By "Create more such innovative..." what they mean is back a dumptruck of cash up to someone with a history of making innovative, popular and profitable games and then saying "We'll unload this if you make us an innovative, popular and profitable game."
All that money can help the process along by allowing the designer to hire competent programmers, artists etc, but working within the rules set forth by a large company can erect other roadblocks to creativity as well.
Actually, sounds really close to "molecular manufacturing" to me. The peptides arrange themselves in a lattice around the severed nerve, and then the body's own repair mechanisms are able to fill in the gaps with a minimal of scarring, similar to a stitch or setting a broken bone. The nanotechnology part comes in the auto-assembling scaffold that you get just by injecting some chemicals.
Sort of like the fact that most of Bones' tools in the Original Star Trek were made from salt and pepper shakers. Basically for the first episode the prop people had forgotten to make anything for his medical tools, and at the last minute just handed him a salt shaker. After that they went out searching for more and more elaborate salt shakers as a joke.
Re:Google's Philosophy: a love and hate relationsh
on
Gauging Google's Gaffes
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
like their relentlessly protected the interest of their chinese users?
Google made compromises which they felt were in the best interest of the Chinese Users. Their options were 1)be banned by the chinese government or 2)censor the results. Now google censors the results, but at the very least tells the users that results are being cesored per Chinese Law. This is information that, as far as I know, other search engines do not reveal. Letting the Chinese people know which information is being censored is the first step in getting that censored information to them, as it will spark curiosity in the rebelious who know that something is wrong with the system, and now have actual evidence.
By and large it is not the shareholders that are asking for guidance, it's financial advisors looking for guidance. Google issued statements on what they will and will not do before the stock was available public, so if people bought stock without looking at these statements, then they don't have anything to complain about. The people who bought stock second hand from those that actually got in on the IPO (back when it was what... $50 a share?) have even less to complain about, as they should have actually taken a look at the terms that Google set forth and what rights the initial stockholders were allowed to transfer.
I doubt the authorities really have to reward anybody for raping or beating up another prisoner. Simply turning a blind eye is enough. Although in some cases, they probably give exceptionally unstable prisoners access to exceptionally heinous criminals (See Christopher Scarver)
Writing a virus with a payload that formats a harddrive/etc would not be the solution.
What needs to be done is write a virus/worm or whatever that patches vulnerabilities, although these can cause major network congestion if not done with great care. Or at the very least a virus that pops up a message every now and then that says "Your computer is vulnerable and indeed already infested with a virus." Then offers links to websites which would help one in securing their computer. Apathy may be a large part of the virus problem, but so is plain old ignorance that there is something that needs to be done. This virus could also cause problems I suppose, if it is hijacked to give misinformation which would tell the user to take steps to unsecure the computer.
True, Japan may only produce about half a million tons of cow manure, but the United States Produces somewhere on the order of five hundred million tons of cow manure a year. Multiply the amount of gas by 1000, and you get 1,653,465,000 gallons of gas per year. That's about 4 million gallons of gas per day, so maybe 1% of our gasoline could be supplied by cow manure. That's not including other fuels that can likely be extracted. Couple this with potential in-situ operations where the manure is converted to energy directly on the farm and you end up with reduced fuel for delivery, although most likely slightly reduced efficiency so we'll call that a wash.
Not that 1% of our fuel seems like a very big deal, but in order to replace petroleum as our primary fuel we are going to have to squeeze every bit of energy out of alternative sources and greatly increase efficiency if we want to maintain our standard of living. Thermal depolymerization may just be one of the pieces in the puzzle of keeping everything running. And the process can be run on many materials besdides just cow manure: first there are many other animals in the united states that create wastes (including people) that could be treated in a similar method, as well as offal from slaughterhouses, used fryer and industrial vegetable oil, possibly waste paper and construction lumber, grain silage... the list goes on and on. Combine the energy from that with some wind power, some solar power, some geothermal power, some hydropower, some biodiesel (where crops would be grown specifically for making into fuel, as opposed to using wastes from existing processes) and a good bit of nuclear power and we can hopefully put a serious dent into our petroleum usage. Efficiency increases through technology and plain old reduction in energy wasteful lifestyle choices will eventually have to fill in the gaps.
There is not going to be one magic bullet that fills our energy needs, we are going to have to develop and use many different sources to fuel future societies and waste reclaimation is one step in the whole issue. We will have to develop and test many different methods to find the right solution for the right application.
