In response to your hypothetical situation there, I would imagine the answer to whether or not he's protected from liability would be "it depends on a number of obscure factors." Say the guy with the damaged property hires a lawyer that finds some obscure law on the books that can be twisted into some sort of liability claim even though the pool was perfectly licenced. Or the reverse, say the pool was unlicenced and a lawyer for that guy finds a law on the books to ague against liability; a current events example of this tactic would be BP using century old maritime laws to argue against liability for damages. And I'm sure I don't need to point it out to you, but for anyone else reading, there's such a vast number of obsolete laws on the books that can be re-interpreted and twisted to whatever lawyer's whim that it almost ends up turning into a sort of a pissing contest between lawyers with a huge incentive for both parties to settle out of court. That's not me disparaging the entire legal system in America though... it's certainly nothing like China, for example, where they make sure there are enough random laws on the books that an average person can't go a day without breaking a few. That way when the government wants to lock someone up for whatever reason, they have a perfectly legal official excuse.
Why do the movie companies believe that we want 3D? Heck, why do the television manufacturers believe that I'm willing to spend 2 grand more for it? Does anyone here feel that its a useful addition to a movie?/frank
They don't care if you want it or not. The studios want it because it allows them to justify an inflated ticket price. They can also tout it as a reason to actually go to a movie theater instead of waiting for the DVD/Blu-ray. An analogy would be when theaters moved to widescreen to compete with television. Did audiences back then really care about the dimensions or aspect ratio of the screen? Probably not. Myself, I think 3D has potential. For example, in Despicable Me, as the end credits role, the minions attempt to "escape" from the screen, using ladders pointed toward the audience, swinging on ropes, etc. Even though this amusing scene takes place as the credits role, it's one where the humor simply wouldn't translate well to 2D. Though it does seem obvious that 3D is an afterthought in most movies today, added only to increase revenue from ticket sales.
The nearest star to the sun is 4 light years, or 25 trillion miles away. Perhaps the nearest intelligent life is simply too far away to detect? And with no guarantee that alien civilizations will use radio, there's no reason to assume we could detect them with programs like SETI. But how else do we expect detect an intelligent civilization trillions of miles away? We're just barely able to detect Earth-sized extrasolar planets. Maybe we need to get better at looking before we complain about not being able to find anything.
Apparently there are no lab conditions on earth that are not duplicated somewhere else in the universe.
Not the case for temperature. Scientists have cooled a piece of rhodium metal to 100 picokelvin. The coldest observed temperature in the universe is about 1K. I remember reading an article where some scientist joked that any region of space colder than what we've achieved in a laboratory would have to be in the laboratory of an alien civilization.;)
A lot about World of Warcraft still doesn't make sense to my videogame-loving brain, but I'm not sure that the people who stick with WoW for years really love videogames to begin with.
Well, I love video games a great deal, but I've stuck with WoW for years. There's a couple reasons. One, I consume the "average" game pretty rapidly, 20 hours of gaming seems to fly by and it's hard to justify $50 for such fleeting entertainment. WoW's $15 a month provides me with hours of gameplay that would otherwise be spent on multiple games in that same month.
The other reason, I admit, has nothing to do with gaming, but friends; both in-game and in real the real world. While some come and go, there's about four or five of us that have stuck with WoW since release day. That's probably the bigger reason I've stuck with it. So even though I do love video games to begin with, I will admit my primary reason for sticking with WoW has nothing to do with video games. It's quite possible that when StarCraft 2 or Diablo III comes out, we'll all migrate and be playing that for years instead.
But speaking of WoW, I think I'll go check my auctions. I'm totally not addicted though, sometimes I don't even play for days! Gasp! Anyway, if there are noob slashdotters out there that would enjoy having a level 80 burn through a few quests for them, send a tell to Raymer on Whisperwind, Alliance side.
That and the fact that the modern American High School is going to be viewed historically as one of the greatest cases of institutionalized abuse; ever, whose only real function is to try to mold you into a good paramilitary worker bee.
In 1997, in High School, I said almost the exact same thing to a friend of mine. I was talking about how future historians will look upon us as having gone through something so stressful, strenuous, and anti-educational, that they will wonder how any of us survived with our sanity intact. I said it because it was something I had started thinking on the way home from school on the bus I rode. I started thinking why, why am I so fucking miserable here, and how can I make it better, and I came to the answer that I cannot because I'm not happy with the System, and unless the entire System is changed, my disposition will not change. This friend of mine was a bright kid, as smart as me if not more so (He did get better grades, but we know how that goes) but when I told him this, he simply rolled his eyes and said, "Who cares."
