My wife's laptop was bought the Christmas before last:
$350 coupon auto applied to the first laptop over $2000, $750 auto applied the second and all subsequent ones.
Spec two $2k+ laptops, have $350 applied to the first, $750 to the second.
Decide you don't want the first, delete it and the associated $350 coupon goes away.
Now go to their Christmas promo site. Give them a junk email address, guess the stocking... fail to win the plasma TV listed as the star prize, collect the automatic "$100 off any system order" coupon that everyone gets for playing the first time and you really wanted anyway.
$2,000.78 - $750 - $100 = $1,150.78 for a $2,000 laptop.
Sure, it's a hassle. Sure, it's a pain in the ass to find the latest bargains. Sure, you occasionally have to wait a week or two for the next round of great deals on the specific thing you're interested in. Still, can you ever find a deal like that on Mac hardware, no matter how hard you're willing to work?
Dell does rip off its mass consumers. Those that have no idea about deals do, admittedly, pay about the same as a comparable Mac. But a 30 second google on "Dell deals" drops their prices 15-40%.
So, sure, for those who don't know, they're about the same price. For anyone who searches for deals, a $2,500 Mac laptop vs. a $2,500 Dell laptop with 15-40% savings are not the same price.
the article extrapolates out to a near future in which we will all be wearing headband computers and IM'ing one another as if telepathically This to going to totally mush the edges of my tinfoil hat!
Doesn't this come down to a total cost of ownership decision that any business should make:
Option A: I buy the traditional option, I lose X% to various natural hardships, I replant the seed I keep back next year.
Option B: I buy the new version, I lose a smaller Y% to various natural hardships, I have to buy the seed again next year.
If my profit increases due to decreased loss by more than the cost of annual purchases, I buy the annual purchase option. If my profit increases less than the cost of annual purchases, I keep doing it the old way.
Cheesy as it feels to see science advance to the point where this happens with crops like it already does with other man made commodities, are the "poor farmers" really being forced in to anything worse [in terms of that business model]? They can still buy traditional seeds, right?
Now there's the bigger issue with whether we want something in our food chain that turns off the ability to reproduce (even if there's no science for it being passed on, that alone should make awesome advertising for those who don't go with it). There's also the bigger issue with this gene getting passed on to other farmers and their crops getting wiped out - unfortunately, thus far, legislation seems to be siding with the seed producers and not those who fall victim to cross polinization thanks to lobbying funds etc.
Still, in terms of the "poor farmers" - unless there's some kind of monopoly I'm missing, why can't they just not buy the product if they don't like the terms?
According to papers the Attorney General filed in court, Dell deprived consumers of the technical support to which they were entitled under their warranty or service contract by:
repeatedly failing to provide timely onsite repair to consumers who purchased service contracts promising "onsite" and expedited service;
pressuring consumers, including those who purchased service contracts promising "onsite" repair, to remove the external cover of their computer and remove, reinstall, and manipulate hardware components;
discouraging consumers from seeking technical support; those who called Dell's toll free number were subjected to long wait times, repeated transfers, and frequent disconnections;
using defective "refurbished" parts or computers to repair or replace consumers' equipment.
Two obvious observations [assuming the lawsuit's accurate]:
Damn, now there's a loss.
They rely on abusing users with limited tech knowledge and limited knowledge of their rights. This isn't exactly a group Linux users famously fall in to.
Then the source showed me an invoice for the same game, this one from IGN/Gamespy. What Gamespot calls a gumball, Gamespy calls, less charmingly, a "Gamespy Spotlight". But the content and the principle is basically the same: the Spotlights are those thumbnail screenshot links that you see on the site's front page. "What you're looking at on the front page is not what the editors decided is the best game," the media buyer informed me. Source: kotaku.com - They actually have a whole section on ethics including one bribe that I'm sure is utterly reasonable.
For increased performance, watch your motherboard selection. You could grab a server oriented board, with dedicated PCI buses for slots, and split the drives over the cards. While this is about HD options, bringing other hardware like motherboards, particularly server oriented ones, opens up sound...
A motherboard designed for a server closet can be as noisy as it damn well pleases - performance and reliability is the goal here and a good way to up those is to get heat the hell off the components and a big noisy fan does that pretty well.
If the media server sits in another room and all that sits near the TV is a passively cooled, deliberately underpowered system with a high speed network connection to the other room, system noise is a total non issue.
