It does seem strange to me over in the UK that phone unlocking has been a big political issue. Seriously, how screwed up is your phone tech over there? Your phone networks aren't interoperable, are you kidding me? I'm hoping there some important technical reason behind that linked to your geography or something.
Also, why is access to unlocked phones such a big deal? Can't you get them? I just bought a new phone without a network lock - it works out cheaper in the long run but most people still buy phones with contracts because the upfront cost is lower and the network deals with any problems you have, handset or network. I have the choice of any network, I just pick up a free (or negligible cost) SIM card from them and I know it'll work. How backward is your phone network if you can't even do that?
Obama promising to fix that issue and actually bring America into the world of the 21st century cell network (despite the protestations of doom from the networks, I'm guessing?) - now THAT would be worth some column inches.
Spec chasers go for whatever the latest and greatest Android/Apple device is and play playground top-trumps with that. Crackberry users just need "good enough" and have been kicking the habit in increasing numbers around the world for some time now for exactly that reason - why pay all that money for good enough when you can get kick-ass with better support prospects for the same price from someone else? From EE (UK 4G network) for same the monthly fee I can get an iPhone 5 for £10 or a Q10 for £30. They're actually trying to charge more for a worse product with the same subscription. The Blackberry only survives because of that tribal fanboi segregation bollocks so many people have fallen for, but without something to crow about, RIM won't survive purely on that for very much longer.
To rub some salt into the wound, Nokia were selling more Lumia phones than RIM were selling phones total - if you factor in Nokia's Asha range, Nokia were bitch-slapping RIM and may actually have been onto a comeback - I wonder how that'll play out for MS? Will we see MS vs Apple vs Google in the top 3 phone charts some time soon?
I wish they'd hurry up and standardize PITF over TCP/IP. There's a great case for adding a standard feature to HTML 5 that invokes it any time someone loads a page with a text box, types a text string along the lines of "first" and initiates an HTTP post action in less than 1.8 seconds.
We can argue about who named what first as much as we like, the fact is that somehow the term Global Warming has been replaced with Climate Change in certain parts of the media in the same way that things like Cancer Link keep getting replaced by Health Risk when attached to certain business interests. It's what happens when science and politics meet and the spin doctors and vested interests all kick into damage control mode and ethics get stomped on by profiteers.
Should we be playing Chinese whispers over the name of something so potentially, universally, catastrophically destructive? What does it say about our society that we're actually staring the end of that society as we know it in the face and arguing over how it's spelled?
Don't confuse the relationship between micro- and macro-climate. It's the difference between telling someone the average percentage of horses that'll finish in all the races across all the tracks in the country this weekend (the macro) against which horse will win any particular race (the micro). Micro-predictions and their relative difficulty have no bearing on the importance of macro-predictions and one's ability to investigate and discrepancies after the fact.
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but F*** the whole god damn lot of you!
America has had it's political system dragged through the s*** so badly that all the elections are now is an argument over which candidate is the shiniest of the two turds so he can spend 8 years making exactly the same mistakes as the last 6-7 guys before him because that's the agenda he was set by his backers.
If you really want to change something, set aside the politics and rhetoric and propaganda, figure out what it is you all want in common and demand it from your political leaders. Isn't that how Democracy is supposed to work? All anyone else from around the world sees from the States is a childish bun-fight. You guys give Democracy a bad name, sort it out already!
Doesn't the Constitution you're oh-so-proud of have something to say about what to do in your current situation? Oh yeah, it's become just as irrelevant over time as any of a hundred other used-to-be great political documents from around the world. At least you can be proud it out-lasted Marxist theory, as if that's worth celebrating.
I'm going to bed now, take your time and write a decent rebuttal this time, one that isn't laughably transparently denialist-fingers-in-my-ears-lalalalacan'thearyou
Okay, I'm too flu'd up right now and my temp is on the way down from 100, so maybe I'm a bit snappy right now, but here goes.
