How is a human supposed to get anything meaningful out of a speeding camera ? The only way I could see this being useful is if the software is able to stitch the images into a big huge panoramic image of the room, or use radar/lidar to assemble a 3D view. Then you have to process that info quickly enough (in your brain) to make a tactical decision before the enemy follows the trajectory back to your location.
Cool technology yes, but it doesn't seem very useful in practice.
They probably felt just as lame as they have their entire life. There's no pride in cheating. You have to work hard to get satisfaction out of it, else we'd all play everything on god-mode and brag about it on Youtube like this little prewhore.
Many would argue that power-leveling is pretty heinous to begin with. It's fine to have guild mates help you with a tough part, but paying someone to basically level your character by abusing glitches or "tolerant" rules completely defeats the purpose of playing the game.
If they didn't want to play the game, then why the fuck did they buy it ?
I assure you, Blizzard has produced more than enough content to satisfy its users. Don't let a handful of cheating imbeciles fool you otherwise. It takes absolutely no smarts to powerlevel, and you miss out on all the actual content that makes the World of Warcraft interesting.
I get what you're saying, and BTW welcome to 21st-century Slashdot. God, this place has gone to the shits.
Anyway, I think the root of this frustration is we've been wooed (read: brainwashed) by the idea of convergence (remember that buzzword?). Dirty rotten companies shove mp3-camera-gameboy-dildo-phones down our throats every minute of every day. Playstations crunch SETI, stream PPV movies and want to kill Sarah Connor.
The Kindle is a single-purpose device: to make money, er... I mean display eBooks. This is counter to the industry's momentum. There are no ringtones, no Java games, no flashy useless feature that people can show off around the office while saying "Hey look! My iPenis is more expensive than yours". It forces the user to be quiet and focused, and they hate that.
Low UIDs like us, we're getting too old for this crowd.
The problem with that idea is that textbooks are too profitable an industry to risk modernizing.
Scratch that - education is too profitable an industry to risk modernizing.
The bottom line is: textbooks are a cash cow for the publishers and schools, and while a lot of people talk about saving dead trees, very few actually care because we don't see those dead trees. We see them on TV, we read about them in craptastic magazines (irony!), but that's always "somewhere else" and the idea fades as quickly as it came.
If you really want to save the trees, kill a lawyer. I'd bet one lawyer wastes more paper in a year than an entire classroom.
You're seriously proposing legislation instead of science ?
OUT WITH YOU!
The way I see it, yes it is practically dictated by the laws of thermodynamics that this process will yield a net loss of energy, but if it can safely eliminate waste while recovering a significant portion of the energy spent, it could become a sustainable solution for trash disposal, as opposed to landfill.
You might be surprised at the performance leap from a new CPU. I went from an X2 4800 with an 8800GTS, to an overclocked C2Q. I noticed a tremendous improvement in almost all games, despite running on the same GPU. For one, it eliminated any and all stuttering, even in older games. I'd say it pumped a good 30% more fps into my main games like WoW, LoTR, and the shooters of course.
Today's graphics cards are so ridiculously fast, they're very commonly limited by the CPU. It's like the 3Dfx days all over again!
Err.... does ECC ram actually help with reliability, or does it merely ensure that errors get detected ?
Perhaps I'm a bit of a purist, but if ECC Ram is actually self-correcting, I would worry about how/why it got corrupted in the first place. I find it much cheaper and easier to buy good quality non-ECC Ram instead.
Here's how I understand this thing we call "economy". There is a fixed amount of various resources in the world... materials, labour, whatever. Those resources are convertible into money and back, right ? So by extension, there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
If fat slobs get poor, that means someone else gets richer. The problem with the U.S. economy is that the gap between rich and average is so great, it destabilizes the entire system.
I realize this is what prior generations called "Pinko idealism", but at some point we'll have to man up and admit that capitalism and banking are inherently self-destructive. The more money you hoard, the greater the chances the system will collapse under your weight.
