Sitting on a tank full of explosive fuel DOES sound pretty dangerous. So it's a good thing we don't drive cars with an explosive fuel tank now. Seriously-- i thought everybody on slashdot already knew that it was the *skin* of the hindenburg (essentially solid rocket fuel) that did most of the burning. Hydrogen rises, and dissipates quickly. Gasoline explodes, and has this nasty liquid peculiarity at normal car-operating temperatures that allows it to "flow" and "pool" and "coat" surfaces in the event of a leak, instead of just whooshing up into the heavens.
Distribution and production infrastructure will definitely be rough, and slow coming. Which is why all the automakers are working on gasoline-cracking catalysts. The first successful fuel cell car will have to have a gas tank AND a hydrogen tank. If you put gas in it, the catalyst will strip hydrogen and fill your hydrogen tank. So, the gas will still cost you whatever gas costs everybody else.
No difference for a long while, but...
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You are quite correct. The "Hydrogen Economy" buzzword-crap refers to the idea of using hydrogen as an energy distribution mechanism, like a battery. You "charge up" your hydrogen tank by using electricity to split H out of H2O, and the electricity has to come from somewhere. You are also correct that it will come from whatever's cheapest, and only the environmental nuts with rooftop PV panels will make hydrogen cleanly.
However-- that's not the point. At least not initially. The idea is to transition to an infrastructure that does not depend on any particular generation method. This opens the way for your car to be powered by anything-- not just gasoline. Once you can put hydrogen in, you're no longer tied to a single source. As more efficient generators and methods (nuclear, solar, excercise-club treadmills) come into play, your existing car will be able to immediately take advantage of them.
To sum up, you're right. It will still be gasoline and coal on the backend for a long while. But every time a more efficient nuke plant pops up, cars can instantly switch their power source by just sourcing hydrogen from somewhere else. Contrast that to our existing infrastructure, where to take advantage of a more efficient generation method or fuel source, you need a new car for each technology advance (say, hybrid vehicles or VW diesels) or non-gasoline-compatible fuel.
It's just a way to disconnect generation from distribution and usage, and it works a hell of a lot better than a stack of Li-ion batteries that weighs as much as your car.
You're a self-righteous prick for accusing me of lying without doing any fact verification yourself. And a pretentious one at that for using the term "dangerous meme."
Sorry to all for getting this far offtopic, but being falsely accused of trolldom by somebody who couldn't be bothered to do a couple of googles and pop up the faculty listing at purdue has really pissed me off.
It's not a troll. Seriously. It was Professor Lipschitz or Lipshitz or some variation on that-- no idea if he was tenured or not. It was my freshman year, and I *believe* it was first semester, making it Chem 124 (the honors chemistry for freshman engineers-- biggest mistake I ever made taking honors for a class unrelated to my core CmpE studies) in fall of 1995.
I know this is only going to make you doubt me further-- I'd give you his full name and a definite semester/year/class, but I'm on a 2-week business trip out of town and can't get to my old notes at home to check for you.
He had an interest in asteroids as well, and was always bringing us images and videos of that stuff, despite it being a chemistry class.
I *believe* it was this guy, as the face matches up roughly with my memory, but it's been 8 years and he looks to have lost some weight. Email him and ask him about the Hoover Dustette.
I had a chemistry professor (Prof. Lipschitz, not sure on spelling anymore) at Purdue during Freshman Engineering that would bring us a different article about a different idiot every friday about someone who had injured themselves masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. But not just any vacuum cleaner-- he managed to find a different incident every week involving the Hoover Dustette. And not just any articles, either-- they had to be from a reliable medical journal. The excuses were hilarious: "I was vacuuming in my bathrobe and fell on top of the vacuum and the robe came undone," etc...
We, of course, all thought it was just his twisted sense of humor. However, at the end of the year, the big lesson was "As engineers, you have to always take into account the unexpected uses of your product."
You see, other people were using other vacuum cleaners for self-gratification successfully, but the Hoover Dustette had an intake fan within only a few inches of the nozzle. Not a good design if you're gonna stick your bits in it.
Fitness for purpose aside, the point is that there are apparently a large number of people using their vacuum cleaners for exactly that.