Chasing Ice is very important as a visualisation of what has until recently been a purely statistical argument. Of course it elicits an emotional reaction, but it doesn't sell any agenda except the one that you can see with your own eyes - the climate is changing and there's a whole stack of evidence that we did it. If you don't get emotional from that realisation, you aren't a human being that's worth keeping alive.
To be honest, I've also been somewhat skeptical of the phrase "Save The Planet". Earth is not in jeopardy - if we nuked the crap out of the land and sea, Earth would continue to orbit, perhaps some new lifeforms would evolve to be as numerous and diverse as life is now, and within 8 billion years the Earth will be gone - either taken out by an asteroid or consumed by the Sun. To the individual human, what's the practical different between "Preserve the habitability of our biosphere" and "Save the planet"? Save the planet is catchier. If you want to argue the toss over it, go ahead - just don't expect anyone to give a shit about anything you say ever again if all you want to do is split infinitives that fine.
Regarding your assertion that AGW is nonsense, I smell the whiff of a hypocrite. You accuse me of congratulating me on my own intelligence, yet you are obviously very self-congratulatory of your own. Climate change deniers always seem to me like the folk who root for the underdog no matter how outgunned they are. I do it during international Rugby matches (Fiji vs New Zealand - of course you want to see the All-Blacks lose!) , you're doing it despite the overwhelming evidence for the existence of man-made climate change and the highly questionable motives of those who oppose it.
But the really interesting part is that you automatically assumed I undertake no philanthropic activity of my own. How the fuck would you know? Have you any idea how much of my life I've dedicated to encouraging to helping the homeless find stable employment and encouraging young people in their artistic expressions? How much of my own resources I've donated to helping cure Alzheimers disease? How much I've fought against homophobia and religious intolerance in my local community? Funny how you tried to direct the argument in that direction instead of something that might actually have been pertinent to the subject matter - perhaps critisizing the solar panels on my roof or my lack of a car, or perhaps my decision to avoid the organic produce shop down the road, or that I advocate for green building methods... because you can't win the argument if you actually stay on topic, can you?
Seriously, kill yourself now, put yourself out of your future misery.
Sorry, posting from bed with flu, missed the word "since" before that first comma. Forgot to mention the server-consolidation messing up pings for everyone outside the USA as well.
It is a shame what happened to Planetside. I played it a few times, the population never really recovered from the BFR exodus. If only Sony would release the source for the server and client... (glances imploringly at Wikileaks)
Nothing even comes close to the scale of Planetside 2's tech, but I must admit to being severely disappointed about how little progress it's made in 10 years. Given the ambition of the original, the sequel is underwhelming to say the least - maybe my imagination is just too far ahead of the game, or maybe Sony just played it safe? Either way, it may be state-of-the-art, but Planetside 2 hasn't shoved Torchlight 2 aside in my gaming schedules (yet?).
Yes, it's an "open beta" - which means that things may not work correctly or be changed/removed.
The hype around this game comes from the pedigree and experience of it's dev team and they've made a mess of what should have been THE core feature of the game. Remove the whole game from the Internet already, it'll never live up to it's promise.
Whoa, wait, the PvP is limited to 5v5 but it gets attention because it's ex-Tribes devs? What happened to them, they get hit in the head by a truck or something?
Ignore the slight in the summary, Soulskill is just a jealous revisionist. Planetside is 10+ years old (predating Call of Duty, Battlefield Vietnam, Halo 2, most of Medal of Honor, World of Warcraft and the Source engine) as has happily ticked along with up to 450 players per continent (map) in hectic PvP battles that put pretty much every game released since to shame. Despite Sony proving it's possible to scale an FPS up that far, everyone else has been too scared to even try.
Firefall's PvP is 5v5. That's just laughable! Is this really what we're supposed to get excited about these days? The last three PvP FPS games I would have recommended to people were, in reverse chronological order, Natural Selection, Planetside and Counterstrike v1.6. Despite a ludicrous increase in the power of computers and the speed of internet connections since these games were released, the ambitions of developers are going backwards at an increasing rate!
