They did not measure the power consumption of the screen, only the CPU, memory, GPU, GMCH, disk, NIC and "uncore", whatever that last one is. Only time I've heard the term was in reference to clock multipliers on certain Intel processors.
LCD screens use constant power - you'd use as much power displaying all black as all white.
Actually, if you read TFA, on most (75%) of the their own tests, they're beaten by Firefox. One of the bits is particularly embarrassing - IE uses the most power of any browser when rendering about:blank. It seemed a bit unscientific (only four sites, one of which couldn't be run by Opera), but it's a blog, not the New England Journal of HTML Rendering.
Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.
And the initial business decision to install GE BWRs was made shortly after losing a world war. And coincidentally one of the biggest corporations on the winning side was selling..... BWRs.
Uh, since when was "1971" "shortly after a world war"? That's an entire generation after the war ended. Japan had launched their own satellite by that point - they definitely weren't the defeated and subjugated nation you apparently envision them as.
The rest of your argument pretty much explicitly defeats itself - you yourself said there's no significant safety difference between a BWR and PWR. At the time, though, there were no proven alternatives - liquid metal cooled reactors were still being tested for civilian use, gas-cooled reactors were unpopular (and arguably even less safe), and molten-salt reactors were still experimental. Those were all the options, and they chose what was logical for that time. Were it my decision, I wouldn't authorize a BWR today, but I would have approved one back in 1970.
Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.
The only real problems are the lack of strong oversight (as you mentioned) and the fact that the reactors were very close to the end of their designed lifespan anyways, and were due to be shutdown within a year (a month, for one of them) due to their age.
The solution to the latter is simple: start shutting down old reactors and building newer, safer ones. Solving the problem of the government and corporations being too close, especially in Japan (seriously, while it's bad in the US, it's even worse in Japan), is a bit less trivial.
Actually, the main improvement in the quality of chess programs is that they do, actually, discard moves that are blatantly bad, and can sometimes recognize when they've found a particularly good move, and thus stop searching for better ones. So, really, they do "think".
Also, chess masters DO have a database. It's called "the hundreds of games they've played and the thousands of games they've studied". Sure, a computer's is slightly larger, but a chessmaster can identify what made which move important.
Deep Blue vs Gary Kasparov was 15 years ago. The state of the art has increased considerably. Plus, computing power has increased even more - Deep Blue was 11 gigaflops, which can be matched by a high-end gaming desktop.
World-class players usually have a Elo rating around 2000-2500. Rybka (first one I checked) on a quad-core machine is usually rated about 3000 or so. Given that info, I would say it's pretty much plausible that a computer can beat any human player.
Chernobyl is relatively safe to visit for a day. Which means that it would be relatively safe (I'd have no problem with it, at least) to remain living by the reactor even while it's still leaking, provided they stop the leak sometime this decade - which means there's unlikely to be a significant long-term radiation problem. Fish and crops might need to be inspected more, since biomagnification can make "safe" levels dangerous, but that'll probably be the only big problem.
Come to think of it, Japan probably has the most experience at de-radiating (or whatever the term is) large areas. After all, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are major cities to this day, and I haven't heard of significant radiation remaining there. I assume there must have been some decontamination work done during the postwar reconstruction, although I can't find any info on it.
I looked at one of the maps. The highest value seen (1 microSievert/hr) means that you're barely getting more radiation over a year than you'd get spending just one hour at Chernobyl today. Since the article, at least, links to the XKCD radiation chart showing as much, I consider this actually a reassuring article - while radiation is leaking, it's not a significant amount. Besides some extra inspections on food from that area, it looks like everything is going to be essentially OK.
In other words, they're allies, but allies of convenience only, and we should be wary that they'll stab us in the back as soon as it's in their interests.
Which, logically, means that we should be planning to stab their back first. Might I suggest hiding something nasty (for them, at least) in the GPL v4?
