The 1970s called, they want their fear-mongering back.
Get with the program; the majority of industrialized countries are now below the replacement fertility (almost all of them if you discount immigration) and there's no reason to believe the rest of the world won't join them as they become sufficiently wealthy. The official UN prediction of the population of 2050 has been coming down for a while now. Malthusian fears of a world of 25 billion people huddled together fighting over every scrap of food, while abstractly still possible, are much, much less likely than the many other fine things to worry about.
By averages, the human population is a bit overdue for one and I don't see what we have done in the last few decades that would necessarily prevent one from taking place again.
Times have really changed. I'm the first to reach for history when it's relevant, but I'm not sure it is in this case. In the plus column, we have incomparably better communication than we did in 1918, and incomparably better detection and tracking. (It is by no means perfect, but good lucking getting a gene sequencing done in 1918.) We are also in general somewhat healthier. (Yes, there's improvements to be made there, too.)
In the minus column, we circulate much more freely than in 1918, and given that we're talking "virus", that's very possibly enough to erase all of the above by itself. Thus, both the
But then again, it may not be. We really don't know, because the unknowns simply swamp the knowns. However, I have to admit that if I had to guess, that if there is a true cycle (and not a statistical anomaly), and we are "overdue", then as we become more and more "overdue", the correct conclusion is that the pluses outweigh the minuses, not that we are more and more likely to have a massive outbreak.
This is in part true exactly because we are vigilant, so this should not be interpreted as a call for less vigilance. This is a call for less pointless worrying. ("Vigilance" is very pointed worrying.)
We're "overdue" for a polio outbreak, but I'm not too worried about it. (I rate a flu outbreak at a much, much higher probablility; I just use this as a more clear example of the point I want to make.)
Note: This is a nuanced message, promoting neither panic, nor complancency. If you interpreted this message in a such a manner, please re-read. Also note the several preceding paragraphs were all predicated on "if there is a true cycle". My real guess is that there isn't; random events can often seem cyclic if you squint at them too much and try to force them to fit a pattern. This puts us even farther into the unknown.
That's not really a spoiler. By the time any of the books happen, that event is ancient history. It's no more a spoiler than the fact than "there's a Ringworld".
The first part of your argument boils down, I believe without much loss, to "it won't catch smart criminals, so it won't catch them all". This is a dumb argument against law for reasons so obvious I hope I really don't have to spell them out. It applies equally to all laws.
(A smokescreen of words can make any point look valid.)
The second part of your argument is that it will reduce the number of skilled people. However, I submit that market forces will make sure that as long as skills are in demand, a supply will be created. And it is extremely possible to obtain the relevant skills in a legal and ethical manner.
I don't know that this law is good or bad; I haven't really looked at it. (The laws do need to be carefully written to make sure it remains legal to provide all relevant security services, which based on other comments may be an issue with this law.) I'm just pointing out your arguments are specious.
Interestingly, not a single one of the activities you (humorously) suggest reward people for simply putting in time, or putting in time with minimal skill. The closest one is homework, and there's still a wild variance between performance and speed based on skill. (If the homework is "macro-able", your teacher sucks.)
If a ten-year-old has the ability to play chess at a near-grandmaster level and beats a 60-year chess hobbyist, people may be envious, but they're not going to complain that the ten-year-old didn't put his grinding in. Skating requires a lot of time, but also talent. (Even less "fair", for most values of fair.)
I'm sort of interested in MMORPGs as an idea, but until they find a better organizational principle, I'm not interested in practice.
It's worth it, especially if you do technical things, and especially if you like keyboard navigation.
(LyX has this feature I plan on copying to every program I ever write, and I can't believe more people haven't stolen it. Any time you use a menu command, the status bar shows all the keyboard shortcuts you could have used, even if the menu showed them. In nothing flat you learn the keyboard shortcuts that you care about. Emacs tries this but it seems inconsistent. I find LyX a real pleasure to use.)
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that the studios want to give movie stars millions of dollars and just can't wait to shower their largesse on them.
I also have to wonder if you understand capitalism.