Where is this SSH client you speak of? Oh, wait-- it's in the update they keep promising but haven't delivered for over a year, and have delayed repeatedly over the last two months. And games? Didn't they delete everybody's games (except for the Asteroids clone) on the CSK a while back because of a licensing issue? So the sidekick has ONE game. And NO SSH client. And no way to add 3rd party games.
But seriously-- it's a well-integrated device. Just don't expect the PDA apps to sync or to get a signal anywhere but outside. And the update really will have the ability to load 3rd-party apps and an SSH client, honest... whenever it gets here.
Everybody's different, and I don't hold your preferences against you. But I had to let my sidekick go, no matter how much I loved the well-integrated multitasking apps. It was missing two critical things I need in a pda/phone:
1. Reliable reception for calls. 2. The ability to sync my contacts and calendar.
If you don't need those, I HIGHLY recommend the sidekick. The integration is second to none, the form factor is very near perfect, and I will sorely miss it. But until they get my must-haves built into Sidekick 2.0, I'll deal with the less-well-integrated Treo so that I can have the better reception and sync.
If you want to get a cheaper Treo, try this path:
1. sign contract with sprint, get free Treo 300. 2. buy Treo 600 from handspring.com, use serial from Treo 300 to qualify for upgrade discount. ($400 total) 3. Sell Treo 300 on ebay.
Everybody needs narrower cars. Preferably 2/3 their current size, so a 2-lane road can be a 3-lane road, and a 2-lane highway can comfortably accomodate a center turn lane.
And in a few years, when our compression algorithms are better, we'll squeeze more into the same roads again! Higher speed limits? Closer tailing distances? Compress, compress, compress!
1. Cheapo film models with proprietary processing. 2. Cheapo film models with proprietary processing that results in one of those ridged plastic things rather than a stero pair. 3. Expensive custom dual-lens SLR film cameras. 4. Expensive single-lens 3D macro cameras. 5. VERY expensive stuff like you mentioned. 6. Do-it-yourself stereo videocams made from board-mount circuits. (This one looks like fun to me, but isn't what I'm after)
I think I may go with what the other poster said, and just glue two of them together. Now if only I could get them to share their focal/shutter info with eachother...
Sorry about my poor wording. It looks like I was trying to say our eyes don't work with two offset images now that i look at my post after the fact.
What I meant was that his idea (using multiple same-location pictures with different focus) was not the way our eyes worked. Bleagh. I realize you need two stereo pairs for people-- which is why I pointed out you'd need to generate a stereo pair from whatever depth map you got.
But you're right-- you're missing the slight bit of extra info you'd have of the sides of one of the objects. If you could do the image processing, you'd have a sort of bas-relief 3D model of the scene, but not quite enough texture map to go all the way around when you tried to render a pair of stereo images for human eyes. Very good point.
It's not how our eyes work-- which is the *easiest* way of duplicating 3D. This is a significant image-processing task, and it may need lenses with fairly short depth of field to provide the information.
Think of it this way-- knowing what's blurry where definitely conveys depth information. If you focus close, and something is in focus, then that object is close to you. The blurrier they get, the farther away they are. You know in 2D space on the image which parts of the blurred area correspond to which parts of the focused bits in the other picture-- and could then reliably assign a depth to them. After using the images like this to reconstruct a depth model, you end up with some sort of limited 3D model (your depth info from what's blurred where) + texturemap (all the in-focus parts from both photographs combined into one clearish image) that could be used to create a stereo pair for viewing.
Depending on a number of things, you might need more than two pictures. Definitely a lot of post-processing to create the real image from the pair, but I think it could be done.
Still easier to just use two cameras. Why aren't there any pocketable consumer 3D digicams? All you need is two lenses, as far apart as your eyes.
Does anybody make a reasonable consumer-level digicam that will take 3D shots without all the monkeying around with moving the camera and re-shooting the same subject?
I would LOVE to be able to snag some 3-megapixel or better 3D shots with someting along the lines of a wider 2-lens Canon S230.
Does anybody know of anything like this? Reasonable quality, easy to use, affordable 3D digital camera?
Just to clarify, the idea of a Hydrogen Economy *does not* use hydrogen as a fuel in the sense that we are used to. The idea is to use hydrogen as a storage and transport mechanism for energy.
