Also, NPR seems like an odd source to focus on in this criticism. If anything, they provide more critical, factually based coverage than any other (non-print) US news outlet. In other words, they're better than just about everyone else in the US media.
I don't disagree that they are some of the best available in the US (and to the parent's point, in my locality BBC news is only available via the NPR station on my car radio). That doesn't mean we should lay off the criticism. Being the best available doesn't mean that they're the best they can be.
I feel even more entitled to complain since, unlike those other news outlets, I pay for it out of my pocket directly.
It could be argued that looking at who they choose to ask the hard questions to, and who they let off the hook reveals a bit of bias, but that is another argument for another time...
I'm shocked that NPR aired this. I understand giving airing sides of an argument, but this is nothing but lies.
NPR's segments like this (they have one every few weeks) always have one (or both) sides lying out their ass. You probably just noticed this time because you actually have a deep understanding of the issue. I listen to NPR news pretty much constantly, and I'm frequently bothered by what they try to pass as 'balance'. They go so far out of their way to present 'both sides' of an issue that they frequently fail to realize that one side is either completely full of crap, or a total crackpot.
Perhaps they think that airing this guy's lies will let people see that he's full of it... But I don't think enough people are knowledgeable enough about the subject to realize it.
Watch any left-wing vs right-wing argument, you will see that this is often the basis. The lefty will shout about stats and graphs, and the righty will call him a biased liar.
By your assessment, and judging by your other Slashdot posts, you must be all the way to the right then?
And all I am saying is: that is your problem. Particularly, specifically, your problem. [...] You refusal to deal with reality, again because you find the message distasteful
Learn to read. Seriously. Go take a class or something. I'm sick of this crap where you try to agree with somebody in principle and have a sensible discussion about the politics of the issue, and it turns into an attack. You are the problem. You are the reason why there are people who don't take the issue seriously.
If you applied an ounce of reason and sense to your analysis, you would see that I completely agree with you, and am only saying that you could better present your case to win more people over to your cause. But, because you decided to get emotionally involved in the discussion before engaging your brain you went on the attack.
You are the person that is failing to deal with reality. The reality is that the climate is changing, and most people aren't going to do a damned thing about it until people like you shut up for a second and listen when people try to teach you how to be persuasive instead of being a fucking prick.
What on Earth has this to do with the data? We are discussing data about global warming, not what do do about it.
You truly are a complete moron.
What I was responding to was the following:
What I'm also really curious about is why so many are so adamant about refusing to acknowledge what seems to be obvious, but that's a task for psychologists and philosophers I suppose.
To try desperately to deny global warming actually exists because you don't like what some people are saying has to be done about it is not logical or rational.
What the hell does that have to do with anything? I was neither trying to argue that it doesn't exist, nor that denying it was rational. I was merely trying to answer a serious question.
First, for the record, I am under no delusions that climate change isn't occuring. I'm not disagreeing with the parent poster, I'm not calling anybody wrong... I was just answering his question. I've accepted the fact, and I don't have any personal animosity expressed in my comment. So chill out a little bit and maybe you'll learn something about why environmentalists are losing.
Now, on to responding to you.
If I tell you to take off your hat, because it is on fire, you would accuse me of waging a culture war?!
Nope, but that's a broken metaphor. What many environmentalists do is more like telling people they should never wear a hat again because the one they've got on is on fire... And the people they're talking to really like hats.
Environmental activists, at least the most vocal of them, like to tell people that they have to live their lives a certain way - a way that people don't want to live - in order to solve the problem of climate change. The trouble is, that the problem can be solved other ways. Ways that are less disruptive to people's lifestyles (and people know that).
Keep in mind here, that all I'm trying to do is explain why some people refuse to believe that global warming exists. All that I'm saying can be summed up easily: People can sense hidden agendas, and they tend not to believe anything you say when they think you've got one.
Have you stopped to think that it is possible that they are fighting that cultural war because of climate change. If you accept that it is our actions that are causing global warming and destroying the planet then you really have no choice but to change those actions.
Yes, I have. That theory has to be dismissed as soon as you realize that those same people oppose solutions that would have the same effect on CO2 emissions, but not the same effect on people's lifestyles in general.
but if it is then I believe that the only real way to stop it will be tro recude consumption.
