I'm really shocked at the tone and direction the "5" folks at alashdot have taken on this. Why? They are basically saying that you as a user/consumer have no rights shut up!
This is part of why I don't play those types of games. If I create a character, back story, personalize it, and level it up, and collect some items for it, that's mine! That's my personally created content that I and every user own their own copy right over. Depending on the character editing UI, I can make my character look exactly like a paper D&D character of mine. I own that character. Now do I care if any given company has their own version of gold, potions, ether, or status curing stuff? Not really. I learn their naming system and pick up the needed crap asap.
I also own the damn account although some slashdot posts are right that you don't really own it, but are renting it. That's like the saying that there is no property ownership in the US because of property taxes the various government bodies only allow you to rent property from them.
Here is something to really think about though. The game creators own most of the copy right on various items and things in those games and can change them at their whims. If you are using default short sword from game company, then don't expect to be surprised if they change the design or effects of it.
They shouldn't be allowed to do is delete any items or change effects of those items that a player has "earned," though they can always have a given uses or such that automatically makes even the most awesome stuff useless by next month to encourage the players to scrape those items that you'd really like to get out of the game.
I'm surprised that slashdot's modded response to this topic is that you don't own crap it all belongs to the company. My favorite post was about owning slashdot comments... Here is a big surprise yes every slashdotter does own the copy right on their own comments. Slashdot doesn't own your comments; you do. If I want to make a book or something out of all my slashdot comments, the only thing slowing me down is that I'd need to upgrade my account to a paid account.
I'm mixed on that. That was my first reaction, and then I thought, but if that AI is talking with stupid people, then isn't it at human level? I don't know about you, but I want AI to be useful. Fooling idiots isn't really all that useful.
Um, how about a glorified telephone support app for Dell or HP? Instead of speaking to some one in another country, you talk to robot/AI generic flow chart person. Trust me, treating everyone like a stupid person seems to be the norm when calling tech support so having an AI that can patiently/cheaply deal with your average stupid person would be ideal there.
The real headline should be something along the lines of freshmen class of Abilene Christian University all required to pay for brand new iPhones.
When I read the "New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback" headline, I thought of cellphone/pda apps. Considering books cost me around $300 a semester back in 1996-2000 and all the other ways that the university tried to leech a buck off my family, I'm not surprised that a college is doing something like this. This sounds and looks like a decent killer app for cell phones/PDAs.
I'm kinda sad though. I'd have thought that we'd have figured out how to get all this done, and my kids using this in elementary school right now. I'm really sad that colleges are just now getting there. I remember back in 1998 when my college just started their web app for signing up for classes. It was much, much better than their telephone system that they'd used before hand. We loved it.
My kids public school has a web app that'll show their 9 weeks grades and an event calendar. O.k. it's nice that they have anything, but still as a parent and tax payer, I'd want all their text books to be in pdf and able to be saved, viewed, printed, quoted from anywhere. I'd also want teachers grade books and PTA meetings online as well. There is a part of me that thinks class rooms need forums or a school running their own version of facebook, yet geared more along the lines of keeping track of all of a student's progress, projects, entire school history, homework, quizes, & test history for everything there, and doing it as a glorified year book. Especially to pound it into the student's head, that this is to make you and us look "good"!;)
The day an AI will pass the Turing Test, it will be the day humanity has become so stupid to not be able to see the differences between a person and a machine.
I'm mixed on that. That was my first reaction, and then I thought, but if that AI is talking with stupid people, then isn't it at human level?
The other thing is are you calling anyone that doesn't notice that it's a robot/AI stupid? By default, I don't even think of what the other person is. I don't know or care if you are white/black/green, male/female/both/neither, or which political views you hold. On slashdot, I only know you by the 3-4 sentences that you type. Is that enough for anyone really to judge one way or another if someone is human or a robot? Nope.
I'd suggest a good portion of slashdot could be robots, and we'd never notice.
I would think it quite hard to be duped into believing a program is a human.
I'll take the opposite POV just to be naughty. Why? Well, browse slashdot at 1 and see how many robots you could pick out. Heck, even at 5 you still get robots due to the slashdot group think; they just say what slashdot wants to hear and get modded up.
If they really wanted to test a few of these systems, they'd get each one a slashdot account and have them read the headlines and then make a single post after reading 10-15 posts at 3 or 4. After six months, let's see what their karma and average mod points are.;)
The again, I've thought much about how certain cars (like my poor BMW) get a bad rap for having "asshole" drivers... if a BMW driver doesn't signal, he's a f&^% bmw driver, if another driver does the same, he's just a f&%^ idiot. Maybe it'll turn out to be based more on the cars' looks than anything else. The car looks angry, therefore the driver must be angry, therefore he must be an asshole.
