I'm a fan of Steam but I am a mad as hell that they let this happen. It is not as if they weren't an obvious target given the number of game companies that have been hit before.This is Valve's fault. They screwed up big time and a limp apology from Gabe Newell doesn't make me feel any better.
I picked up the bundle in order to play Frozen Synapse but I got several other games thrown in because I made a decent contribution. I never heard of most of the games but I have spent the last week playing them. SpaceChem in particularly is extraordinary. It is an extremely challenging puzzle game where you must build complicated machines out of basic building blocks in order to synthesise chemical compounds. It sounds naff but it is incredibly addictive. Beware though the challenges are very tough but I reckon it would suit the the nerd quotient of the average slashdotter.
My local library has been offering ebook lending for several years. They recommend Overdrive but the drm is just Adobe so you can use any ebook reader which supports adobe drm. You download the book in encrypted format and you get a time limited license which allows you to read it. After the 3 week lending period expires you cannot read the book anymore. There also seems to be a lockout in place so that only a one person can read a given ebook at a time. That sounds pretty silly but I guess it is a requirement of the publisher.
Its a pretty good system and I like being able to browse from home but the selection is still fairly poor.
Whenever I see an article like this about yet another scientist trying to create artificial life I wonder whether they have watched and read too much science fiction or whether they just haven't seen enough science fiction.
Big disappointment recently when a young relative put together a crystal radio kit (from Maplin I think). When it didn't work I being the engineer in the family was called in to fix it. I took the scientific approach and calculated the centre to be bang in the middle of the medium wave band. After twiddling with it for some time and getting nothing I finally tried another portable radio with a medium wave band and was amazed to discover that not a single station was still broadcasting on it.
LegalZoom is only a software tool. Clearly the people posing as lawyers in this case are the customers who bought LegalZoom and used it to draw up lawyer like documents.
The solution seems obvious to me. All the users of LegalZoom must pay themselves the mandatory compensation amount. Less a cut of course for the lawyers who so helpfully pursued the class action for them.
After reading your comments about Nintendo Music I cannot help seeing a vision of a ferociously concentrating hard core shooter fanatic pulling off headshots in "Now that's what I Call Modern Battlefield Honor 77" while a jingly Marioesque soundtrack plays in the background.
Yup I second this. There are several top quality fantasy mmorpgs now available on free to play (read pay as you go) models. Lotro is good, as is Dungeons and Dragons online, Age of Conan or Everquest 2 are also available. Runes of magic also has it followers but it is generally considered a tier below the four games I have mentioned.
A lot of the science of the paper is above me but my reading of it is that the research strongly supports the idea that violent games increase violent tendencies but it's just that if a criminal spends all day playing Modern Warfare he won't have time to go robbing banks.
In Fox News terms we are creating a nation of violent psychopaths but as long as they don't come out of Mom's basement we should be OK.
If you add up all the money that goes through Paypal on a daily basis they must rank as one of the world's biggest financial institutions? I wonder if they are subject to any financial regulation?
While Pariser's argument is quite convincing I have another reason for disliking smart filters. Whether we are talking about website search or smart command menus the algorithms seem determined to show me the results I am most likely to use based on historical usage. The trouble is these are the websites, commands, menus whatever that I already know exactly how to find BECAUSE I USE THEM EVERY DAY. If google went out of business tomorrow I would still be able to find Slashdot and all the other sites that I use regularly. I don't need a search tool to tell me about these. The real value of search is in finding the stuff I don't use very often and am therefore unlikely to find by myself. Smart filters hide the very results I need search to find.
I know I may have sneered at "Think of the Children Arguments" in the past but I loathe Facebook and all it stands for so I am ready to compromise my principles in order to help ferment an unstoppable outpouring of public outrage against it.
I absolutely loved it. The magic combinations are a complete hoot. Watch Total Biscuits play through on Youtube for a good aided of what the game entails.
I feel sorry for those folks who couldn't get it to run but I really do believe Magicka is an important gaming milestone.