The government is not there to enact justice, it is there to provide services to its citizens. Justice is not a service. Justice is a tool, a device to help ensure social stability, and as long as justice is controlled by someone on the payroll, there will be no true justice. There is only loyalty to the payroll.
Plus, your sig has been bugging me for a while now:
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to the lazy.
... nor is its purpose to raid lower- and middle-class people's wallets and give it to the rich, but purpose be damned because that's all it's ever been good at!
Why do you want to punish those people? They're free people, doing what they want to do, and it hurts nobody. Why not just let them continue?
Uh, maybe because it's yet another small contribution to this lovely thing we call inflation. Creating money that's not backed by actual value leads to inflation. That $38 markup comes from where exactly ? Was there any significant value added to the product, vs its $2 acquisition condition ? No. In today's connected world, anyone can post anything online and connect directly with the buyer. The retail middleman is thus a parasite.
No one needs to know how you are breaking the law.
Perhaps we talk about it, because we think the law is wrong.
I've been on Slashdot for a few years, as my UID will attest, and I can't really say I've ever seen any sort of groupthink. If anything, the community's attitudes are much less cohesive today that they were ten years ago, simply because the user base has diversified over time. Ten years ago, we were all supergeeks, mostly computer geeks at that, so you could perhaps distort that into groupthink, but really we were just like-minded individuals. It's not like people came here and changed their opinions just to fit in - that's very un-geekly.
There have always been those who support piracy, and those that don't. We're not here to tell people which one is right or wrong, we're just here to discuss the topic and share ideas so that each individual can make that decision for themselves. If you don't like piracy, then don't pirate. Nobody's shoving a torrent up your ass.
The problem with your math is you make the assumption that everyone resells their games after a certain time has passed. This is very far from the truth.
Most people hang on to their games, it's the magpie/collector aspect, and good games often have a nostalgic value attached, so people hang on to them and play them again in later years.
The people reselling their games are usually low-income (teens, failed adults who are too dumb to rent).
What the game industry should do, is eliminate the used market entirely and save themselves a lot of headaches and backhanded litigation by simply reducing the price of the product, to the sweet spot where the sales exceed any lost profits. Figure out some stats for used game sales, add those to your first-party sales, then divide it into your gross sales projections. Games will be anywhere from 20% to 40% cheaper, and more people will buy them.
Just look at what Nintendo and Sony have been doing with their "Platinum Releases" or whatever they call them. They take a best-selling games, slash the price in half, and sell another few million to the budget-conscious among their clientele. It goes against the "free market", which says high demand should dictate high prices, but in practice the reduced price creates an even greater demand, because you're breaking into a whole other demographic. A game is not a limited resource. It is bits on a disc. You can copy it ad infinitum at minimal cost. You can stream it over the internet for even less. The rules of the free market no longer apply.
What will happen is what's already happening: we will pirate the DLC.
I'm perfectly fine with the add-on / expansion business, but the example they give is borderline fraud. Paying to see/beat the final boss ? What kind of crack-headed idea is that ? These publishers have severe tunnel vision!
They complain about the rental/resale business, but those businesses exist because the cost of gaming is already too high. The gaming industry created that void, that pricing vulnerability, and sure enough something came along to fill the void. Now they're pissed off ? Then they should try to compete, for once. $60 for a game is obviously too much for most people, which is why the $5.00 rental industry thrives and the pirate "industry" is booming.
Slashdot Mirror
How is a human supposed to get anything meaningful out of a speeding camera ? The only way I could see this being useful is if the software is able to stitch the images into a big huge panoramic image of the room, or use radar/lidar to assemble a 3D view. Then you have to process that info quickly enough (in your brain) to make a tactical decision before the enemy follows the trajectory back to your location.
Cool technology yes, but it doesn't seem very useful in practice.
They probably felt just as lame as they have their entire life. There's no pride in cheating. You have to work hard to get satisfaction out of it, else we'd all play everything on god-mode and brag about it on Youtube like this little prewhore.
I consider it no worse than normal power-leveling
Many would argue that power-leveling is pretty heinous to begin with. It's fine to have guild mates help you with a tough part, but paying someone to basically level your character by abusing glitches or "tolerant" rules completely defeats the purpose of playing the game.
