Enough gamers are pissed off over the current BC fiasco, and you're suggesting they do it all over again for the PS4 ? SURE! If Sony wants to be the next Nintendo (pre-Wii, that is). Watch the user base decrease with each successive generation as they charge more money for less functionality.
Backware compatibility is a huge driver for a significant chunk of the market. Rarely do I ever see a craigslist ad for a PS2 that doesn't include a stack of PS1 classics, or a Wii without a pile of GameCube hits. Quite a few of my gamer pals have several dozen games from each generation, representing thousands of dollars in investment, that they still play to this day. Great games are timeless, and I have to say that quite often, the new releases are shit, compared to the old ones.
The problem, of course, is that console hardware is often cheap and unreliable. Maybe the CD/DVD reader goes blind, or the memory cards wear out, controllers break... but the software survives! Having a modern console with backward compatibility is a way to breathe new life into those old game discs. On a different angle, what if someone skipped a generation but wants to catch up ? For example, I passed on the PS3, but if/when the PS4 is out, I might want to try some PS3 hits that I've missed... if the software is compatible, great I'll buy the disc. If not, I will pass and Sony loses that sale - a highly profitable software sale - all because they're too cheap to include one silly little retro first-party CPU. That is just weak.
Even major PC game houses have been re-releasing part of their back catalogue via emulators such as DosBox, enabling people to play 20-year-old games on almost any PC built in the last decade. It should be obvious to anyone that old games are a thing of nostalgia, that people are willing to pay for.
I'm going to be blunt: the problem with console ports is that the conversion process is usually outsourced to a 3rd party developer, usually a small shop desperate for work (otherwise they'd be busy with their own projects). The result is that the job is often done hastily by a group of moderately skilled programmers bound by small budgets and poor communication with the original developers.
It's the software equivalent of Leonardo Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa, then hiring some kid down the street to make a black-and-white version. 99.44% guaranteed the kid will do a half-assed job and not show the same level of dedication and rigor as the original artist. Once in a blue moon, you might get lucky and find a guy who does remarkable work, but most of the time they just go through the motions and collect the cheque.
If these game companies had their own in-house platform experts, I think the quality would go up, waaaaay up. If your PC, PS3 and X360 gurus work in the same building, pile into the same car to go grab lunch, or partake in any other social engagement, they will be far more likely to cooperate successfully. Even better if they're all friendly with the UI expert, so they can voice their concerns over the utter lack of a remappable control scheme for the PC, or the clumsiness of having to hold 3 buttons to do a rocket jump on the Wii. A 3rd party developer will just do the work, whether it makes sense or not, according to the paper specs - nothing more, probably less.
In my area, hydro costs roughly 11 cents per kwh. A device using 1 watt, 24 hours a day works out to roughly one dollar a year, thus a PC using 200 watts costs roughly $200/year to operate 24/7.
If you let your PC idle on Speedstep (or equivalent), saving maybe 30-40 watts for 16 hours a day, you're "saving" between 20 and 30 bucks a year vs having Speedstep disabled. If you put the machine in S3 sleep (aka Standby), your PC's power consumption drops to 5 watts or less. Those savings are what Digsby's crapware is gobbling up by maxing out your processor. As a rule of thumb, I factor $20/month to power each standard PC.
At the other end of the scale, if you run a balls-out media workstation or gaming rig like me, peak power consumption might be closer to 800 watts. That means if I install Digsby and their PPI garbage, it's like taking $60 out of my wallet each month to flush down the toilet. Oh, let's not forget the heat output... I have to crank up the A/C, which also doesn't come cheap. You can bet your ass Digsby doesn't get $60 worth from taxing my CPU, so the end result is the power company makes a buck, Digsby makes a few pennies in the short term and eventually lose a chunk of their audience from all these shenanigans.
The sad part in all this, is they probably would make more money AND be less hated if they had simply asked for donations. I'd rather give $20 to a deserving developer, than to the dirty electricity tycoons. It's pretty lame that a company would rather screw their clients behind their backs and inflict greater indirect expense, than be upfront and honest about their financial expectations.
What's moronic is 50 years down the road, when simply being physically imposing is grounds for arrest... when a weakling can point at a big guy and randomly accuse them of anything, because the law and people's prejudice will be unreasonably tipped in their favour.
Would my point be clearer to you if we were talking about white people vs black people ?
What if someone got mugged, but didn't get a good view of the assailant, and at a police lineup they have 4 skinny guys and one big guy. Don't you think the victim will be inclined to assume the big guy did it ? Hell, cops already make those assumptions.
