the wrong way in the lane. They also will fail to follow traffic signals, ride at night in dark cloths without sufficient light devices or even without any reflectors having removed the ones that originally came on the bikes. In short the vast majority of them are suicidal morons. Ironically, I love riding my bicycle here as we have great places to do so, when the weather isn't crap, and have been doing so since I was a kid.
On a side note, the whole idea of getting through an intersection faster is great when you have a green light, but trying to go against the light is stupid no matter how fast you do it.
The Bering Strait isn't "in the middle of fucking nowhere", it's the least water between two distinct and useful somewheres. The problem is you don't see the value of that location.
There has been talk of building bridges or tunnels across that span for at least a century.
Though ships are cheaper than planes, they are more expensive than trains. A railway across the Bering Strait would instantly become a big hit with shipping between North America and Eurasia. After all the USA gets a lot of products from China.
Come to think of it, I do believe that particular route by train would even be faster than the usual sea route by ship for the China-USA trade.
Although to be honest about it, I doubt anything will happen. This would probably be the most extensive and expensive engineering project ever attempted. Then there's a whole thing about China running the hype machine like usual. In exercising their control over the media, China sometimes forgets that the latest musings of a powerful or educated person is not the same thing as a realistic plan.
In this current economy with crap for job prospects, as long as they aren't breaking the law, the clear and real threat of starvation and homelessness is a pretty damn effective 'gun' to your head.
On a measurement level, they are 3 dimensional as nothing in our universe lacks having those 3 dimensions.
Of course, you could never discern that thickness without some highly specialized super sensitive devices.
Then there's the whole effective or design thing going on there. That map you look at when you get lost, it's considered 2d. Not because the ink and paper is composed of atoms and are actually 3d, but rather because the information and design of it's display is only on 2 dimensions. Ever see a 3 dimensional map? Sure, they exist, but you don't carry them around. If you really need 3d info of the terrain, you usually use a topographical map that displays info about the 3d, but in a 2d method.
Sure these new electronic components physically have a 3rd dimension, but it's not part of their functional design. They are laid out like the information on a piece of paper, something generally considered to be 2 dimensional.
So yes, technically your statement of them being 3d is factual, and yet it is completely worthless. Much like most Microsoft technical advice. To quote part of the old joke, "You are in a Helicopter.". If you want to read the whole joke, there are lots of copies of it, here's one: http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/microsoft-helicopter-joke-t3245996.html