There's been a known bug for all of Firefox 3 where all Live Bookmarks were refreshed on start. As this was done in the foreground process, this meant that if you have too many live bookmarks, it can take a while for Firefox to actually start up. I have over 120 live bookmarks, and Firefox 3 takes about five minutes to be usable. Which was entirely responsible for me switching my main browsing to Chrome, keeping Firefox only for checking my RSS feeds once a day.
Is this bug finally fixed, or is it STILL an issue?
China is a corporate state in all but name. The border between businesses and the government has blurred to the point of merging. At this point, they will be content with merely dominating the world's markets, but that could easily change to desiring domination of the world's population (most likely to use as a workforce when enough of China rises above the poverty line that they do not wish to do low-end manual labor).
I don't think that's quite it. After all, the Linux kernel team is pretty well-managed and well-directed.
If anything, I think it's because there's no good way to collaborate on art. SVN and other source-control is too heavily-focused on text - you can't do a diff on a texture, for instance. So you end up with only one or two art passes, instead of the repeated cycles you need. This lends itself to cloning a game rather well, but not for creating a highly original game.
That's because open-source (for whatever reason) is best suited to programs and hardware - science-type things. While I will not deny that code can be artfully crafted, most code is utilitarian and spartan. Games, like music, are art, which is rarely created well by the conventional open-source system.
I have not yet determined the cause of this divide, but it certainly exists. Once I figure out the reason for it, though, devising a way to make open-source art work should be simple.
No, this is still a major improvement. Less oil usage is good. Less food waste in landfills is good. Less dependency on foreign oil is good, at least for the US's economy. Hell, just because of that, you get minor reductions in income, and thus political power, to a variety of less-than-wholesome Middle-East countries. Major? No. A step forward? Hells yes.
Besides, in case you hadn't noticed, plastic is recyclable. I've got an empty bottle of Mt. Dew sitting beside me - it's going into the recycle bin literally as soon as I finish typing this. No landfill usage at all.
On the contrary, it's a brilliant move. They essentially just named Google as a co-defendant (not really, but the effect is similar), which means now Google is providing lawyers and cash towards their side, if only to preemptively defend themselves. Google vs MAFIAA is a much fairer fight than IsoHunt vs MAFIAA.
I've heard of all of those (film history class in college), but I've only seen Potemkin myself. It was pretty good, but it wasn't a modern film. You could remake Kane shot-for-shot, or even just colorize it and remaster the audio, and release it in theaters, and it wouldn't feel out-of-place. Earlier films definitely had quality, but they don't feel like modern films.
Regardless, we're talking about critics here. They consider Kane to be the first movie worthy of the lofty title "ART", and use that as the threshold games must cross to even think about being ART. The fact that I would call Pong a better work of art than some post-post-post-modern "art" is irrelevant to them.
The thing that bugs me is that everyone is comparing games to contemporary art. But books, plays, and music have been developed and refined for centuries, millenia even. Games have been around for, if you stretch things, fourty years.
If you're going to make comparisons, make them to the early works. Compare games to the early classics - make comparisons to Homer, Euripedes, Aristophanes. There's some surprising parallels between the Illiad and Super Mario Bros., come to think of it.
If you must make comparisons to films, make comparison to early films. It was fifty years after the invention of film that we got our first real "masterpiece", Citizen Kane. By that logic, we won't have a game masterpiece for another decade.
I never said it did. The report on it actually said as much; they were more surprised than angry that people were pirating when the product was literally as close to free as possible.
Their thoughts, however, are that if we make pirating more difficult the rates will drop.
That is what they are thinking. However, they don't realize that it's an impossible task - you cannot make piracy itself more of a hassle, only more of a risk. DRM only succeeds in making the initial act of piracy difficult, not piracy itself. And, while they try to make piracy difficult by piling on the DRM, they aren't realizing that they're only making legitimate use difficult as well. As for their attempts to legislate a profit, eventually, some legislator or judge (or armed revolutionary, if need be) will realize that literally half the country is now considered a "criminal", and the unjust laws start crumbling.