It doesn't matter what the sides are, whenever there's inequality, there's abuse, and wherever there's abuse, there's a guy on the internet to complain about it. Today, I'm that guy.
I get what you're saying, and I agree that SiS chips are almost universally paired with shitty ass boards, but my gripes are with the actual chipset's functionality and driver support. I feel they are today where VIA was 7-8 years ago in terms of stability.
It's kinda funny, I joked about this very same idea, that the $2.00/hour outsourcers might be intentionally raping our servers for profit. Then the next day one of my support clients had that exact thing happen to him... one of his developers in India decided to create a bunch of email accounts and spam off of them. I have to admit, it makes perfect sense: he probably made more money selling spam runs for a few days, than a week of regular salary, plus he's not going to get into any immediate trouble... I'm not going to fly over there and beat the tan out of him, he just lost one smallish contract - big whoop.
It's not about "you get what you pay for", and certainly not a racially charged disconnect (at least not in my case), it's just the risk vs reward balance that's tipped against us. Globalization is a double-edged sword. White collar crime is just as big a problem in western societies, but we do it bigger and badder. As an American, if someone offered you $100 a day to sacrifice one of your clients, you'd probably tell him to blow you. In India, $100 might be equivalent to $1000 to us, maybe more. I don't know about you, but in my neighborhood if you want to make $1000 a day you either have to sell your ass, or sell gobs of crack and blow. The incentives vs risks aren't on the same scale at all.
I'm not saying we should treat all outsourcers as hostile crooks, we have plenty of those right here at home, on the payroll even. We just need to approach it sanely. If you underpay someone, they are more likely to fuck you over - that much should be common wisdom in the business world. It's the dirty side-effect of living in an entitlement culture.
Isn't that more a result of poor wiring, and less about the technology itself ? Seems to me, if we stopped hiring grade-9 dropouts to build our houses, maybe the wiring wouldn't suck so bad and powerline networking wouldn't be such a big deal.
In my apartment, I have four separate circuits, but they all bleed into each other at the fusebox, so when the freezer's compressor kicks in, I get pops in my speakers, and the bedroom TV spazzes for a moment as the flyback settles back to resonance. If I installed powerline networking here, I'd likely wake up the next day with a bunch of metal stuck to my patio windows from the massive electromagnetic field. That, and dead hookers.
<weasel>But...but..but... that's interefering with the free market!</weasel>
WHAT FREE MARKET ?
In an ideal world, I would agree with you. I WANT to agree with you, but the reality is that government is not looking out for you and I, it is looking out for Merck, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup. Not Average Joe and Plain Jane. They certainly cannot come to grips with the possibility that technology should be a common good, rather than a privately leveraged asset. "That's hippie talk! Star Trek gobbledygook! If we give away our specs, the terrorists have already won!"
The way things are today, I don't want the governemnt waving its filthy hands anywhere near me. It's not a question of "if" they will fuck it up, but "when" and "how badly".
Yes, again with the conservatives chugging Yankee splooge. Much like the Republican/Democrat duality, our Canadian political parties are locked in a cycle of fucking things up for the next guy to clean up. It just so happens that the conservatives are the most skilled at fucking things up ROYALLY, which of course makes the other guys look bad because they can't fix it.
Guy 2 should have his ass kicked by a wheelchair-bound midget, because he encouraged the practice of bullying by failing to stand up against the oppressor.
If you're the kind of person who goes through life scared shitless of everyone and everything, maybe you should take some self-defense classes. With the proper training, even a 100lb woman can subdue a 300lb lummox. But wait, this is western society, we don't believe in personal responsibility now, do we ? We just make up more laws to "protect" the meek...
I would personally resist a rapist with my last ounce of strength. The fact that some people might be too scared to do so does not reduce the violence of the encounter in any way, shape or form.
We are splitting nits here. The fact that someone does not fight means they are being non-violent. It means it is non-violent rape. Don't confuse "being violent" and "being violated". The two words come from the same root (latin violare), but have evolved into very distinct meanings, at least in English and most romance languages.
So we can only call a crime violent if the victim is willing to resist in same manner?
No. We can only call a crime violent if there was actual violence. Rape and violence are completely distinct concepts, you can have one without the other, though it seems they most often come as a pair. That means you can have violent rape, and non-violent rape.
Rape requires coercion. If you do like the constitution, lay there and take it, it's not rape, you just enjoy (or are indifferent to) getting fucked. If it isn't blatantly obvious to any randomly passing stranger that you've being abused, then I think we shouldn't call it rape. How do you expect people to help if they can't even tell you're being harmed ?