Nah, I blame it on the envy thing. BMWs are an expensive car and most of those Ford, Chevy or Honda drivers hate anyone driving something more expensive than their own car. (Oh, they'll blame it on almost anything else, but this is the real reason.) This is my underling belief why there is so much hate towards both semis and SUVs as well. They blame gas mileage, but what they really hate is that's a more expensive car than they can afford.
I read the headline and thought of course now all you need is web front ends and cell phones/PDAs and presto you've got a "thin client.";) If it's a web front end on a PC, you can still make sure your folks have those essentials like office & what ever else windows apps your place finds that it can't live without. Heck, cell phones/PDAs even have office functionality today. That sales man can use his laptop or if worse comes to worse his PDA/cell phone to pull that much needed power point presentation or even read his e-mail.
Look, I understand that's enough security for your mortals, but I plan to live forever. I don't want someone getting my data just after my 128,299,838,295th birthday!
Um, I plan to live forever too. I'm to the point that I don't care if anyone gets any of my data as I'd be so senile as not to remember any passwords so its some what safer to have all that porn unencrypted.
That's the real problem of living forever is forgetting all that somewhat important crap. Of course what ever you do, don't go for the super perfect memory as that's even worse since you'll never forget some horrible things/websites no matter how much you long to do.
I find the headline "Algorithms Can Make You Pretty" is true. After looking at the pictures though, I don't think that those algorithms will though. I find this a really funny topic to find on slashdot. Any one here have a 12-14 aged daughter? After defining what an algorithm is to them, ask them for a their personal algorithm for making them look pretty. You'll likely be shocked, but that would likely be a much more successful algorithm.
Any married slashdotters? If you dare, ask the same thing of your wife. That would likely be the algorithm that best works for getting you attracted to them. It's actually personalized to your and her tastes even if you don't know really take notice of it. I would have a place and date arranged to where I can take my wife when she gets pretty. You'll need something like that after asking the question to sooth things over anyway.
The great thing about this is that we all have different standards so our version of a good looking attractive mate may be completely different from others.
Evolution can't work if "survival of the fittest" really means "survival of everyone". It looks like we'll either stagnate or evolve completely randomly, in all directions that don't outright kill us.
Survival is only half of it. Breeding is actually the more important half. If we really wanted to know what we were selecting against, we'd kept track of every person that died off without producing any offspring. Those are the traits that for whatever reasons we are selecting against.
I don't buy into the concept that we are breeding idiots or that smart people are selected against. When I actually think about it, I believe that we are always selecting against idiots and only the smartest survive... this basically means those college grads or PHds that never breed that think that they are smart compared the general population are the idiots. Those that get into any relationship that produces long term viable offspring are by default the geniuses of humanity.;)
There is a part of me that thinks that we need to abuse sterilization as part of our criminal justice system. Basically on the fifth time that you are convicted, we'll make sure you aren't going to breed any more.;) (This would have the long term effect of breeding out bad criminals from the gene pool. Only really good criminals would breed.;) ) Actually, I think that getting arrested or jailed is automatically against held you if most members of the opposite sex find out. That's something we just self select against. We haven't breed out criminals from the gene pool yet.
I also think that we are breeding super warriors... This has been going on for over the last 6 thousand years. We've yet to breed a perfect warrior, but hey we just need time and a war or two a generation.
Get ready for the Themed ads. Are you in a fantasy setting? Get ready for ye old Coke Ale. O.k. really only "true" old style beer and their ads should show up there. I have no idea what that would be. Anything from the early 1920s up could have all sorts of old style coke ads. Heck, Coke could make a massive list of their entire ad history and the various times each has run. Then they'd re-run those same ads in each of the games set in each era. If you have a 1960s game, you get 1960s coke ads. If the game is set in 1980s, you get that style of coke ads. They could be tricky and try posting next years ad campaign any game that they can find set next year. Or do one better and come up with future themed ads now sell 'em to the game companies and when that time frame comes up use them in real life.;)
Ad companies should have a love/hate thing with this. Basically once create any physical ad for any company, you also create an online one for games and you some how arrange for the game company to report back how many players have passed by/viewed the ad or you get the ad to do it by itself within the game. Ideally, they could be years into the future off one really good ad today. They'd hate it though because every ad idea that they've ever sold to anyone could be out there competing for eyeballs.
