That our government - like most Western governments - is firmly in the grasp of big business, and no longer really represents the will or interests of the people. Welcome to the "Illusion of Democracy". Government seems to consistently represent the interests of corporations over the interests of the people, at least at the Federal level.
Oh great. Now my country is exporting good old-fashioned American Passive Fatalism to our northern neighbor, too.
Lately, the telecom companies have started hinting that they might start charging for optimal delivery. That is that CNN's website, having paid for premium delivery with your ISP, will have 8x the bandwidth available to you as, for instance, youtube.
I don't see anything wrong with that.
What I would find troubling would be if my ISP throttled YouTube down to 1/8x the effective bandwidth they previously had available, because they DIDN'T pony up a "premium delivery fee". That's protection money, and would surely run the ISP afoul of existing racketeering laws.
[Net neutrality] dictates that all traffic must be treated equally.
Which, knowing the way laws get written, would make it illegal for the ISP to traffic-shape so that your VOIP packets get priority over some kid's warez torrents, too.
I read somewhere that the Japanese (I think) used to do this at musical instrument trade shows, by wearing a 1 cm square tie tack and taking photos of each other holding instruments. They could get the dimensions of the instrument from the photos that way, and make great cheap knock-offs.
I would have to consider at least some parts of this story to be apocryphal -- there's a lot more factors involved in making a good knock-off of a musical instrument than building at an exactly 1:1 scale.
And honestly, if they wanted to copy an instrument design, a much easier way would be to buy one of the instruments at retail, and then meticulously reverse-engineer it to the micron back in the lab.
I want the RIAA to jack prices through the roof. Our wonderful market economy would then allow indie record companies and artists to undercut the "cartel".
If music were a fungible good, that would be happening already. There's no reason for a major-label CD to cost $18 at FYE when the indie guys can sell a CD at half the price and make a (small) profit.
But music ISN'T fungible. A consumer who wants to own a copy of Johnny Big Star's latest hit isn't going to settle for Steve Nobody's record instead, just because it's cheaper.
I ran into one in Final Fantasy VII - I made it most of the way through the game, and was on the way to fight Sephiroth... when I ran out of money and potions, and I'd used the Moogle just far enough that I couldn't make it back to the shop. So, I was kind of screwed.
I had a similar experience with Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, on the Gameboy Advance. I played all the way through this RPG, having a great time, and then found myself in the final battle without enough attack points to defeat the enemy, even after a solid half hour of the same combo-attack/counter/replenish-HP sequence over and over again. So I gave up.
I suppose if I were to step back from the final battle and spend a couple days leveling up battling small enemies, I'd get powerful enough to unlock the ending of the game eventually. But why would I do that? Grinding isn't fun!
Try using cheat codes to get past the Grim Reaper in the original Castlevania. There aren't any!
Unless you have a Game Genie, and what dedicated NES gamer didn't? I even imported mine from Canada, because the US release was held up by Nintendo filing a lawsuit to block it.
why can't slashdot let us have like any sane site? HTML has these tags for a reason.
And that reason is that the HTML spec developers thought that document authors would want to give more than half a second's consideration to the semantic structure of a document as it was being authored. Sadly, the WYSIWYG paradigm had already taken root, and authors found it easier to use the same vanilla quote marks they'd been typing in word processors for fifteen years than to learn about and use inline "q" tags.
Does anybody remember the post-9/11 homeland security debacle with Tom Ridge reccomending people use duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect themselves from terrorists.. and then several people dying by asphyxiating themselves in their own homes?
No, because that never happened.
I see a lot of resources warning that such deaths COULD occur if someone were to follow DHS's idiotic recommendations, but no accounts of any deaths actually occuring. It's an urban legend.
whatever moron phoned in a litebrite as a "bomb" (and the corresponding police moron who agreed with him) should be looking at potential liability.
Not if they were acting in good faith when they treated the device as though it might have been a bomb. And it would be practically impossible to prove that either of them was acting in bad faith.
Hopefully everything just learns something from the incident, and we all move on.
seriously not joking, the differences [between Gamecube and Wii hardware] are so small it wouldnt even be worth calling it a major refresh.
Similarly, the differences between You and A Bozo are virtually indiscernible.
I would have thought we could have moved beyond these "LameCube 1.5" canards by now, considering how little confirmed information there is about the specifications of the Wii's Broadway CPU and Hollywood GPU. I think it's fair to say that Nintendo was more concerned with power consumption than raw performance when these chips were being designed, but I don't know that any fair, quantitative comparison between the new chips and their predecessors exists or has been made public.
It's not that someone couldn't develop a portable console that could compete with the Nintendo DS. It's that nobody seems to have the sense to do it right.
Hey. The PSP may not be crushing Nintendo in the handheld market, and likely never will, but it IS at least competitive. Sony got it at least partially right there.