Obviously I cared, but I felt disappointed that someone I considered a friend wouldn't see things my way and instead simply dismiss my point of view, mainly, I assume, because the System "worked" for him, he was being a worker bee, and if you do that and do it the way they want you to without thinking too much, High School can be a paradise.
I remember one time in an English class, a teacher asked me, "Why don't you do your homework? You did the summer reading assignments." And I remained silent, like worker bees are supposed to, but what I really wanted to say was "I read the books because they were good. A Separate Peace was a very good book, I enjoyed it. I don't do homework because it's an absolute waste of my time, hinders my actual education, and honestly, threatens my sanity."
Had I said that, I would have likely been labeled a threat to the school, especially had it been my senior year which was right after the Columbine event. By the way, in an art project my senior year, I wrote something like "I do what the voices in my head tell me to" on the project. A teacher called me aside to talk about the project and for a moment I beamed thinking, wow, someone understand the point I'm trying to make with this thing, that's amazing, I thought only I would get it, and it turns out... she was trying to confirm if I really hear voices or not, because in this post-Columbine world, you can't be too careful. I was stunned. Here I am being asked if I hear voices in my head because of an art project, something that I thought was supposed to be a CREATIVE outlet! This time I didn't take the worker bee response. I stared at this teacher, and said "Yes. I hear voices in my head." I did so with only a hint of a smile. I got no reaction from her, and nothing ever happened to me afterward, so I think she understood that I wasn't serious, but for a while, I honestly expected that I'd be called in to the guidance counselor's office.
Looking back on High School, I can see how torn I was... I wanted to learn, desperately, I loved learning, I hungered for knowledge. At the same time, I wanted to be left the hell alone and do things at my own pace, not be forced to mind-numbing busywork at the speed of the lowest common denominator. It has been over 6 years since I finished High School, and even though I did a year of college courses (I only stopped because of a huge financial crisis), I still have nightmares about high school. I often wake up to dreams where everything feels like it was yesterday. This tells me the system was so wrong for me that I don't think I'll ever really recover from it. Granted, I'll admit I'm a 1/1000 case probably, since while most kids hate school, I don't think most really know why, and as the say, ignorance is bliss...
...because when you ride around on that epic mount, you didn't really get that gold yourself. You don't really have the sense of how much it is worth. Oh sure, you have a dollar value attached to it now, but it could be that there are people that play WoW to whom money is worth far less than gold. In fact, those are probably the gold sellers biggest customers.
My level 60 Rogue on Whisperwind has bought himself and 2 other people epic mounts (they are normally 1000g, but my rogue is honored and well above Sergeant in pvp rank, so they are 800g for me, yay for double discounts). I've never once purchased any gold online. There are plenty of ways to make money in WoW, and if you do it right it doesn't take hours on end and can be a lot of fun. You simply have to find a niche. In playing the gold-farming game I've had lot of fun, learned where the sweet spots to farm are, learned what sells hot and what is worthless, haggled with people in the trade channels, played the auction house, and made myself a rather rich man in game. It's a good feeling and it was *entertaining* which is why I play WoW.
If I had simply bought the gold, I'd have been *bypassing* hours of fun, and robbing myself of a sense of accomplishment. Granted, to some people, farming for gold isn't fun, and maybe it's different in other games, but if you do it right in WoW you can have a lot of fun at it.
Good idea. GTA is, with or without sexual content, utterly inapproriate for a 12 year old.
I'm going to disagree with you here, because you cannot make generalized statements about what age GTA becomes appropriate. By doing that you are no better than the ESRB which states 18 is ok, but 17 is right out for this kind of sexual content.
Every child ages differently. Some are rather mature mentally at 10 years old. Seriously, not all children are as dumb as we like to pretend. Of course the opposite is true, some are still very immature during their teen years. Think back to high school for a minute and I'm sure you'll remember that a lot of reasons the "nerds" would hang out together was the maturity level. Perhaps some teenagers would rather have intelligent conversation while others would rather yell and be obnoxious.
My point is we can't use generalized one-size-fits-all statements for when a child is ready for certain things. While I will accept that many 12 year olds should not be exposed to GTA, there are many that are certainly mature enough to recognize that it is a game, and only a game. It's up to parents (I know, scary) to determine the mental maturity of their child and decide what content is appropriate for that child. Parents actually watching the child play or (gasp!) playing the game with the child, too, would be helpful, to make sure the child isn't misunderstanding content.