Basically if the ad folks can get you stop looking at the strippers in Duke Nuke 'em Forever and actually look at their porn ads on the walls or outside the stripper joint, then they'd have a success.;)
Sweet Jesus on a flying carpet, "non-citizens have basically no rights and if they want in they have to do what we tell them"?! You do realise Apartheid is over, and you can no longer buy slaves? Your Constitution protects PEOPLE, not citizens.
Um, you are wrong and he is right. Non-citizens don't have the same level of rights as citizens and most likely never will. We generally treat illegal aliens, illegal immigrants and citizens without any id that they are citizens exactly the same. It's easier for the police or whoever the arresting agency is to treat everyone the same and assume that they have rights when they may not. It also causes less trouble when a recent immigrant is arrested and is treated decently.
The Bill of Rights isn't basic human rights; it's a citizens only thing. You as a basic human or foreign national don't just have the right to bear arms in the US because of our Bill of Rights.
I find this entire thread funny. Why? Because it involves customs going into/outside of the country. The rules for that has always been different to normal rules. We actually try to limit the folks entering/exiting the country. I mean if the same rules applied traveling to Mexico or Canada as traveling to any the the states then you'd be allowed to drive right on by without any one stopping or searching you for anything. It's only when you at the border that these different rules come into effect. Would you put up with border guards at every state stopping and searching every car just in case you happened to be on any police list or smuggling something? Nope. We only put up with that entering and leaving the country. The easy solution to that is don't enter or leave any country that you don't like their customs practices.
Sounds like those would be decent design goals for every Ford vehicle for every Ford driver except for the traction control thing. Of course they could make a button or something that enables/disables traction control. I don't know what it is used for so I'd rather have a toggle rather than kick the feature entirely.
At first I was going to moan about parents regulating their kids driving. This looks more like how the damn cars need to be designed from the get go any way. Kids can race anything almost anywhere. Equal speed limits is just something that makes skill stand out a bit more anyway so this won't have any real effect. O.k. it'll keep the drivers of these vehicles from racing unregulated cars. Heck, I bet even with GPS and all sorts of parental monitoring that kids could find a way to race and if any one gets a red flag on their monitoring or get pulled over for anything than they are automatically disqualified.
You have to wonder if this was actually a good long term idea that Intel would be doing it as well. I'm guessing this is more of an accounting trick to help their numbers look better and/or some how lower taxes. I don't own any AMD stock so this doesn't effect me too much... I just hope that they don't go under as Intel does need some one to compete against.
If you don't like whats on TV, DON'T WATCH IT. If you don't want your child watching it, DON'T RELY ON TV AS A BABYSITTER.
Here's better advice from some one that does sometimes use tv, computers, and video games a babysitter while I'm even at the house doing my own thing. Don't have cable or over the air TV. Just buy season DVDs of the stuff you remember watching when you grew up or that you vaguely think that is legit for your family to watch. The same applies to video games and computer crap. Now the only resource that I really have to keep an eye on is the damn computer. Why? Because it's internet connected and they'll play any "free online" game that they've got an ad to click on.
We've got a stack of adult R stuff in our room that we sometimes watch, but we don't have to worry about the kids watching our Red vs Blue. Heck, by the time they turn 15 most of what we've got locked way, would be fine for them to watch. On the infinity+ tv channels... there is the easy solution to that as well if you even do get that... block out everything except the 5-20 cartoon only channels. Even then you can find objectionable stuff in cartoons, but generally that should be fairly safe.
At least, that's been the situation for decades. However the consequences of handing billions to criminals is starting to have an effect. The criminals have billions in assets, and can leverage those for bigger and bigger forms of fraud, and they are.
Are the former criminals going into politics or actually just starting their own banks now?
I think it's interesting that what is normally a dry subject is generating so much public interest.
Um, dry subject? That's got little to nothing to do with it. It's a damn expensive subject. It almost makes the Iraq thing look like chicken feed. If the Iraq thing only cost a few million and less than 50 US lives, we wouldn't care about it. The main thing that we really had against the Iraq thing was that its expensive for the results that we are getting and we aren't really sure about that any more. This bailout far over shadows that little "war." Of course everyone with any sense will be telling our government reps don't you dare give a cent to those banks.
If you want to blow several hundred billion dollars, why not just spend $100-200 billion on wind mills or something of that nature. O.k. they aren't the best thing ever, but atleast we'd get some power out of them at some time during the year. That's more than I could say about the Iraq war or the bailout plan.
