So their shareholders don't hammer them for letting XBox 360 have 2 holiday seasons without "competition" from Sony. While it's true that the PS3 was largely a paper launch, perception is everything.
The PS3 will bomb though; the gaming press hates it, gamers are "meh" about it, and the best game for it (Resistance: Fall of Man) is basically seen as a shitty knock off of Gears of War.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Sony be a takeover target here soon if their PS3/BluRay strategy backfires; they're investing too much of the company's future in a gaming system that the gaming public is largely unenthusiastic about (PS3 prices on eBay have already come down close to retail; most of the "mad rush" of people on launch day were looking to score one to resell on eBay.)
No, IMO it's more of a "these guys business could some day interfere with mine, so I'll see if I can ruin their business model before it gets to that point." If he's investigated the idea (and c'mon, video sharing online was the holy grail for 3 or 4 years, I'm sure he has) then he probably knows the areas where YouTube can get nailed. It just wasn't worth doing until Google and their deep pockets showed up.
This is Mark Cuban we're talking about. He bought a basketball team just so he could hang out with pro athletes. The whole situation with him and the Mavs reminds me of a movie where the biggest fan somehow ends up becoming the owner of the team. His blog rants are the same kind of rants you'd hear from your buddies while watching the game on TV (refs are against us, conspiracy theory, blah blah blah.) What I like about the guy is that the NBA fines him $100,000+ every time he says something stupid and he keeps doing it. That's putting your money where your mouth is.
Of course, this is actually his area of business specialty (media and the internet.) He has a ton of business reasons to ensure Google/YouTube don't succeed. He probably had the same idea 3 or 4 years ago but scrapped it over liability concerns, and he's making sure nobody else gets to make money off it either.
CS is not math. You can get by in CS having just taken algebra and geometry.
CS does involve a lot of number theory, which falls under philosophy departments at most universities (number theory is not math; it also analyzes non-mathematical properties of numbers.) I highly encourage anyone interested in CS to take a lot of philosophical logic classes; many of the techniques for analyzing sets/possible worlds are highly applicable to data structures in CS.
Spend X amount of money to translate the game, and if guaranteed revenue (not necessarily profit) Y is not greater than X... well the game doesn't come out.
I'm guessing Y was greater than X.
People on the internet always think their favorite (game/movie/band/whatever) is extremely popular because they see a lot of people talking about it, when in actuality, few people outside their specific forum/community are interested. Just because you've seen a thousand people talking about how they want Mother 3 does not automatically mean more than a thousand actually want the game.
If they want to do that, they need to offer a "virtualization license" that allows you to have as many virtual windows hosts on a single physical machine as you want. The big sticking point with Windows in virtualization is that you need a license for every vhost. With anywhere between 5 and 30 virtual machines on each physical machine, it makes sense to use Linux whenever possible.
You can track the dead people though. There is a way to detect that kind of fraud and it's not going away. The problem with this is not "OMG the republicans are haxxoring votes!" The problem is "OMG we don't know if the republicans are haxxoring votes or not, but something fishy is going on here."
Voting machines "malfunctioning" is not a partisan issue. I'm sure both sides will exploit it equally. Dead people voting is at least possible to detect if you have the death certificates. Election fraud that looks like a malfunction is bad, because in that case all you have to do is cause a malfunction in an election machine and you can invalidate all of the votes it has recorded so far.
Shenanigans will always exist on both sides, and I believe they are both minimal and equally distributed enough not to sway a national election (local elections are another story, but those are usually more personal.)
If you have anyone to be critical of, it should be the media. And not just with politics, they're looking to create a scandal with *everyone*. "News" in this country is created to entertain, not inform. They're just looking for a juicy tag line that will get you to sit through 2 minutes of commercials.
Midterm elections can work for or against the incumbent. If congress has not been doing its job (like recently) people will actually show up to "vote those bums out of office." Also, there have been some rather nasty scandals in the incumbent party, which can discourage voters from showing up to vote for a candidate they don't believe in, even if they really don't like the other guy.