But, if you're planning on just using one box by the TV, sound is likely to be a serious issue for real movie enjoyment (assuming this isn't the pron storage everyone else jokes about). If that's the case, the range between the insane fans some northbridge chips use (some NForce4 models come to mind, though this obviously isn't the server class you're talking about) and a passively cooled one (or one you can swap out to water cooled) is pretty dramatic.
Given that you can now get totally passively cooled PSUs and a simple kit like Zalman's reserator will passively cool your processor and GPU, literally your only remaining sources of noise will be drive noise and motherboard fans. It would truly suck to get an otherwise utterly silent system and then listen to a motherboard whirring away because it was designed for a server closet.
The majority of volunteers don't know what the majority of volunteers believe.
Everyone believes their opinions are the majority view. They poll their friends, people with similar views, and they get corroborating evidence.
Even in broader pollings, no one really knows what the majority believes - the majority tends to actually be pretty centerist in most arguments but it's only the polarized extremes who care enough to take the time to fill in otherwise pointless polls.
Say you have a question where you're asking if people like X or not. 3 people hate X, 4 people love X, 93 people don't give a damn about X either way. When invited to take a poll, 93 people shake their heads and walk on by. The poll then finds "43% of people hate X, 57% love X... The majority has spoken. They love X." B.S. The majority don't give a damn either way. The majority of those polled love X but that's it.
In the same way, military reunions are going to, by definition, reflect those with powerful feelings about their time in the forces. Documentaries calling up veterans are only going to get those with polarized views - those who want to just get on with life are busy... just getting on with life.
During the last election, it was portrayed that the majority of swift boat veterans hated Kerry for daring to not have serious enough injuries, the three times he was wounded. It was portrayed that there was a near rabid hatred against a man who at least had the balls to show up and did get wounded three times - albeit "not seriously enough" - giving the vote instead to a coward whose daddy pulled strings to get him in a backwater Air National Guard unit that he even then only showed up to when it suited him. Something smells funny there. But it does make great TV for the news channels while the small minority of veterans who chose to be vocal proudly proclaimed they spoke for the masses.
So, in short... It's virtually impossible to legitimately claim you know what the absolute majority thinks. I just have the honesty to admit that in the first place.
That Vietnam was winnable, were the shackles Washington placed on the armed forces removed, is a common enough viewpoint to be held by a significant portion of those who voluntarily served. Significant minority, majority, quorum, whatever... It is commonly held and that much remains true.
It was a common belief in 2000 and particularly 2004 that Bush was a moronic puppet for a bunch of evil bastards that profited immensely from the war *cough*cheney*cough*stillownsstockinhalliburton*co ugh*singlebidcontract*cough*. However, sadly, common was not equal to most then, either - or we would be needing to have this conversation.
I deliberately avoided the word "most."
The truth is, many (38% by the end of '68, 48% were draftees or draft motivated by '71) didn't want to be there in the first place. That alone makes any statement about "most" American troops, when really talking about those who were a willing and voluntary part of the U.S. presence, almost impossible.
However, of the half to two thirds of troops who were there voluntarily, professional soldiers if you will, a very common belief amongst them is that political hamstringing turned a winnable war in to an unwinnable one.
I deliberately didn't claim "most" - the draft percentages alone make any such statement almost untennable. But "common" is certainly true.
he also supports the unpopular Iraq War Somewhat of an oversimplification - though that's pretty much how the political process if conveyed to the public so, hey, in electoral terms, you're probably right.
McCain is a veteran and a P.O.W. who experienced torture first hand.
From his perspective: If you're going to commit to a war, commit to it.
He's admittedly avoiding questions about whether we should have gone in the first place (realities being what they are, there's absolutely no way he could get the republican nomination if he went that far against the republican president.
Still, accepting that it has happened, there are basically three choices: get the hell out and deal with the fallout (becoming the more popular view), stay with your head burried in the sand (the administration policy for the last 4 years), stay and do what needs doing to do it right (McCain's choice). That's pretty common amongst Vietnam vets who are largely convinced Vietnam was winnable had the politicians not hamstrung them at every turn.
The interesting thing about McCain is his ethics on how you go about winning that war. Month on month, the war in Iraq has become more of a failure and more insurgents are turning up. Surely if you kill or capture the numbers the U.S. do, that number should go down? No, you piss away all credibility by torturing people, you piss off far more people who would never otherwise have been insurgents - torturing and abandonning ethics recruits for the other guy far better than anything he could do. As a P.O.W. who was tortured, McCain's been vocal that it's never justified (sure, you might prevent an attack that kills 5,000 now but you radicalize enough people to kill 50,000 over time).