Violent rape requires coercion via violence, or the threat thereof. If someone holds a weapon (knife/gun/stick/fist/marmot) to your head, with the explicit or implicit threat that you will be hurt unless you provide sexual services, that is violent rape (assuming they have their way with you). Of crucial importance is that the threat/aggression and sex do not necessarily have to happen at the same time.
I don't believe in consent by default, or that idiotic rapist defense "she was asking for it with that slutty outfit"... that's cowardly bullshit, but I also don't believe in "victims" deciding they're victims after the fact. I have seen that loophole abused far too often in my relatively short lifetime. Was there or was there not real harm inflicted ? Yes ? No ? Does your answer change if the aggressor has settlement money ? It is more rape-ish if you think you'll get the house and Volvo ?
People use far too many words and exceptions to define these painfully obvious concepts. All sane people are able to immediately tell whether they are being wronged or not. You want to be doing something, or you don't.
Google's results today are no better than the leading search engines 10 years ago. People were gaming the engines then, and Google came up with a smarter algorithm (Pagerank), but today's results page is again full of garbage because people learned how to game Pagerank. Combine that with the web 2.0 fad of scraping and regurgitating everyone else's content, and the resultant pile of URLs for any given keyword is utterly worthless. I call it "metapublishing", because the content is worthless, it's become a twisted game of outwitting Google to maximize ad revenue while providing zero value.
Searching has always been a game of finding the most specific yet least popular terms to define what you want, and then adding a bunch of negative keywords to filter out the junk. Google scored a hit, many many years ago, but they haven't been able (or willing) to maintain that lead, and all their competitors have pretty much died out anyway.
If Google hadn't come along when it did, someone else would have stepped up. Maybe Altavista, or Yahoo, or someone else. There was a need, and a provider to address that need. The only reason we don't have a new search engine to beat Google today is because, well, everyone is scared shitless of going head-to-head with Google, except Microsoft with their propaganda-laced Bing embarrassment. They're just not the golden child people seem to think they are.
Securing a simple web app is mostly a matter of sanitizing your inputs (and sometimes the outputs as well). A good developer should be able to almost intuitively predict the weak points in an app and harden those. Sure, if you're just an average MCSE copy/pasting code from any random forum, you're asking to get owned, but if you understand what your data is doing and why, then it should be a natural part of your development process to identify what does and doesn't belong in your data structures, and ensure that nothing else gets in or out.
Frankly, I've been less than pleased with the whole SLI vs CrossFire debacle. It's a friggin PCI-Express bus! This is nothing more than software and/or firmware enforced lock-in, and it stinks. I would have preferred for Intel to reject the SLI tax entirely. NVidia is the small player here, they're the ones who should be bending over backwards to get the big guys to promote their products. I don't want to pay an SLI tax on my motherboard, NVidia should be plenty glad that I'm buying two expensive GPUs instead of one, and they should consider a partnership with Intel like a divine blessing because Intel is 10 times larger and has far greater reach into every single market.
The situation is simple: right now, I own a perfectly fine motherboard that doesn't support SLI (Intel P35). I also have a perfectly fine Geforce 8800 and would have loved to add a second, but I can't because my board isn't on the SLI whitelist. My options are:
A. buy the second card, and replace my motherboard with an overpriced unstable NForce 750 board
B. fuck NVidia and buy two brand new AMD cards
Assuming equal performance, option B would cost me far less, even though I would prefer the NVidia GPU. Their SLI lock in has thus resulted in a lost sale.
Now I'm just one guy, but here's the funny part: I used to sell gaming rigs... lots and lots of 'em. When people heard about SLI, all the hardcore guys wanted it, but when they found out they had to taint their lovingly assembled systems with an NForce board, most of them backed off. It wasn't even about the money, it's about NVidia's awful track record in the chipset biz. They make even SIS look good. They never really fixed the NF2/3/4 disk corruption glitches, and they trashed the one good thing they had going for them: Soundstorm. That was a long time ago, but the way they handled those very public screwups left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
It's true, and frankly I don't care what a person puts in their body, as long as they're able to function and interact satisfactorily. I obviously don't want a support tech saying "Your web site's down, that's cool man! Smoke a doob and forget about it!"
I'm not averse to drugs or alcohol (I love em myself!). I'm averse to stupidity. How about we devise a screening test for THAT ?!
To me, four pints in an evening is a "social" night, of course I drink far better stuff than Stella, but that's another American/Canadian debate I don't feel like uncorking right now.
There's no shortage of pasty white anglo-saxon weasels that start humping things after half a Corona, but that's not me. Ask any bartender, they can drink themselves silly, then recover fully by noon the next day. I don't go quite as far, and I certainly feel it the next day if I cross that line between social and "paaaarty", but the idea of alcohol tolerance is not some made-up word to defend alcoholics, it is a very real chemical effect.