At that level of consumption, each system consumes.$90 each night, and $3 per weekend. Multiply that by 50 workstations and per year, and the total amount of wasted electricity $19,500 annually. In a 500 person firm, add a zero to the end of that number. This is a huge amount of waste within corporate America, that only takes 2 minutes to change within a bios.
Are you kidding? For those places that actually see that much waste, it is cheaper to eat that as a cost of doing business than change just because some one wants to change something... Remember if it's not broke don't fix it. $19K a year may be a lot to you or me, but that's chick feed at the corporate level. Now if you were saving say 200K or 20M in power then your business might think about changing. It also depends on how difficult to make said change is and get it to stick.
The OP simply meant to point out that he got the PRICE from the INTERNET with the unique code and is arguing that the price retrieved by the cashregister from the stores database is in-accurate.
Um, the only place that this would be remotely valid is if you were at walmart and you were looking up their prices on the walmart website. Of course other stores like target, bestbuy, staples, or tigerdirect will have different prices. Heck, they could include a disclaimer that web store prices do not reflect in store prices and just be done with it.
I am just completely flabbergasted that this can occur. By this logic, China could sue every website that posts anti-government information and seize all of their domains. Including something like google. This is really blowing my mind- can someone smarter than me explain what the judge was smoking, and why this isn't actually going to happen?
You don't understand. We can do what we want to them. They aren't allowed to do anything to us. If they try to do anything to us, then they are evil war mongering terrorists or some other label that we've yet to make up. We'll get away with everything that they let us.
I don't use Adobe apps, but I know many people in the publishing industry who do and tend to have a weird love-hate relationship with them.
Oh, that's not really odd at all. I've got that kinda relationship with every adobe product that I've ever used esp acrobat reader.
I think the problem is that there needs to be another company that is successfully competing against them. For alot of areas you don't "really" have alot of choice. You've got to use photoshop even if you really don't want to because everyone else uses photoshop. Reminds me of paint shop pro. I think for tons of people that does everything that they really need from photoshop, but well they stick with photoshop. The sad thing is that I know PSP can do everything that I need, but I use photoshop because that's how I learned how to do most of those tasks to begin with and I've got photoshop. I don't really want to spend the time learning the new versions of PSP. That's most likely the reason entire industries are stuck with adobe products. That and everyone has to have the best professional product and "everyone knows" that's adobe products for that field...
Now I've never seen Fox News before, and coming from a country there the TV news has a mandate to be unbiased, Fox News was quite a shock to the system. I've never seen anything like it. It's completely one sided (towards Republicans) crammed with emotional rhetoric deliberately aimed at misinforming the viewer. It so over exaggerates the current level of the "terrorist threat" to America, that an outsider viewing this crap would think you're on the cusp of being invaded.... And horrified that there are people in the USA who actually watch this trash and BELIEVE that it's real news!
Um, I'm kinda shocked that you believe the British TV news is unbiased. Fox news is just as valid as CNN, or the BBC news and they all have their biases. I tend not to even watch tv. I'll really scare you. I get most of my "news" from slashdot, wired and fark. Slashdot is heavily biased as well. Fark at least is generally funny and gets that trivia info that happened like who this week's Darwin Awards winners are across. I hate to say that's more important to me, but I'll at least leave it laughing... Most other news sources I leave wanting to shoot the news casters. (Wired is actually has worse biases. They are sorta of like the popular science for techs now and most good schemes they feature there won't be popping up shortly... I'm much more interested when they do articles about events that happened last year and I just didn't know about it. At least I could dream of buying said product then rather than it never really going anywhere.)
What you also don't really consider is that we chose the news sources that reaffirm our own biases. Fox news isn't wrong; it is just spouting a bias that you and others don't believe in so when you tune in there you instantly don't like it and reject anything it says are facts. I bet you'd be surprised by the amount of US folks that know and can show you the biases in your own news sources. The easy answer is that they are all a "British bias." Those that want to reaffirm their British biases tune into British news sources.
I remember several classes where we did everything in points. You still had a percentage at the end, but everyone knew up front the total points and where they all where at any given time. You could get rid of the entire letter grade thing and give each teacher a set amount of points that students can earn through out the year.
Of course, I'd give it five minutes for that to be thrown out for the letter grade just because we like the ABCDF thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really shocked at the tone and direction the "5" folks at alashdot have taken on this. Why? They are basically saying that you as a user/consumer have no rights shut up!
