The only way I will really believe Bezos is sincere is if his company DROPS the patent lawsuit against Barnes and Noble. Its all well and good to talk about how the patent system is fucked up, but when yours lawyers are still behind the scenes suing another company over a silly patent, to me its nothing but a SMOKESCREEN!
I've never faulted Amazon for obtaining the patents -- many companies have even stupider patents for defensive purposes only...For that situation, I blame the USPTO. But for Amazon to keep suing Barnes and Noble while fighting for patent reform is, well, patently absurd. Pun intended.
Correct me if I'm wrong... but aren't they doing this primarily to head of a potentially costly lawsuit? A potential $80 Million (most of which will likely never get claimed) looks small compared with a huge class-action lawsuit which is known to bring about huge settlements.
Technically, yes, but the fact that they could even be sued for this is just ridiculous. I mean, if people lack the common sense to stop playing so much of a game that its giving them blisters, they deserve to have their hand not only blister, but become infected and fall off.
So, IMO, taking advantage of Nintendo's situation, which is caused by the aweful state of US litigations, is kind of a Bad Thing.
The fact that the blisters ARE actually generally relegated to the palm for this game (and thus the gloves they are giving out have no fingers, but a padded palm) makes your attempt at humor far less fun.
All the cpu cycles in the world won't help if you don't know how the cypher was encoded in the first place...Well, assuming the cycles aren't used for some as-of-yet-unknown artificial intelligence.
Many game developers, including Dave Taylor (id, crack.com, Transmeta) have, to some extend, decried the lack of flexibility that comes about when more and more of the 3D pipeline is implemented in software...
Unfortunately for them, and for us in general, we are stuck with this situation whilest using current generation PC technology. Many components of the PC arcitecture, including even the AGP bus, are just too slow to currently allow for this flexibility, even though processor speeds are relatively blazingly fast these days.
As we move up to the next generation (64bit PCs, fast buses), I'd expect a lot of the 3D stuff that is hardware accelerated now to move back into software on general purpose CPUs, until the ceiling starts being hit there too.
.. that no matter how advanced the hi-tech industries become they still manage to release products that still have bugs.
This actually makes perfect sense. The more advanced things get, the more complex their innards are. In both hardware and software, systems these days are generally being built using many layers of abstraction to hide increasing complexity. Start trying to tie all these layers together and you often wind up running into all kinds of previously unnoticed bugs in the underlying systems.
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I've never faulted Amazon for obtaining the patents -- many companies have even stupider patents for defensive purposes only...For that situation, I blame the USPTO. But for Amazon to keep suing Barnes and Noble while fighting for patent reform is, well, patently absurd. Pun intended.
Technically, yes, but the fact that they could even be sued for this is just ridiculous. I mean, if people lack the common sense to stop playing so much of a game that its giving them blisters, they deserve to have their hand not only blister, but become infected and fall off.
So, IMO, taking advantage of Nintendo's situation, which is caused by the aweful state of US litigations, is kind of a Bad Thing.
The fact that the blisters ARE actually generally relegated to the palm for this game (and thus the gloves they are giving out have no fingers, but a padded palm) makes your attempt at humor far less fun.
All the cpu cycles in the world won't help if you don't know how the cypher was encoded in the first place...Well, assuming the cycles aren't used for some as-of-yet-unknown artificial intelligence.
Unfortunately for them, and for us in general, we are stuck with this situation whilest using current generation PC technology. Many components of the PC arcitecture, including even the AGP bus, are just too slow to currently allow for this flexibility, even though processor speeds are relatively blazingly fast these days.
As we move up to the next generation (64bit PCs, fast buses), I'd expect a lot of the 3D stuff that is hardware accelerated now to move back into software on general purpose CPUs, until the ceiling starts being hit there too.
This actually makes perfect sense. The more advanced things get, the more complex their innards are. In both hardware and software, systems these days are generally being built using many layers of abstraction to hide increasing complexity. Start trying to tie all these layers together and you often wind up running into all kinds of previously unnoticed bugs in the underlying systems.