GP was talking about the carbon cycle in general. and carbon does indeed make up one third of the atoms in carbon dioxide. Whenever talking about atmospheric carbon, it is generally accepted that you are primarilly talking about CO2. The plants take carbon dioxide from the air, which the cows eat and then most of the carbon is released back into the atmosphere through respiration in the form of carbon dioxide.
The major problem that GP missed is that it isn't the carbon dioxide (CO2) that cows are emitting that worries people, it's the methane (CH4) that cows emit in significant quantaties due to incomplete anaerobic digestion of their food. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and every mol of CO2 taken from the atmosphere and passed through cows in this form comes out as one mol of CH4 thus increasing the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere.
Although one problem with long dev times is not knowing what features are going to be in future hardware, it will be very difficult to optimize for that. True, you want people with older computers to be able to play the game, but you want it to look really good for people with that uber video card.
Yeah, I realize it's a cheesy analysis based on a graph off wikipedia. I think it's just more predictive than anything. Honestly, I wasn't trying to say that any first console would lose, I was more trying to comment that a failure of the first console released in a generation does not mean the whole generation is doomed to failure. I probably just got carried away. But you must admit, it's an entertaining (although very flawed, I know) concept if you are at all intrigued by the industry. And about as accurate as the metrics most pundits use.
The free market concept proposed by Adam Smith always assumes 1)no international trade and 2)no monopolies. If either of those are missing, free market isn't guaranteed to work. These days, it can probably be argued that at least one of these is violated for just about everything bought in the USA.
The reason that this legislation has a chance is the com companies finally did it... they tried to use their muscle and deep pockets to screw over other companies with muscle and deep pockets. Guess who the loser is going to be...
Taking a look at the past console transitions you see that, of consoles released in the U.S. for the last two transitions the early bird gets squashed. In fact, it appears that any console released significantly before the rest of the generation spelled death for the console.
Current Gen: Dreamcast released a full year before most competitors, over half a year before PS2. Status: Sega no longer making consoles
64 bit era: Atari Jaguar released over a year before ANY other console, a full TWO years before N64. Status: Atari has not made a console since then.
16/32 bit era: Genesis released insignificantly ahead of Turbografx 16. Status: Turbografx dead, Genesis did survive.
8 bit era: Colecovision released over a year before any competition. Status: Colecowhat?
The generation before that, we have the Atari 2600 which was released significantly (about a half year) before the other consoles, and had pretty much the longest stretch of any console (even beating out the Atari 5200, which I assume was an improvement somehow. This is the only example I see of this happening
My guess? The first console of a given generation is rushed out the door, not given that killer must have feature. Meanwhile the other console makers are working either in house or with game developers to have that killer app (game) avaiable on or near release. They are also making sure that the new console is indeed enough of an improvement over the previous gen to justify the price.
The 360? Plagued with design problems (the giant brick of a power supply that overheats if not put on the perfect surface being the best known) HUGE supply problems, many people who preordered STILL do not have their 360. Just read the comments of a supplier to see how bad it is. New Games? Well, the closest thing I can see is to an interesting non-sequel is GUN: yet another FPS, this time in the old west. And you get to ride a horse. There's Kameo, elements of power, and I see that is already for sale in the used bin at video game stores. King Kong? Yet another movie franchise tie-in. Full Auto, another combat racing game. Condemned: Gosh, it's dark in here! Then there's supposedly the killer app: Halo 2. You can get... umm... the t-shirt if you want. You actually want the video game? It's gonna be a bit. Toss in a couple sequels and a few online only games. So, about 4 or 5 original games, most of which are of pretty dubious quality. Sequels. Sequels. Did I say sequels? And a few games which are nowhere near release... I know I'm not going to throw down a minimum of $600.00 on it. (Yeah, places LIST it for less, but those places simply don't have it. And those prices don't include the accessories needed to actually make the whole thing fun.) Ohh... but it plays movies off my computer!!! For that price, I could just go get a Mac Mini. What's that you say? The Mini doesn't include a monitor? Neither does the 360.
So yes, I think the 360 is a waste of money. But if you look at previous generations every console released without competition on the first christmas sales season tanked, except for the Atari 2600. And that was over 25 years ago, the market is surely changed. I predict that Microsoft does have deep enough pockets to keep the 360 going for a little longer than previous early adopter consoles, but will not be able to compete long term with Sony and Nintendo. Sony because their pockets are just as deep as microsoft, and they actually have experience designing consumer electronics and producing entertainment media (although not necesarilly video games, but that's not necessary to become a succesful console if you can get others to do it for you.) And Nintendo will plug along exploiting the niche of people who actually like to play FUN games rather than watch some eye candy. Even though many of Nintendo's titles SEEM to be rehashes of old games, it's
From the article, yes they do have a repeater. It allows emergency signals in. It also allows normal calls in between movies, etc. I assume it will also allow any outbound 911 calls during the movie, but that wasn't in the actual article. I have no idea how it differentiates between emergency signals and others, but that is something that would have to be worked out between the providers of the repeater and the communication companies/FCC(or equivalent in other countries)/etc.
