The problem is that QA and development of good specifications prior to a project have a huge impact on the quality of the product that results. Having said that, QA and specifications are never seen directly by the outside world.
Most programmers I know WANT to write good code but have the odds stacked against them. They aren't given the time and resources to do the job well. When it's crunch time, security and quality are the first things to go because they are less likely to get canned over a bug than over a completely missing feature.
It seems that most of the value in this windowing is the wya you can move stuff out of the way. How is this technique more effective than say minimizing? It looks really neat, but I'm not convinced that it's actually an improvement.
While that may be the trend, it's because of lack of competition more than anything else. Historically, there's been very few ways of getting information into people's homes. At first there was only phone lines, then cable came along and more recently wireless has started to show up.
Ultimately if you control those pipes and you are the only game in town, you have no incentive to innovate. Why upgrade your network to charge another $5/month for services when you can just charge another $5/month.
I don't believe regulation in the sense that you are suggesting would be a benefit. What you'd have it a bunch of people trying to hit that 512/128 sweet spot. So you'd end up with having that bandwidth being about as cheap as possible, but anything more than that would be terribly expensive.
Frankly, I think the best form of regulation would be to say that any company providing a pipe into a home cannot offer service itself but can charge a percentage of the retail price of the services that go over their network. So, for example, you get DSL service, you pay $40/month and SBC get's 10%. Now, why would SBC have an incentive to improve their network? Well, if they do that, your DSL provider can charge you $60/month, and everybody is happier.
Putting them in the position of just running the pipes gives them incentive to be open with their network and to provide the best service possible to the carriers who run over their pipes.
Can you explain to me how Transgaming is supposed to make money if they don't put some restrictions on the distribution of their software? This isn't something for the enterprise market where they could make money on consulting and support, this is for Linux gamers. Linux gamers are the kind of people with the technical know how to completely abandon the commercial package in favor of downloading and compiling themselves. That doesn't lend itself to making money.
Now you might say these are greedy corporate gluttons or some such, but really, are they making a lot of money here? I kinda doubt it. It seems like they are making enough money to pay people's checks so they can afford to continue this work.
The contribution that they make to the community is somewhat indirect. They are making it possible for those of us who are gamers to get completely out of the world of windows. No, they aren't purists, but unless somebody's going to start funding developers to do this work out of the kindness of their heart, I don't think they can afford to be purists.
Problem with that is much of the cool sci-fi concepts have been explored by its progenitors. Though... here's a though. Think "The Outer Limits" but set in the Star Trek universe. So like get a bunch of people to do weekly stories that all take place in the Star Trek universe, but are completely different each week.
Somehow I don't think you'd have trouble digging up writers and actors that would be willing to do one cool episode of star trek.
Well here's the difference as I see it between voyager and say Babylon 5. Babylon 5, from nearly the beginning created a strong sense that the story had a specific plan and that you'd get to see it unfold over each episode.
With Voyager, you knew they were went off into the middle of nowhere and you knew that they wanted to get home and that eventually they probably would. But there was no real sense that anybody working on the scripts knew precisely how they were getting there. And so, for the most part, once again, it was random encounters with aliens interspersed with the occasional plot forwarding episode.
The problem is that it's the same thing over and over again. When ST:TOS came out it was truly unique and interesting. It didn't need to have a serious story arc because it was breaking such new ground.
ST:TNG had two things going for it. One was that it was an expansion of the original concept. The other was that it has a really good cast. Even though, for the most part, the show wasn't doing much in the way of story arcs, they kept it interesting on a week to week basis.
But thing about what you have now. The actors, are decent, but not spectacular. The writing is okay, and the concept is REALLY REALLY well worn now. Oh look they are beaming down to a planet, I bet something bad is going to happen. Oh surprise something bad happened.
It's sort of a victim of it's own success. ST:TOS invented the formula, TNG refined the formula, and then it's been a slow process of burnout as the variations on that theme have slowly died off.
So my thinking is that now that the forumla has been established you can't rely on that to make it interesting. Instead you have to take the forumla and use it as the basis for better thought out and extended story.
I think you might be right, but if anybody could salvage Star Trek, it's Straczynski. Babylon 5 is truly one of the best though out sci-fi programs to have aired on television. His focus on a defined and limited story arc really gave the show a sense of purpose from week to week that I think is totally lacking in most of the Star Trek spinoffs.
The biggest problem, I believe, with Star Trek is that they've tended to let the show ride on random events rather than running plots. The times when they have gone to more of a story arc they have made the shows far more worthwhile.