Stupid dickhead, are you completely unaware of any other research that's been done in the SEVEN YEARS since that film came out? Jump off a cliff and kill yourself already, all you are doing is picking the same hole in the same film by a guy who isn't even a scientist and trying to drag the debate back to a time when you thought you could argue your way out of it. That's your MO isn't it, make enough noise about some insignificant detail and hope it distracts from the advancement of the real issue.
What do you have to say about Chasing Ice, huh, tough guy?
Marketing aimed at children is a disgusting, insidious thing. They don't have money of their own to spend (not in any significant quantity) so the goal of the advertisers is to turn them into self-centred nagging machines with infinite persistence. The more the parents say no to their kids, the more of a nightmare they become, the more likely the resolve will break. It gets worse when the parents also went through this same advertising mind control when they were young because it makes them total push-overs for that kind of nagging from their own kids.
At least I live in the UK - we have at least a few ad-free television channels here. Not even product placement is allowed, the BBC is a commercial-free zone. Hell, I'll buy box sets rather than expose my kids to those ad breaks.
Slashdot Mirror
It does seem strange to me over in the UK that phone unlocking has been a big political issue. Seriously, how screwed up is your phone tech over there? Your phone networks aren't interoperable, are you kidding me? I'm hoping there some important technical reason behind that linked to your geography or something.
Also, why is access to unlocked phones such a big deal? Can't you get them? I just bought a new phone without a network lock - it works out cheaper in the long run but most people still buy phones with contracts because the upfront cost is lower and the network deals with any problems you have, handset or network. I have the choice of any network, I just pick up a free (or negligible cost) SIM card from them and I know it'll work. How backward is your phone network if you can't even do that?
Obama promising to fix that issue and actually bring America into the world of the 21st century cell network (despite the protestations of doom from the networks, I'm guessing?) - now THAT would be worth some column inches.
Let's chalk this one up to a CRT monitor flicker induced synaptic misfire and carry on with our lives as normal.
Spec chasers go for whatever the latest and greatest Android/Apple device is and play playground top-trumps with that. Crackberry users just need "good enough" and have been kicking the habit in increasing numbers around the world for some time now for exactly that reason - why pay all that money for good enough when you can get kick-ass with better support prospects for the same price from someone else? From EE (UK 4G network) for same the monthly fee I can get an iPhone 5 for £10 or a Q10 for £30. They're actually trying to charge more for a worse product with the same subscription. The Blackberry only survives because of that tribal fanboi segregation bollocks so many people have fallen for, but without something to crow about, RIM won't survive purely on that for very much longer.
To rub some salt into the wound, Nokia were selling more Lumia phones than RIM were selling phones total - if you factor in Nokia's Asha range, Nokia were bitch-slapping RIM and may actually have been onto a comeback - I wonder how that'll play out for MS? Will we see MS vs Apple vs Google in the top 3 phone charts some time soon?
http://blog.laptopmag.com/nokia-lumia-outsell-blackberry
I wish they'd hurry up and standardize PITF over TCP/IP. There's a great case for adding a standard feature to HTML 5 that invokes it any time someone loads a page with a text box, types a text string along the lines of "first" and initiates an HTTP post action in less than 1.8 seconds.
As I understand it, the term Global Warming didn't turn up on the main radar until 5 years after that paper came out:
http://transitiontownpayson.net/2013/04/25/who-coined-the-term-global-warming-anyway/
We can argue about who named what first as much as we like, the fact is that somehow the term Global Warming has been replaced with Climate Change in certain parts of the media in the same way that things like Cancer Link keep getting replaced by Health Risk when attached to certain business interests. It's what happens when science and politics meet and the spin doctors and vested interests all kick into damage control mode and ethics get stomped on by profiteers.
Should we be playing Chinese whispers over the name of something so potentially, universally, catastrophically destructive? What does it say about our society that we're actually staring the end of that society as we know it in the face and arguing over how it's spelled?