The movie studios, if they could have their way, would charge the movie stars to appear in their movies. They pay them millions of dollars because the top-name actors think they are worth it... and they are right. Tom Hanks will pull a lot of people into the theatres, enough to recoup the costs. The expert accounts wouldn't be approving the payouts if they hadn't run the numbers, come to this conclusion, and been proven correct numerous times.
You really can't say this is a sign of some sort of global stupidity or anything, either. There are ~300 million people in this country, and the Hollywood market is much larger than that. It only takes a very slight average preference to have amazing box-office consequences. I don't love Tom Hanks and I won't go to see something just because he's in it, but I do think he is a well-above-average actor*. Take that opinion and multiply it by 300million+ and you've got something.
(*: My personal standard for acting is the ability of an actor to play a character and have the actor themselves disappear. Tom Hanks is extremely good; the difference between Forrest Gump and Jim Lovell (Apollo 13) is pretty big, but I still think I see some Tom Hanks-ness in the similarity. A worse actor is Jennifer Aniston, who seems to play Rachel Greene over and over again. Some of the better actors include Patrick Stewart (who does have a certain force of personality, but the distance between Professor Xavier and one of his Shakespearean roles is quite large), and sometimes the smaller players in sci-fi series are suprisingly capable; I've been extremely impressed by Michael Shanks playing Daniel Jackson in SG-1. Daniel Jackson himself is an almost dead-on impression of the original in the movie (I initially didn't realize they changed actors, because it had been a while since the movie), and he does the traditional character-body transfers extremely well, as opposed to Richard Dean Anderson, who does the understated humor thing well but always seems to be Richard Dean Anderson.
Obviously, this is not most people's standards, who I think want the actor to leak through and then pay for the actor. Thus, the cream-of-the-crop tend to be semi-good actors that people really like. Tom Hanks is, IMHO, a minor anomaly in that I think he's pretty good (although not the best) and he's also pretty popular.)
Actually, some lossless encoders tend to *enhance* artifacts that wern't previously there. So sometimes, they do sound worse.
If the putatively "lossless" encoder produces output that decodes to anything other than what the original input decodes to, then by definition it was not lossless.
(If the way I phrased that sounds odd, I wrote it to handle the MP3 -> FLAC "direct" encoding case. "Encodes to anything other than its input" isn't quite right in that case. I'm sure you can FLAC an MP3 file with the right command line argument but you won't get much out of it.)
Thus, if a lossless encoder adds artefacts, it is, ipso facto, not lossless.
Given the relative ease of testing a lossless encoder/decoder combo and the testing any one you've ever heard of has gone through, I find it far more likely that either A: An encoder you think is lossless is in fact lossy, B: You've got a serious flaw in your encoding software (rice up our Gentoo install too much, maybe?) or C: You're full of shit.
I've been developing for about ten years now; not as long as some people, but enough to be getting over the ten year hump for competency. As a result, I don't expect that everybody can pick this idea up and run with it, but it might color how you look at the frameworks.
I'm really starting to sour on frameworks. Libraries, love 'em to pieces. You want to take care of all the bit-bashing in the video card and present me an OpenGL interface, thank you very much. You want to give me a proper 21-st century file abstract like the KDE io-slaves, you have my gratitude. But you start bundling together five or six different technologies, each themselves fairly simple, and give me this unified framework or something, and in short order I'm likely to be cranky. This is especially true for things that are themselves fairly easy, like emitting HTML.
The problem is two-fold:
The resulting framework is quite often nearly impenetrable to an outsider, so when it's wrong, it's really, really wrong; even an open source framework might be of only dubious value since you're unlikely to be able to unravel all of the pieces in any useful amount of time.
As you add pieces together, the complexity of the whole increases geometrically. (Not "exponentially" as the term is commonly abused.) This can be mitigated by maturity, both of framework or core developer, but that's more rare than you might think. But the thing is, you are very unlikely to need all of the pieces. If the framework does 40 things, at a complexity of 1600, but you only need to use it for 12 things, at a complexity of 144, you're gaining an awful lot of complexity. (The numbers are of course made up, but the idea holds; don't try to over-rationalize the figures.) What's worse, as mentioned in the previous point, you might want to do 3 things that the framework fights you on, and now you're either going to have to give up on those 3 things, make unbelievably ugly hacks to get each of them half-sort-of working, or scale a huge learning curve to fix the framework that you are now significantly invested in, but know effectively nothing about the insides.
