So your point is you would ignore the list, so it shouldn't be available to anyone?
I should have spent a touch more time editing the post, but I had to head out. It's more along the lines that I think the list would be counterproductive to the goals of those producing the rating system. Much like how they had to adjust those 'FYI' type radars that tell you how fast you're going in an attempt to slow you down, because people ended up using them as high-score boards.
Generating controversy is how games like GTA, Postal or Redneck Rampage try to generate sales, and all you'd do is give them more tools to generate said controversy(and headlines) to sell product.
The USA already has a game rating system, and from what I've heard only the smallest fraction of a percent of parents use it, being perfectly happy to buy the latest GTA for their pre-teen. Those that WOULD pay attention to the ratings are normally paying more attention to the box and reviews - which gives them a better idea of what's going on in the game than a simple 'Violence: 4' would give. Violence is one thing, but context of said violence matters(at least to my parents) more than it's sheer existence. It might sound strange, but fighting Nazis is seen as better than fighting AS a Nazi, much less a sandbox criminal violence like seen in GTA.
Why mention Australia? Because the moment you pass a rating system there will be calls to ban the 'worst' ratings. For that matter, that a game, being interactive, can present vastly different experiences depending on settings and play styles.
Finally, you ignored my example of a game set in the civil war - how would you rate a game that dedicates your character to opposing said 'bad things'?
Going by your list, as fey000 pointed out, I'd either ignore your 'scores' or even intentionally look for those with the most negative scores.
Australia has one of the nastier government controls on games - many games to be shipped to Australia have to have their 'blood' replaced by purple stuff, have parts of the storyline removed, etc...
What's really big in Australia's gaming community? Importing NON-Australia based games, patching to US versions, etc...
If I'm after a bit of the good old ultra-violence, I'm going to get it. Besides, there have been numerous studies that shows that violent video games DO NOT LEAD TO REAL-WORLD VIOLENCE, especially outside of laboratories using very young children and very short observation periods.
Another problem with such a rating system is - consider if we want to make a historically accurate and educational game involving the US Civil War. I can see the game getting bonuses for that, right along with - Racism, Sexism, Indoctrination, politically driven agenda, even even they are depicted in as negative fashion as possible while remaining historically accurate!
I'm not that great on pseudocode and such, but I think you'd need to somehow put a test in there to check for dialogue, period.
No women in the game? What if there are no people, such as games like tetris and bejewelled? What if they never speak? Heck, what about some of the DOOM games where the only human present is a guy, yes, but he hardly ever speaks?
You probably live in Europe then... 240V to every outlet can be handy sometimes. Though a properly insulated kettle would be interesting.
Though I wonder how that compares efficiency wise with my covering the pot when warming it up and using an induction burner. Or the insulated crock pot, for that matter.
A pressure cooker can do all sorts of amazing things, but there's a reason I said boiling pasta, it's my understanding that you use a pressure cooker to avoid boiling things.;)
Now that one surprises me. I do have an electric range/oven, and I would have thought that pan-frying would use less electricity than baking - especially since I'm usually baking for at least 30 minutes, whereas cooking in a pan can often be done in 20 minutes or less.
It's two factors: Frying is normally done at higher temperatures than baking, which is why it's faster, but you're also tossing a LOT of heat into the air, which is part of why you normally have a ventilation fan on while you're doing it. The second is indeed that a oven is normally very good at heat retention, reducing power usage.
Boiling pasta is actually one of the worst things you can do in a standard kitchen as far as energy efficiency goes.
No, you'd run a couple nuclear plants to provide the baseload.
For backup in cases where the power might have to be provided for a couple weeks at a time, but only for about that long a year, I'd take a serious look at biomass.
Store up enough wood chips and such and you don't need to burn wood/gas to cover an outage. Have an equivalent of Fairbank's BESS to provide power for long enough to get it fired up.
Sure, a Gigawatt power plant, whether coal or nuclear, takes loads of maintenance. Thing is, they also produce so much more power that merely sending somebody by once a year to glance that the greed led is still softly glowing is more maintenance per watt.