I recently switched back to Firefox on my desktop and love it but when I tried Firefox for Android on my phone is was as slow as molasses. You can actually watch the page rendering in pixelated real time. Will the linux optimisations carry over I wonder?
I am a long time PC Gamer and currently in state of intoxication over the amount of gaming goodness I can get on the platform these days for buttons. I can get so much high quality gaming for $5 and $10 that Angry Birds for a dollar seems like the rip off to me.
Perhaps it is impossible to cover the cost of a traditional AAA game by selling it at such a low price but the market is moving on towards dramatically lower prices whether the publishers like it or not. Maybe increased sales will help compensate for lower prices. Digital distribution surely saves some cash as well.
I don't think you are correct to assume that uranium reserves will outlast oil reserves.
Known oil reserves dwarf the energy content of known Uranium reserves. The World Energy Council's survey of World energy is a good source for this. Of course we are using far more oil than we are uranium at present. My back of envelope calculation from WEC data suggest crude oil will run out in about 40 years while Uranium could last 80 at current rates of production. However given how slowly we are moving away from oil I think it is inevitable that non-conventional oil reserves will be exploited (shale / tar sands etc) and that could give us another century of oil.
In any case regardless of what happens to oil I don't think uranium will be an option in 50 years time.
now that we know that governments can turn off Google.
For some time now I have been happily reducing my reliance on both my memory and on paper records as I move all the stuff I need to remember over to digital storage. The pay-off for this is that "me+google+wikipedia" is smarter than "me+a few textbooks" and is a whole lot smarter than "me+ my half remembered facts from college".
The danger however is that should someone hit the fabled internet kill switch I would quickly revert from being 21st century cyber- man back into a clueless Neanderthal while the chap who has been learning tables of logarithms by rote would continue to thrive.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a fan of Steam but I am a mad as hell that they let this happen. It is not as if they weren't an obvious target given the number of game companies that have been hit before.This is Valve's fault. They screwed up big time and a limp apology from Gabe Newell doesn't make me feel any better.
I picked up the bundle in order to play Frozen Synapse but I got several other games thrown in because I made a decent contribution. I never heard of most of the games but I have spent the last week playing them. SpaceChem in particularly is extraordinary. It is an extremely challenging puzzle game where you must build complicated machines out of basic building blocks in order to synthesise chemical compounds. It sounds naff but it is incredibly addictive. Beware though the challenges are very tough but I reckon it would suit the the nerd quotient of the average slashdotter.
My local library has been offering ebook lending for several years. They recommend Overdrive but the drm is just Adobe so you can use any ebook reader which supports adobe drm. You download the book in encrypted format and you get a time limited license which allows you to read it. After the 3 week lending period expires you cannot read the book anymore. There also seems to be a lockout in place so that only a one person can read a given ebook at a time. That sounds pretty silly but I guess it is a requirement of the publisher.
Its a pretty good system and I like being able to browse from home but the selection is still fairly poor.
Whenever I see an article like this about yet another scientist trying to create artificial life I wonder whether they have watched and read too much science fiction or whether they just haven't seen enough science fiction.
So you are saying that anyone who cannot hear the difference between standard cables and expensive premium cables must be a Britney Spears fan?
I think the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
Big disappointment recently when a young relative put together a crystal radio kit (from Maplin I think). When it didn't work I being the engineer in the family was called in to fix it. I took the scientific approach and calculated the centre to be bang in the middle of the medium wave band. After twiddling with it for some time and getting nothing I finally tried another portable radio with a medium wave band and was amazed to discover that not a single station was still broadcasting on it.
LegalZoom is only a software tool. Clearly the people posing as lawyers in this case are the customers who bought LegalZoom and used it to draw up lawyer like documents.
The solution seems obvious to me. All the users of LegalZoom must pay themselves the mandatory compensation amount. Less a cut of course for the lawyers who so helpfully pursued the class action for them.
After reading your comments about Nintendo Music I cannot help seeing a vision of a ferociously concentrating hard core shooter fanatic pulling off headshots in "Now that's what I Call Modern Battlefield Honor 77" while a jingly Marioesque soundtrack plays in the background.