This is part of why I don't play those types of games. If I create a character, back story, personalize it, and level it up, and collect some items for it, that's mine! That's my personally created content that I and every user own their own copy right over. Depending on the character editing UI, I can make my character look exactly like a paper D&D character of mine. I own that character. Now do I care if any given company has their own version of gold, potions, ether, or status curing stuff? Not really. I learn their naming system and pick up the needed crap asap.
I also own the damn account although some slashdot posts are right that you don't really own it, but are renting it.
That's like the saying that there is no property ownership in the US because of property taxes the various government bodies only allow you to rent property from them.
Here is something to really think about though. The game creators own most of the copy right on various items and things in those games and can change them at their whims. If you are using default short sword from game company, then don't expect to be surprised if they change the design or effects of it.
They shouldn't be allowed to do is delete any items or change effects of those items that a player has "earned," though they can always have a given uses or such that automatically makes even the most awesome stuff useless by next month to encourage the players to scrape those items that you'd really like to get out of the game.
I'm surprised that slashdot's modded response to this topic is that you don't own crap it all belongs to the company. My favorite post was about owning slashdot comments... Here is a big surprise yes every slashdotter does own the copy right on their own comments. Slashdot doesn't own your comments; you do. If I want to make a book or something out of all my slashdot comments, the only thing slowing me down is that I'd need to upgrade my account to a paid account.
I'm mixed on that. That was my first reaction, and then I thought, but if that AI is talking with stupid people, then isn't it at human level?
I don't know about you, but I want AI to be useful. Fooling idiots isn't really all that useful.
Um, how about a glorified telephone support app for Dell or HP? Instead of speaking to some one in another country, you talk to robot/AI generic flow chart person. Trust me, treating everyone like a stupid person seems to be the norm when calling tech support so having an AI that can patiently/cheaply deal with your average stupid person would be ideal there.
The real headline should be something along the lines of freshmen class of Abilene Christian University all required to pay for brand new iPhones.
When I read the "New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback" headline, I thought of cellphone/pda apps. Considering books cost me around $300 a semester back in 1996-2000 and all the other ways that the university tried to leech a buck off my family, I'm not surprised that a college is doing something like this. This sounds and looks like a decent killer app for cell phones/PDAs.
I'm kinda sad though. I'd have thought that we'd have figured out how to get all this done, and my kids using this in elementary school right now. I'm really sad that colleges are just now getting there. I remember back in 1998 when my college just started their web app for signing up for classes. It was much, much better than their telephone system that they'd used before hand. We loved it.
My kids public school has a web app that'll show their 9 weeks grades and an event calendar. O.k. it's nice that they have anything, but still as a parent and tax payer, I'd want all their text books to be in pdf and able to be saved, viewed, printed, quoted from anywhere. I'd also want teachers grade books and PTA meetings online as well. There is a part of me that thinks class rooms need forums or a school running their own version of facebook, yet geared more along the lines of keeping track of all of a student's progress, projects, entire school history, homework, quizes, & test history for everything there, and doing it as a glorified year book. Especially to pound it into the student's head, that this is to make you and us look "good"! ;)
The day an AI will pass the Turing Test, it will be the day humanity has become so stupid to not be able to see the differences between a person and a machine.
I'm mixed on that. That was my first reaction, and then I thought, but if that AI is talking with stupid people, then isn't it at human level?
The other thing is are you calling anyone that doesn't notice that it's a robot/AI stupid? By default, I don't even think of what the other person is. I don't know or care if you are white/black/green, male/female/both/neither, or which political views you hold. On slashdot, I only know you by the 3-4 sentences that you type. Is that enough for anyone really to judge one way or another if someone is human or a robot? Nope.
I'd suggest a good portion of slashdot could be robots, and we'd never notice.
I would think it quite hard to be duped into believing a program is a human.
I'll take the opposite POV just to be naughty. Why? Well, browse slashdot at 1 and see how many robots you could pick out. Heck, even at 5 you still get robots due to the slashdot group think; they just say what slashdot wants to hear and get modded up.
If they really wanted to test a few of these systems, they'd get each one a slashdot account and have them read the headlines and then make a single post after reading 10-15 posts at 3 or 4. After six months, let's see what their karma and average mod points are. ;)
The again, I've thought much about how certain cars (like my poor BMW) get a bad rap for having "asshole" drivers... if a BMW driver doesn't signal, he's a f&^% bmw driver, if another driver does the same, he's just a f&%^ idiot. Maybe it'll turn out to be based more on the cars' looks than anything else. The car looks angry, therefore the driver must be angry, therefore he must be an asshole.