Enterprise has done this to some extent over the last season, tracking down the Xindi and it really helped give the show some energy. Deep Space nine had the same sort of thing happen when they had the shape shifter backed armada coming to wipe out their part of the galaxy. ST:TNG has the Borg and a few other running threads.
But overall, with Star Trek, these runing plots have always felt kinda tacked on. Something to drive a season finale, etc. I think starting a new series with a defined story arc over a fixed period like they did with Babylon 5 would really do well.
For example, perhaps do a series that's entirely focussed on the events that take place during the creation of a peace accord with the Klingons. Pick some key moment in federation history and depict it's course over a period of time. Project star trek out into the future and have some run in with a new species perhaps? What about a major civil war with the federation? There's a lot that can be done with this that could really make for an interesting show.
But anyhow, if they want to go that direction and really freshen the show, I think they can. If they try to crank out yet another bland spinoff, it's going to fail. So if they don't want to try something truly new with it, they need to mothball it for like 20 years. Then they can go back and do the same tired old concept again.
Your post has made exactly the point of why we need to allow free speech. Hate speech does proceed hate actions. This means that if that speech is out there, that we can see who's saying it, and presumably know who to keep an eye on when it comes to hate actions.
I'd rather see what people think, out in the open, and evaluate them on that. If they are all hiding their beliefs, then we don't know who the true dangerous idiots are.
Each has it's plusses and minuses. I mean, how about the Netherlands. They are still in Europe right? Free spech, and you can toke up and pay to get laid, all legally. So how free are we really?
Also, check out the Patriot Act sometime and see how truly free we are.
But all of this is a moot point really. Europe can whine all it wants, it's not going to change anything in this country. It's constitutionally protected, which means no treaty can stop it. So they'll just have to cope with all the Nazi's offshoring their websites.
I've been on-line a lot today and didn't even know those sites were down. Didn't effect me in the least. The internet, by it's nature, will always be plagued by the occasional downtime of various services here and there. But in the end, the Internet keeps moving right along.
Think about the worst thing that's ever happened to the Internet and how much that really impacted your daily activity. I don't know about you, but it's always been local connectivity failures that have caused me the most trouble. The occasional site being down really doesn't make a big difference.
I'm going to guess that anybody named "The Mad Penguin" is probably not going to give us an unbiased review of MS products. Furthermore, the review has a clear fascination with lots of technical gadgetry that an average user could care less about.
Anybody who thinks Firefox should cause Microsoft to fear doesn't understand why Microsoft won the browser war. It's not because they were better, but rather because they were good enough and it came with the OS.
The problem I can see in this paper is that it makes certain assumptions about the behaviour of black hat hackers which aren't necessarily true. The majority of vulnerabilities discovered by black hat hackers are eventually leaked from the hacker community to a white hat which will seek a solution to the problem. But there's no reason to conclude that this is true of all vulnerabilities.
I forget the terminology for it, but there's the concept of worms that are launched on a large number of vulnerable machines simultaneously. I'm not aware of an attack like this in the wild but it's theoretically possible and would be terribly destructive. If a black hat hacker plays his cards right, he can probably sneak his exploit onto a few thousand computers without anybody noticing. Then he can launch a massive attack before anybody even knows the vulnerability exists.
Having said that I think that, in the real world, the amount of effort put into finding vulnerabilities by white hats has a minimal cost. There's essentially three areas where security vulnerabilities are discovered by the friendlies:
1) QA of the product developers 2) Hobbyist white hats 3) Network security auditing
The cost of #1 is an assumed cost of any product and is part of the basics of releasing it to the public. You check for typos in the documentation and you check for security bugs.
The cost of #2 is zero because it's people doing these things on their own time for their own amusement.
The cost of #3 is substantial but it's critically important to some businesses to have zero security vulnerabilities. A security breach not only has an immediate cost in time to fix the problem, but it also has a long term cost by damaging the integrity of the company. If your bank got hacked and you lost all your savings, even if it was insured, would you keep your money in that bank?
Obviously the near term cost completely sucks for those who get displaced, it was the same thing for all the blue collar guys who lost their manufacturing jobs, it was the same thing for all the textile workers who lost their jobs. No. It isn't the same. The difference is that when the textile worker lost his job he was told to go to college, get a degree and get a white collar job. Probably in IT ironically.
The IT worker loses his job and what's the answer for him? What new job skills does he learn? What new career can he hope to maintain a decent living in?