In a strong conservative state like Utah, however, where gay marriage, abortion and family values issues rule the day, someone running on a tech platform is a long shot. Don't worry though, Ashdown won't be the last.
Maybe because datacenters and control rooms are utilitarian structures that all generally look alike? A control center is generally a row or 2 of PCs with a projector at the front displaying a nagios/EMC monitoring page purely to look busy (all real alerts are sent to pagers or blackberrys.) If you don't plan on showing it off to the public, I'm guessing it looks a lot like any other office (cubes and meeting rooms.)
A datacenter is almost always a large room full of black cabinets. Yawn, nothing to see there, the only variations are whether they use overhead cabling racks or raised floors. They can be impressive when inside of them, if only for the deafening sound of thousands of rack servers.
Anyone who gets pissed off about this stuff needs to reevaluate their priorities. The items are a nice little "thank you" from Blizzard to the people who play the CCG, not a deck of cards that you buy and get items. If you play the CCG, go for it, just don't expect an item card. I wouldn't buy the cards just in hopes of getting an item though.
I actually don't think it matters to bin Laden who is in power, but the ability to disrupt the American elections would be a good show of al Qaeda's power. Iranian intelligence might have more of an interest in the outcome, however.
A group like Al Qaeda desires to spread confusion and terror through the American people in order to change American policies abroad (their true goal, an Islamist superpower caliphate, is unattainable with the US projecting its power into the middle east.) Once you get past "OMG these guys are evil!" you start to look at them like any other subversive element in society.
Hell, they don't even actually have to rig the election. All they have to do is *claim* that they have and have enough Americans believe them that it creates unrest. If there's no paper trail, and you can't prove that they didn't, that is a bad thing.
You know? That's really funny considering Stallman's crusade to call Linux "GNU/Linux." He even refused to give a speech when I was in college to the university LUG because we called ourselves a "Linux User Group" and not a "GNU/Linux User Group" (I shit you not.)
The biggest threat of election fraud does not come from our own political parties. That form of fraud would be unacceptable, but it would be punishable if the person were caught.
No, the biggest threat comes from terrorists (they have the command and communication infrastructure in place, not to mention motive) or foreign intelligence agencies (a country like Iran would probably rather have a militant administration in power to keep the middle east destablized to keep oil prices high.)
It is a low-risk operation, requiring no weapons, only computer hackers (and yes, terrorist organizations have already proven themselves competent at targeted system attacks.) These kind of people probably already know the information presented, and it is the job of the media to expose negligent government practices to the people. The government has shown themselves totally unwilling to address the problem, so it's going to take someone fixing an election to get the point across. I'm just hoping it's the Republicans and not Iranian intelligence.
It's like playing WoW or any other game: most of us gave up on being the "top" as soon as we realized how many 25 year old jobless basement dwellers there were out there.
It is; but if you combine them on the same die with a large shared cache and the on-chip memory controller... you can see where I'm going with this. Think of it as a separate CPU, just printed on the same silicon wafer. That means you only need 1 fan to cool it and you can lose a lot of heat producing power management circuitry on the video card.
Obviously this is not going to be ideal for high end gaming rigs; but it will improve the quality of integrated video chipsets on lower end and even mid range PCs.
You don't want to be a game journalist. Breaking in is even worse because you're expected to do the same things as a regular game journalist, except not get paid for it. There is very little journalism involved; you're just a glorified PR puppet whose job is to get quotes on the back of a game box to drive traffic to your site.
Beyond that, it will totally ruin your experience of playing video games. It's not about playing the game, but evaluating it, capturing screenshots and videos, and even playing really awful games to completion. You will play many, many games you never had any interest in and that bore you to tears. The choice games (read: any game you've ever heard of) go to the senior guys who have proven they can write good PR fluff.