The human body is an incredibly adaptive system, and it comes in countless varieties. To define any specific amount of alcohol as excessive is to ignore human diversity itself.
I don't disagree in that it is a government problem as well, but in my wacky opinion I find the entire police system - indeed the very concept of it - flawed beyond repair. It straddles far too many gray areas and ultimately, in my view, it fails to accomplish its primary goal of controlling criminal activity.
One of the ways it fails is by having an overly broad definition of "criminal activity". If they kept the problem domain small and tightly defined, I think it would make the job a whole lot easier to handle. There is nothing I hate more than seeing ghost cars parked somewhere lucrative, solely to write a gazillion tickets all week long. We have far more problematic issues to deal with than a few motorists doing 10 kph over.
Perhaps I'm a little more irritated because I used to live in a suburban area, where they had maybe 4 or 5 police vehicles to cover a very large area, yet at least 3 of them would be parked at a certain heavily-congested bridge every single goddamned day, handing out fines left right and center to line-jumpers. Maybe if they had spent the money to build a wider bridge, I'd be a little more forgiving, but the reality is that they just sat there taxing everyone.
It was a quiet area, semi-rural and crime was low anyway, but for years I wished for some serious trouble to hit a remote area. Sure enough one day there was a big mess, where in the same time frame a convenience store clerk was blasted by a shotgun-wielding robber, two homes burned down to the ground from suspected arsonists, and a bunch of teens beat the crap out of some old rich guy while robbing him. They eventually caught one arsonist, the murderous thieves were never caught. Word on the street was that the cops took 3 hours to get to the murder scene, and the beating victim was driven to the police station by their neighbour to file a report.
I no longer live in that area, but this urban sprawl isn't much better. We have more cops, but they spend their time pestering the homeless and again handing out spurious fines to whomever they choose. So please forgive me when I direct my rage at these people who gleefully ignore the real life-threatening situations while harassing harmless citizens every single goddamned day. I've seen some of the worst, and so far I've had no indication of other regional police forces being any better. I would like to think that somewhere, they do things properly and their services are actually worth the money, but so far that dream has not materialized for me.
The holistic approach is indeed what differentiates tech gods from mere drones. It sounds like your daughter and yourself are knowledge sponges... which is great, and if it works for you then go for it (works for me too!), but to try that on someone who isn't as, erm, "spongy" is a sure-fire way to screw them up real good.
That's why it's such a dangerous and misleading "metric". The guy who claims to be a genius has a 50/50 chance of being full of shit. Well ok, in reality it's probably a 95% chance but you know what I mean. More dangerous still is the non-confrontational PC mentality that prevents those dopes from being called out and hung out to dry. I think that passivity is a great motivator for the Know-it-alls to continue peddling their BS.
SMAC/X ? Yes I love it (hate the ginger believers though), but I'm an alpha geek. I wouldn't stick a kid in front of it, not until they're at least 12 and can somewhat wrap their head around the bullshit tango that is politics. Pushing a kid into intellectual tasks too early just means he/she will suck at the basic stuff later in life.
Much of my 20's were spent back-filling the gaps in my skill set, stuff that had been neglected in favor of computers and general science. I'm starting to balance out, but still very much a stereotypical geek under the surface. Beating the crap out of SMAC or Civ2 or any other brainy game will not prepare a kid for the mundane realities of modern life, and I sure as shit can't nerve staple my boss no matter how annoyed I may be.
America hasn't "made us do" any of these things. Our trade ministers and premiers are the ones to blame. We've had a really bad run of crooked bastards over the past decade, and the problem stems from the fact that we have a rapidly expanding Albertan market that's got more in common with southern States than a Canadian provinces, and it just so happens that their own mini Bush is the guy calling the shots here in Ottawa.
If we had leaders with even average-sized balls, they could put a foot down and shift the trade relationships back in our favor - or simply cut the off and see what (doesn't) happen. War ? I can't even type that word without chuckling... The only reason our industries are being exploited is because our leaders set it up that way, under presumed ulterior motives. There's no need to blame the Americans.
Not an employer, more like a subcontractor. They are enlisted by artists to "handle" the royalties on their behalf. If the CRIA disappeared today, artists would still be pretty much in the same place. The big guys would be pissed, but they're free to hire their own 1st-tier droogs. The small guys probably wouldn't notice a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Enough gamers are pissed off over the current BC fiasco, and you're suggesting they do it all over again for the PS4 ? SURE! If Sony wants to be the next Nintendo (pre-Wii, that is). Watch the user base decrease with each successive generation as they charge more money for less functionality.