I could potentially see this as INCREASING the availability of emergency contacts in certain situations, as there would be less interference from other signals, cell towers won't be as overloaded, etc.
I've seen cell phones interrupt plenty of devices: TVs reception getting messed up, buzzing on speakers, etc. With those things, a little interference is just an inconvienience. With Medical Equipment, airplane navigation/control equipment, etc the small chance of failure because of cell phone interference is offset by the fact that if the equpment fails, there is a good chance that someone will die.
But that pager will still be blocked if there is copper filled nanotube paint on the walls of the building. I think this will essentially turn the theatre into a Faraday cage (assuming the walls are grounded) although I'm not quite sure of the specifics of the material.
1. The web design for all user generated content is GOD AWFUL ugly.
2. unintuitive s a matter of opinion. It seems that enough kids are able to figure stuff out. Maybe having to learn how to make it look a little better is part of the attraction; it contributes to the social aspects because you have to ask friends for help.
3. And email accounts are filled with bogus email addresses pimping V1@gr@ and M0rgt@gz CH3@P!
4. Oh, it's slow because Myspace is a kludged together system which the operators never expected to have to scale as large as it did.
Now, if you REALLY want to bury myspace, a comment on just about every image that comes from places like blinkyou.com, or even worse people posting multiple videos in comments. Because I want to listen to the background music of the page, plus four different music videos. Then again, those two points go back to number 1: user generated content will always suck.
And what does Myspace have going for it? A lot of people have a couple real life friends who are on it, and it is indeed a convienient enough way to communicate with them. In essence, Myspace is popular because... it is popular.
The RIAA doesn't want you to be able to play music that's 50 years old. The copyright will have expired by then, allowing you to copy at will. No, we can't have that.
Slashdot Mirror
By "Create more such innovative..." what they mean is back a dumptruck of cash up to someone with a history of making innovative, popular and profitable games and then saying "We'll unload this if you make us an innovative, popular and profitable game."
All that money can help the process along by allowing the designer to hire competent programmers, artists etc, but working within the rules set forth by a large company can erect other roadblocks to creativity as well.
Actually, sounds really close to "molecular manufacturing" to me. The peptides arrange themselves in a lattice around the severed nerve, and then the body's own repair mechanisms are able to fill in the gaps with a minimal of scarring, similar to a stitch or setting a broken bone. The nanotechnology part comes in the auto-assembling scaffold that you get just by injecting some chemicals.
Sort of like the fact that most of Bones' tools in the Original Star Trek were made from salt and pepper shakers. Basically for the first episode the prop people had forgotten to make anything for his medical tools, and at the last minute just handed him a salt shaker. After that they went out searching for more and more elaborate salt shakers as a joke.
like their relentlessly protected the interest of their chinese users?
Google made compromises which they felt were in the best interest of the Chinese Users. Their options were 1)be banned by the chinese government or 2)censor the results. Now google censors the results, but at the very least tells the users that results are being cesored per Chinese Law. This is information that, as far as I know, other search engines do not reveal. Letting the Chinese people know which information is being censored is the first step in getting that censored information to them, as it will spark curiosity in the rebelious who know that something is wrong with the system, and now have actual evidence.
By and large it is not the shareholders that are asking for guidance, it's financial advisors looking for guidance. Google issued statements on what they will and will not do before the stock was available public, so if people bought stock without looking at these statements, then they don't have anything to complain about. The people who bought stock second hand from those that actually got in on the IPO (back when it was what... $50 a share?) have even less to complain about, as they should have actually taken a look at the terms that Google set forth and what rights the initial stockholders were allowed to transfer.
I doubt the authorities really have to reward anybody for raping or beating up another prisoner. Simply turning a blind eye is enough. Although in some cases, they probably give exceptionally unstable prisoners access to exceptionally heinous criminals (See Christopher Scarver)
Writing a virus with a payload that formats a harddrive/etc would not be the solution.
What needs to be done is write a virus/worm or whatever that patches vulnerabilities, although these can cause major network congestion if not done with great care. Or at the very least a virus that pops up a message every now and then that says "Your computer is vulnerable and indeed already infested with a virus." Then offers links to websites which would help one in securing their computer. Apathy may be a large part of the virus problem, but so is plain old ignorance that there is something that needs to be done. This virus could also cause problems I suppose, if it is hijacked to give misinformation which would tell the user to take steps to unsecure the computer.