Sure, they're hooking them up to computerized monitoring now, but that increases install costs and you still have to send somebody out to fix stuff when it does go wrong. It rarely does, but I remember reading somewhere that something like 10% of home installs are producing seriously under design due to an undiscovered problem.
As for cutting electricity usage on the extreme end: Insulate house more. Replace windows Replace Refrigerator with new energy star unit, even if the old one was ES too, standards have improved tremendously. Get one of the ones with the freezer on the bottom - they're the most efficient. Switch to line drying, or get a dehumidifier type dryer. I know we're slashdotters, but turn off the computer if you're not on it. Install an energy efficient micro-server for the torrents, webserver and such. Audit your lights - can you get away with 800 lumens where you currently have 1200? Bake more instead of frying. Turn off the oven in the last few minutes.
On October 31, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit blocked the order requiring changes to the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk program and removed Judge Shira Scheindlin from the case.[27][28][29] On November 9, 2013, the city asked a federal appeals court to vacate Scheindlin's orders.[30][31] On November 22, 2013, the federal appellate court rejected the city's motion for a stay of the judge's orders.[32] Although the appellate court rejected the city's motion for a stay, the case still continues.
Summary: The appeals court vacated the requirement for immediate cessation of the program, but didn't actually get rid of the orders to reform it into something constitutional.
That was the GP's concern, Opportunist flipped it and I responded to that.
The police showing up and taking ALL the IT equipment when they only need the servers is not that likely of a problem even in the USA. Such a confiscation would require reaching though multiple jurisdictions, at which point an office with a clue is likely to get involved and realize that seizing the servers of a reasonably legit cloud company is more than a pain in the butt than working with them to pull what really matters out - the data.
Server racks have been stable in power usage for quite a while. Generally speaking, if they cut the power consumption per 'X' computational measure(flops, CPUs, memory, etc...) in half they'll simply double the density of that computational measure.
Besides, you're probably looking at a 3-7 year upgrade cycle on these racks. I'm sure they don't want to touch them too often.
If it's a proper cloud system the loss of any one node is pretty much expected to be a regular occurrence and automatically compensated for. That's why it's 'cloud', IE you don't care where the servers are, and no accident in any one area of the world should shut you down.
Besides confiscation by government officials you also have backhoes through the fiber, power losses, building accidents/flooding, etc...
Actually, that's closer to three times that of US rates. You're paying double what I am, and I'm in one of the most expensive regions of the country for electricity. Average in the USA is around 12 cents a kwh. That's about.1€
Yeah, there are reasons why I tend to call such types 'statists', because they see the government as the solution to 'everything'. The only difference ends up being their stated reasons.
Then eventually the case is thrown out when it's revealed that the officer's 'gun sense' has a 99.9% false positive rate. Besides, there's enough CCW licenses out there today that a gun printing isn't a reason to search somebody without other suspicion of a crime.
The wee-dsmelling client goes to fucking jail.
Yup, then later wins a $100k or so settlement. The citizen is happy because he got money, the police are happy that they got to pad their arrest stats, and the only ones screwed are the taxpayers.
From what I've seen, violent types will seek violence, gun or no gun. There may be something to the idea that allowing them to play out violent fantasies on a computer is catharic enough to reduce real world violence(and who cares how many digital mooks that have to 'die' in the process).
What guns tend to do is increase the consequences of the violence. Complicating matters is how do you differentiate people who have guns as recreation -hunting, target shooting, and such, and those that have them as a criminal trade tool?
Sadly, we have to do these or long held 'common' beliefs never get challenged even when they're wrong, and we'd still be believing witches and such cause disease.
ps: can special purpose hardware exist if general purpose hardware doesn't?
Yes it can. After all the first 'computers' were dedicated code-breakers and such.
However, there are many different levels of 'general purpose' or 'specialized'. Earlier 'cars' were mentioned as 'general purpose', but think about it, they're actually pretty specialized - they're generally designed for a max of 4-6 passengers, carry maybe a couple hundred pounds of cargo besides the passengers, drive mostly on paved roads, have a range of somewhere between 300 and 400 miles, etc... But within that you have various categories that specialize further - fewer passengers, cargo, more fuel efficient. More luxury or cheaper. Better off-road capability, more cargo space. Faster. So on and so forth.