Of COURSE it's not efficient to turn fossil fuels into hydrogen and then burn the hydrogen. There will be losses with every additional step. It is, however, possible to get your hydrogen from other sources. A couple of solar panels used to electrolyze water (you get the water back when you burn the hydrogen) are only one example. The idea is to start now by switching infrastructure over to handling hydrogen-- which is far cheaper and easier than a wholesale transition to somtehing else. Older cars can still get gas at a gas station while their newer counterparts will get gas and use a catalyst to convert it to hydrogen. As the newer cars become more common, stations will begin to carry pure hydrogen, which eventually will be made more efficiently via nuclear, solar, hamsters, etc...
Anyway-- as you said, think of hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. How efficient it is depends entirely on how efficient the process was that created it.
My microwave kills my wifi network dead. Anytime the thing is running, everybody drops off the network. My analog 2.4GHz phone is enough to drop anybody outside of the room the base station is in. Far higher power in the same signal band from something nearly everybody has in their kitchen.
WiFi is so tiny a signal it's not worth thinking about. If you're truly worried by RF emissions, make a list of your priorities! Decide which bands worry you, and THEN figure out which devices are emitting the most power in that range. I guarantee you'll be chucking your microwave, light dimmers, cordless phones, cell phones, baby monitors, TVs and the like before you ever get down to the wifi.
Maybe for the truly paranoid, somebody should start selling Faraday-cage clothing for kids.
It's weird how people respond differently to a $99 gamecube while immediately buying a $50 game than they do to buying a $150 gamecube+game pack-in.
Not to mention nobody seems to have noticed that even back in the $150 days, you could get a $90 refurb cube from a place like gamestop, and if you waited for a sale, you got a cube AND a game for $90. That's how I picked mine up!
I think it's not so much the price as it is the marketing campaign. It's like people just didn't know you could get $90 cubes a year ago, or didn't hear about the game bundles.
...it's the possibility that it may not be offered separately from the console. Which is *really* annoying. Kinda like only offering that last Zelda Master Quest disc if you had pre-ordered Wind Waker.
Lots of people would buy this game. Some will even buy a new console to get it. But those people are extremely rare-- it's baffling why nintendo does this. They could sell these Zelda re-release discs at full-price and spend their evenings rolling around in big roomfuls of money.
if there isn't some counterintuitive truth to this. Although the only "piratable" console I own is the Sega Dreamcast, I remember in my poorer years thinking about buying a PS1 just because you could get "free" games for it. Invariably, though, even the worst pirates end up buying a few games over the years, so even kids who buy consoles because of the vast piratable library and never buy any of their own will pick up a game or two for christmas, etc...
The very fact that the nintendo gamecube *isn't* cracked may actually be turning away potential customers.
I have a 'cube and i love it, but i can certainly see how people might make a decision like that.
Zing! Boy, you got me there. Never mind that the GPL and the whole concept of "copyleft" outlined in the GNU manifesto fail miserably when there is no copyright law for them to exist in.
From the manifesto itself:
How GNU Will Be Available GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary (18k characters) modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.
If everything's public domain, then there is no longer any copyright-license-based method of requiring people to release their changes and deriviative works back to the public. The best you could do would be some sort of contract agreement with every user.
It's JUST a LICENSE AGREEMENT. Same as agreeing to let Adobe have your firstborn on installation. Or negotiating a site license for windows. Without copyright, it couldn't exist.
I probably am a naive tool by your definition. But so what? I'm no linux shill. I gave up trying to use it as a desktop OS after I realized I was spending hours configuring dependencies for things i could do in under a minute in windows. It's nice on a server at work. Use the best tool for the job. (which at work means having the source is an excellent future-proof insurance policy) The politics annoy me.
Is that seeing this refutation a week or two back one time was apparently enough to add a new "text parsing" routine to my brain. I didn't have any problem reading this at all this time through, and didn't have to stop and think about which way the letters were scrambled. In addition to parsing jumbled text, I can apparently now read text where the inner contents of the words have been flipped left to right without thinking about it.
Thank you, slashdot! Maybe if we keep escalating this, we'll all be able to read high-order encryption without even blinking.
Around my house we don't call it "the Internet" anymore. We refer to it as "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."
Interesting - we are your neighbors and refer to your house as "the Dwelling of Eternal Dorkitude".
We live across the street from you both-- you're that kid who's always playing D&D and pretending he speaks middle english. If you see the Dorks, tell them I want my lawnmower back.