Biodiesel is renewable, yes, but it all has to come from somewhere. How much soy, or what have you needs to be grown to make a gallon of biodiesel? Is there enough arable land to make enough fuel to run the world economy in place of petroleum?
-It's about 12.5 gallons/year for one acre of Soy from what I could find. -There's 470 million acres of arable land in the US. -Average gas usage/person in the us is 1,050 gallons per year -US population is 293 million
So, maximum output is 5.875 billion gallons of diesel/year. Usage is somewhere around 297 billion gallons of gasoline/year. SO it's not possible to completely replace gasoline with soy.
The other thing is that oil prices are relatively stable over time because the extraction process is fairly predicatable. They know how much is in the ground, how much is left, and how much it will cost to get it out. With a farmed fuel, the weather, from year to year can cause potentially large swings in price.
The answer to your question is that Microsoft will set that for the industry. Going from their history, based on the Office licensing model, it sounds like you'll not be locked in per se, but you'll be penalized for not sticking with them. Not precisely a lock in, but just a strong incentive to stick with them.
As far as Sun goes, they won't be around to see it. Name me one software product that Sun has that you'd be willing to subscribe to get access to. Go on... I'm waiting...
This is all just Sun's line for the investors, buying time til their inevitable demise. Their hardware is being outpaced by IBM, they can't come close to IBM in professional services, and Microsoft dominates in the software arena.
Expect Intel/AMD boxes running Linux to continue to dissolve Sun's hardware margins, and Microsoft will prevent them from getting any kind of foot hold in software. Unless they completely re-invent themselves, they aren't going to be around for much longer.
Okay let's say it costs $1/ton to put something in low earth orbit. It would actually cost more to get what you were launching to the launch facility than it would to launch it. A quick check with FedEx showed a rate of about $4500 to ship one ton about half way across the country.
I don't understand the details of how the reactor vessel works, but I'm wondering: do you care if it gets heavily radiated? I mean, let's say it's heavily radiated, does that mean it's no longer suitable as a reactor vessel? How often would you need to replace that, as opposed to the rods in a fission reactor.
ALso, I don't know about you, but if my choice was between a waste product that was lower volume but took thousands of years to decay, and a waste product that was higher volume and took 50 years to decay, I'd favor the latter. I mean, right now, if you bury the waste from a fission reactor, that land is totally useless, in essence, forever. But if it only takes 50-100 years, that means the land is safe again within one person's lifetime.
It's worth seeing if for no other reason than to point out the dramatic difference between Lucas then and Lucas now. THX 1138 is a very minimalist movie. Little use of color, very simple sets, and a depressing but interesting premise. Compare this to say, Episode 1, where it's so overdone with special effects and it's all candy coated.
The other thing to note is the depth of the characters in THX 1138 versus the newest SW movies. Everybody in SW is so seemingly detached, from everything, so little emotion. In THX 1138, it's all about letting the emotion come out of that cold rigorously controlled world.
Quoting from the article: While there were some very promising titles on display at this year's show, there were very few games that were truly unique. Most, instead, rehashed familiar genres, tossing in a few new elements or simply polishing gameplay.
If you take out the "simply polishing gameplay" phrase, this statement would apply to movies as well. Most movies are pretty much just rehashes of existing concepts, with different actors and special effects. Yet, the movie industry thrives and makes billions of dollars.
So my sense is that the game industry isn't going anywhere, it's just maturing as a creative medium. That means that, over time, you're going to see less innovation, just like you do in most creative media. Doesn't mean people are going to stop buying.
Re:Inflation.
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Where do you think that electricity is coming from? The majority of electricity is produced using fossil fuels. Ultimately the short spikes in price aren't going to make a difference to you, but long term price changes will affect you eventually.
Right, and the irony is that this is making it less green. I mean, that electricity has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? How many folks in China do you think are hooking their bike up to a solar panel? No, they are hooking it up to the wall, which is being powered by some long dead dinosaur in all likelyhood.
I wouldn't object to such a system if it was tracking people anonymously. Like, if you knew that there was 50 people who went down the trail and only 49 came back, then who cares who that 50th person is, it just means they didn't make it back.
Interesting little factoid: Saudi Arabia, which has always produced more oil than Iraq, produced roughly 40 billion dollars worth of oil in 2002. The price tag, this year, for occupying Iraq looks to be in the range of 100 billion.