Stop believing and start thinking. There are ways to increase efficiency and to generate energy from non-fossil sources.
You find me a politican that will tell that to their elecorate.
Al Gore. Oh, wait... You probably want one that won by saying that... Tough luck there. It's hard to win people over by breaking bad news to them, especially when the bad news isn't even true. (I'm talking about the need for lifestyle change there) You won't find any record in human history of an entire civilization voluntarily reducing their quality of life without the looming threat of death in the *very* short term.
Perhaps you (by you I mean the stereotypical environmentalist) should stop branding the people with reasoned points of view... Oh, who am I kidding... Perhaps you should stop branding everybody who isn't 100% alligned with your hyper-idealistic world view as planet-haters, and then you wouldn't have to deal with the only people left standing up; the people who are just as fanatical, but on the other side of the issue.
Something tells me that if you're so hard up for a drive *now* that you are willing to blow $1000, and not wait for cheaper, more feature rich drives, you're putting it in a system that is solely designed for BluRay authoring...
It is a bad precedent to set
What a load of crap. They're not setting a precedent... They're just getting their drive out the door before everybody else. The CD part of the firmware probably wasn't done, and leaving it out probably shaved days off the release.
If you don't understand it, it probably isn't aimed at you.
What I'm also really curious about is why so many are so adamant about refusing to acknowledge what seems to be obvious
Easy. It's because most of the people who push for people to do something about it have unpalatable hidden agendas. For every person out there using global climate change as their stick to get you to live your life the way they think you should, you've got another who sees through their agenda and finds a way to believe they're lying about the climate change too.
You want people to believe the climate is changing? Stop using climate change as a weapon in a culture war.
With the crap most CD copy protection does, and how quickly it burns through drives, I wouldn't want to put CDs in this thing... Hell, for $1000, I wouldn't do *anything* with it that I could do with a cheaper drive...
Every Apple hardware issue can be enumerated on Slashdot, and they can keep up with a pace of one article every few months on average. Compared to experiences I've had with... well, let's say 'other vendors' to keep the fanboys at bay, Slashdot paints a pretty rosy picture of Apple.
As to the value on my drive, I based that on our ASP margin times the number of parts sold per day times the estimated lead on our competitor(s) we would lose should one of them get the design info on my machine.
While that's true of what they're saying in this article, some of the fastest hard drives available right now are 2.5" drives. Check out the Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147 SAS. Average seek of 3.6ms, sustained data rate of 93.3MB/sec... All in a nice little 2.5" package. Of course, the 147GB model sucks down 12 watts at idle, but that's the price you pay for performance. Size, however, is no longer a price you pay for performance.
The article says they're using it to search for things that lead them to the Inquirer.... not to MSDN. Perhaps the percentage would be even higher for MSDN?
Unless it's the location of $100M cash, or the instructions on how to access $100M cash, you certainly do not. Even then, it's probably not worth that much, since that much cash draws suspicion.
Any other data you may carry and percieve to be worth that much money is really only worth that much to the lawyers that prosecute your (or whoever steals your laptop's) ass if you try and do anything with it that makes you any money.
If we lost a notebook we could lose billions of dollars
Again, total bullshit. Doubly so because you phrased it as 'could lose'... The only possible exception there being that you have evidence describing how you illegaly obtained billions of dollars.
If being sexually assaulted results in being very wealthy for the rest of your life, that creates an enormous incentive to "be sexually assaulted". We shouldn't make such an incentive for false accusations. This is especially true since our justice system seems more interested in successfully prosecuting people, than making sure people are actually guilty.
If social gathering places are held responsible for laws broken by their patrons, every publically open business is going to be sued out of existance.
If people get financially compensated every time they do something that causes something bad to happen to them, we'll end up with a higher idiot count than we have even today.
Nope. It's just slashdot posters taking the story out of context. Go actually read the article and notice that it doesn't say anything about PC chips or microprocessors.
Do you think that 2.4Ghz digital transmission is generated by magic?
The problem isn't that the writer is incompetent, it's that he assumed his readers weren't.