When you start to shelter children at arbitrary ages you are being unfair to the children that have already matured beyond them. Parents can't possibly shelter every child from every violent or sexual scene, but they can sit down with their children and attempt to explain what's acceptable in society, what's real, and what's only a game. I suppose it is a lot easier for parents to treat the PlayStation like a babysitter.
If you say GTA is too violent for 12 year old kids, then they shouldn't be allowed to watch the news either. Like someone else in this thread already said, life is rated AO. Parents need to accept this and actually communicate with their children instead of trying to lock them up and shelter them from every drop of blood or every nipple.
Also yeah, the first 3 Dune books were good - the rest of them sucked
While one could argue that Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune were not as good as the first four, you cannot dismiss God Emperor of Dune and lump into a "sucked" category. It is possibly the best book since the original. In fact, I would consider the first three books to be basically a primer for God Emperor of Dune. Since it takes place 4,000 years later, we needed those three books of backstory to understand the universe that Leto II rules. Leto is perhaps the single most fascinating character in science fiction history. Never more than a child, yet one of the oldest children that ever lived due to his complete ancestral memories. No longer human due to his gradual transformation into a sandworm, yet it was his deep desire for humanity's survival (The Golden Path) that motivated him to take on the transformation in the first place.
Leto is an enigma in many ways. He does things far worse than any tyrant in history, but he did it out of a deep love for humanity, since had he not done so no humans would have survived. And Herbert really made Leto's actions and reactions truly seem as if the character had the immense, unimaginable amount of experiences stored in his mind from the ancestral memories, and the 4,000 years of his life, and the experiences he witnessed which had not yet occurred thanks to his ability to peer into the future.
The only really valid complaint about God Emperor of Dune is that it's a little low on action, but then the entire Dune series is not about action. While there are some rather dramatic moments and intense action at various points in the series, the books are mostly about philosophy. And what better character can put human philosophy into a different perspective than one who has the memories of billions upon billions of humans stretching back to the dawn of time, and has lived for 4,000 years? It's hard to imagine or believe in such a character, yet Herbert makes Leto very convincing, and I doubt any other writer could have.
So while you have dismissed God Emperor of Dune into a "sucked" category, I wanted to point out that I feel it represents one of the finest achievements in science fiction history.
I've read that's actually part of the problem with the xbox in Japan. Since apartment space is very scarce there, the GameCube looks a lot more attractive. Granted, if someone really wants an xbox I'm sure they can make room (don't exactly have to tear down walls for it, heh), but it's an interesting cultural difference that you don't normally stop to think about.
Both the terms "moon" and "planet" are very subjective and usually it falls to the whim of the particular astronomer that discovered the thing. There's no set of guidelines. For example many astronomers consider the Earth and Moon to be almost a twin-planet system, because our moon is so large relative to the planet itself, and many consider Pluto not to be a planet at all but perhaps an escaped moon of one of the gas giants. Also astronomers seem to be prejudice toward balls of ice, those usually will never be called a planet no matter how large. So, there is really no cutoff size for moons or planets, and the classification is really not an exact science.
You can't legally sign away your rights in a contract. I don't care what you have to sign, in the United States you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. You shouldn't have to prove to Sam's Club or anyone else that you didn't steal anything. The burden of proof is on them, not you.
I thought it was interestnig that in a recent slashdot interview with Microsoft's Martin Taylor, he was very careful to leave the question about charging for Microsoft's spyware tool up in the open. Here's what he said:
Roblimo: How much would these add-on programs cost you? People like you and me, lets say, as a journalist, I too can get free software from anybody. What would it cost you as a regular user?
Martin: Well today, XP SP2 is free if you're a genuine or a valid Windows XP user. It's just a matter of downloading. And today the spyware product that I've downloaded is also a free beta and we've not announced any pricing terms or plans for the product as of yet. So everything I'm using today is free.
I listened to the MP3, and the way he said "as of yet" kinda stuck in my head. I don't think Microsoft will charge for this though... While there are a lot of average Joe users out there that will sheepishly buy whatever Microsoft says they need, the concept of buying extra protection from Microsoft to fix the holes that shouldn't be there to start with might not hold too well with even the most loyal users.
Charging extra for spyware tools would almost give Microsoft a monetary incentive to make the operating system less secure out of the box to make sure there is a market for their spyware tools.