I think there's more to it than that. Take the case of the "Humble Indie Bundles" - you could set your own price, down to a single cent, and much of it (buyer-determined) went to charity. And yet piracy of those games was not only prevalent, but actually increased during these sales.
This tells me that there is a significant mental barrier between "$0.01" and "$0.00". I do not believe it is the financial cost itself, but the difficulties of buying something online compared to pirating. The hassle of Paypal or credit cards or anything else is, IMO, the primary barrier. What is needed is a fast, zero-pain, minimal-set-up system for buying goods online. When buying the software is as easy as pirating it, piracy will drop.
This is probably why Steam has been successful. Once you've set up purchasing with your account, buying a game is simple - most of it consists of clicking "next" a few times. It's not perfect - it tends to assume you want to buy multiple games at once, making buying a single game more difficult than it should be - and of course there's the DRM issue, but it seems to be doing this better than most.
I occasionally do freelance work, making small game models/levels for random people online. Several times, rather than accept payment via Paypal or anything, I've simply told the client "find a game on my Steam wishlist that's about $10, that's enough payment for me". That's how difficult handling actual money online is - trading a service for a product is actually easier.
Yes, pricing is part of the problem. I haven't bought a game at release-day price since the last big Zelda game came out. I don't mind waiting a few months (or even years) for the price to drop from $50 or $60 to $20. I also haven't bought music anywhere in forever - 8 songs that came out in 1986 are not worth $15, even if it is a magnum opus of heavy metal.
So, really, the pricing is only half the issue. First is the divide between "what the product is worth" and "what the product is priced at", second is the divide between "how easy buying it is" and "how easy pirating it is". Solve those two, and piracy will drop significantly. Not to nothing, of course, but it will drop to reasonable levels.
You don't design for the largest possible, you design for the largest likely. An average nuke plant has a designed lifespan of ~50 years; designing it to withstand a thousand-year event is overkill.
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Actually, if you read TFA, on most (75%) of the their own tests, they're beaten by Firefox. One of the bits is particularly embarrassing - IE uses the most power of any browser when rendering about:blank. It seemed a bit unscientific (only four sites, one of which couldn't be run by Opera), but it's a blog, not the New England Journal of HTML Rendering.
My point still holds that they could not have chosen better technology at that time.
Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.
And the initial business decision to install GE BWRs was made shortly after losing a world war. And coincidentally one of the biggest corporations on the winning side was selling ..... BWRs.
Uh, since when was "1971" "shortly after a world war"? That's an entire generation after the war ended. Japan had launched their own satellite by that point - they definitely weren't the defeated and subjugated nation you apparently envision them as.
The rest of your argument pretty much explicitly defeats itself - you yourself said there's no significant safety difference between a BWR and PWR. At the time, though, there were no proven alternatives - liquid metal cooled reactors were still being tested for civilian use, gas-cooled reactors were unpopular (and arguably even less safe), and molten-salt reactors were still experimental. Those were all the options, and they chose what was logical for that time. Were it my decision, I wouldn't authorize a BWR today, but I would have approved one back in 1970.
Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.
The only real problems are the lack of strong oversight (as you mentioned) and the fact that the reactors were very close to the end of their designed lifespan anyways, and were due to be shutdown within a year (a month, for one of them) due to their age.
The solution to the latter is simple: start shutting down old reactors and building newer, safer ones. Solving the problem of the government and corporations being too close, especially in Japan (seriously, while it's bad in the US, it's even worse in Japan), is a bit less trivial.
Actually, the main improvement in the quality of chess programs is that they do, actually, discard moves that are blatantly bad, and can sometimes recognize when they've found a particularly good move, and thus stop searching for better ones. So, really, they do "think".
Also, chess masters DO have a database. It's called "the hundreds of games they've played and the thousands of games they've studied". Sure, a computer's is slightly larger, but a chessmaster can identify what made which move important.