Personally, I think the war in Iraq was an horrific lie fed to the American people - Bin Laden never had real ties, Saddam never had real ties to 911, they never tried to buy yellowcake uranium and the chemical weapons that we sold to them were destroyed after the first gulf war. I think the current method of occupation is a great way to make the situation in the middle east worse and kill a lot of young Americans along with thousands of Iraqi civilians. I also think that getting out [sensibly] is the right thing to do......Still, while I don't agree with McCain that it should be continued, if it is to be, I have vastly more respect for his notion about how to do it than the current administration's system that seems to be based largely on denial or any of the other republicans that seem to hope more of the same may work differently for them.
So, I'd prefer a democrat that gets us out of the war entirely. Still, if I have to have a republican that keeps us there, let's get one with an actual clue about how to do something positive.
They're upset that someone else is using their IP, [generally] ignoring copyrights and trademarks of the work they created by using someone else's IP, [generally] ignoring copyrights and trademarks?
Forbidden You don't have permission to access/Structure:/2007/05/26/myspace-falsely-labeled-a-woman-as-sex -offender/ on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Apache/1.3.37 Server at tech.blorge.com Port 80
MMOGs are typically years late and I'll bet part of the problem is trying to be more parallel/distributed. Programming teams are relatively small parts of an MMOGs development (granted, the term "programmer" and boundaries of "programming team" get blurred as artists become "particle programmers" etc.).
Taking a look at the credits list for one of the major MMOs I was involved with, there were a ten programmers, two additional programming credits, two lead engineers and a tech director listed. Call that 15-20 people, a few more if you add in the DB teams etc.
Compare that to over 30 designers, design assistants and additional game design credits, 4 writers, 7 world/architecture personel, 9 characters/creatures folks, 5 animators, 19 motion capture personel (before the three actors) and one George Lucas.
Companies go bust over late games. Sigil's gone in large part because they kept overrunning Microsoft's willingness to add another six months and another million or two in salaries, leading to Microsoft pulling out (and a lot more politics beyond). If the real cause of games running late was coding, an area that takes maybe 10% of the production budget, don't you think they'd throw double, even triple the resources at it (even if that means only a few more guys but hugely paid parallel coding geniuses) to avoid the massive costs associated with a delay?
Think about it: A typical MMO lifecycle is around five years with a geared up team for maybe the last three. You run late by a year, you're paying 20-30% extra in salaries. If it was really a coding issue, wouldn't you triple the resources and pay less overall?
The biggest challenge for most games is getting the game balance tweaked so it's atually fun, scrapping all the ideas you ran with for a year or two that seemed great but didn't work once lots of people were playing together, and populating enough content to stand up against games that have been out for half a decade and ship with ten expansion packs in one box set for less than the cost of your new release.
Getting code to run in parallel isn't to be diminished... But the scale of where resources are put shows far more is invested in to art, design and content than ever goes near programming. If programming were really a bottleneck, it's an easy one to fix (even accepting that double the money doesn't equal half the time due to scaling issues).
Populous amazed for its time - and was actually a huge amount of fun for the era.
Syndicate - a truly fun strategy based RTS before anyone coined the term RTS.
Magic Carpet - Any game, especially considering how long ago it was, that can render stereograms in real time to give genuine 3D (even if it sucks in practice) will manage to amaze me.
Dungeon Keeper - Regularly amazed with moments of humor and turning the dungeon crawl on its head.
Black And White - Admittedly didn't manage to hold interest across the full game but I'm yet to meet anyone who wasn't amazed the first time their creature decided to sit down and eat his own fecal matter.
Fable - OK, didn't play that one.
The Movies - If the goal is to amaze, look at the wealth of machinima that game opened up to people who'd never even thought of the medium before (granted, Stunt Island (way back in the day) and The Sims also both did that).
Each of his games contains innovation that makes you sit back, blink, and think "Wow". That, to me is amazement and therefore amazing.
Even looking at the games as a whole, not just for their one great moment... I'm not convinced any of them have been bad games. If anything, they've suffered from having a few truly innovative features that, unfortunately, blow their load in the first hour or two, making an otherwise reasonable game seem much poorer in comparison.
