I'd propose "Cerberus" as the name for their forked version of Firefox that has XML3D rendering capability. Cerberus is is three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. After all, Hades has lots of fire and the connection between foxes and dogs is tangible (they are both canines, AFAIK).
The name of the Debian version of Firefox is Iceweasel. Based on that, I'm assuming that the Mozilla Corporation is going to exercise their trademark and kindly request that these researchers think of a better name for their fork of Firefox that incorporates XML3D.
If successful, it wouldn't surprise me to see the Mozilla folks include this feature in a future release of Firefox.
That wouldn't stop scalpers. Idiots would still buy them, especially if they claimed that these tickets didn't need ID.
It's a long-term solution. Eventually people would learn not to buy from scalpers under any circumstance. The stupid assholes who pay money to scalpers without getting to see their show would be a collateral damage. As somebody who doesn't shop for goods-and-services from criminals, I'd welcome the opportunity to see these people who do get fleeced.
NASA will work within the guidelines of the Congress approved budget appropriations it receives. Right now the President recommends increasing the NASA budget significantly during the next five years, while terminating immediate plans to return to the Moon. The current Presidential recommendations would strengthen our ability to move mass into LEO by commercializing it. Congress is under no obligation to go along with the President's recommendation, and if a majority will sign a bill that keeps Constellation around through FY2001, then the president will get the ball back in his court to decide if he wants to approve that.
TL;DR - The proposal to cancel Constellation is currently a mere recommendation.
If you are donating something to charity, why would you want (or be allowed) to pass that cost onto the rest of the taxpayers?
If I give a charity a hammer that I purchased yesterday from the hardware store for $10, the charity has gained a net benefit of $10, and I have lost $10 from my annual income.
The reasoning is that the $10 hammer that I gave to the charity provides a 100% benefit to the charity, whereas the comparable amount of taxes would provide a 15-30% benefit to the taxpayers. In economic terms, as long as the charity can demonstrate it's performing a service that benefits the taxpayers, giving me the choice of where the money is spent is worth it to the government to justify the 70-85% added benefit to the taxpayers.
===
I would love to find justification to write-off not-for-income development on work that provides a benefit to taxpayers, though I fear that so many people would abuse this that the governments tax revenue would drop significantly until Congress and the President authorized higher income taxes on our normal income. In other words, it makes little sense to rob Peter to pay Paul. Or stated another way... how you spend your free-time is a personal decision and the government is not in the business of rewarding you for being a Good Samaritan.
look at how they botched the Canada/USA hockey coverage yesterday to show "ice dancing" or whatever instead
The hockey game was on MSNBC. This was a rare time when flipping back and forth from NBC to the sister channel during commercials worked well. Usually the only secondary option is CNBC which stands for Curling NBC, I think.
When he saved up enough points he had a list of things he could cash them in for, like eating out at a restaurant of his choice, seeing a movie, or getting some Lego. It did seem to help.
No armor upgrades or attack bonuses? And you didn't offer to teach him new spells or more powerful versions of the spells he already knew?
They don't have an Apollo/Cold War budget, but Obama's executive plan published last Monday calls for increasing the NASA budget to build-up a Commercially-viable space-worthy fleet that can cheaply take humans safely into LEO. This is (IMO) better than setting a short-term Moon goal.
The current Moon-plan is moth-balled... but NASA has been helping to fund multiple competing companies with their own test rocket launches since last year. This is a good alternative to the dream of getting back to the Moon by 2020.
Boeing competes with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for government work. They're separate and independent companies who bid on the same multi-billion dollar contracts based on the theory that competition drives quality up and costs down. For intents and purposes, these companies are required to follow strict government rules to win contracts... so they can be labeled as quasi-government companies.
As far I know, the Chinese have one national defense company and the implication of this article is that spies infiltrate American (and likely Russian) offices and keep costs down by stealing the original research.