If they didn't want to play the game, then why the fuck did they buy it ?
I assure you, Blizzard has produced more than enough content to satisfy its users. Don't let a handful of cheating imbeciles fool you otherwise. It takes absolutely no smarts to powerlevel, and you miss out on all the actual content that makes the World of Warcraft interesting.
Without lore, it's just a Progress Quest
Technical problem: too many damned kids on Slashdot.
Technical answer: cap UIDs at a half-million, punt all the rest, close signups forever.
Amirite?
I get what you're saying, and BTW welcome to 21st-century Slashdot. God, this place has gone to the shits.
Anyway, I think the root of this frustration is we've been wooed (read: brainwashed) by the idea of convergence (remember that buzzword?). Dirty rotten companies shove mp3-camera-gameboy-dildo-phones down our throats every minute of every day. Playstations crunch SETI, stream PPV movies and want to kill Sarah Connor.
The Kindle is a single-purpose device: to make money, er... I mean display eBooks. This is counter to the industry's momentum. There are no ringtones, no Java games, no flashy useless feature that people can show off around the office while saying "Hey look! My iPenis is more expensive than yours". It forces the user to be quiet and focused, and they hate that.
Low UIDs like us, we're getting too old for this crowd.
The problem with that idea is that textbooks are too profitable an industry to risk modernizing.
Scratch that - education is too profitable an industry to risk modernizing.
The bottom line is: textbooks are a cash cow for the publishers and schools, and while a lot of people talk about saving dead trees, very few actually care because we don't see those dead trees. We see them on TV, we read about them in craptastic magazines (irony!), but that's always "somewhere else" and the idea fades as quickly as it came.
If you really want to save the trees, kill a lawyer. I'd bet one lawyer wastes more paper in a year than an entire classroom.
Difference being that his job is probably a profitable endeavor.
Space missions are pure R&D. There's no money in space, and there won't be for a very long time until we find something we actually want out there.
So you're officially given up on Earth ?
All this Green bullshit to try and make this ball of dirt last a bit longer, and all you want to do is get off it ? Is it NASA or NIMBY ?
Methinks his unit granularity is rather broad :)
You're seriously proposing legislation instead of science ?
OUT WITH YOU!
The way I see it, yes it is practically dictated by the laws of thermodynamics that this process will yield a net loss of energy, but if it can safely eliminate waste while recovering a significant portion of the energy spent, it could become a sustainable solution for trash disposal, as opposed to landfill.
The difference is you can easily make artificial snow, but to make artificial money you need to be :
1. Government
2. Jewish
3. Already rich
Typically three traits that do not apply to open-source developers.
You might be surprised at the performance leap from a new CPU. I went from an X2 4800 with an 8800GTS, to an overclocked C2Q. I noticed a tremendous improvement in almost all games, despite running on the same GPU. For one, it eliminated any and all stuttering, even in older games. I'd say it pumped a good 30% more fps into my main games like WoW, LoTR, and the shooters of course.
Today's graphics cards are so ridiculously fast, they're very commonly limited by the CPU. It's like the 3Dfx days all over again!
Do you really see a difference between 2ghz and 3ghz for anything other than encoding video?
Yes, it gives you more headroom for when your PC is bogged down with spyware and viruses!
Err.... does ECC ram actually help with reliability, or does it merely ensure that errors get detected ?
Perhaps I'm a bit of a purist, but if ECC Ram is actually self-correcting, I would worry about how/why it got corrupted in the first place. I find it much cheaper and easier to buy good quality non-ECC Ram instead.
How do you figure ?
Here's how I understand this thing we call "economy". There is a fixed amount of various resources in the world... materials, labour, whatever. Those resources are convertible into money and back, right ? So by extension, there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
If fat slobs get poor, that means someone else gets richer. The problem with the U.S. economy is that the gap between rich and average is so great, it destabilizes the entire system.