The biggest issue here is that [EA Mobile and Gameloft] both have experience with mobile phone game development. I doubt they have the skill set necessary to develop games on the level of what's seen for the DS or PSP.
I'm not so sure about that. They both have ties to full-sizeconsole/handheld developers, from whom they could presumably call in reinforcements if a more expansive gaming experience is called for. Gameloft (a subsidiary of Ubisoft) has even developed Gameboy Advance games in the past.
No one is likely to see the N-Gage as anything other than an overgrown mobile phone.
And that might be okay, if both Nokia and consumers accept it for what it is. Much like the Treo and Blackberry have carved out a niche for the phone that's also a PDA, or Apple's forthcoming phone that's also an iPod, there may be a market for a product that strikes a balance between mobile phone and gaming device.
One requisite, if the cell phone/handheld gaming platform is going to be a success, is networked play. What's the point of having a GPRS radio built into your game machine if the game isn't going to send and receive data over it?
There was absolutely nothing I could do to make the system run it. Oh sure, the system could be upgraded with a new processor, memory, hard drive or whatever, but no upgrade would allow [my beige G3 Mac to run OS X 10.2].
I feel ya, brother. I mean, I'm trying to get Vista Home Edition to run on my 486DX2/66, and it just won't, no matter which components I upgrade!
Appending means they're being tacked onto the end. If they're being added at the beginning, they're being prepended.
According to a couple of dictionaries I consulted, "prepend" is not a recognized word, and "append" refers to adding or attachment without regard to where.
I propose that "append" was adopted by the computing community to mean a specific type of data transformation where the new addition was placed at the end of the existing data, and "prepend" was a neologism invented to describe the opposite type.
Of course without any evidence to back this story up, Slashdot could probably now be sued by ThePlanet for libel.
Nope, Slashdot could only lose a libel suit if they had evidence that they KNEW this story was a fabrication, but published it anyway. Taking the submitter at his word, for better or worse, gives Slashdot protection from charges of libel.
Then again, this same "protection" explains why the news media calls LED advertisements "hoax bomb devices" and vectors tales about Barack Obama attending a Muslim school in Indonesia. If they do any research, they could bring liability upon themselves.
Something as simple of 15~20 minutes of overtime (why does the boss call at 4:58PM for a chat about an e-mail I sent at 9AM) every week over a few years can leave a company with massive fines.
Not if you're overtime-exempt, which if you're an IT professional you almost certainly are.
you can call them up and ask them if they remember the time they did Stacy while she was passed out after the office party. Maybe get a nice retirement bonus out of it.
What the fuck, dude. If you hear your employer tell that story, the right thing to do is not to write it down in your little Book Of Secrets so you can use it as blackmail material later. You call the fucking police and report an alleged rape.
In the 80's, it did not matter what computer a user had at home. As long as the computer had the appropriate terminal emulator, the user could dial in and work.
Yes, everyone just had to settle for a least-common-denominator approach and pretend their 16- and 32-bit microcomputers were 8-bit teletype terminals, and everything interoperated fine.
Whoever asked this question clearly does not understand what network neutrality is about.
And I don't blame them, as no one else really seems to agree on what the phrase "network neutrality" is supposed to mean, or even how it should be capitalized.
In the 1960s, auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni created films with a highly personal stamp, but while their films had some measure of popular success at the time, people today are no longer interested and films mainly function as simple mindless entertainment.
I reject your argument.
For it to hold, one must ignore both the populist dreck that filled theaters in the 1960s (where do you think Mystery Science Theater 3000 got so much of their material?), and also films of the modern era that are both successful and "high art" (I'll cite Charlie Kaufman's screenplays as just one example, there are plenty others).
do I see you volumteering to open the brown bag someome left behind on the bus? in the states, maybe. in Israel, probably not.
I'll keep that in mind the next time I move to Israel.
Until then, I still live in a country where the time between terrorist incidents is measured in years, not weeks, and I'm not going to cry wolf and shut down the entire neighborhood just because there's an 0.1% chance that a bag left on a bus actually isn't full of forgotten lunch or discarded trash.
Slashdot Mirror
That our government - like most Western governments - is firmly in the grasp of big business, and no longer really represents the will or interests of the people. Welcome to the "Illusion of Democracy". Government seems to consistently represent the interests of corporations over the interests of the people, at least at the Federal level.
Oh great. Now my country is exporting good old-fashioned American Passive Fatalism to our northern neighbor, too.
Lately, the telecom companies have started hinting that they might start charging for optimal delivery. That is that CNN's website, having paid for premium delivery with your ISP, will have 8x the bandwidth available to you as, for instance, youtube.
I don't see anything wrong with that.