So they aren't really gaining anything from this as far as that goes.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that QA and development of good specifications prior to a project have a huge impact on the quality of the product that results. Having said that, QA and specifications are never seen directly by the outside world.
Most programmers I know WANT to write good code but have the odds stacked against them. They aren't given the time and resources to do the job well. When it's crunch time, security and quality are the first things to go because they are less likely to get canned over a bug than over a completely missing feature.
It seems that most of the value in this windowing is the wya you can move stuff out of the way. How is this technique more effective than say minimizing? It looks really neat, but I'm not convinced that it's actually an improvement.
While that may be the trend, it's because of lack of competition more than anything else. Historically, there's been very few ways of getting information into people's homes. At first there was only phone lines, then cable came along and more recently wireless has started to show up.
Ultimately if you control those pipes and you are the only game in town, you have no incentive to innovate. Why upgrade your network to charge another $5/month for services when you can just charge another $5/month.
I don't believe regulation in the sense that you are suggesting would be a benefit. What you'd have it a bunch of people trying to hit that 512/128 sweet spot. So you'd end up with having that bandwidth being about as cheap as possible, but anything more than that would be terribly expensive.
Frankly, I think the best form of regulation would be to say that any company providing a pipe into a home cannot offer service itself but can charge a percentage of the retail price of the services that go over their network. So, for example, you get DSL service, you pay $40/month and SBC get's 10%. Now, why would SBC have an incentive to improve their network? Well, if they do that, your DSL provider can charge you $60/month, and everybody is happier.
Putting them in the position of just running the pipes gives them incentive to be open with their network and to provide the best service possible to the carriers who run over their pipes.
Can you explain to me how Transgaming is supposed to make money if they don't put some restrictions on the distribution of their software? This isn't something for the enterprise market where they could make money on consulting and support, this is for Linux gamers. Linux gamers are the kind of people with the technical know how to completely abandon the commercial package in favor of downloading and compiling themselves. That doesn't lend itself to making money.
Now you might say these are greedy corporate gluttons or some such, but really, are they making a lot of money here? I kinda doubt it. It seems like they are making enough money to pay people's checks so they can afford to continue this work.
The contribution that they make to the community is somewhat indirect. They are making it possible for those of us who are gamers to get completely out of the world of windows. No, they aren't purists, but unless somebody's going to start funding developers to do this work out of the kindness of their heart, I don't think they can afford to be purists.
Problem with that is much of the cool sci-fi concepts have been explored by its progenitors. Though... here's a though. Think "The Outer Limits" but set in the Star Trek universe. So like get a bunch of people to do weekly stories that all take place in the Star Trek universe, but are completely different each week.
Somehow I don't think you'd have trouble digging up writers and actors that would be willing to do one cool episode of star trek.
Well here's the difference as I see it between voyager and say Babylon 5. Babylon 5, from nearly the beginning created a strong sense that the story had a specific plan and that you'd get to see it unfold over each episode.
With Voyager, you knew they were went off into the middle of nowhere and you knew that they wanted to get home and that eventually they probably would. But there was no real sense that anybody working on the scripts knew precisely how they were getting there. And so, for the most part, once again, it was random encounters with aliens interspersed with the occasional plot forwarding episode.
The problem is that it's the same thing over and over again. When ST:TOS came out it was truly unique and interesting. It didn't need to have a serious story arc because it was breaking such new ground.
ST:TNG had two things going for it. One was that it was an expansion of the original concept. The other was that it has a really good cast. Even though, for the most part, the show wasn't doing much in the way of story arcs, they kept it interesting on a week to week basis.
But thing about what you have now. The actors, are decent, but not spectacular. The writing is okay, and the concept is REALLY REALLY well worn now. Oh look they are beaming down to a planet, I bet something bad is going to happen. Oh surprise something bad happened.
It's sort of a victim of it's own success. ST:TOS invented the formula, TNG refined the formula, and then it's been a slow process of burnout as the variations on that theme have slowly died off.
So my thinking is that now that the forumla has been established you can't rely on that to make it interesting. Instead you have to take the forumla and use it as the basis for better thought out and extended story.
I think you might be right, but if anybody could salvage Star Trek, it's Straczynski. Babylon 5 is truly one of the best though out sci-fi programs to have aired on television. His focus on a defined and limited story arc really gave the show a sense of purpose from week to week that I think is totally lacking in most of the Star Trek spinoffs.
The biggest problem, I believe, with Star Trek is that they've tended to let the show ride on random events rather than running plots. The times when they have gone to more of a story arc they have made the shows far more worthwhile.