I realize this is what prior generations called "Pinko idealism", but at some point we'll have to man up and admit that capitalism and banking are inherently self-destructive. The more money you hoard, the greater the chances the system will collapse under your weight.
That's funny, I was convinced such costs were passed down to the consumer...
It's not like a company would want to lose money on a sale...
Oh boy... field trip!
The government is not there to enact justice, it is there to provide services to its citizens. Justice is not a service. Justice is a tool, a device to help ensure social stability, and as long as justice is controlled by someone on the payroll, there will be no true justice. There is only loyalty to the payroll.
Plus, your sig has been bugging me for a while now:
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to the lazy.
... nor is its purpose to raid lower- and middle-class people's wallets and give it to the rich, but purpose be damned because that's all it's ever been good at!
I fail to see the sarcasm in your comment.
The problem is this is a quantum device.
Even thinking about it will alter its results. People will mess with the system, intentionally or not, just be knowing it exists.
It's a neat idea, but humans are way too moronic to not ruin everything they touch.
Why do you want to punish those people? They're free people, doing what they want to do, and it hurts nobody. Why not just let them continue?
Uh, maybe because it's yet another small contribution to this lovely thing we call inflation. Creating money that's not backed by actual value leads to inflation. That $38 markup comes from where exactly ? Was there any significant value added to the product, vs its $2 acquisition condition ? No. In today's connected world, anyone can post anything online and connect directly with the buyer. The retail middleman is thus a parasite.
No one needs to know how you are breaking the law.
Perhaps we talk about it, because we think the law is wrong.
I've been on Slashdot for a few years, as my UID will attest, and I can't really say I've ever seen any sort of groupthink. If anything, the community's attitudes are much less cohesive today that they were ten years ago, simply because the user base has diversified over time. Ten years ago, we were all supergeeks, mostly computer geeks at that, so you could perhaps distort that into groupthink, but really we were just like-minded individuals. It's not like people came here and changed their opinions just to fit in - that's very un-geekly.
There have always been those who support piracy, and those that don't. We're not here to tell people which one is right or wrong, we're just here to discuss the topic and share ideas so that each individual can make that decision for themselves. If you don't like piracy, then don't pirate. Nobody's shoving a torrent up your ass.
The problem with your math is you make the assumption that everyone resells their games after a certain time has passed. This is very far from the truth.
Most people hang on to their games, it's the magpie/collector aspect, and good games often have a nostalgic value attached, so people hang on to them and play them again in later years.
The people reselling their games are usually low-income (teens, failed adults who are too dumb to rent).
What the game industry should do, is eliminate the used market entirely and save themselves a lot of headaches and backhanded litigation by simply reducing the price of the product, to the sweet spot where the sales exceed any lost profits. Figure out some stats for used game sales, add those to your first-party sales, then divide it into your gross sales projections. Games will be anywhere from 20% to 40% cheaper, and more people will buy them.
Just look at what Nintendo and Sony have been doing with their "Platinum Releases" or whatever they call them. They take a best-selling games, slash the price in half, and sell another few million to the budget-conscious among their clientele. It goes against the "free market", which says high demand should dictate high prices, but in practice the reduced price creates an even greater demand, because you're breaking into a whole other demographic. A game is not a limited resource. It is bits on a disc. You can copy it ad infinitum at minimal cost. You can stream it over the internet for even less. The rules of the free market no longer apply.
I do not know why people buy at theses places.
I'm sure you do know, you're just trying to be polite.
I'm a career asshole, and I will spell it out: People are stupid.
There!
What will happen is what's already happening: we will pirate the DLC.
I'm perfectly fine with the add-on / expansion business, but the example they give is borderline fraud. Paying to see/beat the final boss ? What kind of crack-headed idea is that ? These publishers have severe tunnel vision!
They complain about the rental/resale business, but those businesses exist because the cost of gaming is already too high. The gaming industry created that void, that pricing vulnerability, and sure enough something came along to fill the void. Now they're pissed off ? Then they should try to compete, for once. $60 for a game is obviously too much for most people, which is why the $5.00 rental industry thrives and the pirate "industry" is booming.