Would a 19 year old be breaking the law if he got drunk in a Toronto bar and then went to the united states still intoxicated?
Forget the coffee cups... it won't cover ashtrays and no smoking signs.
True, Japan may only produce about half a million tons of cow manure, but the United States Produces somewhere on the order of five hundred million tons of cow manure a year. Multiply the amount of gas by 1000, and you get 1,653,465,000 gallons of gas per year. That's about 4 million gallons of gas per day, so maybe 1% of our gasoline could be supplied by cow manure. That's not including other fuels that can likely be extracted. Couple this with potential in-situ operations where the manure is converted to energy directly on the farm and you end up with reduced fuel for delivery, although most likely slightly reduced efficiency so we'll call that a wash.
Not that 1% of our fuel seems like a very big deal, but in order to replace petroleum as our primary fuel we are going to have to squeeze every bit of energy out of alternative sources and greatly increase efficiency if we want to maintain our standard of living. Thermal depolymerization may just be one of the pieces in the puzzle of keeping everything running. And the process can be run on many materials besdides just cow manure: first there are many other animals in the united states that create wastes (including people) that could be treated in a similar method, as well as offal from slaughterhouses, used fryer and industrial vegetable oil, possibly waste paper and construction lumber, grain silage... the list goes on and on. Combine the energy from that with some wind power, some solar power, some geothermal power, some hydropower, some biodiesel (where crops would be grown specifically for making into fuel, as opposed to using wastes from existing processes) and a good bit of nuclear power and we can hopefully put a serious dent into our petroleum usage. Efficiency increases through technology and plain old reduction in energy wasteful lifestyle choices will eventually have to fill in the gaps.
There is not going to be one magic bullet that fills our energy needs, we are going to have to develop and use many different sources to fuel future societies and waste reclaimation is one step in the whole issue. We will have to develop and test many different methods to find the right solution for the right application.
GP was talking about the carbon cycle in general. and carbon does indeed make up one third of the atoms in carbon dioxide. Whenever talking about atmospheric carbon, it is generally accepted that you are primarilly talking about CO2. The plants take carbon dioxide from the air, which the cows eat and then most of the carbon is released back into the atmosphere through respiration in the form of carbon dioxide.
The major problem that GP missed is that it isn't the carbon dioxide (CO2) that cows are emitting that worries people, it's the methane (CH4) that cows emit in significant quantaties due to incomplete anaerobic digestion of their food. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and every mol of CO2 taken from the atmosphere and passed through cows in this form comes out as one mol of CH4 thus increasing the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere.
Although one problem with long dev times is not knowing what features are going to be in future hardware, it will be very difficult to optimize for that. True, you want people with older computers to be able to play the game, but you want it to look really good for people with that uber video card.
Yeah, I realize it's a cheesy analysis based on a graph off wikipedia. I think it's just more predictive than anything. Honestly, I wasn't trying to say that any first console would lose, I was more trying to comment that a failure of the first console released in a generation does not mean the whole generation is doomed to failure. I probably just got carried away. But you must admit, it's an entertaining (although very flawed, I know) concept if you are at all intrigued by the industry. And about as accurate as the metrics most pundits use.
The free market concept proposed by Adam Smith always assumes 1)no international trade and 2)no monopolies. If either of those are missing, free market isn't guaranteed to work. These days, it can probably be argued that at least one of these is violated for just about everything bought in the USA.
The reason that this legislation has a chance is the com companies finally did it... they tried to use their muscle and deep pockets to screw over other companies with muscle and deep pockets. Guess who the loser is going to be...
Taking a look at the past console transitions you see that, of consoles released in the U.S. for the last two transitions the early bird gets squashed. In fact, it appears that any console released significantly before the rest of the generation spelled death for the console.
Current Gen: Dreamcast released a full year before most competitors, over half a year before PS2. Status: Sega no longer making consoles
64 bit era: Atari Jaguar released over a year before ANY other console, a full TWO years before N64. Status: Atari has not made a console since then.
16/32 bit era: Genesis released insignificantly ahead of Turbografx 16. Status: Turbografx dead, Genesis did survive.
8 bit era: Colecovision released over a year before any competition. Status: Colecowhat?
The generation before that, we have the Atari 2600 which was released significantly (about a half year) before the other consoles, and had pretty much the longest stretch of any console (even beating out the Atari 5200, which I assume was an improvement somehow. This is the only example I see of this happening
My guess? The first console of a given generation is rushed out the door, not given that killer must have feature. Meanwhile the other console makers are working either in house or with game developers to have that killer app (game) avaiable on or near release. They are also making sure that the new console is indeed enough of an improvement over the previous gen to justify the price.