Oh, and you have a deadline to meet, and if you don't give their games a favorable review, the PR people for that game company will mysteriously stop returning your e-mails and phone calls, so you can forget about getting eval copies of their games for the next 6 months.
Suddenly, playing a video game starts to seem like, well, work. And you'll not want to do what you do for 7 hours a day every day once you get off work.
So, someone who has to be told "Be good, or God will send you to Hell" is really a better person than one who hasn't been told that? If you're just being good out of fear, does that make you a good person or a fearful one? If you're being good in desire of praise, are you a good person or just someone who likes his ego stroked?
Atheism in one form or another has always existed. It's not a symptom of the 'modern age,' simply the fact that we do not have Genesis taught as The One Truth from birth (and this has not been the case since the Renaissance.)
And don't blame your/others character flaws on anyone; it is your fault. It's also your problem, and your responsibility to fix if you don't like it. Nobody is a victim who chooses their actions; there is always another choice. You may not like the consequences of that choice, but you have it nonetheless.
That's exactly what happened - it was flagged inappropriate by viewers (something that happens with any video anyone objects to in any way,) YouTube staff reviewed it and determined it was not inappropriate, and removed the flag. The system worked, that is all.
In this day of anonymous blogs and partisan shillery, you need a disclaimer as to the political leanings of your news sources. Especially with a politically charged story like this.
Spamhaus is not based in the USA, and has no offices in the USA, so therefore the court has no jurisdiction to sieze anything from them. It's even dubious that the judge has the right to sieze the domain name, as it's registered with another non-US company. ICANN is just saying "Don't bother slapping us with a subpoena because we can't do it anyway."
This has much further reaching implications than it may seem at first. First Spamhaus, then online gambling sites that are perfectly legal in other countries. After that will come torrent sites, crack sites or anyone who does anything that might be illegal in the USA but legal elsewhere.
It's more complicated than that. I was very careful in my wording of "perfect atomic copy."
Having two physically identical things does not mean that they are the same thing. In fact, merely identifying them as two identical things explicitly states that they are not the same thing. Having tried, it's actually very hard to come up with a criteria for identity between any two things other than abstract concepts (identity for sets, for example, is easy to prove. The question of "what makes up a human being" has not been satisfactorily answered; we are obviously our physical nature but a lot of people believe there is more to it than that, and coming up with an authoritative list of that "more" is going to cause a lot of argument.)
Determining a criteria of identity between two potentially identical things is the key. Your criteria of identity may take into account only physical structure, where mine may consider a space-time location as well, in which case two clones standing side-by-side cannot be the same, even if they are 100% physically identical. One can also make the argument that via the semi-random processes in the human body, they cease being physically identical the moment the copy is made. If they then have independent experiences, would they continue being the same?
"Philosophical question" usually means that people have thought about the issue, written papers about it, several books, and then determined that the problem has no easy answer (and no answer that will probably be considered "right" by any large majority.) 20th century metaphysics has been somewhat obsessed with this problem, so there is quite a volume of material on it.
Oh yeah, the above post assumes a physicalist point of view; in other words, consciousness is a purely physical object.. we still haven't tackled the mind/body problem effectively so the jury is still out on that one. That's also the best-case scenario for a teleportation device that works in this manner; if consciousness is something more than physical, then physically reconstructing the body would not be sufficient for teleportation anyway.
There are certain ethical questions that go along with teleportation of humans as well.
If you create a perfect atomic copy of a living being and then destroy the original, is the copy really the same as the original? What if you just never destroyed the original? Is destroying the original tantamount to murder?
I think questions like this will mean that even when we have the technology to do this with large objects (even living objects,) it will never be used on humans. The ethical risks, and our inability to determine an answer to the philosophical questions (if the copy has the exact same memories, when you ask it if it is a copy, it will say no) mean that we're going to have to find some method of instant transportation that does not involve deconstructing and reconstructing things on a molecular level.
Slashdot Mirror
So their shareholders don't hammer them for letting XBox 360 have 2 holiday seasons without "competition" from Sony. While it's true that the PS3 was largely a paper launch, perception is everything.