Deep Blue vs Gary Kasparov was 15 years ago. The state of the art has increased considerably. Plus, computing power has increased even more - Deep Blue was 11 gigaflops, which can be matched by a high-end gaming desktop.
World-class players usually have a Elo rating around 2000-2500. Rybka (first one I checked) on a quad-core machine is usually rated about 3000 or so. Given that info, I would say it's pretty much plausible that a computer can beat any human player.
Chernobyl is relatively safe to visit for a day. Which means that it would be relatively safe (I'd have no problem with it, at least) to remain living by the reactor even while it's still leaking, provided they stop the leak sometime this decade - which means there's unlikely to be a significant long-term radiation problem. Fish and crops might need to be inspected more, since biomagnification can make "safe" levels dangerous, but that'll probably be the only big problem.
Come to think of it, Japan probably has the most experience at de-radiating (or whatever the term is) large areas. After all, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are major cities to this day, and I haven't heard of significant radiation remaining there. I assume there must have been some decontamination work done during the postwar reconstruction, although I can't find any info on it.
I looked at one of the maps. The highest value seen (1 microSievert/hr) means that you're barely getting more radiation over a year than you'd get spending just one hour at Chernobyl today. Since the article, at least, links to the XKCD radiation chart showing as much, I consider this actually a reassuring article - while radiation is leaking, it's not a significant amount. Besides some extra inspections on food from that area, it looks like everything is going to be essentially OK.
In other words, they're allies, but allies of convenience only, and we should be wary that they'll stab us in the back as soon as it's in their interests.
Which, logically, means that we should be planning to stab their back first. Might I suggest hiding something nasty (for them, at least) in the GPL v4?
There's been a known bug for all of Firefox 3 where all Live Bookmarks were refreshed on start. As this was done in the foreground process, this meant that if you have too many live bookmarks, it can take a while for Firefox to actually start up. I have over 120 live bookmarks, and Firefox 3 takes about five minutes to be usable. Which was entirely responsible for me switching my main browsing to Chrome, keeping Firefox only for checking my RSS feeds once a day.
Is this bug finally fixed, or is it STILL an issue?
China is a corporate state in all but name. The border between businesses and the government has blurred to the point of merging. At this point, they will be content with merely dominating the world's markets, but that could easily change to desiring domination of the world's population (most likely to use as a workforce when enough of China rises above the poverty line that they do not wish to do low-end manual labor).
I don't think that's quite it. After all, the Linux kernel team is pretty well-managed and well-directed.
If anything, I think it's because there's no good way to collaborate on art. SVN and other source-control is too heavily-focused on text - you can't do a diff on a texture, for instance. So you end up with only one or two art passes, instead of the repeated cycles you need. This lends itself to cloning a game rather well, but not for creating a highly original game.
That's because open-source (for whatever reason) is best suited to programs and hardware - science-type things. While I will not deny that code can be artfully crafted, most code is utilitarian and spartan. Games, like music, are art, which is rarely created well by the conventional open-source system.
I have not yet determined the cause of this divide, but it certainly exists. Once I figure out the reason for it, though, devising a way to make open-source art work should be simple.
No, this is still a major improvement. Less oil usage is good. Less food waste in landfills is good. Less dependency on foreign oil is good, at least for the US's economy. Hell, just because of that, you get minor reductions in income, and thus political power, to a variety of less-than-wholesome Middle-East countries. Major? No. A step forward? Hells yes.
Besides, in case you hadn't noticed, plastic is recyclable. I've got an empty bottle of Mt. Dew sitting beside me - it's going into the recycle bin literally as soon as I finish typing this. No landfill usage at all.
"MPAA Sues Netflix, Claims to Own Patent on "Monetization of Serialized Entertainment Video via Broadcast Medium""
Of course, that doesn't mean the argument isn't childish. It just means that your nephew likely has a career in law ahead of him.