Especially in this age of using more dynamic languages, I'm finding I'm a lot happier taking smaller libraries and tying them together with my own frameworks, which I understand and can make sing and dance in exactly the ways I need them to with only the minimal complexity.
One important point here is the scale of development. If I'm going to do a three-week project, I'm going to probably go ahead and use a framework. But the larger the project, the larger the team, the more time that geometric price has to come up and bite you in the ass, where you Absolutely, Positively Need this thing the framework can't do, and it has to be done by tomorrow.
Also depends on your skill level, of course. And one of the cardinal Laws of Programming is that there are no Laws of Programming, only tradeoffs. I don't expect everyone to agree, I'm not pitching this so much as throwing it out as food for thought. Caveat, caveat, caveat.
I don't do Java, but my guess is that Hibernate, to the extent that it is a framework, is probably a win because it's so mature. But then again, you can also look at it as a really big library, because it sure does seem to play well with a lot of things. I think one of the distinguishing charateristics of a "framework" as I mean it in this post is that it is well-nigh impossible to glue two "frameworks" together, and sometimes even adding the capabilities of an additional library is an exercise in frustration. But the upshot is, I'm finding in practice that I'm a lot happier and more effective in the medium and long term, even on my own projects, with libraries that I tie together myself and not "frameworks".
While I'm not dogmatic about any particular one of them, the Agile-style development really help with this, and I might not feel this way without their influence. Automated Test (unit tests, usu
I think what this all boils down to is that our definition of "run" for a quantum computer is flawed. This makes much more sense than a computer that "produces results" (the only really meaningful definiton of "runs", really), but doesn't actually "run".
The old definition makes for good headlines, but it doesn't enhance understanding of what's going on. I think you can sum it up by saying to "run" the quantum computer requires the waveform to run through it, but not necessarily what we would call the "photon" itself. Under QM as I understand it (not professionally, just educated layman), that's how QM works anyhow, all the time, so it's "just" Yet Another Counterintuitive QM Result, not "running without running".
I'm going to echo other's observations that your friend's laptop was likely defective. The 600M is, at least as of today, based on the Celeron M processor, and that should actually run pretty cool.
I was somewhat amused by this article because I actually read it on an Inspiron 6000, running on a Pentium M, which I use as a true laptop (i.e., on my lap) for many hours a day. I run Gentoo on it, so I'm often compiling and such. I have no idea why anybody would need a "Lapinator" for this laptop; if I max out the CPU and burn a DVD and everything else all at the same time, it takes about an hour to get to "slightly uncomfortable".
Many, many other laptops get much warmer just idling, such as my POS Compaq Presario 600, than the Inspiron 6000 gets going flat out. No exaggeration, as I can handle the Inspiron going flat out, whereas the Presario on idle after half an hour has to get off my lap.
I definately recommend the 6000 to anyone interested in a cool laptop. (Although it's a pity they seem to have discontinued the 1650x1050 option; jeeze, people, won't somebody buy the higher resolution options? They're getting harder to find every month...)
As already mentioned, this doesn't compete with Bittorrent, because bittorrent isn't designed for RSS feeds. Along with the file size issue idonthack mentioned (torrents are only a win when the size of the file being transferred is much much larger than the coordination overhead, generally not the case for RSS), BitTorrent is also not designed for files to change over time; it would require a complete overhaul of the protocol because the file hashes that are the foundation of the protocol would be constantly changing.
There is room for coordination with bittorrent, though; imagine a Pastry-based P2P feed that then used RSS enclosures to tie into a (trackerless?) BitTorrent feed for a fully distributed pod-/vid-/file-casting solution that anybody could run with no fear of the bandwidth involved.
Tack in some sort of P2P web system, and in theory, you could run a massively popular podcast/blog with millions of hits a day off of your cable modem. (Although something with a bit more upstreaming oomph would be good for the rarely-requested content that falls out of the P2P; anyhow, any ol' webhost could handle this kind of bandwidth.)