The PS3 will bomb though; the gaming press hates it, gamers are "meh" about it, and the best game for it (Resistance: Fall of Man) is basically seen as a shitty knock off of Gears of War.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Sony be a takeover target here soon if their PS3/BluRay strategy backfires; they're investing too much of the company's future in a gaming system that the gaming public is largely unenthusiastic about (PS3 prices on eBay have already come down close to retail; most of the "mad rush" of people on launch day were looking to score one to resell on eBay.)
No, IMO it's more of a "these guys business could some day interfere with mine, so I'll see if I can ruin their business model before it gets to that point." If he's investigated the idea (and c'mon, video sharing online was the holy grail for 3 or 4 years, I'm sure he has) then he probably knows the areas where YouTube can get nailed. It just wasn't worth doing until Google and their deep pockets showed up.
This is Mark Cuban we're talking about. He bought a basketball team just so he could hang out with pro athletes. The whole situation with him and the Mavs reminds me of a movie where the biggest fan somehow ends up becoming the owner of the team. His blog rants are the same kind of rants you'd hear from your buddies while watching the game on TV (refs are against us, conspiracy theory, blah blah blah.) What I like about the guy is that the NBA fines him $100,000+ every time he says something stupid and he keeps doing it. That's putting your money where your mouth is.
Of course, this is actually his area of business specialty (media and the internet.) He has a ton of business reasons to ensure Google/YouTube don't succeed. He probably had the same idea 3 or 4 years ago but scrapped it over liability concerns, and he's making sure nobody else gets to make money off it either.
CS is not math. You can get by in CS having just taken algebra and geometry.
CS does involve a lot of number theory, which falls under philosophy departments at most universities (number theory is not math; it also analyzes non-mathematical properties of numbers.) I highly encourage anyone interested in CS to take a lot of philosophical logic classes; many of the techniques for analyzing sets/possible worlds are highly applicable to data structures in CS.
Because there is an equation...
Spend X amount of money to translate the game, and if guaranteed revenue (not necessarily profit) Y is not greater than X... well the game doesn't come out.
I'm guessing Y was greater than X.
People on the internet always think their favorite (game/movie/band/whatever) is extremely popular because they see a lot of people talking about it, when in actuality, few people outside their specific forum/community are interested. Just because you've seen a thousand people talking about how they want Mother 3 does not automatically mean more than a thousand actually want the game.
If they want to do that, they need to offer a "virtualization license" that allows you to have as many virtual windows hosts on a single physical machine as you want. The big sticking point with Windows in virtualization is that you need a license for every vhost. With anywhere between 5 and 30 virtual machines on each physical machine, it makes sense to use Linux whenever possible.
You can track the dead people though. There is a way to detect that kind of fraud and it's not going away. The problem with this is not "OMG the republicans are haxxoring votes!" The problem is "OMG we don't know if the republicans are haxxoring votes or not, but something fishy is going on here."
Voting machines "malfunctioning" is not a partisan issue. I'm sure both sides will exploit it equally. Dead people voting is at least possible to detect if you have the death certificates. Election fraud that looks like a malfunction is bad, because in that case all you have to do is cause a malfunction in an election machine and you can invalidate all of the votes it has recorded so far.
Shenanigans will always exist on both sides, and I believe they are both minimal and equally distributed enough not to sway a national election (local elections are another story, but those are usually more personal.)
If you have anyone to be critical of, it should be the media. And not just with politics, they're looking to create a scandal with *everyone*. "News" in this country is created to entertain, not inform. They're just looking for a juicy tag line that will get you to sit through 2 minutes of commercials.
Of course not. They'll call it the United States of A-Mario!
Midterm elections can work for or against the incumbent. If congress has not been doing its job (like recently) people will actually show up to "vote those bums out of office." Also, there have been some rather nasty scandals in the incumbent party, which can discourage voters from showing up to vote for a candidate they don't believe in, even if they really don't like the other guy.