On the contrary, it's a brilliant move. They essentially just named Google as a co-defendant (not really, but the effect is similar), which means now Google is providing lawyers and cash towards their side, if only to preemptively defend themselves. Google vs MAFIAA is a much fairer fight than IsoHunt vs MAFIAA.
I've heard of all of those (film history class in college), but I've only seen Potemkin myself. It was pretty good, but it wasn't a modern film. You could remake Kane shot-for-shot, or even just colorize it and remaster the audio, and release it in theaters, and it wouldn't feel out-of-place. Earlier films definitely had quality, but they don't feel like modern films.
Regardless, we're talking about critics here. They consider Kane to be the first movie worthy of the lofty title "ART", and use that as the threshold games must cross to even think about being ART. The fact that I would call Pong a better work of art than some post-post-post-modern "art" is irrelevant to them.
The thing that bugs me is that everyone is comparing games to contemporary art. But books, plays, and music have been developed and refined for centuries, millenia even. Games have been around for, if you stretch things, fourty years.
If you're going to make comparisons, make them to the early works. Compare games to the early classics - make comparisons to Homer, Euripedes, Aristophanes. There's some surprising parallels between the Illiad and Super Mario Bros., come to think of it.
If you must make comparisons to films, make comparison to early films. It was fifty years after the invention of film that we got our first real "masterpiece", Citizen Kane. By that logic, we won't have a game masterpiece for another decade.
I never said it did. The report on it actually said as much; they were more surprised than angry that people were pirating when the product was literally as close to free as possible.
Their thoughts, however, are that if we make pirating more difficult the rates will drop.
That is what they are thinking. However, they don't realize that it's an impossible task - you cannot make piracy itself more of a hassle, only more of a risk. DRM only succeeds in making the initial act of piracy difficult, not piracy itself. And, while they try to make piracy difficult by piling on the DRM, they aren't realizing that they're only making legitimate use difficult as well. As for their attempts to legislate a profit, eventually, some legislator or judge (or armed revolutionary, if need be) will realize that literally half the country is now considered a "criminal", and the unjust laws start crumbling.
I think there's more to it than that. Take the case of the "Humble Indie Bundles" - you could set your own price, down to a single cent, and much of it (buyer-determined) went to charity. And yet piracy of those games was not only prevalent, but actually increased during these sales.
This tells me that there is a significant mental barrier between "$0.01" and "$0.00". I do not believe it is the financial cost itself, but the difficulties of buying something online compared to pirating. The hassle of Paypal or credit cards or anything else is, IMO, the primary barrier. What is needed is a fast, zero-pain, minimal-set-up system for buying goods online. When buying the software is as easy as pirating it, piracy will drop.
This is probably why Steam has been successful. Once you've set up purchasing with your account, buying a game is simple - most of it consists of clicking "next" a few times. It's not perfect - it tends to assume you want to buy multiple games at once, making buying a single game more difficult than it should be - and of course there's the DRM issue, but it seems to be doing this better than most.
I occasionally do freelance work, making small game models/levels for random people online. Several times, rather than accept payment via Paypal or anything, I've simply told the client "find a game on my Steam wishlist that's about $10, that's enough payment for me". That's how difficult handling actual money online is - trading a service for a product is actually easier.
Yes, pricing is part of the problem. I haven't bought a game at release-day price since the last big Zelda game came out. I don't mind waiting a few months (or even years) for the price to drop from $50 or $60 to $20. I also haven't bought music anywhere in forever - 8 songs that came out in 1986 are not worth $15, even if it is a magnum opus of heavy metal.
So, really, the pricing is only half the issue. First is the divide between "what the product is worth" and "what the product is priced at", second is the divide between "how easy buying it is" and "how easy pirating it is". Solve those two, and piracy will drop significantly. Not to nothing, of course, but it will drop to reasonable levels.
You don't design for the largest possible, you design for the largest likely. An average nuke plant has a designed lifespan of ~50 years; designing it to withstand a thousand-year event is overkill.