Umm... While WoW does have seem neat graphical effects, and a lot of things in the game look downright awesome... A lot of little details stand out to me as looking really bad. Certain trees/bushes/fences look like extremely low res textures, like something I'd except to see in Quake I. I don't really have a problem with bad graphics, but I do prefer consistency. When some things look extraordinary while others look ugly, it makes the ugly bits stand out more. But perhaps I'm being to fussy... And this gripe aside, I love the game enough to get my Rogue up to level 54. I'm on the Whisperwind server, my char is named "Raymer" and if any other slashdotters play there, be sure to whisper me and I'll hit you up with some gold or gear or something.;)
At what point does Google turn from everybody's favorite company, to the next Microsoft?
That's a statement from someone needing a history lesson. Listen kiddos, people have always hated Microsoft. It's not like they were some great little start up that everyone loved and then, one day, turned evil. They started out by charging money for things others were willing to give away. They started out by forcing the notion of computer software as intellectual property, at a time when computer hobbyists were freely exchanging homemade programs with one another. If anything, Microsoft has a lot more fans now that they are such a juggernaut. The apologists you see on Slashdot are a direct result of Microsoft's financial success: people don't want to hate a company that has so much, because they want to be on that company's side, hoping to get a little of what they have.
But please, the notion of Microsoft as some great little start up that turned evil is entirely wrong. Microsoft was founded by a rich kid; Gates had a trust fund since he was born, his parents were rather wealthy, yet people try to paint him as a rags to riches story. Microsoft has made most of its money by making it nearly illegal to not give them your money.
From day one, Microsoft and Google were entirely different. And that is an encouraging thought.
While I, of course, have the habit of spotting good sniper spots, as most FPSers do, I also have another problem when I return to the Outside World... THE GRAPHICS! Sometimes I'll look up at a tree or the reflection of something and think "WOW! That's an awesome effect, I'm surprised my video card can, oh wait that's right, this is reality."
From IMDB trivia on the filming of The Day After Tomorrow:
"The US Army loaned several UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters for the rescue scene at the end, prompting the Canadian authorities to reassure the people of Montreal that they weren't being invaded by America."
Tycho comments on the whole death of suprnova thing, and one of things he says is:
There are conversations to be had about the morality of file sharing, but until those stern words are able to project a "morality field" that causes those in their radius to behave honorably such dialogues fall into the "adorable but irrelevant" category.
Wow. I think he just summed up an entire form of slashdot subculture... in a single sentence. That's awesome!
In this case there's nothing illegal about it, because you aren't required to make any direct investment monitarily...
But you are required to make an investment of energy in some form, be it the persuasion of friends/enemies into the scheme or the signing up, pretending to use, and then canceling of said scheme. I guess the law has a different perspective on money than I do, since money and energy are almost the same thing in my head. It seems that money is simply a convenient way to represent energy, right? If a hypothetical slashdotter buys an iPod with money, or "buys" one by working the scheme, he has consumed energy either way. And, as I may have learned from your posts, he likely consumed stored solar energy, and maybe a dash of geothermal.;)
There's a well written wikipedia article on the subject of this particular, and popular, scheme. I think it's so amusing that Slashdotters, the very people who piss and moan about people being dumb enough to fall for the Nigerian email scams, so willingly participate in a flawed scheme that is on extremely questionable legal grounds and one day will simply run out of steam. Sure, you may have gotten your iPod, but consider this: it wasn't free (it cost you time and effort in the referrals or whatever they made you do) and now you're likely on some list as an easy mark for future schemes. While a "free" iPod still sounds nice, I tend to wonder if it is really worth it.
It's amazing how many people think that AMD chips are somehow sub-par simply because they aren't supported by popular vendors like Dell and Gateway. Even some of the more advanced computer users I encounter seem to believe that AMD chips will be "more buggy" or slower than Intel chips. AMD has changed a lot since the introduction of the K7, and ever since then I've felt they've been at least a couple steps ahead of Intel when it comes to CPU performance and technology. Intel made some pretty big mistakes with the P4 arch (the huge pipeline that derails easily, for example) and Intel has been clocking their processors very close to the limit in order to push the GHz race, which AMD simply can't win.
This is also an effective strategy for Intel since so many people still believe clockspeed is the only factor in performance. People always attack AMD for switching to their somewhat vague performance rating system, and my response is: Can you really blame AMD for that? Intel has done so much work to convince the public that only clockspeed matters, AMD simply can't try to sell their lower clocked chips as equals without the rating system.
Honestly though, unless you're a gamer, both AMD and Intel have chips way, way, way faster than you'll ever need. Say some old lady wants to buy collectibles off eBay? Don't even need a computer from this decade to do it. However, I'd say the amount of desktops sold for gaming or 3D rendering, CAD, etc, are a pretty small percentage, yet those are the only users that actually take full advantage of the power of today's systems.