One academic criticism of the Chinese culture that I've heard from an American professor is that they value getting the final result more than the path used to arrive at the final result. Original research is just as good as copying from a neighbor. Follow the path of least resistance. It's a completely logical way of thinking unless you consider cheating to be unethical. The professor who shared this with me said that his research had found it very difficult to educate native Chinese students because there is this natural inclination to "cheat" more-so than from other cultures which value individual achievement.
Which way is right? It's hard to say. Powerful arguments can be made for both the "competition" model and the "collaboration" model.
Amazon makes buttloads of money selling inventory that it won't pay its suppliers for until sometime next month. When you buy something from Amazon, you can bet they got invoiced for it about 2 or 3 weeks ago and they they won't actually pay the invoice for another week or two. During those two weeks, they earn interest on your money.:)
I hold out hope that some thieves are motivated by being dealt a bad hand in the poker game of life. Sure, many thieves steal to feed addictions to drugs and others steal to accumulate vast riches. However, I have an unscientific gut-feeling that society pushes some people to crime as a quasi-justified means of survival by letting them fall head-first into the depravity of poverty.
Then again... these sorts of thieves are motivated by both a lack of money and a lack of "friends" willing to help them out. Not knowing how to ask for help should itself be classified a crime.
Good roofs and fresh paint on a sharp looking lawn without human effort would be a shocker. But what does that do to an economy. We don't even know if humans should be involved in an economy or whether we best let robots and computers serve us all things that we need.
It's probably too late for this comment to get modded high enough for many people to see it, but I'm in the process of polishing/publishing a speculative fiction novel that attacks this topic. Preview version is available here.
I think the basic social motivation will evolve to (a) robots do boring work, (b) humans do creative work. Certainly, a robot driven economy will be capable of supporting a centralized leadership, but as long as the general population is given enough freedom to basically do whatever they want within a loose social construct it's hard to imagine many people would complain. Though, naturally a big part of a lot of speculative fiction is "Post Scarcity Economy" (which implies that enough resources are available to support everybody [regardless of whether they do any work or not] so that nobody is left wanting).
Two concepts that are truly impossible to anticipate the outcomes of... ruling classes are predisposed to nepotism and cronyism and these things invariably lead to corruption. The other thing is all centralized governments support censorship to a certain degree and it's impossible to draw a line where censorship can be enforced without removing people's freedom. It's not clear how robotics can be used to address these two concerns.
I believe NASA keeps Independent Verification and Validation for critical system in-house. Building a rocket is an easy task compared to certifying that it's safe for manned space flight.
The fact that Open Formats need to fight so hard to be accepted in the marketplace while Proprietary Formats (with their binary blobs and patent issues) enjoy market dominance is the part that I was saying is backward.
The concept is morally bankrupt and philosophically backwards. I understand perfectly well that Microsoft is making the correct business-decision to avoid supporting open formats.
Don't send us Microsoft Word documents. My TA and I don't have Word, we're probably not on a computer that does when we grade your homework, and we can't be arsed to go find a decoder for whatever the newest obscure Microsoft format is.
The sad truth is that you can read Word files in OpenOffice as long as you aren't using the version of Word from 2007, but you can't open OpenOffice files in Word unless you install some extra plug-in.
This seems backwards to me that Open Source Software supports proprietary formats better than Proprietary Software support open formats. Que sera sera.
I don't support the RIAA, but I also don't support anti-RIAA propaganda that I don't understand. The summary was not as clear about why this trial represents the evil motives of the RIAA. I simply asked for clarification of this fact from somebody who might be more knowledgeable.
Don't jaywalk kids because the RIAA will come get you.
The RIAA announced that they were terminating their practices of filing hundreds of civil lawsuits so your jaywalking children should be okay.
Is this article the evolved version of the RIAA's anti-consumer tactics? It's not clear from the summary, but the way I read this is that the RIAA is evil because mimimium song prices are being raised from $0.65 to $0.70. Can't this increase (approximately 7%) be explained by typical inflation and justifiably be expected every two years? I'm not sure why this story is so evil.