Dungeon Keeper was arguably the first of his games to start suffering like this. Had it not had the flourishes of genius that it got out of the way early on, it would have been a reasonably playable, 80% rating, kind of a game that quite a few people would happily play through to conclusion. Instead, we were so gorged on the dark humor, the plays on torture, etc. that the game that would have otherwise been perfectly fun seemed like a letdown from there on out.
Black and White was much the same. At its heart, it was still the same Populous game we'd always loved. Had it not been for the creatures, we'd have called it a decent if not inspiring game that a lot of people would have played through to the end anyway (albeit with lower overall sales). Instead, we wowed at the creatures, we played with the spells, we blew stuff up, then realized the next 20-30 hours weren't going to keep surprising us like the first few and gave up on a game that wasn't terrible - it just wasn't going to keep delivering the "ooh-shiny" hits.
In the grand tradition of Peter Molyneux's history of saying crazy-awesome things in interviews... his upcoming fantasy game. I think the accuracy may have been unintentional there. Peter makes awesome fantasy games. Sometimes they are set in the past, sometimes the future, sometimes, fantasy worlds, sometimes sci-fi settings. Unfortunately, what he tends to describe to the press, pre-release, are always "fantasy games" - fantasies of what the game could be.
It's a shame in some ways because each of his games have actually been amazing, particularly in terms of innovation, in their own right. They just always fall short of the fantasies he had in his head and described to the press and so always get judged accordingly. It's like a high jumper setting the bar at a mile in to the sky then jumping twice as high as the previous world record - everyone leaves disappointed that he failed to reach the bar he set for himself rather than impressed by what was still a great jump.
It is illegal to enter my home, but if I stand at the door and say "Come on in." It would not be reasonable to think that if you came in you would be charged with breaking and entering. They offered free WiFi to customers. To sit in your car, quietly using their access, is more akin to a store owner standing at the door saying, "Customers welcome!" and then finding a vagrant quietly came in via another door and started raiding the pantry. That the vagrant claims, "Well, I slipped in through the other door so I never heard them mention 'to customers'" isn't really an excuse when they accuse them of trespass or theft. In the same way, that this guy never went in to the store and thus never read the signs that (granted, presumably) said, "Free WiFi for customers." isn't an excuse either.
it seems few in the village of Sparta, Mich., were aware that using an unsecured Wi-Fi connection without the owner's permission--a practice known as piggybacking--was a felony Whether it's something we see as fair or not, the law considers it your duty to familiarize yourself with it or accept the consequences of not being familiar with it.
I'd argue against it but, frankly, without it, Paris Hilton's, "Like, uh, I'm rich! My nail buffer said I could like totally keep driving with a suspended license. I, like, had no idea that was bad." would have been a valid defense.
Aside from your missing the implication of strangers for cottaging to apply...
How about:
There was a case featured in the November 1996 issue of "Marie Claire" involving an Atlanta wife who tried to have her soon-to-be ex-husband charged with rape. She had persuaded her then hubby to tie her up and later used the bondage as a means of proving that the sex had not been consensual. Her sister came forward and informed the court of the plot against the man, but there was another twist in the story.
Although the man was acquitted on the rape charge, the man was sentenced to five years in jail for having performed oral sex on the woman. He had admitted to that during the course of the case and so he was charged and sentenced under Georgia law. Source
From the same article:
Places where oral sex is illegal: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington D.C.
An erection that shows through a man's clothing is illegal in: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington D.C. and Wisconsin.
In Georgia those charged and convicted for either oral or anal sex can be sentenced to no less than one year and no more than 20 years imprisonment.
In Missouri sexually deviant behavior between people of the same sex is classified as a class A misdemeanor.
In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania it is against the law to have sex with a truck driver in a tollbooth.
In Nevada it is illegal to have sex without a condom.
In Willowdale, Oregon it is against the law for a husband to talk to dirty in his wife's ear during sex.
In Clinton, Oklahoma it is illegal to masturbate while watching two people have sex in a car.
In Washington State there is a law against having sex with a virgin under any circumstances (including the wedding night!).
In Newcastle, Wyoming it is illegal to have sex in a butcher shop's meat freezer.
In Washington D.C. there is a law against having sex in any position other than face to face.
I personally applaud this. Those who break these type of laws... Which laws are we talking about?