But in marketing to the average Joe, facts don't matter, and Intel has always been the winner of the marketing war. Dell offering some AMD chips is a minor victory for AMD, but in the end Intel would have to make some really huge mistakes to lose more ground to AMD.
"In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless." -Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA, 2002 interview with Harvard Political Review's Derek Slater
I tend to believe there is an upper limit to how much storage a human being can possibily use... I would imagine a few petabytes would be more or less un-fill-able. While this may sound like a "640k ought to be enough" style quote, I think that at some point home users will have enough storage capacity to store more than the entire sum of recorded human history (not sure if that would even go beyond a few petabytes) and at that point, I think we will basically be done increasing storage capacity for home users.
Slashdot Mirror
In response to your hypothetical situation there, I would imagine the answer to whether or not he's protected from liability would be "it depends on a number of obscure factors." Say the guy with the damaged property hires a lawyer that finds some obscure law on the books that can be twisted into some sort of liability claim even though the pool was perfectly licenced. Or the reverse, say the pool was unlicenced and a lawyer for that guy finds a law on the books to ague against liability; a current events example of this tactic would be BP using century old maritime laws to argue against liability for damages. And I'm sure I don't need to point it out to you, but for anyone else reading, there's such a vast number of obsolete laws on the books that can be re-interpreted and twisted to whatever lawyer's whim that it almost ends up turning into a sort of a pissing contest between lawyers with a huge incentive for both parties to settle out of court. That's not me disparaging the entire legal system in America though... it's certainly nothing like China, for example, where they make sure there are enough random laws on the books that an average person can't go a day without breaking a few. That way when the government wants to lock someone up for whatever reason, they have a perfectly legal official excuse.
Why do the movie companies believe that we want 3D? Heck, why do the television manufacturers believe that I'm willing to spend 2 grand more for it? Does anyone here feel that its a useful addition to a movie? /frank
They don't care if you want it or not. The studios want it because it allows them to justify an inflated ticket price. They can also tout it as a reason to actually go to a movie theater instead of waiting for the DVD/Blu-ray. An analogy would be when theaters moved to widescreen to compete with television. Did audiences back then really care about the dimensions or aspect ratio of the screen? Probably not. Myself, I think 3D has potential. For example, in Despicable Me, as the end credits role, the minions attempt to "escape" from the screen, using ladders pointed toward the audience, swinging on ropes, etc. Even though this amusing scene takes place as the credits role, it's one where the humor simply wouldn't translate well to 2D. Though it does seem obvious that 3D is an afterthought in most movies today, added only to increase revenue from ticket sales.
The nearest star to the sun is 4 light years, or 25 trillion miles away. Perhaps the nearest intelligent life is simply too far away to detect? And with no guarantee that alien civilizations will use radio, there's no reason to assume we could detect them with programs like SETI. But how else do we expect detect an intelligent civilization trillions of miles away? We're just barely able to detect Earth-sized extrasolar planets. Maybe we need to get better at looking before we complain about not being able to find anything.
If we look at the real world, we'll see events happening without cause everywhere (virtual particles, radioactive decay, etc.).
And there's idea that very concept of "causality" is a property of our universe and thus not necessarily applicable before the Big Bang.
Not the case for temperature. Scientists have cooled a piece of rhodium metal to 100 picokelvin. The coldest observed temperature in the universe is about 1K. I remember reading an article where some scientist joked that any region of space colder than what we've achieved in a laboratory would have to be in the laboratory of an alien civilization. ;)
Well, I love video games a great deal, but I've stuck with WoW for years. There's a couple reasons. One, I consume the "average" game pretty rapidly, 20 hours of gaming seems to fly by and it's hard to justify $50 for such fleeting entertainment. WoW's $15 a month provides me with hours of gameplay that would otherwise be spent on multiple games in that same month.
The other reason, I admit, has nothing to do with gaming, but friends; both in-game and in real the real world. While some come and go, there's about four or five of us that have stuck with WoW since release day. That's probably the bigger reason I've stuck with it. So even though I do love video games to begin with, I will admit my primary reason for sticking with WoW has nothing to do with video games. It's quite possible that when StarCraft 2 or Diablo III comes out, we'll all migrate and be playing that for years instead.
But speaking of WoW, I think I'll go check my auctions. I'm totally not addicted though, sometimes I don't even play for days! Gasp! Anyway, if there are noob slashdotters out there that would enjoy having a level 80 burn through a few quests for them, send a tell to Raymer on Whisperwind, Alliance side.