Such pieces as the op are good from the 'think about it' perspective, but your average computer is already a mess of specialized processors. The CPU is only 'general purpose' in the sense that it's supposed to coordinate between all of them. Anything that happens frequently enough or is expensive enough has it's own dedicated unit. Graphics. Northbridge, southbridge, networking, USB, I/O in general, etc...
"and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There have indeed been some limited searching without a warrant authorized, but even 'probable cause' is very limited without one.
But yeah, I didn't go deep enough; the best way I can put it is that 'I didn't want to write a book'.
I was just countering the idea that police only needed warrants for 'unreasonable' searches, which actually aren't supposed to be issued if that is indeed the case, so you need a warrant even for reasonable searches, because the warrant is part of the process for determining reasonableness.
Being turned down for a warrant or deciding to do a search without one because you know you wouldn't get it is a sign that the search wouldn't be reasonable.
COMPLETELY free of unreasonable searches implies that you are not completely free of reasonable searches. That's why the cop can frisk you if he smells weed.
Actually no. He technically needs a warrant to search you. IE he needs to convince a judge that his smelling of you is evidence enough that you're carrying an illegal substance to justify a reasonable search. The officer does not get to decide this himself, even if judges are often rubber-stamps.
Frisking people without a warrant is actually limited to 'officer safety', IE they're technically looking for weapons and such, though it was determined that other things discovered during that search would be admissible.
Then they started searching cell phones during such stops, it's currently working it's way through the courts because you're not going to find a weapon in a phone's memory...
Slashdot Mirror
So your point is you would ignore the list, so it shouldn't be available to anyone?
I should have spent a touch more time editing the post, but I had to head out. It's more along the lines that I think the list would be counterproductive to the goals of those producing the rating system. Much like how they had to adjust those 'FYI' type radars that tell you how fast you're going in an attempt to slow you down, because people ended up using them as high-score boards.
Generating controversy is how games like GTA, Postal or Redneck Rampage try to generate sales, and all you'd do is give them more tools to generate said controversy(and headlines) to sell product.
The USA already has a game rating system, and from what I've heard only the smallest fraction of a percent of parents use it, being perfectly happy to buy the latest GTA for their pre-teen. Those that WOULD pay attention to the ratings are normally paying more attention to the box and reviews - which gives them a better idea of what's going on in the game than a simple 'Violence: 4' would give. Violence is one thing, but context of said violence matters(at least to my parents) more than it's sheer existence. It might sound strange, but fighting Nazis is seen as better than fighting AS a Nazi, much less a sandbox criminal violence like seen in GTA.
Why mention Australia? Because the moment you pass a rating system there will be calls to ban the 'worst' ratings. For that matter, that a game, being interactive, can present vastly different experiences depending on settings and play styles.
Finally, you ignored my example of a game set in the civil war - how would you rate a game that dedicates your character to opposing said 'bad things'?
And an overall aggregate score
Going by your list, as fey000 pointed out, I'd either ignore your 'scores' or even intentionally look for those with the most negative scores.
Australia has one of the nastier government controls on games - many games to be shipped to Australia have to have their 'blood' replaced by purple stuff, have parts of the storyline removed, etc...
What's really big in Australia's gaming community? Importing NON-Australia based games, patching to US versions, etc...
If I'm after a bit of the good old ultra-violence, I'm going to get it. Besides, there have been numerous studies that shows that violent video games DO NOT LEAD TO REAL-WORLD VIOLENCE, especially outside of laboratories using very young children and very short observation periods.
Another problem with such a rating system is - consider if we want to make a historically accurate and educational game involving the US Civil War. I can see the game getting bonuses for that, right along with - Racism, Sexism, Indoctrination, politically driven agenda, even even they are depicted in as negative fashion as possible while remaining historically accurate!
I'm not that great on pseudocode and such, but I think you'd need to somehow put a test in there to check for dialogue, period.