I think this is a worthy goal, as if nothing else, popular websites run for fun would no longer be faced with the dilemma of advertising to cover bandwidth costs or going offline.
Question. I'm interested in laptops, but one of my top priorities is low heat production during normal usage. I actually use laptops as literal laptops, so it's a big deal to me.
How's the heat on your machine?
(It's surprisingly difficult to get this information. People are starting to care but you still will only hear about heat production in a laptop if it's extremely high, leaving the entire range between "extremely low" and "high" uncovered. Unless someone can point me at a good source of info?)
I'm OK with it being slightly uncomfortable after hours of 100% usage at top speed, but I've had laptops that become thoroughly uncomfortable after five minutes of idling, and I'm extremely concerned about ever getting another one of those ever again.
Do the storyline, sound and imagery have to be heroic and embedded in the players mythos before the game is entertaining and entrains the player?
I don't know. Do you consider "Firaxis Games Inc.'s Civilization games, Take2's Railroad Tycoon, and Dance Dance Revolution" to have heroic sound and imagery, embedded in the "player's mythos"? I'm not entirely certain what you mean by that last one (multiple ideas come to mind)... but I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
Your first paragraph was somewhat interesting, but I think you excessively narrow down the definition of "game" when you assume that all games match that description.
Another interesting "average", though technically harder to pull off, would be to get 15 players simultaneously watching the same game in real-time, "averaging" in some reasonably manner the 15 inputs coming in, and feeding that to the game. It would be interesting to see if it sucks, or manages to play better than the individuals, or what.
Ah, so you're the Slashdot poster that sees the word "statistics" and bitches about sample size almost like a reflex, regardless of whether the concept even makes any sense in context.
Who cares about "statistical significance"? Were you actually planning on using this data to come to some sort of conclusion of any importance? I sure hope that in your world, this is not terribly useful data!
It's essentially a clearing house and as such it is protected against such lawsuits anyway.
Citation?
I believe you are thinking of the safe harbor part of the DMCA, a part of the DMCA which could use some tweaking perhaps but is fundamentally sound. But that only protects:
A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider's transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material
Emphasis mine (obviously). This is a limited protection against copyright claims, not carte blanche to violate the law as long as you do it in a big way with your eyes closed.
Slashdot Mirror
The 1970s called, they want their fear-mongering back.
Get with the program; the majority of industrialized countries are now below the replacement fertility (almost all of them if you discount immigration) and there's no reason to believe the rest of the world won't join them as they become sufficiently wealthy. The official UN prediction of the population of 2050 has been coming down for a while now. Malthusian fears of a world of 25 billion people huddled together fighting over every scrap of food, while abstractly still possible, are much, much less likely than the many other fine things to worry about.
By averages, the human population is a bit overdue for one and I don't see what we have done in the last few decades that would necessarily prevent one from taking place again.
Times have really changed. I'm the first to reach for history when it's relevant, but I'm not sure it is in this case. In the plus column, we have incomparably better communication than we did in 1918, and incomparably better detection and tracking. (It is by no means perfect, but good lucking getting a gene sequencing done in 1918.) We are also in general somewhat healthier. (Yes, there's improvements to be made there, too.)
In the minus column, we circulate much more freely than in 1918, and given that we're talking "virus", that's very possibly enough to erase all of the above by itself. Thus, both the
But then again, it may not be. We really don't know, because the unknowns simply swamp the knowns. However, I have to admit that if I had to guess, that if there is a true cycle (and not a statistical anomaly), and we are "overdue", then as we become more and more "overdue", the correct conclusion is that the pluses outweigh the minuses, not that we are more and more likely to have a massive outbreak.
This is in part true exactly because we are vigilant, so this should not be interpreted as a call for less vigilance. This is a call for less pointless worrying. ("Vigilance" is very pointed worrying.)
We're "overdue" for a polio outbreak, but I'm not too worried about it. (I rate a flu outbreak at a much, much higher probablility; I just use this as a more clear example of the point I want to make.)