In 1997, in High School, I said almost the exact same thing to a friend of mine. I was talking about how future historians will look upon us as having gone through something so stressful, strenuous, and anti-educational, that they will wonder how any of us survived with our sanity intact. I said it because it was something I had started thinking on the way home from school on the bus I rode. I started thinking why, why am I so fucking miserable here, and how can I make it better, and I came to the answer that I cannot because I'm not happy with the System, and unless the entire System is changed, my disposition will not change. This friend of mine was a bright kid, as smart as me if not more so (He did get better grades, but we know how that goes) but when I told him this, he simply rolled his eyes and said, "Who cares."
Obviously I cared, but I felt disappointed that someone I considered a friend wouldn't see things my way and instead simply dismiss my point of view, mainly, I assume, because the System "worked" for him, he was being a worker bee, and if you do that and do it the way they want you to without thinking too much, High School can be a paradise.
I remember one time in an English class, a teacher asked me, "Why don't you do your homework? You did the summer reading assignments." And I remained silent, like worker bees are supposed to, but what I really wanted to say was "I read the books because they were good. A Separate Peace was a very good book, I enjoyed it. I don't do homework because it's an absolute waste of my time, hinders my actual education, and honestly, threatens my sanity."
Had I said that, I would have likely been labeled a threat to the school, especially had it been my senior year which was right after the Columbine event. By the way, in an art project my senior year, I wrote something like "I do what the voices in my head tell me to" on the project. A teacher called me aside to talk about the project and for a moment I beamed thinking, wow, someone understand the point I'm trying to make with this thing, that's amazing, I thought only I would get it, and it turns out... she was trying to confirm if I really hear voices or not, because in this post-Columbine world, you can't be too careful. I was stunned. Here I am being asked if I hear voices in my head because of an art project, something that I thought was supposed to be a CREATIVE outlet! This time I didn't take the worker bee response. I stared at this teacher, and said "Yes. I hear voices in my head." I did so with only a hint of a smile. I got no reaction from her, and nothing ever happened to me afterward, so I think she understood that I wasn't serious, but for a while, I honestly expected that I'd be called in to the guidance counselor's office.
Looking back on High School, I can see how torn I was... I wanted to learn, desperately, I loved learning, I hungered for knowledge. At the same time, I wanted to be left the hell alone and do things at my own pace, not be forced to mind-numbing busywork at the speed of the lowest common denominator. It has been over 6 years since I finished High School, and even though I did a year of college courses (I only stopped because of a huge financial crisis), I still have nightmares about high school. I often wake up to dreams where everything feels like it was yesterday. This tells me the system was so wrong for me that I don't think I'll ever really recover from it. Granted, I'll admit I'm a 1/1000 case probably, since while most kids hate school, I don't think most really know why, and as the say, ignorance is bliss...
My level 60 Rogue on Whisperwind has bought himself and 2 other people epic mounts (they are normally 1000g, but my rogue is honored and well above Sergeant in pvp rank, so they are 800g for me, yay for double discounts). I've never once purchased any gold online. There are plenty of ways to make money in WoW, and if you do it right it doesn't take hours on end and can be a lot of fun. You simply have to find a niche. In playing the gold-farming game I've had lot of fun, learned where the sweet spots to farm are, learned what sells hot and what is worthless, haggled with people in the trade channels, played the auction house, and made myself a rather rich man in game. It's a good feeling and it was *entertaining* which is why I play WoW.
If I had simply bought the gold, I'd have been *bypassing* hours of fun, and robbing myself of a sense of accomplishment. Granted, to some people, farming for gold isn't fun, and maybe it's different in other games, but if you do it right in WoW you can have a lot of fun at it.
So, anyone on Whisperwind want some gold? :P
I'm going to disagree with you here, because you cannot make generalized statements about what age GTA becomes appropriate. By doing that you are no better than the ESRB which states 18 is ok, but 17 is right out for this kind of sexual content.
Every child ages differently. Some are rather mature mentally at 10 years old. Seriously, not all children are as dumb as we like to pretend. Of course the opposite is true, some are still very immature during their teen years. Think back to high school for a minute and I'm sure you'll remember that a lot of reasons the "nerds" would hang out together was the maturity level. Perhaps some teenagers would rather have intelligent conversation while others would rather yell and be obnoxious.