I find it extremely questionable how so many people have this fundamentalist belief that companies should devote everything chasing numbers on paper, which are extremely artificial and arbitrary BTW (notice how this guy laments about them "destroying" 11 billion in stock value), instead of encouraging people to be creative and simply make great products.
I'm going to take issue with the claim that businesses should "be creative and make great products".
In my view, globalization has pushed the manufacturing industry away from "great products" and into the realm of "good enough for a couple years" products. Cars aren't what they used to be. Most furniture these days is made from plastic mixtures and particle board. Food is genetically mutated. Even books are being served up as disposable digital bits instead of printed pages.
All these changes comes in the name of being able to provide a broader spectrum of the population with goods and services that they haven't traditionally been able to enjoy, and it can be attributed to lowering quality to cut costs (i.e. by using cheaper (more abundantly available) materials).
The business upside to the decrease in quality, of course, is increased market share because a greater percent of people can afford these products.
To return to the point... businesses don't exist to make "great products". They exist to make "products people want to buy". Since we're such a materialistic society, we want *everything* and that means we're forced to sacrifice quality because the average Joe simply can't afford both expensive furniture and an expensive entertainment system. The compromise is that Joe Sixpack buys relatively cheap versions of the products he wants that fit within his budget. In the process, cost cutting manufacturers are put on a pedestal. Ergo, the rise of Ikea, Walmart, Target, Kia, and Hyundai.
Activision Blizzard now the ones that are mostly after money
Activision has always been about money. One thing that's surprised me is that they bought the Guitar Hero franchise IP (from Red Octane, or something) and then let Harmonix get right back in the saddle to produce a (in my opinion) technically superior franchise called Rock Band. But Guitar Hero makes more money because it's got better marketing and not as good support for DLC.
Blizzard has always been about quality games. I'd be very surprised if Activision will try to mess up the money-making machine that turns up hits like Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft. That was definitely a great acquisition.
But text-to-speech violates the rights of publishing companies who sell audiobooks for grossly inflated prices to people who like to "listen" to books while they are stuck in traffic every morning on their daily commute. It's therapeutic. Enabling text-to-speech would cause the publishers to sue.
the "patience, effort and time" needed to play the same damn levels over and over again (because I kept dying at the same key spot!) began to wear very thin very quickly.
I recall the running jump onto the single block in world 8-1 of Super Mario Bros being a particular nuisance.
And saving 2 sets of P-Wings for level 8 of Super Mario Bros 3 so I could fly over the stupid gunships.
But those endings... "Congrats, you saved the Princess" aren't that fulfilling. You just know the Princess is going to get herself captured again. The fulfillment is the journey to get from the beginning to the end. If games do successfully provide that, then let then write a crappy ending and sell DLC. I play to enjoy the game, not the ending.
Seeking relative anonymity through a Slashdot username is one thing... seeking it through a job post is another. As far as I know, there are no internet forums where most usernames strongly reflect real identities.
a longer term view eventually yeilds better returns
It's possible that this move is a long-term view and that it's actually an awesome business model. What I think EA is saying is that they have the best sports games and other retailers are so far behind that there is no clear competitive threat.
To that effect, they're right because the audio clip slogan that plays at the beginning "EA Sports. It's in the game." is so ingrained in my head that I can't remember the last time I played a non-EA sports game.
By bringing in a massive cash injection from 2010 sales they are poised to spend lots of money to make the 2012 titles that much better. The only part that I'd wish they changed was charging $60 for a new game. If they tacked on a "turn in your old game and get 50% off" model (as a gamer, I own Tiger Wood 2009 for Wii, but can't justify getting TW 2010 even though it's significantly improved by Motion Plus technology) they'd simultaneously damage aftermarket sales and prop up new sales - but there's no evidence they're willing to pursue this strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd propose "Cerberus" as the name for their forked version of Firefox that has XML3D rendering capability. Cerberus is is three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. After all, Hades has lots of fire and the connection between foxes and dogs is tangible (they are both canines, AFAIK).