Nah, I blame it on the envy thing. BMWs are an expensive car and most of those Ford, Chevy or Honda drivers hate anyone driving something more expensive than their own car. (Oh, they'll blame it on almost anything else, but this is the real reason.) This is my underling belief why there is so much hate towards both semis and SUVs as well. They blame gas mileage, but what they really hate is that's a more expensive car than they can afford.
I read the headline and thought of course now all you need is web front ends and cell phones/PDAs and presto you've got a "thin client." ;) If it's a web front end on a PC, you can still make sure your folks have those essentials like office & what ever else windows apps your place finds that it can't live without. Heck, cell phones/PDAs even have office functionality today. That sales man can use his laptop or if worse comes to worse his PDA/cell phone to pull that much needed power point presentation or even read his e-mail.
Look, I understand that's enough security for your mortals, but I plan to live forever. I don't want someone getting my data just after my 128,299,838,295th birthday!
Um, I plan to live forever too. I'm to the point that I don't care if anyone gets any of my data as I'd be so senile as not to remember any passwords so its some what safer to have all that porn unencrypted.
That's the real problem of living forever is forgetting all that somewhat important crap. Of course what ever you do, don't go for the super perfect memory as that's even worse since you'll never forget some horrible things/websites no matter how much you long to do.
I find the headline "Algorithms Can Make You Pretty" is true. After looking at the pictures though, I don't think that those algorithms will though. I find this a really funny topic to find on slashdot. Any one here have a 12-14 aged daughter? After defining what an algorithm is to them, ask them for a their personal algorithm for making them look pretty. You'll likely be shocked, but that would likely be a much more successful algorithm.
Any married slashdotters? If you dare, ask the same thing of your wife. That would likely be the algorithm that best works for getting you attracted to them. It's actually personalized to your and her tastes even if you don't know really take notice of it. I would have a place and date arranged to where I can take my wife when she gets pretty. You'll need something like that after asking the question to sooth things over anyway.
The great thing about this is that we all have different standards so our version of a good looking attractive mate may be completely different from others.
Evolution can't work if "survival of the fittest" really means "survival of everyone". It looks like we'll either stagnate or evolve completely randomly, in all directions that don't outright kill us.
Survival is only half of it. Breeding is actually the more important half. If we really wanted to know what we were selecting against, we'd kept track of every person that died off without producing any offspring. Those are the traits that for whatever reasons we are selecting against.
I don't buy into the concept that we are breeding idiots or that smart people are selected against. When I actually think about it, I believe that we are always selecting against idiots and only the smartest survive... this basically means those college grads or PHds that never breed that think that they are smart compared the general population are the idiots. Those that get into any relationship that produces long term viable offspring are by default the geniuses of humanity. ;)
There is a part of me that thinks that we need to abuse sterilization as part of our criminal justice system. Basically on the fifth time that you are convicted, we'll make sure you aren't going to breed any more. ;) (This would have the long term effect of breeding out bad criminals from the gene pool. Only really good criminals would breed. ;) ) Actually, I think that getting arrested or jailed is automatically against held you if most members of the opposite sex find out. That's something we just self select against. We haven't breed out criminals from the gene pool yet.
I also think that we are breeding super warriors... This has been going on for over the last 6 thousand years. We've yet to breed a perfect warrior, but hey we just need time and a war or two a generation.
Get ready for the Themed ads. Are you in a fantasy setting? Get ready for ye old Coke Ale. O.k. really only "true" old style beer and their ads should show up there. I have no idea what that would be. Anything from the early 1920s up could have all sorts of old style coke ads. Heck, Coke could make a massive list of their entire ad history and the various times each has run. Then they'd re-run those same ads in each of the games set in each era. If you have a 1960s game, you get 1960s coke ads. If the game is set in 1980s, you get that style of coke ads. They could be tricky and try posting next years ad campaign any game that they can find set next year. Or do one better and come up with future themed ads now sell 'em to the game companies and when that time frame comes up use them in real life. ;)
Ad companies should have a love/hate thing with this. Basically once create any physical ad for any company, you also create an online one for games and you some how arrange for the game company to report back how many players have passed by/viewed the ad or you get the ad to do it by itself within the game. Ideally, they could be years into the future off one really good ad today. They'd hate it though because every ad idea that they've ever sold to anyone could be out there competing for eyeballs.