The 360? Plagued with design problems (the giant brick of a power supply that overheats if not put on the perfect surface being the best known) HUGE supply problems, many people who preordered STILL do not have their 360. Just read the comments of a supplier to see how bad it is. New Games? Well, the closest thing I can see is to an interesting non-sequel is GUN: yet another FPS, this time in the old west. And you get to ride a horse. There's Kameo, elements of power, and I see that is already for sale in the used bin at video game stores. King Kong? Yet another movie franchise tie-in. Full Auto, another combat racing game. Condemned: Gosh, it's dark in here! Then there's supposedly the killer app: Halo 2. You can get... umm... the t-shirt if you want. You actually want the video game? It's gonna be a bit. Toss in a couple sequels and a few online only games. So, about 4 or 5 original games, most of which are of pretty dubious quality. Sequels. Sequels. Did I say sequels? And a few games which are nowhere near release... I know I'm not going to throw down a minimum of $600.00 on it. (Yeah, places LIST it for less, but those places simply don't have it. And those prices don't include the accessories needed to actually make the whole thing fun.) Ohh... but it plays movies off my computer!!! For that price, I could just go get a Mac Mini. What's that you say? The Mini doesn't include a monitor? Neither does the 360.
So yes, I think the 360 is a waste of money. But if you look at previous generations every console released without competition on the first christmas sales season tanked, except for the Atari 2600. And that was over 25 years ago, the market is surely changed. I predict that Microsoft does have deep enough pockets to keep the 360 going for a little longer than previous early adopter consoles, but will not be able to compete long term with Sony and Nintendo. Sony because their pockets are just as deep as microsoft, and they actually have experience designing consumer electronics and producing entertainment media (although not necesarilly video games, but that's not necessary to become a succesful console if you can get others to do it for you.) And Nintendo will plug along exploiting the niche of people who actually like to play FUN games rather than watch some eye candy. Even though many of Nintendo's titles SEEM to be rehashes of old games, it's
Not true. One must know that beer is the mindkiller.
PepsiCo owns Frito-Lay, who makes Doritos. I assume this is what the GrandParent was talking about.
From the article, yes they do have a repeater. It allows emergency signals in. It also allows normal calls in between movies, etc. I assume it will also allow any outbound 911 calls during the movie, but that wasn't in the actual article. I have no idea how it differentiates between emergency signals and others, but that is something that would have to be worked out between the providers of the repeater and the communication companies/FCC(or equivalent in other countries)/etc.
I could potentially see this as INCREASING the availability of emergency contacts in certain situations, as there would be less interference from other signals, cell towers won't be as overloaded, etc.
I've seen cell phones interrupt plenty of devices: TVs reception getting messed up, buzzing on speakers, etc. With those things, a little interference is just an inconvienience. With Medical Equipment, airplane navigation/control equipment, etc the small chance of failure because of cell phone interference is offset by the fact that if the equpment fails, there is a good chance that someone will die.
But that pager will still be blocked if there is copper filled nanotube paint on the walls of the building. I think this will essentially turn the theatre into a Faraday cage (assuming the walls are grounded) although I'm not quite sure of the specifics of the material.
Retorts:
1. The web design for all user generated content is GOD AWFUL ugly.
2. unintuitive s a matter of opinion. It seems that enough kids are able to figure stuff out. Maybe having to learn how to make it look a little better is part of the attraction; it contributes to the social aspects because you have to ask friends for help.
3. And email accounts are filled with bogus email addresses pimping V1@gr@ and M0rgt@gz CH3@P!
4. Oh, it's slow because Myspace is a kludged together system which the operators never expected to have to scale as large as it did.
Now, if you REALLY want to bury myspace, a comment on just about every image that comes from places like blinkyou.com, or even worse people posting multiple videos in comments. Because I want to listen to the background music of the page, plus four different music videos. Then again, those two points go back to number 1: user generated content will always suck.
And what does Myspace have going for it? A lot of people have a couple real life friends who are on it, and it is indeed a convienient enough way to communicate with them. In essence, Myspace is popular because... it is popular.
I think they are using "date" as a euphamism for "have sex with."
I'll just tell you so you don't have to watch the end: it was the colonel, in the study, with a secret blend of herbs and spices.
The RIAA doesn't want you to be able to play music that's 50 years old. The copyright will have expired by then, allowing you to copy at will. No, we can't have that.