Didn't you ever think that if you had a digital signal entering your cell phone at 2.4 Ghz, you'd need a transistor in there that could switch at least that fast? You realize that there are other types of chips than microprocessors, right?
The quotes in that CNet article are both nebulous and posturing. I'm sure he said those things to put some business pressure on the two sides to work towards unifying the format. Remember, there was one last push for unification around the time the article came out.
Since Samsung, LG, and Acer all announced that they would ship dual format players back in March (three months after that CNet article), the only reason to cite that CNet article is if you're not paying attention, or you're trolling. If you're not paying attention, how did you find that CNet article...
The big difference between Thief 3 and the earlier titles (and this is true of many games coming out in the last 2-3 years), is that they removed any degree of freedom that could allow the player to alter the path to the next objective.
This new Thief was made for players that like getting carried through the game like it's a movie with buttons (marketing morons call these people mainstream gamers. It's the 'gamers' part that they have wrong). The first two were made for players that enjoy the possibility that they can screw up or leave the beaten path. It used to be that if you could find some other way to do something in a game, be it easier or harder, you could. This wasn't something coded into the game, it was something they left out of the code. These new types include enforcment requiring you to complete tasks in sequence and using the methods that the developers have decided is best.
Personally, I believe that a game can be made is such a way that satisfies both types of players, but maybe producers have lost the will to attempt that, or we've completed the transition from games being art to games being cookie-cutter creations created by formula by coffee-fueled robots. Or maybe we've gotten to the point where game producers have gotten so egotistical that they *know* what the best way for you to play the game is, and it must be enforced...
For other recent examples of this phenomenon (sometimes refered too as dumbing-down, or consolification), see TES4: Oblivion, HoMM5, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
You lost me. You were talking about a harmless prank, then something 'really nasty', but it still sounded like a harmless prank to me.
Also, NPR seems like an odd source to focus on in this criticism. If anything, they provide more critical, factually based coverage than any other (non-print) US news outlet. In other words, they're better than just about everyone else in the US media.
I don't disagree that they are some of the best available in the US (and to the parent's point, in my locality BBC news is only available via the NPR station on my car radio). That doesn't mean we should lay off the criticism. Being the best available doesn't mean that they're the best they can be.
I feel even more entitled to complain since, unlike those other news outlets, I pay for it out of my pocket directly.
It could be argued that looking at who they choose to ask the hard questions to, and who they let off the hook reveals a bit of bias, but that is another argument for another time...
I'm shocked that NPR aired this. I understand giving airing sides of an argument, but this is nothing but lies.
NPR's segments like this (they have one every few weeks) always have one (or both) sides lying out their ass. You probably just noticed this time because you actually have a deep understanding of the issue. I listen to NPR news pretty much constantly, and I'm frequently bothered by what they try to pass as 'balance'. They go so far out of their way to present 'both sides' of an issue that they frequently fail to realize that one side is either completely full of crap, or a total crackpot.
Perhaps they think that airing this guy's lies will let people see that he's full of it... But I don't think enough people are knowledgeable enough about the subject to realize it.
Watch any left-wing vs right-wing argument, you will see that this is often the basis. The lefty will shout about stats and graphs, and the righty will call him a biased liar.
By your assessment, and judging by your other Slashdot posts, you must be all the way to the right then?
And all I am saying is: that is your problem. Particularly, specifically, your problem. [...] You refusal to deal with reality, again because you find the message distasteful
Learn to read. Seriously. Go take a class or something. I'm sick of this crap where you try to agree with somebody in principle and have a sensible discussion about the politics of the issue, and it turns into an attack. You are the problem. You are the reason why there are people who don't take the issue seriously.
If you applied an ounce of reason and sense to your analysis, you would see that I completely agree with you, and am only saying that you could better present your case to win more people over to your cause. But, because you decided to get emotionally involved in the discussion before engaging your brain you went on the attack.
You are the person that is failing to deal with reality. The reality is that the climate is changing, and most people aren't going to do a damned thing about it until people like you shut up for a second and listen when people try to teach you how to be persuasive instead of being a fucking prick.