Backware compatibility is a huge driver for a significant chunk of the market. Rarely do I ever see a craigslist ad for a PS2 that doesn't include a stack of PS1 classics, or a Wii without a pile of GameCube hits. Quite a few of my gamer pals have several dozen games from each generation, representing thousands of dollars in investment, that they still play to this day. Great games are timeless, and I have to say that quite often, the new releases are shit, compared to the old ones.
The problem, of course, is that console hardware is often cheap and unreliable. Maybe the CD/DVD reader goes blind, or the memory cards wear out, controllers break... but the software survives! Having a modern console with backward compatibility is a way to breathe new life into those old game discs. On a different angle, what if someone skipped a generation but wants to catch up ? For example, I passed on the PS3, but if/when the PS4 is out, I might want to try some PS3 hits that I've missed... if the software is compatible, great I'll buy the disc. If not, I will pass and Sony loses that sale - a highly profitable software sale - all because they're too cheap to include one silly little retro first-party CPU. That is just weak.
Even major PC game houses have been re-releasing part of their back catalogue via emulators such as DosBox, enabling people to play 20-year-old games on almost any PC built in the last decade. It should be obvious to anyone that old games are a thing of nostalgia, that people are willing to pay for.
I'm going to be blunt: the problem with console ports is that the conversion process is usually outsourced to a 3rd party developer, usually a small shop desperate for work (otherwise they'd be busy with their own projects). The result is that the job is often done hastily by a group of moderately skilled programmers bound by small budgets and poor communication with the original developers.
It's the software equivalent of Leonardo Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa, then hiring some kid down the street to make a black-and-white version. 99.44% guaranteed the kid will do a half-assed job and not show the same level of dedication and rigor as the original artist. Once in a blue moon, you might get lucky and find a guy who does remarkable work, but most of the time they just go through the motions and collect the cheque.
If these game companies had their own in-house platform experts, I think the quality would go up, waaaaay up. If your PC, PS3 and X360 gurus work in the same building, pile into the same car to go grab lunch, or partake in any other social engagement, they will be far more likely to cooperate successfully. Even better if they're all friendly with the UI expert, so they can voice their concerns over the utter lack of a remappable control scheme for the PC, or the clumsiness of having to hold 3 buttons to do a rocket jump on the Wii. A 3rd party developer will just do the work, whether it makes sense or not, according to the paper specs - nothing more, probably less.
How about I redirect your car's fuel line to my own tank until you opt-out, huh ? It's fair, right ?
In my area, hydro costs roughly 11 cents per kwh. A device using 1 watt, 24 hours a day works out to roughly one dollar a year, thus a PC using 200 watts costs roughly $200/year to operate 24/7.
If you let your PC idle on Speedstep (or equivalent), saving maybe 30-40 watts for 16 hours a day, you're "saving" between 20 and 30 bucks a year vs having Speedstep disabled. If you put the machine in S3 sleep (aka Standby), your PC's power consumption drops to 5 watts or less. Those savings are what Digsby's crapware is gobbling up by maxing out your processor. As a rule of thumb, I factor $20/month to power each standard PC.
At the other end of the scale, if you run a balls-out media workstation or gaming rig like me, peak power consumption might be closer to 800 watts. That means if I install Digsby and their PPI garbage, it's like taking $60 out of my wallet each month to flush down the toilet. Oh, let's not forget the heat output... I have to crank up the A/C, which also doesn't come cheap. You can bet your ass Digsby doesn't get $60 worth from taxing my CPU, so the end result is the power company makes a buck, Digsby makes a few pennies in the short term and eventually lose a chunk of their audience from all these shenanigans.
The sad part in all this, is they probably would make more money AND be less hated if they had simply asked for donations. I'd rather give $20 to a deserving developer, than to the dirty electricity tycoons. It's pretty lame that a company would rather screw their clients behind their backs and inflict greater indirect expense, than be upfront and honest about their financial expectations.
What's moronic is 50 years down the road, when simply being physically imposing is grounds for arrest... when a weakling can point at a big guy and randomly accuse them of anything, because the law and people's prejudice will be unreasonably tipped in their favour.
Would my point be clearer to you if we were talking about white people vs black people ?
What if someone got mugged, but didn't get a good view of the assailant, and at a police lineup they have 4 skinny guys and one big guy. Don't you think the victim will be inclined to assume the big guy did it ? Hell, cops already make those assumptions.
It doesn't matter what the sides are, whenever there's inequality, there's abuse, and wherever there's abuse, there's a guy on the internet to complain about it. Today, I'm that guy.