My point is we can't use generalized one-size-fits-all statements for when a child is ready for certain things. While I will accept that many 12 year olds should not be exposed to GTA, there are many that are certainly mature enough to recognize that it is a game, and only a game. It's up to parents (I know, scary) to determine the mental maturity of their child and decide what content is appropriate for that child. Parents actually watching the child play or (gasp!) playing the game with the child, too, would be helpful, to make sure the child isn't misunderstanding content.
When you start to shelter children at arbitrary ages you are being unfair to the children that have already matured beyond them. Parents can't possibly shelter every child from every violent or sexual scene, but they can sit down with their children and attempt to explain what's acceptable in society, what's real, and what's only a game. I suppose it is a lot easier for parents to treat the PlayStation like a babysitter.
If you say GTA is too violent for 12 year old kids, then they shouldn't be allowed to watch the news either. Like someone else in this thread already said, life is rated AO. Parents need to accept this and actually communicate with their children instead of trying to lock them up and shelter them from every drop of blood or every nipple.
Sorry for the rant.
While one could argue that Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune were not as good as the first four, you cannot dismiss God Emperor of Dune and lump into a "sucked" category. It is possibly the best book since the original. In fact, I would consider the first three books to be basically a primer for God Emperor of Dune. Since it takes place 4,000 years later, we needed those three books of backstory to understand the universe that Leto II rules. Leto is perhaps the single most fascinating character in science fiction history. Never more than a child, yet one of the oldest children that ever lived due to his complete ancestral memories. No longer human due to his gradual transformation into a sandworm, yet it was his deep desire for humanity's survival (The Golden Path) that motivated him to take on the transformation in the first place.
Leto is an enigma in many ways. He does things far worse than any tyrant in history, but he did it out of a deep love for humanity, since had he not done so no humans would have survived. And Herbert really made Leto's actions and reactions truly seem as if the character had the immense, unimaginable amount of experiences stored in his mind from the ancestral memories, and the 4,000 years of his life, and the experiences he witnessed which had not yet occurred thanks to his ability to peer into the future.
The only really valid complaint about God Emperor of Dune is that it's a little low on action, but then the entire Dune series is not about action. While there are some rather dramatic moments and intense action at various points in the series, the books are mostly about philosophy. And what better character can put human philosophy into a different perspective than one who has the memories of billions upon billions of humans stretching back to the dawn of time, and has lived for 4,000 years? It's hard to imagine or believe in such a character, yet Herbert makes Leto very convincing, and I doubt any other writer could have. So while you have dismissed God Emperor of Dune into a "sucked" category, I wanted to point out that I feel it represents one of the finest achievements in science fiction history.
I've read that's actually part of the problem with the xbox in Japan. Since apartment space is very scarce there, the GameCube looks a lot more attractive. Granted, if someone really wants an xbox I'm sure they can make room (don't exactly have to tear down walls for it, heh), but it's an interesting cultural difference that you don't normally stop to think about.
Both the terms "moon" and "planet" are very subjective and usually it falls to the whim of the particular astronomer that discovered the thing. There's no set of guidelines. For example many astronomers consider the Earth and Moon to be almost a twin-planet system, because our moon is so large relative to the planet itself, and many consider Pluto not to be a planet at all but perhaps an escaped moon of one of the gas giants. Also astronomers seem to be prejudice toward balls of ice, those usually will never be called a planet no matter how large. So, there is really no cutoff size for moons or planets, and the classification is really not an exact science.
You can't legally sign away your rights in a contract. I don't care what you have to sign, in the United States you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. You shouldn't have to prove to Sam's Club or anyone else that you didn't steal anything. The burden of proof is on them, not you.
Roblimo: How much would these add-on programs cost you? People like you and me, lets say, as a journalist, I too can get free software from anybody. What would it cost you as a regular user?
Martin: Well today, XP SP2 is free if you're a genuine or a valid Windows XP user. It's just a matter of downloading. And today the spyware product that I've downloaded is also a free beta and we've not announced any pricing terms or plans for the product as of yet. So everything I'm using today is free.
I listened to the MP3, and the way he said "as of yet" kinda stuck in my head. I don't think Microsoft will charge for this though... While there are a lot of average Joe users out there that will sheepishly buy whatever Microsoft says they need, the concept of buying extra protection from Microsoft to fix the holes that shouldn't be there to start with might not hold too well with even the most loyal users.
Charging extra for spyware tools would almost give Microsoft a monetary incentive to make the operating system less secure out of the box to make sure there is a market for their spyware tools.