Don't confuse the relationship between micro- and macro-climate. It's the difference between telling someone the average percentage of horses that'll finish in all the races across all the tracks in the country this weekend (the macro) against which horse will win any particular race (the micro). Micro-predictions and their relative difficulty have no bearing on the importance of macro-predictions and one's ability to investigate and discrepancies after the fact.
I'd shake your hand for being so honest with yourself, but you'd catch my flu so rain check on that. ;)
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but F*** the whole god damn lot of you!
America has had it's political system dragged through the s*** so badly that all the elections are now is an argument over which candidate is the shiniest of the two turds so he can spend 8 years making exactly the same mistakes as the last 6-7 guys before him because that's the agenda he was set by his backers.
If you really want to change something, set aside the politics and rhetoric and propaganda, figure out what it is you all want in common and demand it from your political leaders. Isn't that how Democracy is supposed to work? All anyone else from around the world sees from the States is a childish bun-fight. You guys give Democracy a bad name, sort it out already!
Doesn't the Constitution you're oh-so-proud of have something to say about what to do in your current situation? Oh yeah, it's become just as irrelevant over time as any of a hundred other used-to-be great political documents from around the world. At least you can be proud it out-lasted Marxist theory, as if that's worth celebrating.
To clarify:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetside
mixed with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game)
with the FPS element also used for in-flight boarding of other people's ships.
Where did the papercraft bit come from? My interest is piqued.
...and just to help me out when I'm sick, I head back to the Slashdot front page and Christmas has come early!
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/09/16/229256/another-climate-change-retraction
I'm going to bed now, take your time and write a decent rebuttal this time, one that isn't laughably transparently denialist-fingers-in-my-ears-lalalalacan'thearyou
Okay, I'm too flu'd up right now and my temp is on the way down from 100, so maybe I'm a bit snappy right now, but here goes.
Chasing Ice is very important as a visualisation of what has until recently been a purely statistical argument. Of course it elicits an emotional reaction, but it doesn't sell any agenda except the one that you can see with your own eyes - the climate is changing and there's a whole stack of evidence that we did it. If you don't get emotional from that realisation, you aren't a human being that's worth keeping alive.
To be honest, I've also been somewhat skeptical of the phrase "Save The Planet". Earth is not in jeopardy - if we nuked the crap out of the land and sea, Earth would continue to orbit, perhaps some new lifeforms would evolve to be as numerous and diverse as life is now, and within 8 billion years the Earth will be gone - either taken out by an asteroid or consumed by the Sun. To the individual human, what's the practical different between "Preserve the habitability of our biosphere" and "Save the planet"? Save the planet is catchier. If you want to argue the toss over it, go ahead - just don't expect anyone to give a shit about anything you say ever again if all you want to do is split infinitives that fine.
Regarding your assertion that AGW is nonsense, I smell the whiff of a hypocrite. You accuse me of congratulating me on my own intelligence, yet you are obviously very self-congratulatory of your own. Climate change deniers always seem to me like the folk who root for the underdog no matter how outgunned they are. I do it during international Rugby matches (Fiji vs New Zealand - of course you want to see the All-Blacks lose!) , you're doing it despite the overwhelming evidence for the existence of man-made climate change and the highly questionable motives of those who oppose it.
But the really interesting part is that you automatically assumed I undertake no philanthropic activity of my own. How the fuck would you know? Have you any idea how much of my life I've dedicated to encouraging to helping the homeless find stable employment and encouraging young people in their artistic expressions? How much of my own resources I've donated to helping cure Alzheimers disease? How much I've fought against homophobia and religious intolerance in my local community? Funny how you tried to direct the argument in that direction instead of something that might actually have been pertinent to the subject matter - perhaps critisizing the solar panels on my roof or my lack of a car, or perhaps my decision to avoid the organic produce shop down the road, or that I advocate for green building methods... because you can't win the argument if you actually stay on topic, can you?
Seriously, kill yourself now, put yourself out of your future misery.