Enterprise has done this to some extent over the last season, tracking down the Xindi and it really helped give the show some energy. Deep Space nine had the same sort of thing happen when they had the shape shifter backed armada coming to wipe out their part of the galaxy. ST:TNG has the Borg and a few other running threads.
But overall, with Star Trek, these runing plots have always felt kinda tacked on. Something to drive a season finale, etc. I think starting a new series with a defined story arc over a fixed period like they did with Babylon 5 would really do well.
For example, perhaps do a series that's entirely focussed on the events that take place during the creation of a peace accord with the Klingons. Pick some key moment in federation history and depict it's course over a period of time. Project star trek out into the future and have some run in with a new species perhaps? What about a major civil war with the federation? There's a lot that can be done with this that could really make for an interesting show.
But anyhow, if they want to go that direction and really freshen the show, I think they can. If they try to crank out yet another bland spinoff, it's going to fail. So if they don't want to try something truly new with it, they need to mothball it for like 20 years. Then they can go back and do the same tired old concept again.
Your post has made exactly the point of why we need to allow free speech. Hate speech does proceed hate actions. This means that if that speech is out there, that we can see who's saying it, and presumably know who to keep an eye on when it comes to hate actions.
I'd rather see what people think, out in the open, and evaluate them on that. If they are all hiding their beliefs, then we don't know who the true dangerous idiots are.
Each has it's plusses and minuses. I mean, how about the Netherlands. They are still in Europe right? Free spech, and you can toke up and pay to get laid, all legally. So how free are we really?
Also, check out the Patriot Act sometime and see how truly free we are.
But all of this is a moot point really. Europe can whine all it wants, it's not going to change anything in this country. It's constitutionally protected, which means no treaty can stop it. So they'll just have to cope with all the Nazi's offshoring their websites.
I've been on-line a lot today and didn't even know those sites were down. Didn't effect me in the least. The internet, by it's nature, will always be plagued by the occasional downtime of various services here and there. But in the end, the Internet keeps moving right along.
Think about the worst thing that's ever happened to the Internet and how much that really impacted your daily activity. I don't know about you, but it's always been local connectivity failures that have caused me the most trouble. The occasional site being down really doesn't make a big difference.
I'm going to guess that anybody named "The Mad Penguin" is probably not going to give us an unbiased review of MS products. Furthermore, the review has a clear fascination with lots of technical gadgetry that an average user could care less about.
Anybody who thinks Firefox should cause Microsoft to fear doesn't understand why Microsoft won the browser war. It's not because they were better, but rather because they were good enough and it came with the OS.
The problem I can see in this paper is that it makes certain assumptions about the behaviour of black hat hackers which aren't necessarily true. The majority of vulnerabilities discovered by black hat hackers are eventually leaked from the hacker community to a white hat which will seek a solution to the problem. But there's no reason to conclude that this is true of all vulnerabilities.
I forget the terminology for it, but there's the concept of worms that are launched on a large number of vulnerable machines simultaneously. I'm not aware of an attack like this in the wild but it's theoretically possible and would be terribly destructive. If a black hat hacker plays his cards right, he can probably sneak his exploit onto a few thousand computers without anybody noticing. Then he can launch a massive attack before anybody even knows the vulnerability exists.
Having said that I think that, in the real world, the amount of effort put into finding vulnerabilities by white hats has a minimal cost. There's essentially three areas where security vulnerabilities are discovered by the friendlies:
1) QA of the product developers
2) Hobbyist white hats
3) Network security auditing
The cost of #1 is an assumed cost of any product and is part of the basics of releasing it to the public. You check for typos in the documentation and you check for security bugs.
The cost of #2 is zero because it's people doing these things on their own time for their own amusement.
The cost of #3 is substantial but it's critically important to some businesses to have zero security vulnerabilities. A security breach not only has an immediate cost in time to fix the problem, but it also has a long term cost by damaging the integrity of the company. If your bank got hacked and you lost all your savings, even if it was insured, would you keep your money in that bank?
Obviously the near term cost completely sucks for those who get displaced, it was the same thing for all the blue collar guys who lost their manufacturing jobs, it was the same thing for all the textile workers who lost their jobs.
No. It isn't the same. The difference is that when the textile worker lost his job he was told to go to college, get a degree and get a white collar job. Probably in IT ironically.
The IT worker loses his job and what's the answer for him? What new job skills does he learn? What new career can he hope to maintain a decent living in?