Basically if the ad folks can get you stop looking at the strippers in Duke Nuke 'em Forever and actually look at their porn ads on the walls or outside the stripper joint, then they'd have a success. ;)
Sweet Jesus on a flying carpet, "non-citizens have basically no rights and if they want in they have to do what we tell them"?!
You do realise Apartheid is over, and you can no longer buy slaves? Your Constitution protects PEOPLE, not citizens.
Um, you are wrong and he is right. Non-citizens don't have the same level of rights as citizens and most likely never will. We generally treat illegal aliens, illegal immigrants and citizens without any id that they are citizens exactly the same. It's easier for the police or whoever the arresting agency is to treat everyone the same and assume that they have rights when they may not. It also causes less trouble when a recent immigrant is arrested and is treated decently.
The Bill of Rights isn't basic human rights; it's a citizens only thing. You as a basic human or foreign national don't just have the right to bear arms in the US because of our Bill of Rights.
I find this entire thread funny. Why? Because it involves customs going into/outside of the country. The rules for that has always been different to normal rules. We actually try to limit the folks entering/exiting the country. I mean if the same rules applied traveling to Mexico or Canada as traveling to any the the states then you'd be allowed to drive right on by without any one stopping or searching you for anything. It's only when you at the border that these different rules come into effect. Would you put up with border guards at every state stopping and searching every car just in case you happened to be on any police list or smuggling something? Nope. We only put up with that entering and leaving the country. The easy solution to that is don't enter or leave any country that you don't like their customs practices.
Sounds like those would be decent design goals for every Ford vehicle for every Ford driver except for the traction control thing. Of course they could make a button or something that enables/disables traction control. I don't know what it is used for so I'd rather have a toggle rather than kick the feature entirely.
At first I was going to moan about parents regulating their kids driving. This looks more like how the damn cars need to be designed from the get go any way. Kids can race anything almost anywhere. Equal speed limits is just something that makes skill stand out a bit more anyway so this won't have any real effect. O.k. it'll keep the drivers of these vehicles from racing unregulated cars. Heck, I bet even with GPS and all sorts of parental monitoring that kids could find a way to race and if any one gets a red flag on their monitoring or get pulled over for anything than they are automatically disqualified.
You have to wonder if this was actually a good long term idea that Intel would be doing it as well. I'm guessing this is more of an accounting trick to help their numbers look better and/or some how lower taxes. I don't own any AMD stock so this doesn't effect me too much... I just hope that they don't go under as Intel does need some one to compete against.
If you don't like whats on TV, DON'T WATCH IT.
If you don't want your child watching it, DON'T RELY ON TV AS A BABYSITTER.
Here's better advice from some one that does sometimes use tv, computers, and video games a babysitter while I'm even at the house doing my own thing. Don't have cable or over the air TV. Just buy season DVDs of the stuff you remember watching when you grew up or that you vaguely think that is legit for your family to watch. The same applies to video games and computer crap. Now the only resource that I really have to keep an eye on is the damn computer. Why? Because it's internet connected and they'll play any "free online" game that they've got an ad to click on.
We've got a stack of adult R stuff in our room that we sometimes watch, but we don't have to worry about the kids watching our Red vs Blue. Heck, by the time they turn 15 most of what we've got locked way, would be fine for them to watch. On the infinity+ tv channels... there is the easy solution to that as well if you even do get that... block out everything except the 5-20 cartoon only channels. Even then you can find objectionable stuff in cartoons, but generally that should be fairly safe.
Please don't tell me that these pieces of equipment have ads on them or linked to them. That could be both the most evil and brilliant idea ever.
I'd bet Pilot Error before anything else.
At least, that's been the situation for decades. However the consequences of handing billions to criminals is starting to have an effect. The criminals have billions in assets, and can leverage those for bigger and bigger forms of fraud, and they are.
Are the former criminals going into politics or actually just starting their own banks now?
I think it's interesting that what is normally a dry subject is generating so much public interest.
Um, dry subject? That's got little to nothing to do with it. It's a damn expensive subject. It almost makes the Iraq thing look like chicken feed. If the Iraq thing only cost a few million and less than 50 US lives, we wouldn't care about it. The main thing that we really had against the Iraq thing was that its expensive for the results that we are getting and we aren't really sure about that any more. This bailout far over shadows that little "war." Of course everyone with any sense will be telling our government reps don't you dare give a cent to those banks.