Two words for you: Away Boarders!
Sorry, posting from bed with flu, missed the word "since" before that first comma. Forgot to mention the server-consolidation messing up pings for everyone outside the USA as well.
Makes you wish Planetside or Freelancer would get source releases. Imagine the possibilities when there's that kind of talent out there...
It is a shame what happened to Planetside. I played it a few times, the population never really recovered from the BFR exodus. If only Sony would release the source for the server and client... (glances imploringly at Wikileaks)
Nothing even comes close to the scale of Planetside 2's tech, but I must admit to being severely disappointed about how little progress it's made in 10 years. Given the ambition of the original, the sequel is underwhelming to say the least - maybe my imagination is just too far ahead of the game, or maybe Sony just played it safe? Either way, it may be state-of-the-art, but Planetside 2 hasn't shoved Torchlight 2 aside in my gaming schedules (yet?).
Yes, it's an "open beta" - which means that things may not work correctly or be changed/removed.
The hype around this game comes from the pedigree and experience of it's dev team and they've made a mess of what should have been THE core feature of the game. Remove the whole game from the Internet already, it'll never live up to it's promise.
(Flicks through the Firefall Wiki)
5v5 map... 7v7 map... 12v12 map... 5v5 map... good god, that's pathetic. The first M in MMO is supposed to stand for Massive, not Matchmaking.
Ok, back up, it's not limited to 5v5... it's NOTHING AT ALL right now:
http://n4g.com/news/1354614/firefall-pvp-suspended-while-red-5-studios-completely-rethinks-it
The truck-to-the-head theory still stands.
Actually, it's even worse than I thought. It's not limited to 5v5, it's limited to no PvP at all because it was so terribly bad:
http://n4g.com/news/1354614/firefall-pvp-suspended-while-red-5-studios-completely-rethinks-it
Whoa, wait, the PvP is limited to 5v5 but it gets attention because it's ex-Tribes devs? What happened to them, they get hit in the head by a truck or something?
One word for you: Planetside.
Ignore the slight in the summary, Soulskill is just a jealous revisionist. Planetside is 10+ years old (predating Call of Duty, Battlefield Vietnam, Halo 2, most of Medal of Honor, World of Warcraft and the Source engine) as has happily ticked along with up to 450 players per continent (map) in hectic PvP battles that put pretty much every game released since to shame. Despite Sony proving it's possible to scale an FPS up that far, everyone else has been too scared to even try.
Firefall's PvP is 5v5. That's just laughable! Is this really what we're supposed to get excited about these days? The last three PvP FPS games I would have recommended to people were, in reverse chronological order, Natural Selection, Planetside and Counterstrike v1.6. Despite a ludicrous increase in the power of computers and the speed of internet connections since these games were released, the ambitions of developers are going backwards at an increasing rate!
Stupid dickhead, are you completely unaware of any other research that's been done in the SEVEN YEARS since that film came out? Jump off a cliff and kill yourself already, all you are doing is picking the same hole in the same film by a guy who isn't even a scientist and trying to drag the debate back to a time when you thought you could argue your way out of it. That's your MO isn't it, make enough noise about some insignificant detail and hope it distracts from the advancement of the real issue.
What do you have to say about Chasing Ice, huh, tough guy?
Marketing aimed at children is a disgusting, insidious thing. They don't have money of their own to spend (not in any significant quantity) so the goal of the advertisers is to turn them into self-centred nagging machines with infinite persistence. The more the parents say no to their kids, the more of a nightmare they become, the more likely the resolve will break. It gets worse when the parents also went through this same advertising mind control when they were young because it makes them total push-overs for that kind of nagging from their own kids.
At least I live in the UK - we have at least a few ad-free television channels here. Not even product placement is allowed, the BBC is a commercial-free zone. Hell, I'll buy box sets rather than expose my kids to those ad breaks.
Hey, newspaper guy! It's called "Social Engineering" and it's broadly the same as "Con Artistry".
Glory To Arstotzka!