The name of the Debian version of Firefox is Iceweasel. Based on that, I'm assuming that the Mozilla Corporation is going to exercise their trademark and kindly request that these researchers think of a better name for their fork of Firefox that incorporates XML3D.
If successful, it wouldn't surprise me to see the Mozilla folks include this feature in a future release of Firefox.
That wouldn't stop scalpers. Idiots would still buy them, especially if they claimed that these tickets didn't need ID.
It's a long-term solution. Eventually people would learn not to buy from scalpers under any circumstance. The stupid assholes who pay money to scalpers without getting to see their show would be a collateral damage. As somebody who doesn't shop for goods-and-services from criminals, I'd welcome the opportunity to see these people who do get fleeced.
NASA will work within the guidelines of the Congress approved budget appropriations it receives. Right now the President recommends increasing the NASA budget significantly during the next five years, while terminating immediate plans to return to the Moon. The current Presidential recommendations would strengthen our ability to move mass into LEO by commercializing it. Congress is under no obligation to go along with the President's recommendation, and if a majority will sign a bill that keeps Constellation around through FY2001, then the president will get the ball back in his court to decide if he wants to approve that.
TL;DR - The proposal to cancel Constellation is currently a mere recommendation.
If you are donating something to charity, why would you want (or be allowed) to pass that cost onto the rest of the taxpayers?
If I give a charity a hammer that I purchased yesterday from the hardware store for $10, the charity has gained a net benefit of $10, and I have lost $10 from my annual income.
The reasoning is that the $10 hammer that I gave to the charity provides a 100% benefit to the charity, whereas the comparable amount of taxes would provide a 15-30% benefit to the taxpayers. In economic terms, as long as the charity can demonstrate it's performing a service that benefits the taxpayers, giving me the choice of where the money is spent is worth it to the government to justify the 70-85% added benefit to the taxpayers.
===
I would love to find justification to write-off not-for-income development on work that provides a benefit to taxpayers, though I fear that so many people would abuse this that the governments tax revenue would drop significantly until Congress and the President authorized higher income taxes on our normal income. In other words, it makes little sense to rob Peter to pay Paul. Or stated another way... how you spend your free-time is a personal decision and the government is not in the business of rewarding you for being a Good Samaritan.
look at how they botched the Canada/USA hockey coverage yesterday to show "ice dancing" or whatever instead
The hockey game was on MSNBC. This was a rare time when flipping back and forth from NBC to the sister channel during commercials worked well. Usually the only secondary option is CNBC which stands for Curling NBC, I think.
When he saved up enough points he had a list of things he could cash them in for, like eating out at a restaurant of his choice, seeing a movie, or getting some Lego. It did seem to help.
No armor upgrades or attack bonuses? And you didn't offer to teach him new spells or more powerful versions of the spells he already knew?
Sure as heck doesn't sound like an RPG to me!
They don't have much of a budget anymore.
They don't have an Apollo/Cold War budget, but Obama's executive plan published last Monday calls for increasing the NASA budget to build-up a Commercially-viable space-worthy fleet that can cheaply take humans safely into LEO. This is (IMO) better than setting a short-term Moon goal.
The current Moon-plan is moth-balled... but NASA has been helping to fund multiple competing companies with their own test rocket launches since last year. This is a good alternative to the dream of getting back to the Moon by 2020.
Boeing competes with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for government work. They're separate and independent companies who bid on the same multi-billion dollar contracts based on the theory that competition drives quality up and costs down. For intents and purposes, these companies are required to follow strict government rules to win contracts... so they can be labeled as quasi-government companies.
As far I know, the Chinese have one national defense company and the implication of this article is that spies infiltrate American (and likely Russian) offices and keep costs down by stealing the original research.
One academic criticism of the Chinese culture that I've heard from an American professor is that they value getting the final result more than the path used to arrive at the final result. Original research is just as good as copying from a neighbor. Follow the path of least resistance. It's a completely logical way of thinking unless you consider cheating to be unethical. The professor who shared this with me said that his research had found it very difficult to educate native Chinese students because there is this natural inclination to "cheat" more-so than from other cultures which value individual achievement.