What I would find troubling would be if my ISP throttled YouTube down to 1/8x the effective bandwidth they previously had available, because they DIDN'T pony up a "premium delivery fee". That's protection money, and would surely run the ISP afoul of existing racketeering laws.
[Net neutrality] dictates that all traffic must be treated equally.
Which, knowing the way laws get written, would make it illegal for the ISP to traffic-shape so that your VOIP packets get priority over some kid's warez torrents, too.
what kind of a government would leave a thing such as THE WORLD WIDE WEB in the hands of business'?
It's been in their hands for over ten years now, and seems to be thriving. Why do we expect that to change anytime in the future?
I read somewhere that the Japanese (I think) used to do this at musical instrument trade shows, by wearing a 1 cm square tie tack and taking photos of each other holding instruments. They could get the dimensions of the instrument from the photos that way, and make great cheap knock-offs.
I would have to consider at least some parts of this story to be apocryphal -- there's a lot more factors involved in making a good knock-off of a musical instrument than building at an exactly 1:1 scale.
And honestly, if they wanted to copy an instrument design, a much easier way would be to buy one of the instruments at retail, and then meticulously reverse-engineer it to the micron back in the lab.
I want the RIAA to jack prices through the roof. Our wonderful market economy would then allow indie record companies and artists to undercut the "cartel".
If music were a fungible good, that would be happening already. There's no reason for a major-label CD to cost $18 at FYE when the indie guys can sell a CD at half the price and make a (small) profit.
But music ISN'T fungible. A consumer who wants to own a copy of Johnny Big Star's latest hit isn't going to settle for Steve Nobody's record instead, just because it's cheaper.
I ran into one in Final Fantasy VII - I made it most of the way through the game, and was on the way to fight Sephiroth... when I ran out of money and potions, and I'd used the Moogle just far enough that I couldn't make it back to the shop. So, I was kind of screwed.
I had a similar experience with Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, on the Gameboy Advance. I played all the way through this RPG, having a great time, and then found myself in the final battle without enough attack points to defeat the enemy, even after a solid half hour of the same combo-attack/counter/replenish-HP sequence over and over again. So I gave up.
I suppose if I were to step back from the final battle and spend a couple days leveling up battling small enemies, I'd get powerful enough to unlock the ending of the game eventually. But why would I do that? Grinding isn't fun!
Try using cheat codes to get past the Grim Reaper in the original Castlevania. There aren't any!
Unless you have a Game Genie, and what dedicated NES gamer didn't? I even imported mine from Canada, because the US release was held up by Nintendo filing a lawsuit to block it.
Can someone please name ONE game that the Wii has that is worth playing?
Wii Sports.
Don't let the simplistic Fisher-Price-looking avatars turn you off, there's a truly addictive fun-ness to it.
Any more brain busters?
why can't slashdot let us have like any sane site? HTML has these tags for a reason.
And that reason is that the HTML spec developers thought that document authors would want to give more than half a second's consideration to the semantic structure of a document as it was being authored. Sadly, the WYSIWYG paradigm had already taken root, and authors found it easier to use the same vanilla quote marks they'd been typing in word processors for fifteen years than to learn about and use inline "q" tags.
On the other hand, your "energy saving" refridgerator will cost many times this amount. Mine averages around $70 a month worth of electricity.
My total electric bill rarely climbs above $70/mo, and yes, my apartment does have a refrigerator in it (and not a particularly "green" one, either).
There must be some other factor at play.
Does anybody remember the post-9/11 homeland security debacle with Tom Ridge reccomending people use duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect themselves from terrorists.. and then several people dying by asphyxiating themselves in their own homes?
No, because that never happened.
I see a lot of resources warning that such deaths COULD occur if someone were to follow DHS's idiotic recommendations, but no accounts of any deaths actually occuring. It's an urban legend.
whatever moron phoned in a litebrite as a "bomb" (and the corresponding police moron who agreed with him) should be looking at potential liability.
Not if they were acting in good faith when they treated the device as though it might have been a bomb. And it would be practically impossible to prove that either of them was acting in bad faith.
Hopefully everything just learns something from the incident, and we all move on.
So you want some more recent games that have awesome gameplay that don't need the latest and greatest computer and graphics card?
How about Tetris?
That's a game that only requires a 20x10 monochromatic grid to be playable. And yet it's one of the best computer puzzle games of all time.
seriously not joking, the differences [between Gamecube and Wii hardware] are so small it wouldnt even be worth calling it a major refresh.
Similarly, the differences between You and A Bozo are virtually indiscernible.
I would have thought we could have moved beyond these "LameCube 1.5" canards by now, considering how little confirmed information there is about the specifications of the Wii's Broadway CPU and Hollywood GPU. I think it's fair to say that Nintendo was more concerned with power consumption than raw performance when these chips were being designed, but I don't know that any fair, quantitative comparison between the new chips and their predecessors exists or has been made public.
It's not that someone couldn't develop a portable console that could compete with the Nintendo DS. It's that nobody seems to have the sense to do it right.
Hey. The PSP may not be crushing Nintendo in the handheld market, and likely never will, but it IS at least competitive. Sony got it at least partially right there.
The biggest issue here is that [EA Mobile and Gameloft] both have experience with mobile phone game development. I doubt they have the skill set necessary to develop games on the level of what's seen for the DS or PSP.
I'm not so sure about that. They both have ties to full-sizeconsole/handheld developers, from whom they could presumably call in reinforcements if a more expansive gaming experience is called for. Gameloft (a subsidiary of Ubisoft) has even developed Gameboy Advance games in the past.
No one is likely to see the N-Gage as anything other than an overgrown mobile phone.
And that might be okay, if both Nokia and consumers accept it for what it is. Much like the Treo and Blackberry have carved out a niche for the phone that's also a PDA, or Apple's forthcoming phone that's also an iPod, there may be a market for a product that strikes a balance between mobile phone and gaming device.
One requisite, if the cell phone/handheld gaming platform is going to be a success, is networked play. What's the point of having a GPRS radio built into your game machine if the game isn't going to send and receive data over it?
You probably didn't notice that there is an Amiga OS/4 either
It's half as good as IBM's OS/2, but way better than Tandy's OS/9.
There was absolutely nothing I could do to make the system run it. Oh sure, the system could be upgraded with a new processor, memory, hard drive or whatever, but no upgrade would allow [my beige G3 Mac to run OS X 10.2].
I feel ya, brother. I mean, I'm trying to get Vista Home Edition to run on my 486DX2/66, and it just won't, no matter which components I upgrade!
Appending means they're being tacked onto the end. If they're being added at the beginning, they're being prepended.
According to a couple of dictionaries I consulted, "prepend" is not a recognized word, and "append" refers to adding or attachment without regard to where.
I propose that "append" was adopted by the computing community to mean a specific type of data transformation where the new addition was placed at the end of the existing data, and "prepend" was a neologism invented to describe the opposite type.
Of course without any evidence to back this story up, Slashdot could probably now be sued by ThePlanet for libel.
Nope, Slashdot could only lose a libel suit if they had evidence that they KNEW this story was a fabrication, but published it anyway. Taking the submitter at his word, for better or worse, gives Slashdot protection from charges of libel.
Then again, this same "protection" explains why the news media calls LED advertisements "hoax bomb devices" and vectors tales about Barack Obama attending a Muslim school in Indonesia. If they do any research, they could bring liability upon themselves.
Something as simple of 15~20 minutes of overtime (why does the boss call at 4:58PM for a chat about an e-mail I sent at 9AM) every week over a few years can leave a company with massive fines.
Not if you're overtime-exempt, which if you're an IT professional you almost certainly are.
you can call them up and ask them if they remember the time they did Stacy while she was passed out after the office party. Maybe get a nice retirement bonus out of it.
What the fuck, dude. If you hear your employer tell that story, the right thing to do is not to write it down in your little Book Of Secrets so you can use it as blackmail material later. You call the fucking police and report an alleged rape.
In the 80's, it did not matter what computer a user had at home. As long as the computer had the appropriate terminal emulator, the user could dial in and work.
Yes, everyone just had to settle for a least-common-denominator approach and pretend their 16- and 32-bit microcomputers were 8-bit teletype terminals, and everything interoperated fine.
Whoever asked this question clearly does not understand what network neutrality is about.
And I don't blame them, as no one else really seems to agree on what the phrase "network neutrality" is supposed to mean, or even how it should be capitalized.
In the 1960s, auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni created films with a highly personal stamp, but while their films had some measure of popular success at the time, people today are no longer interested and films mainly function as simple mindless entertainment.
I reject your argument.
For it to hold, one must ignore both the populist dreck that filled theaters in the 1960s (where do you think Mystery Science Theater 3000 got so much of their material?), and also films of the modern era that are both successful and "high art" (I'll cite Charlie Kaufman's screenplays as just one example, there are plenty others).
do I see you volumteering to open the brown bag someome left behind on the bus? in the states, maybe. in Israel, probably not.
I'll keep that in mind the next time I move to Israel.
Until then, I still live in a country where the time between terrorist incidents is measured in years, not weeks, and I'm not going to cry wolf and shut down the entire neighborhood just because there's an 0.1% chance that a bag left on a bus actually isn't full of forgotten lunch or discarded trash.
There are several ways to make a successful IED: either hide it, or make it look like a normal object.
And the ATHF LED art was neither hidden, nor normal-looking. Thus the most reasonable assumption to make would be that they were not IEDs.
Did you mean to support the case you're arguing against?