No women in the game? What if there are no people, such as games like tetris and bejewelled? What if they never speak? Heck, what about some of the DOOM games where the only human present is a guy, yes, but he hardly ever speaks?
In skyscrapers? Suicides probably factor in. Also not wanting to disturb all the residents of the various level of the tower.
You probably live in Europe then... 240V to every outlet can be handy sometimes. Though a properly insulated kettle would be interesting.
Though I wonder how that compares efficiency wise with my covering the pot when warming it up and using an induction burner. Or the insulated crock pot, for that matter.
A pressure cooker can do all sorts of amazing things, but there's a reason I said boiling pasta, it's my understanding that you use a pressure cooker to avoid boiling things. ;)
Now that one surprises me. I do have an electric range/oven, and I would have thought that pan-frying would use less electricity than baking - especially since I'm usually baking for at least 30 minutes, whereas cooking in a pan can often be done in 20 minutes or less.
It's two factors: Frying is normally done at higher temperatures than baking, which is why it's faster, but you're also tossing a LOT of heat into the air, which is part of why you normally have a ventilation fan on while you're doing it. The second is indeed that a oven is normally very good at heat retention, reducing power usage.
Boiling pasta is actually one of the worst things you can do in a standard kitchen as far as energy efficiency goes.
No, you'd run a couple nuclear plants to provide the baseload.
For backup in cases where the power might have to be provided for a couple weeks at a time, but only for about that long a year, I'd take a serious look at biomass.
Store up enough wood chips and such and you don't need to burn wood/gas to cover an outage. Have an equivalent of Fairbank's BESS to provide power for long enough to get it fired up.
Sure, a Gigawatt power plant, whether coal or nuclear, takes loads of maintenance. Thing is, they also produce so much more power that merely sending somebody by once a year to glance that the greed led is still softly glowing is more maintenance per watt.
Sure, they're hooking them up to computerized monitoring now, but that increases install costs and you still have to send somebody out to fix stuff when it does go wrong. It rarely does, but I remember reading somewhere that something like 10% of home installs are producing seriously under design due to an undiscovered problem.
Alaska here. A touch over 20 cents/kwh.
As for cutting electricity usage on the extreme end:
Insulate house more. Replace windows
Replace Refrigerator with new energy star unit, even if the old one was ES too, standards have improved tremendously. Get one of the ones with the freezer on the bottom - they're the most efficient.
Switch to line drying, or get a dehumidifier type dryer.
I know we're slashdotters, but turn off the computer if you're not on it. Install an energy efficient micro-server for the torrents, webserver and such.
Audit your lights - can you get away with 800 lumens where you currently have 1200?
Bake more instead of frying. Turn off the oven in the last few minutes.
Maybe one of you considered without taxes? :)
my figure was with the various regulatory fees and taxes. Makes it even worse if kuldan didn't include them.
A being able to bike to work is a luxury... ;)
Huh, that's not what wikipedia is saying:
On October 31, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit blocked the order requiring changes to the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk program and removed Judge Shira Scheindlin from the case.[27][28][29] On November 9, 2013, the city asked a federal appeals court to vacate Scheindlin's orders.[30][31] On November 22, 2013, the federal appellate court rejected the city's motion for a stay of the judge's orders.[32] Although the appellate court rejected the city's motion for a stay, the case still continues.
Summary: The appeals court vacated the requirement for immediate cessation of the program, but didn't actually get rid of the orders to reform it into something constitutional.
By the time you're allowed to take your laptop out, you practically need to put it away anyway.
None of my flights are that quick. I'm driving if the travel distance is that short.
That was the GP's concern, Opportunist flipped it and I responded to that.
The police showing up and taking ALL the IT equipment when they only need the servers is not that likely of a problem even in the USA. Such a confiscation would require reaching though multiple jurisdictions, at which point an office with a clue is likely to get involved and realize that seizing the servers of a reasonably legit cloud company is more than a pain in the butt than working with them to pull what really matters out - the data.
Server racks have been stable in power usage for quite a while. Generally speaking, if they cut the power consumption per 'X' computational measure(flops, CPUs, memory, etc...) in half they'll simply double the density of that computational measure.