In a strong conservative state like Utah, however, where gay marriage, abortion and family values issues rule the day, someone running on a tech platform is a long shot. Don't worry though, Ashdown won't be the last.
Maybe because datacenters and control rooms are utilitarian structures that all generally look alike? A control center is generally a row or 2 of PCs with a projector at the front displaying a nagios/EMC monitoring page purely to look busy (all real alerts are sent to pagers or blackberrys.) If you don't plan on showing it off to the public, I'm guessing it looks a lot like any other office (cubes and meeting rooms.)
A datacenter is almost always a large room full of black cabinets. Yawn, nothing to see there, the only variations are whether they use overhead cabling racks or raised floors. They can be impressive when inside of them, if only for the deafening sound of thousands of rack servers.
Anyone who gets pissed off about this stuff needs to reevaluate their priorities. The items are a nice little "thank you" from Blizzard to the people who play the CCG, not a deck of cards that you buy and get items. If you play the CCG, go for it, just don't expect an item card. I wouldn't buy the cards just in hopes of getting an item though.
I actually don't think it matters to bin Laden who is in power, but the ability to disrupt the American elections would be a good show of al Qaeda's power. Iranian intelligence might have more of an interest in the outcome, however.
A group like Al Qaeda desires to spread confusion and terror through the American people in order to change American policies abroad (their true goal, an Islamist superpower caliphate, is unattainable with the US projecting its power into the middle east.) Once you get past "OMG these guys are evil!" you start to look at them like any other subversive element in society.
Hell, they don't even actually have to rig the election. All they have to do is *claim* that they have and have enough Americans believe them that it creates unrest. If there's no paper trail, and you can't prove that they didn't, that is a bad thing.
You know? That's really funny considering Stallman's crusade to call Linux "GNU/Linux." He even refused to give a speech when I was in college to the university LUG because we called ourselves a "Linux User Group" and not a "GNU/Linux User Group" (I shit you not.)
The biggest threat of election fraud does not come from our own political parties. That form of fraud would be unacceptable, but it would be punishable if the person were caught.
No, the biggest threat comes from terrorists (they have the command and communication infrastructure in place, not to mention motive) or foreign intelligence agencies (a country like Iran would probably rather have a militant administration in power to keep the middle east destablized to keep oil prices high.)
It is a low-risk operation, requiring no weapons, only computer hackers (and yes, terrorist organizations have already proven themselves competent at targeted system attacks.) These kind of people probably already know the information presented, and it is the job of the media to expose negligent government practices to the people. The government has shown themselves totally unwilling to address the problem, so it's going to take someone fixing an election to get the point across. I'm just hoping it's the Republicans and not Iranian intelligence.
It's like playing WoW or any other game: most of us gave up on being the "top" as soon as we realized how many 25 year old jobless basement dwellers there were out there.
It is; but if you combine them on the same die with a large shared cache and the on-chip memory controller... you can see where I'm going with this. Think of it as a separate CPU, just printed on the same silicon wafer. That means you only need 1 fan to cool it and you can lose a lot of heat producing power management circuitry on the video card.
Obviously this is not going to be ideal for high end gaming rigs; but it will improve the quality of integrated video chipsets on lower end and even mid range PCs.
Hence why you never give a game a 15% score unless it's a budget title.
You don't want to be a game journalist. Breaking in is even worse because you're expected to do the same things as a regular game journalist, except not get paid for it. There is very little journalism involved; you're just a glorified PR puppet whose job is to get quotes on the back of a game box to drive traffic to your site.
Beyond that, it will totally ruin your experience of playing video games. It's not about playing the game, but evaluating it, capturing screenshots and videos, and even playing really awful games to completion. You will play many, many games you never had any interest in and that bore you to tears. The choice games (read: any game you've ever heard of) go to the senior guys who have proven they can write good PR fluff.