It's quite a psychedelic image.
They are going to have a hard time finding a judge or jury who isn't addicted to some Apple product methinks.
Yup I second this. There are several top quality fantasy mmorpgs now available on free to play (read pay as you go) models. Lotro is good, as is Dungeons and Dragons online, Age of Conan or Everquest 2 are also available. Runes of magic also has it followers but it is generally considered a tier below the four games I have mentioned.
They are forcing an 11 year old to drive at almost twice the speed of sound. The monsters!!!
A lot of the science of the paper is above me but my reading of it is that the research strongly supports the idea that violent games increase violent tendencies but it's just that if a criminal spends all day playing Modern Warfare he won't have time to go robbing banks.
In Fox News terms we are creating a nation of violent psychopaths but as long as they don't come out of Mom's basement we should be OK.
If you add up all the money that goes through Paypal on a daily basis they must rank as one of the world's biggest financial institutions? I wonder if they are subject to any financial regulation?
and Netscape Navigator.
IE7 and FF 3.5 are hardly ancient history.
While Pariser's argument is quite convincing I have another reason for disliking smart filters. Whether we are talking about website search or smart command menus the algorithms seem determined to show me the results I am most likely to use based on historical usage. The trouble is these are the websites, commands, menus whatever that I already know exactly how to find BECAUSE I USE THEM EVERY DAY. If google went out of business tomorrow I would still be able to find Slashdot and all the other sites that I use regularly. I don't need a search tool to tell me about these. The real value of search is in finding the stuff I don't use very often and am therefore unlikely to find by myself. Smart filters hide the very results I need search to find.
I know I may have sneered at "Think of the Children Arguments" in the past but I loathe Facebook and all it stands for so I am ready to compromise my principles in order to help ferment an unstoppable outpouring of public outrage against it.
I absolutely loved it. The magic combinations are a complete hoot. Watch Total Biscuits play through on Youtube for a good aided of what the game entails.
I feel sorry for those folks who couldn't get it to run but I really do believe Magicka is an important gaming milestone.
I recently switched back to Firefox on my desktop and love it but when I tried Firefox for Android on my phone is was as slow as molasses. You can actually watch the page rendering in pixelated real time. Will the linux optimisations carry over I wonder?
I am a long time PC Gamer and currently in state of intoxication over the amount of gaming goodness I can get on the platform these days for buttons. I can get so much high quality gaming for $5 and $10 that Angry Birds for a dollar seems like the rip off to me.
Perhaps it is impossible to cover the cost of a traditional AAA game by selling it at such a low price but the market is moving on towards dramatically lower prices whether the publishers like it or not. Maybe increased sales will help compensate for lower prices. Digital distribution surely saves some cash as well.
I don't think you are correct to assume that uranium reserves will outlast oil reserves.
Known oil reserves dwarf the energy content of known Uranium reserves. The World Energy Council's survey of World energy is a good source for this. Of course we are using far more oil than we are uranium at present. My back of envelope calculation from WEC data suggest crude oil will run out in about 40 years while Uranium could last 80 at current rates of production. However given how slowly we are moving away from oil I think it is inevitable that non-conventional oil reserves will be exploited (shale / tar sands etc) and that could give us another century of oil.
In any case regardless of what happens to oil I don't think uranium will be an option in 50 years time.
I'll probably get modded down for this but I can't help it. I am in a giddy mood today.
because my better half is afraid of spiders. As soon as I pull one of those 8 legged creatures out I will be sleeping on my own.
I know where they are coming from but I have no idea how they can turn this into a patent.
Fixed it for you
now that we know that governments can turn off Google.
For some time now I have been happily reducing my reliance on both my memory and on paper records as I move all the stuff I need to remember over to digital storage. The pay-off for this is that "me+google+wikipedia" is smarter than "me+a few textbooks" and is a whole lot smarter than "me+ my half remembered facts from college".
The danger however is that should someone hit the fabled internet kill switch I would quickly revert from being 21st century cyber- man back into a clueless Neanderthal while the chap who has been learning tables of logarithms by rote would continue to thrive.