Hell, I'd settle for them shipping the game at all :)
Biodiesel is renewable, yes, but it all has to come from somewhere. How much soy, or what have you needs to be grown to make a gallon of biodiesel? Is there enough arable land to make enough fuel to run the world economy in place of petroleum?
-It's about 12.5 gallons/year for one acre of Soy from what I could find.
-There's 470 million acres of arable land in the US.
-Average gas usage/person in the us is 1,050 gallons per year
-US population is 293 million
So, maximum output is 5.875 billion gallons of diesel/year. Usage is somewhere around 297 billion gallons of gasoline/year. SO it's not possible to completely replace gasoline with soy.
The other thing is that oil prices are relatively stable over time because the extraction process is fairly predicatable. They know how much is in the ground, how much is left, and how much it will cost to get it out. With a farmed fuel, the weather, from year to year can cause potentially large swings in price.
The answer to your question is that Microsoft will set that for the industry. Going from their history, based on the Office licensing model, it sounds like you'll not be locked in per se, but you'll be penalized for not sticking with them. Not precisely a lock in, but just a strong incentive to stick with them.
As far as Sun goes, they won't be around to see it. Name me one software product that Sun has that you'd be willing to subscribe to get access to. Go on... I'm waiting...
This is all just Sun's line for the investors, buying time til their inevitable demise. Their hardware is being outpaced by IBM, they can't come close to IBM in professional services, and Microsoft dominates in the software arena.
Expect Intel/AMD boxes running Linux to continue to dissolve Sun's hardware margins, and Microsoft will prevent them from getting any kind of foot hold in software. Unless they completely re-invent themselves, they aren't going to be around for much longer.
Okay let's say it costs $1/ton to put something in low earth orbit. It would actually cost more to get what you were launching to the launch facility than it would to launch it. A quick check with FedEx showed a rate of about $4500 to ship one ton about half way across the country.
I don't understand the details of how the reactor vessel works, but I'm wondering: do you care if it gets heavily radiated? I mean, let's say it's heavily radiated, does that mean it's no longer suitable as a reactor vessel? How often would you need to replace that, as opposed to the rods in a fission reactor.
ALso, I don't know about you, but if my choice was between a waste product that was lower volume but took thousands of years to decay, and a waste product that was higher volume and took 50 years to decay, I'd favor the latter. I mean, right now, if you bury the waste from a fission reactor, that land is totally useless, in essence, forever. But if it only takes 50-100 years, that means the land is safe again within one person's lifetime.
It's worth seeing if for no other reason than to point out the dramatic difference between Lucas then and Lucas now. THX 1138 is a very minimalist movie. Little use of color, very simple sets, and a depressing but interesting premise. Compare this to say, Episode 1, where it's so overdone with special effects and it's all candy coated.
The other thing to note is the depth of the characters in THX 1138 versus the newest SW movies. Everybody in SW is so seemingly detached, from everything, so little emotion. In THX 1138, it's all about letting the emotion come out of that cold rigorously controlled world.
Quoting from the article:
While there were some very promising titles on display at this year's show, there were very few games that were truly unique. Most, instead, rehashed familiar genres, tossing in a few new elements or simply polishing gameplay.
If you take out the "simply polishing gameplay" phrase, this statement would apply to movies as well. Most movies are pretty much just rehashes of existing concepts, with different actors and special effects. Yet, the movie industry thrives and makes billions of dollars.
So my sense is that the game industry isn't going anywhere, it's just maturing as a creative medium. That means that, over time, you're going to see less innovation, just like you do in most creative media. Doesn't mean people are going to stop buying.
Where do you think that electricity is coming from? The majority of electricity is produced using fossil fuels. Ultimately the short spikes in price aren't going to make a difference to you, but long term price changes will affect you eventually.
Right, and the irony is that this is making it less green. I mean, that electricity has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? How many folks in China do you think are hooking their bike up to a solar panel? No, they are hooking it up to the wall, which is being powered by some long dead dinosaur in all likelyhood.
:)
If you want green, try using the pedals
I wouldn't object to such a system if it was tracking people anonymously. Like, if you knew that there was 50 people who went down the trail and only 49 came back, then who cares who that 50th person is, it just means they didn't make it back.
Interesting little factoid: Saudi Arabia, which has always produced more oil than Iraq, produced roughly 40 billion dollars worth of oil in 2002. The price tag, this year, for occupying Iraq looks to be in the range of 100 billion.
So they aren't really gaining anything from this as far as that goes.