What on Earth has this to do with the data? We are discussing data about global warming, not what do do about it.
You truly are a complete moron.
What I was responding to was the following:
What I'm also really curious about is why so many are so adamant about refusing to acknowledge what seems to be obvious, but that's a task for psychologists and philosophers I suppose.
To try desperately to deny global warming actually exists because you don't like what some people are saying has to be done about it is not logical or rational.
What the hell does that have to do with anything? I was neither trying to argue that it doesn't exist, nor that denying it was rational. I was merely trying to answer a serious question.
Your attitude is counter productive.
First, for the record, I am under no delusions that climate change isn't occuring. I'm not disagreeing with the parent poster, I'm not calling anybody wrong... I was just answering his question. I've accepted the fact, and I don't have any personal animosity expressed in my comment. So chill out a little bit and maybe you'll learn something about why environmentalists are losing.
Now, on to responding to you.
If I tell you to take off your hat, because it is on fire, you would accuse me of waging a culture war?!
Nope, but that's a broken metaphor. What many environmentalists do is more like telling people they should never wear a hat again because the one they've got on is on fire... And the people they're talking to really like hats.
Environmental activists, at least the most vocal of them, like to tell people that they have to live their lives a certain way - a way that people don't want to live - in order to solve the problem of climate change. The trouble is, that the problem can be solved other ways. Ways that are less disruptive to people's lifestyles (and people know that).
Keep in mind here, that all I'm trying to do is explain why some people refuse to believe that global warming exists. All that I'm saying can be summed up easily: People can sense hidden agendas, and they tend not to believe anything you say when they think you've got one.
Have you stopped to think that it is possible that they are fighting that cultural war because of climate change. If you accept that it is our actions that are causing global warming and destroying the planet then you really have no choice but to change those actions.
Yes, I have. That theory has to be dismissed as soon as you realize that those same people oppose solutions that would have the same effect on CO2 emissions, but not the same effect on people's lifestyles in general.
but if it is then I believe that the only real way to stop it will be tro recude consumption.
Stop believing and start thinking. There are ways to increase efficiency and to generate energy from non-fossil sources.
You find me a politican that will tell that to their elecorate.
Al Gore. Oh, wait... You probably want one that won by saying that... Tough luck there. It's hard to win people over by breaking bad news to them, especially when the bad news isn't even true. (I'm talking about the need for lifestyle change there) You won't find any record in human history of an entire civilization voluntarily reducing their quality of life without the looming threat of death in the *very* short term.
Perhaps you (by you I mean the stereotypical environmentalist) should stop branding the people with reasoned points of view... Oh, who am I kidding... Perhaps you should stop branding everybody who isn't 100% alligned with your hyper-idealistic world view as planet-haters, and then you wouldn't have to deal with the only people left standing up; the people who are just as fanatical, but on the other side of the issue.
Something tells me that if you're so hard up for a drive *now* that you are willing to blow $1000, and not wait for cheaper, more feature rich drives, you're putting it in a system that is solely designed for BluRay authoring...
It is a bad precedent to set
What a load of crap. They're not setting a precedent... They're just getting their drive out the door before everybody else. The CD part of the firmware probably wasn't done, and leaving it out probably shaved days off the release.
If you don't understand it, it probably isn't aimed at you.
What I'm also really curious about is why so many are so adamant about refusing to acknowledge what seems to be obvious
Easy. It's because most of the people who push for people to do something about it have unpalatable hidden agendas. For every person out there using global climate change as their stick to get you to live your life the way they think you should, you've got another who sees through their agenda and finds a way to believe they're lying about the climate change too.
You want people to believe the climate is changing? Stop using climate change as a weapon in a culture war.
Incidentally, you can get a CD burner for less than a Blu-Ray blank for this thing.
Why no love for DVD-RAM?
Licensing fees.
With the crap most CD copy protection does, and how quickly it burns through drives, I wouldn't want to put CDs in this thing... Hell, for $1000, I wouldn't do *anything* with it that I could do with a cheaper drive...
Every Apple hardware issue can be enumerated on Slashdot, and they can keep up with a pace of one article every few months on average. Compared to experiences I've had with... well, let's say 'other vendors' to keep the fanboys at bay, Slashdot paints a pretty rosy picture of Apple.