Oh, and you have a deadline to meet, and if you don't give their games a favorable review, the PR people for that game company will mysteriously stop returning your e-mails and phone calls, so you can forget about getting eval copies of their games for the next 6 months.
Suddenly, playing a video game starts to seem like, well, work. And you'll not want to do what you do for 7 hours a day every day once you get off work.
So, someone who has to be told "Be good, or God will send you to Hell" is really a better person than one who hasn't been told that? If you're just being good out of fear, does that make you a good person or a fearful one? If you're being good in desire of praise, are you a good person or just someone who likes his ego stroked?
Atheism in one form or another has always existed. It's not a symptom of the 'modern age,' simply the fact that we do not have Genesis taught as The One Truth from birth (and this has not been the case since the Renaissance.)
And don't blame your/others character flaws on anyone; it is your fault. It's also your problem, and your responsibility to fix if you don't like it. Nobody is a victim who chooses their actions; there is always another choice. You may not like the consequences of that choice, but you have it nonetheless.
That's exactly what happened - it was flagged inappropriate by viewers (something that happens with any video anyone objects to in any way,) YouTube staff reviewed it and determined it was not inappropriate, and removed the flag. The system worked, that is all.
In this day of anonymous blogs and partisan shillery, you need a disclaimer as to the political leanings of your news sources. Especially with a politically charged story like this.
It's a bit different than that.
Spamhaus is not based in the USA, and has no offices in the USA, so therefore the court has no jurisdiction to sieze anything from them. It's even dubious that the judge has the right to sieze the domain name, as it's registered with another non-US company. ICANN is just saying "Don't bother slapping us with a subpoena because we can't do it anyway."
This has much further reaching implications than it may seem at first. First Spamhaus, then online gambling sites that are perfectly legal in other countries. After that will come torrent sites, crack sites or anyone who does anything that might be illegal in the USA but legal elsewhere.
It's a slippery slope.
It's more complicated than that. I was very careful in my wording of "perfect atomic copy."
Having two physically identical things does not mean that they are the same thing. In fact, merely identifying them as two identical things explicitly states that they are not the same thing. Having tried, it's actually very hard to come up with a criteria for identity between any two things other than abstract concepts (identity for sets, for example, is easy to prove. The question of "what makes up a human being" has not been satisfactorily answered; we are obviously our physical nature but a lot of people believe there is more to it than that, and coming up with an authoritative list of that "more" is going to cause a lot of argument.)
Determining a criteria of identity between two potentially identical things is the key. Your criteria of identity may take into account only physical structure, where mine may consider a space-time location as well, in which case two clones standing side-by-side cannot be the same, even if they are 100% physically identical. One can also make the argument that via the semi-random processes in the human body, they cease being physically identical the moment the copy is made. If they then have independent experiences, would they continue being the same?
"Philosophical question" usually means that people have thought about the issue, written papers about it, several books, and then determined that the problem has no easy answer (and no answer that will probably be considered "right" by any large majority.) 20th century metaphysics has been somewhat obsessed with this problem, so there is quite a volume of material on it.
Oh yeah, the above post assumes a physicalist point of view; in other words, consciousness is a purely physical object.. we still haven't tackled the mind/body problem effectively so the jury is still out on that one. That's also the best-case scenario for a teleportation device that works in this manner; if consciousness is something more than physical, then physically reconstructing the body would not be sufficient for teleportation anyway.
There are certain ethical questions that go along with teleportation of humans as well.
:)
If you create a perfect atomic copy of a living being and then destroy the original, is the copy really the same as the original? What if you just never destroyed the original? Is destroying the original tantamount to murder?
I think questions like this will mean that even when we have the technology to do this with large objects (even living objects,) it will never be used on humans. The ethical risks, and our inability to determine an answer to the philosophical questions (if the copy has the exact same memories, when you ask it if it is a copy, it will say no) mean that we're going to have to find some method of instant transportation that does not involve deconstructing and reconstructing things on a molecular level.
Wormholes, anyone?