Note: This is a nuanced message, promoting neither panic, nor complancency. If you interpreted this message in a such a manner, please re-read. Also note the several preceding paragraphs were all predicated on "if there is a true cycle". My real guess is that there isn't; random events can often seem cyclic if you squint at them too much and try to force them to fit a pattern. This puts us even farther into the unknown.
That's not really a spoiler. By the time any of the books happen, that event is ancient history. It's no more a spoiler than the fact than "there's a Ringworld".
The first part of your argument boils down, I believe without much loss, to "it won't catch smart criminals, so it won't catch them all". This is a dumb argument against law for reasons so obvious I hope I really don't have to spell them out. It applies equally to all laws.
(A smokescreen of words can make any point look valid.)
The second part of your argument is that it will reduce the number of skilled people. However, I submit that market forces will make sure that as long as skills are in demand, a supply will be created. And it is extremely possible to obtain the relevant skills in a legal and ethical manner.
I don't know that this law is good or bad; I haven't really looked at it. (The laws do need to be carefully written to make sure it remains legal to provide all relevant security services, which based on other comments may be an issue with this law.) I'm just pointing out your arguments are specious.
Interestingly, not a single one of the activities you (humorously) suggest reward people for simply putting in time, or putting in time with minimal skill. The closest one is homework, and there's still a wild variance between performance and speed based on skill. (If the homework is "macro-able", your teacher sucks.)
If a ten-year-old has the ability to play chess at a near-grandmaster level and beats a 60-year chess hobbyist, people may be envious, but they're not going to complain that the ten-year-old didn't put his grinding in. Skating requires a lot of time, but also talent. (Even less "fair", for most values of fair.)
I'm sort of interested in MMORPGs as an idea, but until they find a better organizational principle, I'm not interested in practice.
It's worth it, especially if you do technical things, and especially if you like keyboard navigation.
(LyX has this feature I plan on copying to every program I ever write, and I can't believe more people haven't stolen it. Any time you use a menu command, the status bar shows all the keyboard shortcuts you could have used, even if the menu showed them. In nothing flat you learn the keyboard shortcuts that you care about. Emacs tries this but it seems inconsistent. I find LyX a real pleasure to use.)
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that the studios want to give movie stars millions of dollars and just can't wait to shower their largesse on them.
I also have to wonder if you understand capitalism.
The movie studios, if they could have their way, would charge the movie stars to appear in their movies. They pay them millions of dollars because the top-name actors think they are worth it... and they are right. Tom Hanks will pull a lot of people into the theatres, enough to recoup the costs. The expert accounts wouldn't be approving the payouts if they hadn't run the numbers, come to this conclusion, and been proven correct numerous times.
You really can't say this is a sign of some sort of global stupidity or anything, either. There are ~300 million people in this country, and the Hollywood market is much larger than that. It only takes a very slight average preference to have amazing box-office consequences. I don't love Tom Hanks and I won't go to see something just because he's in it, but I do think he is a well-above-average actor*. Take that opinion and multiply it by 300million+ and you've got something.
(*: My personal standard for acting is the ability of an actor to play a character and have the actor themselves disappear. Tom Hanks is extremely good; the difference between Forrest Gump and Jim Lovell (Apollo 13) is pretty big, but I still think I see some Tom Hanks-ness in the similarity. A worse actor is Jennifer Aniston, who seems to play Rachel Greene over and over again. Some of the better actors include Patrick Stewart (who does have a certain force of personality, but the distance between Professor Xavier and one of his Shakespearean roles is quite large), and sometimes the smaller players in sci-fi series are suprisingly capable; I've been extremely impressed by Michael Shanks playing Daniel Jackson in SG-1. Daniel Jackson himself is an almost dead-on impression of the original in the movie (I initially didn't realize they changed actors, because it had been a while since the movie), and he does the traditional character-body transfers extremely well, as opposed to Richard Dean Anderson, who does the understated humor thing well but always seems to be Richard Dean Anderson.
Obviously, this is not most people's standards, who I think want the actor to leak through and then pay for the actor. Thus, the cream-of-the-crop tend to be semi-good actors that people really like. Tom Hanks is, IMHO, a minor anomaly in that I think he's pretty good (although not the best) and he's also pretty popular.)