Don't be silly. Use of the GPL neither overthrows or supersedes traditional copyright law in any sense. In fact, as you point out, it only functions via traditional copyright.
I think "supplements" might have been a better choice than "supplants." All of the original intent of copyright law still applies to a GPL'd bit of stuff-- but there are additional rights and restrictions granted above and beyond that through the license itself. It is just one more type of license, as are the many and varied licenses produced and negotiated every day that are all regarded as "traditional" despite their differences.
Copyright law is still the same old traditional copyright law. All we have here is a license agreement.
Anyway-- I'm getting long-winded for no good reason. I intended mainly poke fun at a poorly-thought-out argument based on a pedantic reading of the definition by being even more pedantic. It is not, as the original poster suggested, a "a piece of legal trickery that stands in defiance of three hundred years of judicial and legislative tradition". It is just another license agreement.
Go home, silly troll. Please take notice of the synonym listed at the bottom of this Merriam-Webster definition of the word "supplant" on your way. (emphasis mine)
Main Entry: supplant Pronunciation: s&-'plant Function: transitive verb Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French supplanter, from Latin supplantare to overthrow by tripping up, from sub- + planta sole of the foot -- more at PLACE Date: 14th century 1 : to supersede (another) especially by force or treachery 2 a (1) obsolete : UPROOT (2) : to eradicate and supply a substitute for b : to take the place of and serve as a substitute for especially by reason of superior excellence or power synonym see REPLACE
That's a playstation issue. I'm not sure why Sony didn't do hardware antialiasing with the PS2-- even the Dreamcast had fullscreen AA. The gamecube has it, too-- but I don't have an XBox to verify on and i'm too lazy to look it up. I suspect it does, though, but it might get disabled at 720p.
You've got it backwards. The Farscape module was based on the (now cancelled) crew return vehicle for the ISS. The vehicle was dubbed the X-38 through its testing-- here's a quick link:
Slashdot Mirror
Sitting on a tank full of explosive fuel DOES sound pretty dangerous. So it's a good thing we don't drive cars with an explosive fuel tank now. Seriously-- i thought everybody on slashdot already knew that it was the *skin* of the hindenburg (essentially solid rocket fuel) that did most of the burning. Hydrogen rises, and dissipates quickly. Gasoline explodes, and has this nasty liquid peculiarity at normal car-operating temperatures that allows it to "flow" and "pool" and "coat" surfaces in the event of a leak, instead of just whooshing up into the heavens.
Distribution and production infrastructure will definitely be rough, and slow coming. Which is why all the automakers are working on gasoline-cracking catalysts. The first successful fuel cell car will have to have a gas tank AND a hydrogen tank. If you put gas in it, the catalyst will strip hydrogen and fill your hydrogen tank. So, the gas will still cost you whatever gas costs everybody else.
You are quite correct. The "Hydrogen Economy" buzzword-crap refers to the idea of using hydrogen as an energy distribution mechanism, like a battery. You "charge up" your hydrogen tank by using electricity to split H out of H2O, and the electricity has to come from somewhere. You are also correct that it will come from whatever's cheapest, and only the environmental nuts with rooftop PV panels will make hydrogen cleanly.
However-- that's not the point. At least not initially. The idea is to transition to an infrastructure that does not depend on any particular generation method. This opens the way for your car to be powered by anything-- not just gasoline. Once you can put hydrogen in, you're no longer tied to a single source. As more efficient generators and methods (nuclear, solar, excercise-club treadmills) come into play, your existing car will be able to immediately take advantage of them.
To sum up, you're right. It will still be gasoline and coal on the backend for a long while. But every time a more efficient nuke plant pops up, cars can instantly switch their power source by just sourcing hydrogen from somewhere else. Contrast that to our existing infrastructure, where to take advantage of a more efficient generation method or fuel source, you need a new car for each technology advance (say, hybrid vehicles or VW diesels) or non-gasoline-compatible fuel.
It's just a way to disconnect generation from distribution and usage, and it works a hell of a lot better than a stack of Li-ion batteries that weighs as much as your car.
Civility! Wow. Now I feel like a tool for the namecalling. Apology accepted, and you have my apologies for a lapse in the humor department as well.