Oral sex is illegal in: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington D.C. (OK, I admit, I got great head in MN)
An erection that shows through a man's clothing is illegal in: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington D.C. and Wisconsin. (Lock me up for pretty much every time I had to read to the class in French classes during my teens)
In Missouri sexually deviant behavior between people of the same sex is classified as a class A misdemeanor.
In Willowdale, Oregon it is against the law for a husband to talk to dirty in his wife's ear during sex.
In Washington State there is a law against having sex with a virgin under any circumstances (including the wedding night!).
Newcastle, Wyoming it is illegal to have sex in a butcher shop's meat freezer.
In Washington D.C. there is a law against having sex in any position other than face to face.
Up until the last couple of years, consensual homosexual acts have been able to put you on the sex offenders register in many states. Sex with a consenting partner, in a park, after midnight, when all children should long since be in bed - you're a sex offender. Oral sex in Utah? Mississippi's ludicrous "sex with a minor unless you can prove she was not of previously virtuous character.."? They all merit a place on the list.
I don't dispute that identifying those who prey on children may have its merits. Given the sex offender registry is a great way of stitching red letters on the chests of anyone that offends good conservative taste, that is hardly its sole effect.
Given how open to abuse the system is, how long before the MPAA figures, "Hey, there's hardcore porn on them there torrents. I wonder if we could get anyone that uses them labeled a sex offender, destroy their lives, and kill off torrents that way, without worrying about trying to prove actual piracy."?
I've never got caught having sex in public nor getting a blowjob in Utah. I also happen to be straight. Still, even if I had been caught for any of those acts, it's absolutely none of their business whether I use MySpace.
Mind you, I also grew up in England where, after the Daily Mail posted a list of 1,000 sex offenders, including some errors, a paediatrician got their house burned down. Dirty paediatricians! I hate the way they look at and touch children!
It's one thing if you're making and distributing content for free.
If napisy.org was ad supported and made money from the ads, even if it gave away the content for free, they're still profitting from someone else's intellectual property - no one would view the ads and thus they'd bring in no money if it wasn't for the free content.
That said, I'd go after the owners of the site and any profits they made rather than users who really were offering their translation services for free.
There's also the good question about how it affects the revenue available to provide quality translations. This came up with the whole online guitar tabs discussion earlier in the week:
If there is a free, albeit poor, version - does that reduce the number of sales of a higher quality but costly version?
In a world with economies of scale, what effect does that have in the long run?
Example with made up numbers:
A professional translation and remastering the disc to include it costs $50,000.
A given movie gets around 50,000 Polish language sales.
The English/French/Spanish standard version of the DVD is $15. Figuring all Polish people want a Polish version, they can bump the cost to $16 and split the $50,000 equally amongst 50,000 sales.
Now a free, albeit poorer version is available. Half the people save cash by getting the cheaper option. Now they have to split the same $50,000 across only 25,000 Polish language sales. To recoup costs, the price margin is now $2 greater instead of $1.
Over time, that $2 rankles half the remaining people. Now Polish language DVDs are $19 for the 12,500 copies sold. That price difference gets big enough that just over half of the remaining users defect to the English plus generic versions. The remaining 5,000 Polish users are now dropping $10 in translation fees per disc just to pay their share while the other 45,000 are buying the English version for barely half the price.
At this point, with $15 English plus poor translation or $25 for a decent Polish copy, most of the 5,000 who have no idea how to run the software simply give up. With no market, the film company doesn't even bother paying for a Polish release.
Now every Pole gets to buy an English copy and read ban Polrish (deliberate typo) subtitles whilst bitching about how terrible the movie industry is for never releasing Polish subtitles.
I've no idea if it actually works out that way, how the numbers move, etc. But it's that fear that printed tab publishers have tried to exploit and it is at least worth considering the potential hidden costs of something that appear free on the surface.
You forget, Vista was originally announced when 8 bit CPUs were common. It was only delay after delay that held them up until 32 bit CPUs were the low end and 64 bit ones were pretty common.
In 2088, when they finally ship their new version, we'll likely all be running megabit CPUs. We still won't have our long promised flying cars however. This of course assumes Moore's law - which will still have regular discussions on Slashdot about how it's reached its limits.
They do have a good point on the quality side of things...
Very, very few tabs on sites like Olga come even close to the quality of a decent tab book.
F5, A#5, G5, C5 may well be the chords to the main part of Teen Spirit but tells me nothing about strum patterns, rhythm, which strings I should be missing on certain strums, etc. It tells me nothing about C and F notes that chime out afterwards.