You're right... That's the wrong model.
I can't find the 2.5 inch model on their website, but they exist... There are plenty of news stories about them, and I've got one here.
As to the value on my drive, I based that on our ASP margin times the number of parts sold per day times the estimated lead on our competitor(s) we would lose should one of them get the design info on my machine.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions.
While that's true of what they're saying in this article, some of the fastest hard drives available right now are 2.5" drives. Check out the Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147 SAS. Average seek of 3.6ms, sustained data rate of 93.3MB/sec... All in a nice little 2.5" package. Of course, the 147GB model sucks down 12 watts at idle, but that's the price you pay for performance. Size, however, is no longer a price you pay for performance.
The article says they're using it to search for things that lead them to the Inquirer.... not to MSDN. Perhaps the percentage would be even higher for MSDN?
Shit, the data on mine is worth ~$75-100M.
Unless it's the location of $100M cash, or the instructions on how to access $100M cash, you certainly do not. Even then, it's probably not worth that much, since that much cash draws suspicion.
Any other data you may carry and percieve to be worth that much money is really only worth that much to the lawyers that prosecute your (or whoever steals your laptop's) ass if you try and do anything with it that makes you any money.
If we lost a notebook we could lose billions of dollars
Again, total bullshit. Doubly so because you phrased it as 'could lose'... The only possible exception there being that you have evidence describing how you illegaly obtained billions of dollars.
There are tons of reasons she has to lose...
If being sexually assaulted results in being very wealthy for the rest of your life, that creates an enormous incentive to "be sexually assaulted". We shouldn't make such an incentive for false accusations. This is especially true since our justice system seems more interested in successfully prosecuting people, than making sure people are actually guilty.
If social gathering places are held responsible for laws broken by their patrons, every publically open business is going to be sued out of existance.
If people get financially compensated every time they do something that causes something bad to happen to them, we'll end up with a higher idiot count than we have even today.
Nope. It's just slashdot posters taking the story out of context. Go actually read the article and notice that it doesn't say anything about PC chips or microprocessors.
Do you think that 2.4Ghz digital transmission is generated by magic?
The problem isn't that the writer is incompetent, it's that he assumed his readers weren't.
Didn't you ever think that if you had a digital signal entering your cell phone at 2.4 Ghz, you'd need a transistor in there that could switch at least that fast? You realize that there are other types of chips than microprocessors, right?
The quotes in that CNet article are both nebulous and posturing. I'm sure he said those things to put some business pressure on the two sides to work towards unifying the format. Remember, there was one last push for unification around the time the article came out.
Since Samsung, LG, and Acer all announced that they would ship dual format players back in March (three months after that CNet article), the only reason to cite that CNet article is if you're not paying attention, or you're trolling. If you're not paying attention, how did you find that CNet article...
You're aware, right, that this never happened, and two other vendors (Acer and LG) have announced dual-format readers too?
I'm so sick of this troll. Can we put this to rest please?
The big difference between Thief 3 and the earlier titles (and this is true of many games coming out in the last 2-3 years), is that they removed any degree of freedom that could allow the player to alter the path to the next objective.
This new Thief was made for players that like getting carried through the game like it's a movie with buttons (marketing morons call these people mainstream gamers. It's the 'gamers' part that they have wrong). The first two were made for players that enjoy the possibility that they can screw up or leave the beaten path. It used to be that if you could find some other way to do something in a game, be it easier or harder, you could. This wasn't something coded into the game, it was something they left out of the code. These new types include enforcment requiring you to complete tasks in sequence and using the methods that the developers have decided is best.
Personally, I believe that a game can be made is such a way that satisfies both types of players, but maybe producers have lost the will to attempt that, or we've completed the transition from games being art to games being cookie-cutter creations created by formula by coffee-fueled robots. Or maybe we've gotten to the point where game producers have gotten so egotistical that they *know* what the best way for you to play the game is, and it must be enforced...
For other recent examples of this phenomenon (sometimes refered too as dumbing-down, or consolification), see TES4: Oblivion, HoMM5, etc...