No, "Comic Book Guy" is "Everybody knows Wiggum wears his badge on his right, not his left." A lot of people know the names of the Simpsons.
(And no, I have no idea about whether the badge was correct. I just made that up.)
'Cause they're most likely different people.
Did you notice your UID is just shy of the million mark? Lots o' folk round here. (Not "a million", perhaps, but lots.)
Get better or I shall replace you with a small shell script!
Fortunately, our military priorities are not set by people who think statements like " All future wars will be fought against terrorists" are sensible.
Actually, some lossless encoders tend to *enhance* artifacts that wern't previously there. So sometimes, they do sound worse.
If the putatively "lossless" encoder produces output that decodes to anything other than what the original input decodes to, then by definition it was not lossless.
(If the way I phrased that sounds odd, I wrote it to handle the MP3 -> FLAC "direct" encoding case. "Encodes to anything other than its input" isn't quite right in that case. I'm sure you can FLAC an MP3 file with the right command line argument but you won't get much out of it.)
Thus, if a lossless encoder adds artefacts, it is, ipso facto, not lossless.
Given the relative ease of testing a lossless encoder/decoder combo and the testing any one you've ever heard of has gone through, I find it far more likely that either A: An encoder you think is lossless is in fact lossy, B: You've got a serious flaw in your encoding software (rice up our Gentoo install too much, maybe?) or C: You're full of shit.
I'm really starting to sour on frameworks. Libraries, love 'em to pieces. You want to take care of all the bit-bashing in the video card and present me an OpenGL interface, thank you very much. You want to give me a proper 21-st century file abstract like the KDE io-slaves, you have my gratitude. But you start bundling together five or six different technologies, each themselves fairly simple, and give me this unified framework or something, and in short order I'm likely to be cranky. This is especially true for things that are themselves fairly easy, like emitting HTML.
The problem is two-fold:
Especially in this age of using more dynamic languages, I'm finding I'm a lot happier taking smaller libraries and tying them together with my own frameworks, which I understand and can make sing and dance in exactly the ways I need them to with only the minimal complexity.
One important point here is the scale of development. If I'm going to do a three-week project, I'm going to probably go ahead and use a framework. But the larger the project, the larger the team, the more time that geometric price has to come up and bite you in the ass, where you Absolutely, Positively Need this thing the framework can't do, and it has to be done by tomorrow.
Also depends on your skill level, of course. And one of the cardinal Laws of Programming is that there are no Laws of Programming, only tradeoffs. I don't expect everyone to agree, I'm not pitching this so much as throwing it out as food for thought. Caveat, caveat, caveat.
I don't do Java, but my guess is that Hibernate, to the extent that it is a framework, is probably a win because it's so mature. But then again, you can also look at it as a really big library, because it sure does seem to play well with a lot of things. I think one of the distinguishing charateristics of a "framework" as I mean it in this post is that it is well-nigh impossible to glue two "frameworks" together, and sometimes even adding the capabilities of an additional library is an exercise in frustration. But the upshot is, I'm finding in practice that I'm a lot happier and more effective in the medium and long term, even on my own projects, with libraries that I tie together myself and not "frameworks".
While I'm not dogmatic about any particular one of them, the Agile-style development really help with this, and I might not feel this way without their influence. Automated Test (unit tests, usu
the only thing we can't do with the Linux dev kits is gain full access to the sound programming (there's a good reason for it).
What?
(Curious.)
I think what this all boils down to is that our definition of "run" for a quantum computer is flawed. This makes much more sense than a computer that "produces results" (the only really meaningful definiton of "runs", really), but doesn't actually "run".
The old definition makes for good headlines, but it doesn't enhance understanding of what's going on. I think you can sum it up by saying to "run" the quantum computer requires the waveform to run through it, but not necessarily what we would call the "photon" itself. Under QM as I understand it (not professionally, just educated layman), that's how QM works anyhow, all the time, so it's "just" Yet Another Counterintuitive QM Result, not "running without running".
I'm going to echo other's observations that your friend's laptop was likely defective. The 600M is, at least as of today, based on the Celeron M processor, and that should actually run pretty cool.