Which way is right? It's hard to say. Powerful arguments can be made for both the "competition" model and the "collaboration" model.
how Amazon became Amazon in the first place.
Amazon makes buttloads of money selling inventory that it won't pay its suppliers for until sometime next month. When you buy something from Amazon, you can bet they got invoiced for it about 2 or 3 weeks ago and they they won't actually pay the invoice for another week or two. During those two weeks, they earn interest on your money. :)
Thieves are responsible for theft.
I hold out hope that some thieves are motivated by being dealt a bad hand in the poker game of life. Sure, many thieves steal to feed addictions to drugs and others steal to accumulate vast riches. However, I have an unscientific gut-feeling that society pushes some people to crime as a quasi-justified means of survival by letting them fall head-first into the depravity of poverty.
Then again... these sorts of thieves are motivated by both a lack of money and a lack of "friends" willing to help them out. Not knowing how to ask for help should itself be classified a crime.
Does this emphasize the fact that Microsoft has no idea about how to properly evaluate the value of any particular software product?
Good roofs and fresh paint on a sharp looking lawn without human effort would be a shocker. But what does that do to an economy. We don't even know if humans should be involved in an economy or whether we best let robots and computers serve us all things that we need.
It's probably too late for this comment to get modded high enough for many people to see it, but I'm in the process of polishing/publishing a speculative fiction novel that attacks this topic. Preview version is available here.
I think the basic social motivation will evolve to (a) robots do boring work, (b) humans do creative work. Certainly, a robot driven economy will be capable of supporting a centralized leadership, but as long as the general population is given enough freedom to basically do whatever they want within a loose social construct it's hard to imagine many people would complain. Though, naturally a big part of a lot of speculative fiction is "Post Scarcity Economy" (which implies that enough resources are available to support everybody [regardless of whether they do any work or not] so that nobody is left wanting).
Two concepts that are truly impossible to anticipate the outcomes of... ruling classes are predisposed to nepotism and cronyism and these things invariably lead to corruption. The other thing is all centralized governments support censorship to a certain degree and it's impossible to draw a line where censorship can be enforced without removing people's freedom. It's not clear how robotics can be used to address these two concerns.
I believe NASA keeps Independent Verification and Validation for critical system in-house. Building a rocket is an easy task compared to certifying that it's safe for manned space flight.
The fact that Open Formats need to fight so hard to be accepted in the marketplace while Proprietary Formats (with their binary blobs and patent issues) enjoy market dominance is the part that I was saying is backward.
The concept is morally bankrupt and philosophically backwards. I understand perfectly well that Microsoft is making the correct business-decision to avoid supporting open formats.
Don't send us Microsoft Word documents. My TA and I don't have Word, we're probably not on a computer that does when we grade your homework, and we can't be arsed to go find a decoder for whatever the newest obscure Microsoft format is.
The sad truth is that you can read Word files in OpenOffice as long as you aren't using the version of Word from 2007, but you can't open OpenOffice files in Word unless you install some extra plug-in.
This seems backwards to me that Open Source Software supports proprietary formats better than Proprietary Software support open formats. Que sera sera.
I don't support the RIAA, but I also don't support anti-RIAA propaganda that I don't understand. The summary was not as clear about why this trial represents the evil motives of the RIAA. I simply asked for clarification of this fact from somebody who might be more knowledgeable.
Don't jaywalk kids because the RIAA will come get you.
The RIAA announced that they were terminating their practices of filing hundreds of civil lawsuits so your jaywalking children should be okay.
Is this article the evolved version of the RIAA's anti-consumer tactics? It's not clear from the summary, but the way I read this is that the RIAA is evil because mimimium song prices are being raised from $0.65 to $0.70. Can't this increase (approximately 7%) be explained by typical inflation and justifiably be expected every two years? I'm not sure why this story is so evil.