You're a self-righteous prick for accusing me of lying without doing any fact verification yourself. And a pretentious one at that for using the term "dangerous meme."
Sorry to all for getting this far offtopic, but being falsely accused of trolldom by somebody who couldn't be bothered to do a couple of googles and pop up the faculty listing at purdue has really pissed me off.
It's not a troll. Seriously. It was Professor Lipschitz or Lipshitz or some variation on that-- no idea if he was tenured or not. It was my freshman year, and I *believe* it was first semester, making it Chem 124 (the honors chemistry for freshman engineers-- biggest mistake I ever made taking honors for a class unrelated to my core CmpE studies) in fall of 1995.
I know this is only going to make you doubt me further-- I'd give you his full name and a definite semester/year/class, but I'm on a 2-week business trip out of town and can't get to my old notes at home to check for you.
He had an interest in asteroids as well, and was always bringing us images and videos of that stuff, despite it being a chemistry class.
I *believe* it was this guy, as the face matches up roughly with my memory, but it's been 8 years and he looks to have lost some weight. Email him and ask him about the Hoover Dustette.
Even better, here is a link indicating at least a few of these incidents as having appeared in the British Medical Journal.
I couldn't make this shit up.
I had a chemistry professor (Prof. Lipschitz, not sure on spelling anymore) at Purdue during Freshman Engineering that would bring us a different article about a different idiot every friday about someone who had injured themselves masturbating with a vacuum cleaner. But not just any vacuum cleaner-- he managed to find a different incident every week involving the Hoover Dustette. And not just any articles, either-- they had to be from a reliable medical journal. The excuses were hilarious: "I was vacuuming in my bathrobe and fell on top of the vacuum and the robe came undone," etc...
We, of course, all thought it was just his twisted sense of humor. However, at the end of the year, the big lesson was "As engineers, you have to always take into account the unexpected uses of your product."
You see, other people were using other vacuum cleaners for self-gratification successfully, but the Hoover Dustette had an intake fan within only a few inches of the nozzle. Not a good design if you're gonna stick your bits in it.
Fitness for purpose aside, the point is that there are apparently a large number of people using their vacuum cleaners for exactly that.
Where is this SSH client you speak of? Oh, wait-- it's in the update they keep promising but haven't delivered for over a year, and have delayed repeatedly over the last two months. And games? Didn't they delete everybody's games (except for the Asteroids clone) on the CSK a while back because of a licensing issue? So the sidekick has ONE game. And NO SSH client. And no way to add 3rd party games.
But seriously-- it's a well-integrated device. Just don't expect the PDA apps to sync or to get a signal anywhere but outside. And the update really will have the ability to load 3rd-party apps and an SSH client, honest... whenever it gets here.
I finally gave up waiting and got a Treo 600.
Everybody's different, and I don't hold your preferences against you. But I had to let my sidekick go, no matter how much I loved the well-integrated multitasking apps. It was missing two critical things I need in a pda/phone:
1. Reliable reception for calls.
2. The ability to sync my contacts and calendar.
If you don't need those, I HIGHLY recommend the sidekick. The integration is second to none, the form factor is very near perfect, and I will sorely miss it. But until they get my must-haves built into Sidekick 2.0, I'll deal with the less-well-integrated Treo so that I can have the better reception and sync.
If you want to get a cheaper Treo, try this path:
1. sign contract with sprint, get free Treo 300.
2. buy Treo 600 from handspring.com, use serial from Treo 300 to qualify for upgrade discount. ($400 total)
3. Sell Treo 300 on ebay.
Everybody needs narrower cars. Preferably 2/3 their current size, so a 2-lane road can be a 3-lane road, and a 2-lane highway can comfortably accomodate a center turn lane.
And in a few years, when our compression algorithms are better, we'll squeeze more into the same roads again! Higher speed limits? Closer tailing distances? Compress, compress, compress!
Tried-- the best i've come up with are:
1. Cheapo film models with proprietary processing.
2. Cheapo film models with proprietary processing that results in one of those ridged plastic things rather than a stero pair.
3. Expensive custom dual-lens SLR film cameras.
4. Expensive single-lens 3D macro cameras.
5. VERY expensive stuff like you mentioned.
6. Do-it-yourself stereo videocams made from board-mount circuits. (This one looks like fun to me, but isn't what I'm after)
I think I may go with what the other poster said, and just glue two of them together. Now if only I could get them to share their focal/shutter info with eachother...