I was somewhat amused by this article because I actually read it on an Inspiron 6000, running on a Pentium M, which I use as a true laptop (i.e., on my lap) for many hours a day. I run Gentoo on it, so I'm often compiling and such. I have no idea why anybody would need a "Lapinator" for this laptop; if I max out the CPU and burn a DVD and everything else all at the same time, it takes about an hour to get to "slightly uncomfortable".
Many, many other laptops get much warmer just idling, such as my POS Compaq Presario 600, than the Inspiron 6000 gets going flat out. No exaggeration, as I can handle the Inspiron going flat out, whereas the Presario on idle after half an hour has to get off my lap.
I definately recommend the 6000 to anyone interested in a cool laptop. (Although it's a pity they seem to have discontinued the 1650x1050 option; jeeze, people, won't somebody buy the higher resolution options? They're getting harder to find every month...)
The Intellivision came after the Atari 2600.
As already mentioned, this doesn't compete with Bittorrent, because bittorrent isn't designed for RSS feeds. Along with the file size issue idonthack mentioned (torrents are only a win when the size of the file being transferred is much much larger than the coordination overhead, generally not the case for RSS), BitTorrent is also not designed for files to change over time; it would require a complete overhaul of the protocol because the file hashes that are the foundation of the protocol would be constantly changing.
There is room for coordination with bittorrent, though; imagine a Pastry-based P2P feed that then used RSS enclosures to tie into a (trackerless?) BitTorrent feed for a fully distributed pod-/vid-/file-casting solution that anybody could run with no fear of the bandwidth involved.
Tack in some sort of P2P web system, and in theory, you could run a massively popular podcast/blog with millions of hits a day off of your cable modem. (Although something with a bit more upstreaming oomph would be good for the rarely-requested content that falls out of the P2P; anyhow, any ol' webhost could handle this kind of bandwidth.)
I think this is a worthy goal, as if nothing else, popular websites run for fun would no longer be faced with the dilemma of advertising to cover bandwidth costs or going offline.
Question. I'm interested in laptops, but one of my top priorities is low heat production during normal usage. I actually use laptops as literal laptops, so it's a big deal to me.
How's the heat on your machine?
(It's surprisingly difficult to get this information. People are starting to care but you still will only hear about heat production in a laptop if it's extremely high, leaving the entire range between "extremely low" and "high" uncovered. Unless someone can point me at a good source of info?)
I'm OK with it being slightly uncomfortable after hours of 100% usage at top speed, but I've had laptops that become thoroughly uncomfortable after five minutes of idling, and I'm extremely concerned about ever getting another one of those ever again.
Do the storyline, sound and imagery have to be heroic and embedded in the players mythos before the game is entertaining and entrains the player?
I don't know. Do you consider "Firaxis Games Inc.'s Civilization games, Take2's Railroad Tycoon, and Dance Dance Revolution" to have heroic sound and imagery, embedded in the "player's mythos"? I'm not entirely certain what you mean by that last one (multiple ideas come to mind)... but I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
Your first paragraph was somewhat interesting, but I think you excessively narrow down the definition of "game" when you assume that all games match that description.
That would just be part of the fun. :)
Another interesting "average", though technically harder to pull off, would be to get 15 players simultaneously watching the same game in real-time, "averaging" in some reasonably manner the 15 inputs coming in, and feeding that to the game. It would be interesting to see if it sucks, or manages to play better than the individuals, or what.
Ah, so you're the Slashdot poster that sees the word "statistics" and bitches about sample size almost like a reflex, regardless of whether the concept even makes any sense in context.
Who cares about "statistical significance"? Were you actually planning on using this data to come to some sort of conclusion of any importance? I sure hope that in your world, this is not terribly useful data!
Citation?
I believe you are thinking of the safe harbor part of the DMCA, a part of the DMCA which could use some tweaking perhaps but is fundamentally sound. But that only protects:Emphasis mine (obviously). This is a limited protection against copyright claims, not carte blanche to violate the law as long as you do it in a big way with your eyes closed.
So, you got another specific safe harbor in mind?
I am just saying that when the time comes, how pathetic will I have to be to re-buy that in Blu-Ray[?]
Have you considered... not?