I get what you're saying, and I agree that SiS chips are almost universally paired with shitty ass boards, but my gripes are with the actual chipset's functionality and driver support. I feel they are today where VIA was 7-8 years ago in terms of stability.
It's kinda funny, I joked about this very same idea, that the $2.00/hour outsourcers might be intentionally raping our servers for profit. Then the next day one of my support clients had that exact thing happen to him... one of his developers in India decided to create a bunch of email accounts and spam off of them. I have to admit, it makes perfect sense: he probably made more money selling spam runs for a few days, than a week of regular salary, plus he's not going to get into any immediate trouble... I'm not going to fly over there and beat the tan out of him, he just lost one smallish contract - big whoop.
It's not about "you get what you pay for", and certainly not a racially charged disconnect (at least not in my case), it's just the risk vs reward balance that's tipped against us. Globalization is a double-edged sword. White collar crime is just as big a problem in western societies, but we do it bigger and badder. As an American, if someone offered you $100 a day to sacrifice one of your clients, you'd probably tell him to blow you. In India, $100 might be equivalent to $1000 to us, maybe more. I don't know about you, but in my neighborhood if you want to make $1000 a day you either have to sell your ass, or sell gobs of crack and blow. The incentives vs risks aren't on the same scale at all.
I'm not saying we should treat all outsourcers as hostile crooks, we have plenty of those right here at home, on the payroll even. We just need to approach it sanely. If you underpay someone, they are more likely to fuck you over - that much should be common wisdom in the business world. It's the dirty side-effect of living in an entitlement culture.
Isn't that more a result of poor wiring, and less about the technology itself ? Seems to me, if we stopped hiring grade-9 dropouts to build our houses, maybe the wiring wouldn't suck so bad and powerline networking wouldn't be such a big deal.
In my apartment, I have four separate circuits, but they all bleed into each other at the fusebox, so when the freezer's compressor kicks in, I get pops in my speakers, and the bedroom TV spazzes for a moment as the flyback settles back to resonance. If I installed powerline networking here, I'd likely wake up the next day with a bunch of metal stuck to my patio windows from the massive electromagnetic field. That, and dead hookers.
<weasel>But...but..but... that's interefering with the free market!</weasel>
WHAT FREE MARKET ?
In an ideal world, I would agree with you. I WANT to agree with you, but the reality is that government is not looking out for you and I, it is looking out for Merck, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup. Not Average Joe and Plain Jane. They certainly cannot come to grips with the possibility that technology should be a common good, rather than a privately leveraged asset. "That's hippie talk! Star Trek gobbledygook! If we give away our specs, the terrorists have already won!"
The way things are today, I don't want the governemnt waving its filthy hands anywhere near me. It's not a question of "if" they will fuck it up, but "when" and "how badly".
Yes, again with the conservatives chugging Yankee splooge. Much like the Republican/Democrat duality, our Canadian political parties are locked in a cycle of fucking things up for the next guy to clean up. It just so happens that the conservatives are the most skilled at fucking things up ROYALLY, which of course makes the other guys look bad because they can't fix it.
Thank you, AC. It's nice to know some people can still tell the difference between the two.
One works for the money, the other is a developer.
Guy 2 should have his ass kicked by a wheelchair-bound midget, because he encouraged the practice of bullying by failing to stand up against the oppressor.
If you're the kind of person who goes through life scared shitless of everyone and everything, maybe you should take some self-defense classes. With the proper training, even a 100lb woman can subdue a 300lb lummox. But wait, this is western society, we don't believe in personal responsibility now, do we ? We just make up more laws to "protect" the meek...
I would personally resist a rapist with my last ounce of strength. The fact that some people might be too scared to do so does not reduce the violence of the encounter in any way, shape or form.
We are splitting nits here. The fact that someone does not fight means they are being non-violent. It means it is non-violent rape. Don't confuse "being violent" and "being violated". The two words come from the same root (latin violare), but have evolved into very distinct meanings, at least in English and most romance languages.
So we can only call a crime violent if the victim is willing to resist in same manner?
No. We can only call a crime violent if there was actual violence. Rape and violence are completely distinct concepts, you can have one without the other, though it seems they most often come as a pair. That means you can have violent rape, and non-violent rape.
Rape requires coercion. If you do like the constitution, lay there and take it, it's not rape, you just enjoy (or are indifferent to) getting fucked. If it isn't blatantly obvious to any randomly passing stranger that you've being abused, then I think we shouldn't call it rape. How do you expect people to help if they can't even tell you're being harmed ?