Besides, you're probably looking at a 3-7 year upgrade cycle on these racks. I'm sure they don't want to touch them too often.
If it's a proper cloud system the loss of any one node is pretty much expected to be a regular occurrence and automatically compensated for. That's why it's 'cloud', IE you don't care where the servers are, and no accident in any one area of the world should shut you down.
Besides confiscation by government officials you also have backhoes through the fiber, power losses, building accidents/flooding, etc...
Showers at work are an under-appreciated luxury.
Actually, that's closer to three times that of US rates. You're paying double what I am, and I'm in one of the most expensive regions of the country for electricity. Average in the USA is around 12 cents a kwh. That's about .1€
Yeah, there are reasons why I tend to call such types 'statists', because they see the government as the solution to 'everything'. The only difference ends up being their stated reasons.
there was a gun-like bulge in his pants
Then eventually the case is thrown out when it's revealed that the officer's 'gun sense' has a 99.9% false positive rate. Besides, there's enough CCW licenses out there today that a gun printing isn't a reason to search somebody without other suspicion of a crime.
The wee-dsmelling client goes to fucking jail.
Yup, then later wins a $100k or so settlement. The citizen is happy because he got money, the police are happy that they got to pad their arrest stats, and the only ones screwed are the taxpayers.
Probably negative in both cases.
From what I've seen, violent types will seek violence, gun or no gun. There may be something to the idea that allowing them to play out violent fantasies on a computer is catharic enough to reduce real world violence(and who cares how many digital mooks that have to 'die' in the process).
What guns tend to do is increase the consequences of the violence. Complicating matters is how do you differentiate people who have guns as recreation -hunting, target shooting, and such, and those that have them as a criminal trade tool?
Sadly, we have to do these or long held 'common' beliefs never get challenged even when they're wrong, and we'd still be believing witches and such cause disease.
ps: can special purpose hardware exist if general purpose hardware doesn't?
Yes it can. After all the first 'computers' were dedicated code-breakers and such.
However, there are many different levels of 'general purpose' or 'specialized'. Earlier 'cars' were mentioned as 'general purpose', but think about it, they're actually pretty specialized - they're generally designed for a max of 4-6 passengers, carry maybe a couple hundred pounds of cargo besides the passengers, drive mostly on paved roads, have a range of somewhere between 300 and 400 miles, etc... But within that you have various categories that specialize further - fewer passengers, cargo, more fuel efficient. More luxury or cheaper. Better off-road capability, more cargo space. Faster. So on and so forth.
Such pieces as the op are good from the 'think about it' perspective, but your average computer is already a mess of specialized processors. The CPU is only 'general purpose' in the sense that it's supposed to coordinate between all of them. Anything that happens frequently enough or is expensive enough has it's own dedicated unit. Graphics. Northbridge, southbridge, networking, USB, I/O in general, etc...
"and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There have indeed been some limited searching without a warrant authorized, but even 'probable cause' is very limited without one.
But yeah, I didn't go deep enough; the best way I can put it is that 'I didn't want to write a book'.
I was just countering the idea that police only needed warrants for 'unreasonable' searches, which actually aren't supposed to be issued if that is indeed the case, so you need a warrant even for reasonable searches, because the warrant is part of the process for determining reasonableness.
Being turned down for a warrant or deciding to do a search without one because you know you wouldn't get it is a sign that the search wouldn't be reasonable.
COMPLETELY free of unreasonable searches implies that you are not completely free of reasonable searches. That's why the cop can frisk you if he smells weed.
Actually no. He technically needs a warrant to search you. IE he needs to convince a judge that his smelling of you is evidence enough that you're carrying an illegal substance to justify a reasonable search. The officer does not get to decide this himself, even if judges are often rubber-stamps.
Frisking people without a warrant is actually limited to 'officer safety', IE they're technically looking for weapons and such, though it was determined that other things discovered during that search would be admissible.
Then they started searching cell phones during such stops, it's currently working it's way through the courts because you're not going to find a weapon in a phone's memory...