Sorry about my poor wording. It looks like I was trying to say our eyes don't work with two offset images now that i look at my post after the fact.
What I meant was that his idea (using multiple same-location pictures with different focus) was not the way our eyes worked. Bleagh. I realize you need two stereo pairs for people-- which is why I pointed out you'd need to generate a stereo pair from whatever depth map you got.
But you're right-- you're missing the slight bit of extra info you'd have of the sides of one of the objects. If you could do the image processing, you'd have a sort of bas-relief 3D model of the scene, but not quite enough texture map to go all the way around when you tried to render a pair of stereo images for human eyes. Very good point.
It's not how our eyes work-- which is the *easiest* way of duplicating 3D. This is a significant image-processing task, and it may need lenses with fairly short depth of field to provide the information.
Think of it this way-- knowing what's blurry where definitely conveys depth information. If you focus close, and something is in focus, then that object is close to you. The blurrier they get, the farther away they are. You know in 2D space on the image which parts of the blurred area correspond to which parts of the focused bits in the other picture-- and could then reliably assign a depth to them. After using the images like this to reconstruct a depth model, you end up with some sort of limited 3D model (your depth info from what's blurred where) + texturemap (all the in-focus parts from both photographs combined into one clearish image) that could be used to create a stereo pair for viewing.
Depending on a number of things, you might need more than two pictures. Definitely a lot of post-processing to create the real image from the pair, but I think it could be done.
Still easier to just use two cameras. Why aren't there any pocketable consumer 3D digicams? All you need is two lenses, as far apart as your eyes.
Does anybody make a reasonable consumer-level digicam that will take 3D shots without all the monkeying around with moving the camera and re-shooting the same subject?
I would LOVE to be able to snag some 3-megapixel or better 3D shots with someting along the lines of a wider 2-lens Canon S230.
Does anybody know of anything like this? Reasonable quality, easy to use, affordable 3D digital camera?
Just to clarify, the idea of a Hydrogen Economy *does not* use hydrogen as a fuel in the sense that we are used to. The idea is to use hydrogen as a storage and transport mechanism for energy.
Of COURSE it's not efficient to turn fossil fuels into hydrogen and then burn the hydrogen. There will be losses with every additional step. It is, however, possible to get your hydrogen from other sources. A couple of solar panels used to electrolyze water (you get the water back when you burn the hydrogen) are only one example. The idea is to start now by switching infrastructure over to handling hydrogen-- which is far cheaper and easier than a wholesale transition to somtehing else. Older cars can still get gas at a gas station while their newer counterparts will get gas and use a catalyst to convert it to hydrogen. As the newer cars become more common, stations will begin to carry pure hydrogen, which eventually will be made more efficiently via nuclear, solar, hamsters, etc...
Anyway-- as you said, think of hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. How efficient it is depends entirely on how efficient the process was that created it.
My microwave kills my wifi network dead. Anytime the thing is running, everybody drops off the network. My analog 2.4GHz phone is enough to drop anybody outside of the room the base station is in. Far higher power in the same signal band from something nearly everybody has in their kitchen.
WiFi is so tiny a signal it's not worth thinking about. If you're truly worried by RF emissions, make a list of your priorities! Decide which bands worry you, and THEN figure out which devices are emitting the most power in that range. I guarantee you'll be chucking your microwave, light dimmers, cordless phones, cell phones, baby monitors, TVs and the like before you ever get down to the wifi.
Maybe for the truly paranoid, somebody should start selling Faraday-cage clothing for kids.
It's weird how people respond differently to a $99 gamecube while immediately buying a $50 game than they do to buying a $150 gamecube+game pack-in.
Not to mention nobody seems to have noticed that even back in the $150 days, you could get a $90 refurb cube from a place like gamestop, and if you waited for a sale, you got a cube AND a game for $90. That's how I picked mine up!
I think it's not so much the price as it is the marketing campaign. It's like people just didn't know you could get $90 cubes a year ago, or didn't hear about the game bundles.
...it's the possibility that it may not be offered separately from the console. Which is *really* annoying. Kinda like only offering that last Zelda Master Quest disc if you had pre-ordered Wind Waker.