Umm... While WoW does have seem neat graphical effects, and a lot of things in the game look downright awesome... A lot of little details stand out to me as looking really bad. Certain trees/bushes/fences look like extremely low res textures, like something I'd except to see in Quake I. I don't really have a problem with bad graphics, but I do prefer consistency. When some things look extraordinary while others look ugly, it makes the ugly bits stand out more. But perhaps I'm being to fussy... And this gripe aside, I love the game enough to get my Rogue up to level 54. I'm on the Whisperwind server, my char is named "Raymer" and if any other slashdotters play there, be sure to whisper me and I'll hit you up with some gold or gear or something. ;)
That's a statement from someone needing a history lesson. Listen kiddos, people have always hated Microsoft. It's not like they were some great little start up that everyone loved and then, one day, turned evil. They started out by charging money for things others were willing to give away. They started out by forcing the notion of computer software as intellectual property, at a time when computer hobbyists were freely exchanging homemade programs with one another. If anything, Microsoft has a lot more fans now that they are such a juggernaut. The apologists you see on Slashdot are a direct result of Microsoft's financial success: people don't want to hate a company that has so much, because they want to be on that company's side, hoping to get a little of what they have.
But please, the notion of Microsoft as some great little start up that turned evil is entirely wrong. Microsoft was founded by a rich kid; Gates had a trust fund since he was born, his parents were rather wealthy, yet people try to paint him as a rags to riches story. Microsoft has made most of its money by making it nearly illegal to not give them your money.
From day one, Microsoft and Google were entirely different. And that is an encouraging thought.
While I, of course, have the habit of spotting good sniper spots, as most FPSers do, I also have another problem when I return to the Outside World... THE GRAPHICS! Sometimes I'll look up at a tree or the reflection of something and think "WOW! That's an awesome effect, I'm surprised my video card can, oh wait that's right, this is reality."
"The US Army loaned several UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters for the rescue scene at the end, prompting the Canadian authorities to reassure the people of Montreal that they weren't being invaded by America."
There are conversations to be had about the morality of file sharing, but until those stern words are able to project a "morality field" that causes those in their radius to behave honorably such dialogues fall into the "adorable but irrelevant" category.
Wow. I think he just summed up an entire form of slashdot subculture... in a single sentence. That's awesome!
But you are required to make an investment of energy in some form, be it the persuasion of friends/enemies into the scheme or the signing up, pretending to use, and then canceling of said scheme. I guess the law has a different perspective on money than I do, since money and energy are almost the same thing in my head. It seems that money is simply a convenient way to represent energy, right? If a hypothetical slashdotter buys an iPod with money, or "buys" one by working the scheme, he has consumed energy either way. And, as I may have learned from your posts, he likely consumed stored solar energy, and maybe a dash of geothermal. ;)
There's a well written wikipedia article on the subject of this particular, and popular, scheme. I think it's so amusing that Slashdotters, the very people who piss and moan about people being dumb enough to fall for the Nigerian email scams, so willingly participate in a flawed scheme that is on extremely questionable legal grounds and one day will simply run out of steam. Sure, you may have gotten your iPod, but consider this: it wasn't free (it cost you time and effort in the referrals or whatever they made you do) and now you're likely on some list as an easy mark for future schemes. While a "free" iPod still sounds nice, I tend to wonder if it is really worth it.
This is also an effective strategy for Intel since so many people still believe clockspeed is the only factor in performance. People always attack AMD for switching to their somewhat vague performance rating system, and my response is: Can you really blame AMD for that? Intel has done so much work to convince the public that only clockspeed matters, AMD simply can't try to sell their lower clocked chips as equals without the rating system.
Honestly though, unless you're a gamer, both AMD and Intel have chips way, way, way faster than you'll ever need. Say some old lady wants to buy collectibles off eBay? Don't even need a computer from this decade to do it. However, I'd say the amount of desktops sold for gaming or 3D rendering, CAD, etc, are a pretty small percentage, yet those are the only users that actually take full advantage of the power of today's systems.
But in marketing to the average Joe, facts don't matter, and Intel has always been the winner of the marketing war. Dell offering some AMD chips is a minor victory for AMD, but in the end Intel would have to make some really huge mistakes to lose more ground to AMD.
"In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless." -Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA, 2002 interview with Harvard Political Review's Derek Slater
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I tend to believe there is an upper limit to how much storage a human being can possibily use... I would imagine a few petabytes would be more or less un-fill-able. While this may sound like a "640k ought to be enough" style quote, I think that at some point home users will have enough storage capacity to store more than the entire sum of recorded human history (not sure if that would even go beyond a few petabytes) and at that point, I think we will basically be done increasing storage capacity for home users.