Violent rape requires coercion via violence, or the threat thereof. If someone holds a weapon (knife/gun/stick/fist/marmot) to your head, with the explicit or implicit threat that you will be hurt unless you provide sexual services, that is violent rape (assuming they have their way with you). Of crucial importance is that the threat/aggression and sex do not necessarily have to happen at the same time.
I don't believe in consent by default, or that idiotic rapist defense "she was asking for it with that slutty outfit"... that's cowardly bullshit, but I also don't believe in "victims" deciding they're victims after the fact. I have seen that loophole abused far too often in my relatively short lifetime. Was there or was there not real harm inflicted ? Yes ? No ? Does your answer change if the aggressor has settlement money ? It is more rape-ish if you think you'll get the house and Volvo ?
People use far too many words and exceptions to define these painfully obvious concepts. All sane people are able to immediately tell whether they are being wronged or not. You want to be doing something, or you don't.
You clearly weren't an Altavista user.
Google's results today are no better than the leading search engines 10 years ago. People were gaming the engines then, and Google came up with a smarter algorithm (Pagerank), but today's results page is again full of garbage because people learned how to game Pagerank. Combine that with the web 2.0 fad of scraping and regurgitating everyone else's content, and the resultant pile of URLs for any given keyword is utterly worthless. I call it "metapublishing", because the content is worthless, it's become a twisted game of outwitting Google to maximize ad revenue while providing zero value.
Searching has always been a game of finding the most specific yet least popular terms to define what you want, and then adding a bunch of negative keywords to filter out the junk. Google scored a hit, many many years ago, but they haven't been able (or willing) to maintain that lead, and all their competitors have pretty much died out anyway.
If Google hadn't come along when it did, someone else would have stepped up. Maybe Altavista, or Yahoo, or someone else. There was a need, and a provider to address that need. The only reason we don't have a new search engine to beat Google today is because, well, everyone is scared shitless of going head-to-head with Google, except Microsoft with their propaganda-laced Bing embarrassment. They're just not the golden child people seem to think they are.
Securing a simple web app is mostly a matter of sanitizing your inputs (and sometimes the outputs as well). A good developer should be able to almost intuitively predict the weak points in an app and harden those. Sure, if you're just an average MCSE copy/pasting code from any random forum, you're asking to get owned, but if you understand what your data is doing and why, then it should be a natural part of your development process to identify what does and doesn't belong in your data structures, and ensure that nothing else gets in or out.
Frankly, I've been less than pleased with the whole SLI vs CrossFire debacle. It's a friggin PCI-Express bus! This is nothing more than software and/or firmware enforced lock-in, and it stinks. I would have preferred for Intel to reject the SLI tax entirely. NVidia is the small player here, they're the ones who should be bending over backwards to get the big guys to promote their products. I don't want to pay an SLI tax on my motherboard, NVidia should be plenty glad that I'm buying two expensive GPUs instead of one, and they should consider a partnership with Intel like a divine blessing because Intel is 10 times larger and has far greater reach into every single market.
The situation is simple: right now, I own a perfectly fine motherboard that doesn't support SLI (Intel P35). I also have a perfectly fine Geforce 8800 and would have loved to add a second, but I can't because my board isn't on the SLI whitelist. My options are:
A. buy the second card, and replace my motherboard with an overpriced unstable NForce 750 board
B. fuck NVidia and buy two brand new AMD cards
Assuming equal performance, option B would cost me far less, even though I would prefer the NVidia GPU. Their SLI lock in has thus resulted in a lost sale.
Now I'm just one guy, but here's the funny part: I used to sell gaming rigs... lots and lots of 'em. When people heard about SLI, all the hardcore guys wanted it, but when they found out they had to taint their lovingly assembled systems with an NForce board, most of them backed off. It wasn't even about the money, it's about NVidia's awful track record in the chipset biz. They make even SIS look good. They never really fixed the NF2/3/4 disk corruption glitches, and they trashed the one good thing they had going for them: Soundstorm. That was a long time ago, but the way they handled those very public screwups left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
It's true, and frankly I don't care what a person puts in their body, as long as they're able to function and interact satisfactorily. I obviously don't want a support tech saying "Your web site's down, that's cool man! Smoke a doob and forget about it!"
I'm not averse to drugs or alcohol (I love em myself!). I'm averse to stupidity. How about we devise a screening test for THAT ?!
That depends on the drinker.
To me, four pints in an evening is a "social" night, of course I drink far better stuff than Stella, but that's another American/Canadian debate I don't feel like uncorking right now.