Lots of people would buy this game. Some will even buy a new console to get it. But those people are extremely rare-- it's baffling why nintendo does this. They could sell these Zelda re-release discs at full-price and spend their evenings rolling around in big roomfuls of money.
if there isn't some counterintuitive truth to this. Although the only "piratable" console I own is the Sega Dreamcast, I remember in my poorer years thinking about buying a PS1 just because you could get "free" games for it. Invariably, though, even the worst pirates end up buying a few games over the years, so even kids who buy consoles because of the vast piratable library and never buy any of their own will pick up a game or two for christmas, etc...
The very fact that the nintendo gamecube *isn't* cracked may actually be turning away potential customers.
I have a 'cube and i love it, but i can certainly see how people might make a decision like that.
Zing! Boy, you got me there. Never mind that the GPL and the whole concept of "copyleft" outlined in the GNU manifesto fail miserably when there is no copyright law for them to exist in.
From the manifesto itself:
How GNU Will Be Available
GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary (18k characters) modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.
If everything's public domain, then there is no longer any copyright-license-based method of requiring people to release their changes and deriviative works back to the public. The best you could do would be some sort of contract agreement with every user.
It's JUST a LICENSE AGREEMENT. Same as agreeing to let Adobe have your firstborn on installation. Or negotiating a site license for windows. Without copyright, it couldn't exist.
I probably am a naive tool by your definition. But so what? I'm no linux shill. I gave up trying to use it as a desktop OS after I realized I was spending hours configuring dependencies for things i could do in under a minute in windows. It's nice on a server at work. Use the best tool for the job. (which at work means having the source is an excellent future-proof insurance policy) The politics annoy me.
Is that seeing this refutation a week or two back one time was apparently enough to add a new "text parsing" routine to my brain. I didn't have any problem reading this at all this time through, and didn't have to stop and think about which way the letters were scrambled. In addition to parsing jumbled text, I can apparently now read text where the inner contents of the words have been flipped left to right without thinking about it.
Thank you, slashdot! Maybe if we keep escalating this, we'll all be able to read high-order encryption without even blinking.
Around my house we don't call it "the Internet" anymore. We refer to it as "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."
Interesting - we are your neighbors and refer to your house as "the Dwelling of Eternal Dorkitude".
We live across the street from you both-- you're that kid who's always playing D&D and pretending he speaks middle english. If you see the Dorks, tell them I want my lawnmower back.
Don't be silly. Use of the GPL neither overthrows or supersedes traditional copyright law in any sense. In fact, as you point out, it only functions via traditional copyright.
I think "supplements" might have been a better choice than "supplants." All of the original intent of copyright law still applies to a GPL'd bit of stuff-- but there are additional rights and restrictions granted above and beyond that through the license itself. It is just one more type of license, as are the many and varied licenses produced and negotiated every day that are all regarded as "traditional" despite their differences.
Copyright law is still the same old traditional copyright law. All we have here is a license agreement.
Anyway-- I'm getting long-winded for no good reason. I intended mainly poke fun at a poorly-thought-out argument based on a pedantic reading of the definition by being even more pedantic. It is not, as the original poster suggested, a "a piece of legal trickery that stands in defiance of three hundred years of judicial and legislative tradition". It is just another license agreement.
Go home, silly troll. Please take notice of the synonym listed at the bottom of this Merriam-Webster definition of the word "supplant" on your way. (emphasis mine)
Main Entry: supplant
Pronunciation: s&-'plant
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French supplanter, from Latin supplantare to overthrow by tripping up, from sub- + planta sole of the foot -- more at PLACE
Date: 14th century
1 : to supersede (another) especially by force or treachery
2 a (1) obsolete : UPROOT (2) : to eradicate and supply a substitute for b : to take the place of and serve as a substitute for especially by reason of superior excellence or power
synonym see REPLACE
That's a playstation issue. I'm not sure why Sony didn't do hardware antialiasing with the PS2-- even the Dreamcast had fullscreen AA. The gamecube has it, too-- but I don't have an XBox to verify on and i'm too lazy to look it up. I suspect it does, though, but it might get disabled at 720p.
You've got it backwards. The Farscape module was based on the (now cancelled) crew return vehicle for the ISS. The vehicle was dubbed the X-38 through its testing-- here's a quick link:
X-38 Stuff