If you want to blow several hundred billion dollars, why not just spend $100-200 billion on wind mills or something of that nature. O.k. they aren't the best thing ever, but atleast we'd get some power out of them at some time during the year. That's more than I could say about the Iraq war or the bailout plan.
At that level of consumption, each system consumes .$90 each night, and $3 per weekend. Multiply that by 50 workstations and per year, and the total amount of wasted electricity $19,500 annually. In a 500 person firm, add a zero to the end of that number. This is a huge amount of waste within corporate America, that only takes 2 minutes to change within a bios.
Are you kidding? For those places that actually see that much waste, it is cheaper to eat that as a cost of doing business than change just because some one wants to change something... Remember if it's not broke don't fix it. $19K a year may be a lot to you or me, but that's chick feed at the corporate level. Now if you were saving say 200K or 20M in power then your business might think about changing. It also depends on how difficult to make said change is and get it to stick.
The OP simply meant to point out that he got the PRICE from the INTERNET with the unique code and is arguing that the price retrieved by the cashregister from the stores database is in-accurate.
Um, the only place that this would be remotely valid is if you were at walmart and you were looking up their prices on the walmart website. Of course other stores like target, bestbuy, staples, or tigerdirect will have different prices. Heck, they could include a disclaimer that web store prices do not reflect in store prices and just be done with it.
I am just completely flabbergasted that this can occur. By this logic, China could sue every website that posts anti-government information and seize all of their domains. Including something like google. This is really blowing my mind- can someone smarter than me explain what the judge was smoking, and why this isn't actually going to happen?
You don't understand. We can do what we want to them. They aren't allowed to do anything to us. If they try to do anything to us, then they are evil war mongering terrorists or some other label that we've yet to make up. We'll get away with everything that they let us.
This applies equally to everyone.
I don't use Adobe apps, but I know many people in the publishing industry who do and tend to have a weird love-hate relationship with them.
Oh, that's not really odd at all. I've got that kinda relationship with every adobe product that I've ever used esp acrobat reader.
I think the problem is that there needs to be another company that is successfully competing against them. For alot of areas you don't "really" have alot of choice. You've got to use photoshop even if you really don't want to because everyone else uses photoshop. Reminds me of paint shop pro. I think for tons of people that does everything that they really need from photoshop, but well they stick with photoshop. The sad thing is that I know PSP can do everything that I need, but I use photoshop because that's how I learned how to do most of those tasks to begin with and I've got photoshop. I don't really want to spend the time learning the new versions of PSP. That's most likely the reason entire industries are stuck with adobe products. That and everyone has to have the best professional product and "everyone knows" that's adobe products for that field...
Now I've never seen Fox News before, and coming from a country there the TV news has a mandate to be unbiased, Fox News was quite a shock to the system. I've never seen anything like it. It's completely one sided (towards Republicans) crammed with emotional rhetoric deliberately aimed at misinforming the viewer. It so over exaggerates the current level of the "terrorist threat" to America, that an outsider viewing this crap would think you're on the cusp of being invaded. ...
And horrified that there are people in the USA who actually watch this trash and BELIEVE that it's real news!
Um, I'm kinda shocked that you believe the British TV news is unbiased. Fox news is just as valid as CNN, or the BBC news and they all have their biases. I tend not to even watch tv. I'll really scare you. I get most of my "news" from slashdot, wired and fark. Slashdot is heavily biased as well. Fark at least is generally funny and gets that trivia info that happened like who this week's Darwin Awards winners are across. I hate to say that's more important to me, but I'll at least leave it laughing... Most other news sources I leave wanting to shoot the news casters. (Wired is actually has worse biases. They are sorta of like the popular science for techs now and most good schemes they feature there won't be popping up shortly... I'm much more interested when they do articles about events that happened last year and I just didn't know about it. At least I could dream of buying said product then rather than it never really going anywhere.)
What you also don't really consider is that we chose the news sources that reaffirm our own biases. Fox news isn't wrong; it is just spouting a bias that you and others don't believe in so when you tune in there you instantly don't like it and reject anything it says are facts. I bet you'd be surprised by the amount of US folks that know and can show you the biases in your own news sources. The easy answer is that they are all a "British bias." Those that want to reaffirm their British biases tune into British news sources.
I remember several classes where we did everything in points. You still had a percentage at the end, but everyone knew up front the total points and where they all where at any given time. You could get rid of the entire letter grade thing and give each teacher a set amount of points that students can earn through out the year.
Of course, I'd give it five minutes for that to be thrown out for the letter grade just because we like the ABCDF thing.