Ironically, for all the claims of "I'm not good enough to figure out how to play a song by ear..." - to use most online tabs, aside from getting pointed in the right direction, you really do need to have an ear for rhythm, an ear for when exactly the chord changes happen, what the strum patterns are, when to use up vs. downstrokes, etc.
There is a major problem in the printed music world that only better known artists merit the expense of producing a good tab book and that most of those books are only available via special order. Still, when they do exist, when you can find them (this is starting to sound like the A-Team), the world of difference between them and the average tab is astronomical.
I'm caught in the middle: I'd hate to see high quality publishing disappear but I also don't see low quality, text based tabs (that often have five different, all disagreeing, version) really being that much of a threat.
Then again, in a world where record companies are trying to shore up CD sales, about about including a DVD with video files of exactly what the artists' hands did when playing the songs, lyrics and scores included? Given the choice between iTunes' $0.99 a limited song and $1.29 an unlocked one, I'd rather drop $15 on an album that'll teach me how to play its content as well. Sure, on a one-off basis, those costs would be huge but if it were done for every album, economies of scale could turn it in to a day's filming, a quick editing job and a day or two of a cheap person transcribing it.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife's laptop was bought the Christmas before last:
$350 coupon auto applied to the first laptop over $2000, $750 auto applied the second and all subsequent ones.
Spec two $2k+ laptops, have $350 applied to the first, $750 to the second.
Decide you don't want the first, delete it and the associated $350 coupon goes away.
Now go to their Christmas promo site. Give them a junk email address, guess the stocking... fail to win the plasma TV listed as the star prize, collect the automatic "$100 off any system order" coupon that everyone gets for playing the first time and you really wanted anyway.
$2,000.78 - $750 - $100 = $1,150.78 for a $2,000 laptop.
Sure, it's a hassle. Sure, it's a pain in the ass to find the latest bargains. Sure, you occasionally have to wait a week or two for the next round of great deals on the specific thing you're interested in. Still, can you ever find a deal like that on Mac hardware, no matter how hard you're willing to work?
Dell does rip off its mass consumers. Those that have no idea about deals do, admittedly, pay about the same as a comparable Mac. But a 30 second google on "Dell deals" drops their prices 15-40%.
So, sure, for those who don't know, they're about the same price. For anyone who searches for deals, a $2,500 Mac laptop vs. a $2,500 Dell laptop with 15-40% savings are not the same price.
Doesn't this come down to a total cost of ownership decision that any business should make:
Option A: I buy the traditional option, I lose X% to various natural hardships, I replant the seed I keep back next year.
Option B: I buy the new version, I lose a smaller Y% to various natural hardships, I have to buy the seed again next year.
If my profit increases due to decreased loss by more than the cost of annual purchases, I buy the annual purchase option. If my profit increases less than the cost of annual purchases, I keep doing it the old way.
Cheesy as it feels to see science advance to the point where this happens with crops like it already does with other man made commodities, are the "poor farmers" really being forced in to anything worse [in terms of that business model]? They can still buy traditional seeds, right?
Now there's the bigger issue with whether we want something in our food chain that turns off the ability to reproduce (even if there's no science for it being passed on, that alone should make awesome advertising for those who don't go with it). There's also the bigger issue with this gene getting passed on to other farmers and their crops getting wiped out - unfortunately, thus far, legislation seems to be siding with the seed producers and not those who fall victim to cross polinization thanks to lobbying funds etc.
Still, in terms of the "poor farmers" - unless there's some kind of monopoly I'm missing, why can't they just not buy the product if they don't like the terms?
- repeatedly failing to provide timely onsite repair to consumers who purchased service contracts promising "onsite" and expedited service;
- pressuring consumers, including those who purchased service contracts promising "onsite" repair, to remove the external cover of their computer and remove, reinstall, and manipulate hardware components;
- discouraging consumers from seeking technical support; those who called Dell's toll free number were subjected to long wait times, repeated transfers, and frequent disconnections;
- using defective "refurbished" parts or computers to repair or replace consumers' equipment.
sourceTwo obvious observations [assuming the lawsuit's accurate]:
IGN/Gamespy. What Gamespot calls a gumball, Gamespy calls, less charmingly, a "Gamespy Spotlight". But the content and the principle is basically the same: the Spotlights are those thumbnail screenshot links that you see on the site's front page. "What you're looking at on the front page is not what the editors decided is the best game," the media buyer informed me. