For one: 'utterance_in_a_state_of_speechlessness' should be 'utterance state="speechlessness"'
Why not a 'state type="speechlessness"' parent node with an 'utterance' child? After all, it is an utterance IN a state of speechlessness...
Open-endedness can be a curse. There are too many valid ways to specify any data structure in XML. And yet, you invariably end up having to deal with someone who chose a horribly INVALID way to do it. It's quite a phenomenon.
A better analogy would be your landlord letting the FBI into your apartment with no warrant.
Your rental contract may actually contain a clause that allows your landlord to give law enforcement access to your apartment at his/her discretion. I don't know if a phone customer's contract for service with AT&T contains or even could contain such a clause.
do these guys who were suing actually have any reason to believe their calls in specific were actually monitored/recorded? I guess they could admit talking to their terrorist friends and that would probably give them the status to sue, but it would also get them into a bit of hot water.
You're making the assumption that the only calls which have been monitored/recorded are those with a known terrorist as one of the parties. We simply have no way of knowing whether that is true, because neither the courts nor Congress give a damn about their checks-and-balances powers to press the executive branch for information about how the program is being run.
Even if that is the intended purpose of the program, even if the system for pre-identifying terrorists is highly accurate, there are still undoubtedly some false positives, where American citizens with no connections to terrorism whatsoever have had their private phone conversations reviewed by the government. Statistically, un-Constitutional search of private information is almost certain to have happened. But unless we find out who it happened to, there's no avenue for redress, and no one can prove it's happened to them. It's a Catch-22.
The whole point of this case is that neither the corp. neither the govt. has to tell you what they're doing. Good luck with your free market remedy under those circumstances.
I'll do my damnedest to replace them with a corporation and a government that WILL tell me what they're doing. It's going to take some coordination with my fellow citizens to accomplish, though.
Vote the Republicans out of the executive and legislative branches. Boycott AT&T.
Al Gore would have won in 2000 had this system been used in most states, and it is the democrats who don't want it changed.
"Blue states" tend to be larger and have more electoral votes to distribute, while "red states" tend to be smaller. Under a system where two of a state's electoral votes went to the winner of the state and the rest were divided up by population, the small states with only one or two Representatives would still be de facto "winner takes all" states. Only in the large states would some of the electoral votes shift from the party that carried the state to the runner(s)-up.
Proportional voting would give Democrats very few chances to gain electoral votes, and many chances to lose them. That Gore could have won with such a system in 2000 may have been an anomaly.
How many consoles have games available ten years after launch?
The Wikipedia entry for "Video game consoles" has some charts showing the lifespans of selected consoles in North America, Japan, and Europe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console
The only consoles to approach a ten-year lifespan in the United States were the Atari VCS/2600 and the original Nintendo Entertainment System. It must be noted, too, that after each's 6-year mark or so, the manufacturers were looking to move on to the next generation, and continued support for the original system was much reduced. Sony has been doing the same thing, looking at the PSX/PSone and PS2/PStwo lifespans.
Indeed, looking at the graphs, it would appear that the lifespans of consoles are historically getting shorter, not longer. You may still be able to BUY a new PSthree in 2016, but all the games being released them will be PS4 exclusives. Doesn't really count.
Here's a better suggestion than your peaceful-resistance, flash-mob, media-celebrity fantasy: if you don't like the self-checkout lanes, use the full-service lanes instead.
You could go buy yourself a PSP, and play the limited selection of PSP only games, as well as the PSP port games, or you could go buy yourself a DS, and choose from a much wider selection. And then there's the curiosity factor, the "oooh, pretty" factor, and the cost factor.
Umm, I think you just accidentally proved that it is Sony who is the Apple of the portable games market.
Surely not the Amiga 500? Maybe I'm biased as I'm european though =)
Possibly so.
In North America, pretty much the only thing the Amiga line was known for was video editing when attached to a Video Toaster, or for being the source of several badly-ported generic European platform games released for Sega Genesis.
1. Shy Guys in Yoshi's Island were not the first appearance of SMB2 characters in other SMB games. SMB3 had both Bob-Ombs and Pokeys, both of which made their first appearances in Doki Doki Panic.
2. SMB3 allowed Mario to pick up Koopa shells and certain other enemies... a gameplay mechanic that was also inherited from Doki Doki.
Go read a list of the full name of every country in the Western Hemisphere (or the world, for that matter), and let me know how many have "America" in the name. I will agree to call anyone from any one of those countries "Americans".
How many countries in that continent north of Africa and west of Asia have the term "Europe" in their name?
What do you call people who hail from that continent?
maybe the Japanese just don't know how to make a complex interface that is intuitive for anyone but themselves.
I think there's some truth in this.
The example of a 52-button DVD recorder remote with a built-in LCD screen given by a previous commenter... that's just bad interface design.
For one thing, if you're using a DVD recorder the odds are very, very good that you have its video output hooked up to a TV. Why does there need to be a graphical display on the remote itself? Use the TV as the display and display status messages as a video overlay.
For another thing, I can't imagine there are 52 distinct actions I would need immediate access to on a DVD recorder. If I'm using the device in the way it's typically going to be used, i.e. watching or recording a DVD, I really only need about 7 buttons: record, play, stop, back, forward, volume up, volume down.
If I need other, less-frequently used controls, give me a "menu" button that changes the behaviors of the other buttons. I can navigate a couple screens of menus on those rare occasions where I need to change my preferred subtitle language.
Apple seems to have the right idea here. Notice how newer iPods have even fewer distinct controls than earlier ones? How many buttons does their Front Row remote have compared to Microsoft's behemoth Media Center remote designs?
Thirdly, let's please not hold up remote controls as examples of cutting-edge technology. We're still using the same mess of unreliable, incompatible infrared code sequences we were using when wireless remotes were introduced 25 years ago. Is there nobody in the home electronics industry willing to commit to an open standard, maybe something Bluetooth-like, that will let me treat my collection of components as a sensible and cohesive whole, instead of having to teach my "learning" remote how to deal with each one individually?
You also cant forget how many people out there are buying the 3000$ TV's....they dont buy these so that they can watch their VHS tapes.
Fair enough. But remember that you also have to think about all the people who are buying off-brand CRT televisions for $129 at the discount stores, as well as all the people who are still looking at the same TV they bought in 1991.
The question is, will there be enough cell processors to stuff into these boxes with yields being so aweful?
I seem to recall hearing that Sony has already addressed the problem of poor Cell fabrication yields by only requiring that 7 of the 8 SPE's on the silicon be functional, allowing chips with imperfections to be used in production.
I can and I will sit here and state that Street Fighter II was without a story.
Street Fighter II had a story; in fact, it had a different story for each playable character. True, all eight of them were simple variations on "I must beat the last opponent because of reason x, but still.
STUN Runner and SFRush are awesome games. Just because you don't like them doesn't change the fact that millions of fans would agree with me.
I doubt that millions of fans even remember S.T.U.N. Runner. That doesn't mean it wasn't a great game; actually it seems like many of the Atari arcade titles of that era had a unique style that made them really stand out. Klax, anyone? Rampart? Xybots?
I haate that students coming out of universities, when asked about registers and how would they write a multiply routine if they only had shifts and adds, ask "why do I need to know this?"
Are you interviewing them for a job coding on a processor that only has shift and add operations?
An expert assembly programmer in a CPU which he knows well can still do much better than a compiler.
This is true, but it is also true that for the cost of hiring one expert assembly programmer, you can hire three or four competent, if inexpert, Java programmers.
Last time I looked we had over 6 billion people in this very world (that is 3 orders of magnitude difference). So still virtually nobody.
Last time I looked, 99 percent of the world's population lacked the resources, intelligence, or inclination to write computer code. That's -2 orders of magnitude from six billion.
So a full 10% of people who MIGHT be interested in this shared source product currently meet the terms of the license, and most others can qualify simply by enrolling at a community college or such for a couple hundred bucks.
I expected when I saw the story summary, and especially the misleading term "music industry" in the headline, that there would be a lot of comments in the thread criticizing the record labels for being so greedy. This is a result of a common and fundamental misconception about copyright and the music industry.
Record companies typically do not hold the copyright on lyrics to songs. There are two distinct forms of copyright involved here:
1) Mechanical copyright "(C)" is the right to produce and distribute copies of the sheet music, lyrics, etc. of a song. This form of copyright is often held by the artists themselves, and enforcement is often delegated to a collective agency such as ASCAP or BMI.
2) Phonorecording copyright "(P)" is the one usually signed over the the record label, giving them the rights to produce and distribute audio recordings of specific performances of songs.
Reprinting song lyrics without permission doesn't hurt the label. Who it DOES hurt are the artists. The right to be compensated for lyric publication is one of the few ways a songwriter can make money off their work without the RIAA taking a bite.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about the way FPS controls would be implemented using the Wii remote, most of which I don't think there are any grounds to make.
Most specifically, you believe that the position of the Wiimote relative to the center of the screen will be used to determine what direction your character moves in, which I do not expect to be the case. More likely you will use the thumbstick on the nunchuk attachment for that, and the remote's orientation will be used for camera movement and/or weapon aiming.
It's too early yet, too, to conclude that this scheme would be any better than the dual-thumbsticks scheme, or the WASD/mouse scheme. We will have to wait and see.
companies that had no history or fondness for mascots-- like EA-- got really really big.
Wouldn't John Madden qualify as a mascot of sorts for EA? (He would qualify as "really really big", too.)
When it comes down to it, Master Chief has to be just a guy in a military mech suit.
So too was Samus Aran, and yet Nintendo was able to give her enough characterization to make her one of the hallmark characters of their brand, going strong even 20 years later. Will we still care about the adventures of Master Chef in 2021?
Slashdot Mirror
For one: 'utterance_in_a_state_of_speechlessness' should be 'utterance state="speechlessness"'
Why not a 'state type="speechlessness"' parent node with an 'utterance' child? After all, it is an utterance IN a state of speechlessness...
Open-endedness can be a curse. There are too many valid ways to specify any data structure in XML. And yet, you invariably end up having to deal with someone who chose a horribly INVALID way to do it. It's quite a phenomenon.
A better analogy would be your landlord letting the FBI into your apartment with no warrant.
Your rental contract may actually contain a clause that allows your landlord to give law enforcement access to your apartment at his/her discretion. I don't know if a phone customer's contract for service with AT&T contains or even could contain such a clause.
do these guys who were suing actually have any reason to believe their calls in specific were actually monitored/recorded? I guess they could admit talking to their terrorist friends and that would probably give them the status to sue, but it would also get them into a bit of hot water.
You're making the assumption that the only calls which have been monitored/recorded are those with a known terrorist as one of the parties. We simply have no way of knowing whether that is true, because neither the courts nor Congress give a damn about their checks-and-balances powers to press the executive branch for information about how the program is being run.
Even if that is the intended purpose of the program, even if the system for pre-identifying terrorists is highly accurate, there are still undoubtedly some false positives, where American citizens with no connections to terrorism whatsoever have had their private phone conversations reviewed by the government. Statistically, un-Constitutional search of private information is almost certain to have happened. But unless we find out who it happened to, there's no avenue for redress, and no one can prove it's happened to them. It's a Catch-22.
The whole point of this case is that neither the corp. neither the govt. has to tell you what they're doing. Good luck with your free market remedy under those circumstances.
I'll do my damnedest to replace them with a corporation and a government that WILL tell me what they're doing. It's going to take some coordination with my fellow citizens to accomplish, though.
Vote the Republicans out of the executive and legislative branches. Boycott AT&T.
It's a phone screen, why not use it like one?
Better yet, why not just use the screen that's already on your phone for this?
It should be fairly trivial to design a system that sends an SMS/MMS message to your cell phone upon some computer event.
Al Gore would have won in 2000 had this system been used in most states, and it is the democrats who don't want it changed.
"Blue states" tend to be larger and have more electoral votes to distribute, while "red states" tend to be smaller. Under a system where two of a state's electoral votes went to the winner of the state and the rest were divided up by population, the small states with only one or two Representatives would still be de facto "winner takes all" states. Only in the large states would some of the electoral votes shift from the party that carried the state to the runner(s)-up.
Proportional voting would give Democrats very few chances to gain electoral votes, and many chances to lose them. That Gore could have won with such a system in 2000 may have been an anomaly.
How many consoles have games available ten years after launch?
The Wikipedia entry for "Video game consoles" has some charts showing the lifespans of selected consoles in North America, Japan, and Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console
The only consoles to approach a ten-year lifespan in the United States were the Atari VCS/2600 and the original Nintendo Entertainment System. It must be noted, too, that after each's 6-year mark or so, the manufacturers were looking to move on to the next generation, and continued support for the original system was much reduced. Sony has been doing the same thing, looking at the PSX/PSone and PS2/PStwo lifespans.
Indeed, looking at the graphs, it would appear that the lifespans of consoles are historically getting shorter, not longer. You may still be able to BUY a new PSthree in 2016, but all the games being released them will be PS4 exclusives. Doesn't really count.
Google Maps/Earth is cool, but how does it compare to shaping everyones lives like color tv and the transistor.
Too early to tell. Let's check back in 40 years.
Here's a better suggestion than your peaceful-resistance, flash-mob, media-celebrity fantasy: if you don't like the self-checkout lanes, use the full-service lanes instead.
You could go buy yourself a PSP, and play the limited selection of PSP only games, as well as the PSP port games, or you could go buy yourself a DS, and choose from a much wider selection. And then there's the curiosity factor, the "oooh, pretty" factor, and the cost factor.
Umm, I think you just accidentally proved that it is Sony who is the Apple of the portable games market.
Surely not the Amiga 500? Maybe I'm biased as I'm european though =)
Possibly so.
In North America, pretty much the only thing the Amiga line was known for was video editing when attached to a Video Toaster, or for being the source of several badly-ported generic European platform games released for Sega Genesis.
1. Shy Guys in Yoshi's Island were not the first appearance of SMB2 characters in other SMB games. SMB3 had both Bob-Ombs and Pokeys, both of which made their first appearances in Doki Doki Panic.
2. SMB3 allowed Mario to pick up Koopa shells and certain other enemies... a gameplay mechanic that was also inherited from Doki Doki.
Go read a list of the full name of every country in the Western Hemisphere (or the world, for that matter), and let me know how many have "America" in the name. I will agree to call anyone from any one of those countries "Americans".
How many countries in that continent north of Africa and west of Asia have the term "Europe" in their name?
What do you call people who hail from that continent?
maybe the Japanese just don't know how to make a complex interface that is intuitive for anyone but themselves.
I think there's some truth in this.
The example of a 52-button DVD recorder remote with a built-in LCD screen given by a previous commenter... that's just bad interface design.
For one thing, if you're using a DVD recorder the odds are very, very good that you have its video output hooked up to a TV. Why does there need to be a graphical display on the remote itself? Use the TV as the display and display status messages as a video overlay.
For another thing, I can't imagine there are 52 distinct actions I would need immediate access to on a DVD recorder. If I'm using the device in the way it's typically going to be used, i.e. watching or recording a DVD, I really only need about 7 buttons: record, play, stop, back, forward, volume up, volume down.
If I need other, less-frequently used controls, give me a "menu" button that changes the behaviors of the other buttons. I can navigate a couple screens of menus on those rare occasions where I need to change my preferred subtitle language.
Apple seems to have the right idea here. Notice how newer iPods have even fewer distinct controls than earlier ones? How many buttons does their Front Row remote have compared to Microsoft's behemoth Media Center remote designs?
Thirdly, let's please not hold up remote controls as examples of cutting-edge technology. We're still using the same mess of unreliable, incompatible infrared code sequences we were using when wireless remotes were introduced 25 years ago. Is there nobody in the home electronics industry willing to commit to an open standard, maybe something Bluetooth-like, that will let me treat my collection of components as a sensible and cohesive whole, instead of having to teach my "learning" remote how to deal with each one individually?
Seemingly serious sites can be littered with [malicious ads] and in regard to professionalism it just seems like scraping the bottom of the barrel.
MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
You also cant forget how many people out there are buying the 3000$ TV's....they dont buy these so that they can watch their VHS tapes.
Fair enough. But remember that you also have to think about all the people who are buying off-brand CRT televisions for $129 at the discount stores, as well as all the people who are still looking at the same TV they bought in 1991.
The question is, will there be enough cell processors to stuff into these boxes with yields being so aweful?
I seem to recall hearing that Sony has already addressed the problem of poor Cell fabrication yields by only requiring that 7 of the 8 SPE's on the silicon be functional, allowing chips with imperfections to be used in production.
I can and I will sit here and state that Street Fighter II was without a story.
Street Fighter II had a story; in fact, it had a different story for each playable character. True, all eight of them were simple variations on "I must beat the last opponent because of reason x, but still.
STUN Runner and SFRush are awesome games. Just because you don't like them doesn't change the fact that millions of fans would agree with me.
I doubt that millions of fans even remember S.T.U.N. Runner. That doesn't mean it wasn't a great game; actually it seems like many of the Atari arcade titles of that era had a unique style that made them really stand out. Klax, anyone? Rampart? Xybots?
I haate that students coming out of universities, when asked about registers and how would they write a multiply routine if they only had shifts and adds, ask "why do I need to know this?"
Are you interviewing them for a job coding on a processor that only has shift and add operations?
If not, why do they need to know this?
An expert assembly programmer in a CPU which he knows well can still do much better than a compiler.
This is true, but it is also true that for the cost of hiring one expert assembly programmer, you can hire three or four competent, if inexpert, Java programmers.
Last time I looked we had over 6 billion people in this very world (that is 3 orders of magnitude difference). So still virtually nobody.
Last time I looked, 99 percent of the world's population lacked the resources, intelligence, or inclination to write computer code. That's -2 orders of magnitude from six billion.
So a full 10% of people who MIGHT be interested in this shared source product currently meet the terms of the license, and most others can qualify simply by enrolling at a community college or such for a couple hundred bucks.
I expected when I saw the story summary, and especially the misleading term "music industry" in the headline, that there would be a lot of comments in the thread criticizing the record labels for being so greedy. This is a result of a common and fundamental misconception about copyright and the music industry.
Record companies typically do not hold the copyright on lyrics to songs. There are two distinct forms of copyright involved here:
1) Mechanical copyright "(C)" is the right to produce and distribute copies of the sheet music, lyrics, etc. of a song. This form of copyright is often held by the artists themselves, and enforcement is often delegated to a collective agency such as ASCAP or BMI.
2) Phonorecording copyright "(P)" is the one usually signed over the the record label, giving them the rights to produce and distribute audio recordings of specific performances of songs.
Reprinting song lyrics without permission doesn't hurt the label. Who it DOES hurt are the artists. The right to be compensated for lyric publication is one of the few ways a songwriter can make money off their work without the RIAA taking a bite.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about the way FPS controls would be implemented using the Wii remote, most of which I don't think there are any grounds to make.
Most specifically, you believe that the position of the Wiimote relative to the center of the screen will be used to determine what direction your character moves in, which I do not expect to be the case. More likely you will use the thumbstick on the nunchuk attachment for that, and the remote's orientation will be used for camera movement and/or weapon aiming.
It's too early yet, too, to conclude that this scheme would be any better than the dual-thumbsticks scheme, or the WASD/mouse scheme. We will have to wait and see.
It looks like there was only one console that had a mascot, and that was a fluke.
Why don't you count Bonk (and later, his alter ego Air Zonk) as a mascot for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 console?
It's because Keith Courage and Johnny Turbo have bought your silence, haven't they. DAMN YOU GUYS!!!
companies that had no history or fondness for mascots-- like EA-- got really really big.
Wouldn't John Madden qualify as a mascot of sorts for EA? (He would qualify as "really really big", too.)
When it comes down to it, Master Chief has to be just a guy in a military mech suit.
So too was Samus Aran, and yet Nintendo was able to give her enough characterization to make her one of the hallmark characters of their brand, going strong even 20 years later. Will we still care about the adventures of Master Chef in 2021?