I find it extremely questionable how so many people have this fundamentalist belief that companies should devote everything chasing numbers on paper, which are extremely artificial and arbitrary BTW (notice how this guy laments about them "destroying" 11 billion in stock value), instead of encouraging people to be creative and simply make great products.
I'm going to take issue with the claim that businesses should "be creative and make great products".
In my view, globalization has pushed the manufacturing industry away from "great products" and into the realm of "good enough for a couple years" products. Cars aren't what they used to be. Most furniture these days is made from plastic mixtures and particle board. Food is genetically mutated. Even books are being served up as disposable digital bits instead of printed pages.
All these changes comes in the name of being able to provide a broader spectrum of the population with goods and services that they haven't traditionally been able to enjoy, and it can be attributed to lowering quality to cut costs (i.e. by using cheaper (more abundantly available) materials).
The business upside to the decrease in quality, of course, is increased market share because a greater percent of people can afford these products.
To return to the point... businesses don't exist to make "great products". They exist to make "products people want to buy". Since we're such a materialistic society, we want *everything* and that means we're forced to sacrifice quality because the average Joe simply can't afford both expensive furniture and an expensive entertainment system. The compromise is that Joe Sixpack buys relatively cheap versions of the products he wants that fit within his budget. In the process, cost cutting manufacturers are put on a pedestal. Ergo, the rise of Ikea, Walmart, Target, Kia, and Hyundai.
Activision Blizzard now the ones that are mostly after money
Activision has always been about money. One thing that's surprised me is that they bought the Guitar Hero franchise IP (from Red Octane, or something) and then let Harmonix get right back in the saddle to produce a (in my opinion) technically superior franchise called Rock Band. But Guitar Hero makes more money because it's got better marketing and not as good support for DLC.
Blizzard has always been about quality games. I'd be very surprised if Activision will try to mess up the money-making machine that turns up hits like Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft. That was definitely a great acquisition.
But text-to-speech violates the rights of publishing companies who sell audiobooks for grossly inflated prices to people who like to "listen" to books while they are stuck in traffic every morning on their daily commute. It's therapeutic. Enabling text-to-speech would cause the publishers to sue.
It's a viscous cycle.
the "patience, effort and time" needed to play the same damn levels over and over again (because I kept dying at the same key spot!) began to wear very thin very quickly.
I recall the running jump onto the single block in world 8-1 of Super Mario Bros being a particular nuisance.
And saving 2 sets of P-Wings for level 8 of Super Mario Bros 3 so I could fly over the stupid gunships.
But those endings... "Congrats, you saved the Princess" aren't that fulfilling. You just know the Princess is going to get herself captured again. The fulfillment is the journey to get from the beginning to the end. If games do successfully provide that, then let then write a crappy ending and sell DLC. I play to enjoy the game, not the ending.
Seeking relative anonymity through a Slashdot username is one thing... seeking it through a job post is another. As far as I know, there are no internet forums where most usernames strongly reflect real identities.
Doesn't a post from Ryan North or any of the other comics referenced under every XKCD strip hold any weight for you?
a longer term view eventually yeilds better returns
It's possible that this move is a long-term view and that it's actually an awesome business model. What I think EA is saying is that they have the best sports games and other retailers are so far behind that there is no clear competitive threat.
To that effect, they're right because the audio clip slogan that plays at the beginning "EA Sports. It's in the game." is so ingrained in my head that I can't remember the last time I played a non-EA sports game.
By bringing in a massive cash injection from 2010 sales they are poised to spend lots of money to make the 2012 titles that much better. The only part that I'd wish they changed was charging $60 for a new game. If they tacked on a "turn in your old game and get 50% off" model (as a gamer, I own Tiger Wood 2009 for Wii, but can't justify getting TW 2010 even though it's significantly improved by Motion Plus technology) they'd simultaneously damage aftermarket sales and prop up new sales - but there's no evidence they're willing to pursue this strategy.