There's no shortage of pasty white anglo-saxon weasels that start humping things after half a Corona, but that's not me. Ask any bartender, they can drink themselves silly, then recover fully by noon the next day. I don't go quite as far, and I certainly feel it the next day if I cross that line between social and "paaaarty", but the idea of alcohol tolerance is not some made-up word to defend alcoholics, it is a very real chemical effect.
The human body is an incredibly adaptive system, and it comes in countless varieties. To define any specific amount of alcohol as excessive is to ignore human diversity itself.
I don't disagree in that it is a government problem as well, but in my wacky opinion I find the entire police system - indeed the very concept of it - flawed beyond repair. It straddles far too many gray areas and ultimately, in my view, it fails to accomplish its primary goal of controlling criminal activity.
One of the ways it fails is by having an overly broad definition of "criminal activity". If they kept the problem domain small and tightly defined, I think it would make the job a whole lot easier to handle. There is nothing I hate more than seeing ghost cars parked somewhere lucrative, solely to write a gazillion tickets all week long. We have far more problematic issues to deal with than a few motorists doing 10 kph over.
Perhaps I'm a little more irritated because I used to live in a suburban area, where they had maybe 4 or 5 police vehicles to cover a very large area, yet at least 3 of them would be parked at a certain heavily-congested bridge every single goddamned day, handing out fines left right and center to line-jumpers. Maybe if they had spent the money to build a wider bridge, I'd be a little more forgiving, but the reality is that they just sat there taxing everyone.
It was a quiet area, semi-rural and crime was low anyway, but for years I wished for some serious trouble to hit a remote area. Sure enough one day there was a big mess, where in the same time frame a convenience store clerk was blasted by a shotgun-wielding robber, two homes burned down to the ground from suspected arsonists, and a bunch of teens beat the crap out of some old rich guy while robbing him. They eventually caught one arsonist, the murderous thieves were never caught. Word on the street was that the cops took 3 hours to get to the murder scene, and the beating victim was driven to the police station by their neighbour to file a report.
I no longer live in that area, but this urban sprawl isn't much better. We have more cops, but they spend their time pestering the homeless and again handing out spurious fines to whomever they choose. So please forgive me when I direct my rage at these people who gleefully ignore the real life-threatening situations while harassing harmless citizens every single goddamned day. I've seen some of the worst, and so far I've had no indication of other regional police forces being any better. I would like to think that somewhere, they do things properly and their services are actually worth the money, but so far that dream has not materialized for me.
The holistic approach is indeed what differentiates tech gods from mere drones. It sounds like your daughter and yourself are knowledge sponges... which is great, and if it works for you then go for it (works for me too!), but to try that on someone who isn't as, erm, "spongy" is a sure-fire way to screw them up real good.
That's why it's such a dangerous and misleading "metric". The guy who claims to be a genius has a 50/50 chance of being full of shit. Well ok, in reality it's probably a 95% chance but you know what I mean. More dangerous still is the non-confrontational PC mentality that prevents those dopes from being called out and hung out to dry. I think that passivity is a great motivator for the Know-it-alls to continue peddling their BS.
Your family sounds hella exciting.
SMAC/X ? Yes I love it (hate the ginger believers though), but I'm an alpha geek. I wouldn't stick a kid in front of it, not until they're at least 12 and can somewhat wrap their head around the bullshit tango that is politics. Pushing a kid into intellectual tasks too early just means he/she will suck at the basic stuff later in life.
Much of my 20's were spent back-filling the gaps in my skill set, stuff that had been neglected in favor of computers and general science. I'm starting to balance out, but still very much a stereotypical geek under the surface. Beating the crap out of SMAC or Civ2 or any other brainy game will not prepare a kid for the mundane realities of modern life, and I sure as shit can't nerve staple my boss no matter how annoyed I may be.
America hasn't "made us do" any of these things. Our trade ministers and premiers are the ones to blame. We've had a really bad run of crooked bastards over the past decade, and the problem stems from the fact that we have a rapidly expanding Albertan market that's got more in common with southern States than a Canadian provinces, and it just so happens that their own mini Bush is the guy calling the shots here in Ottawa.
If we had leaders with even average-sized balls, they could put a foot down and shift the trade relationships back in our favor - or simply cut the off and see what (doesn't) happen. War ? I can't even type that word without chuckling... The only reason our industries are being exploited is because our leaders set it up that way, under presumed ulterior motives. There's no need to blame the Americans.
Not an employer, more like a subcontractor. They are enlisted by artists to "handle" the royalties on their behalf. If the CRIA disappeared today, artists would still be pretty much in the same place. The big guys would be pissed, but they're free to hire their own 1st-tier droogs. The small guys probably wouldn't notice a thing.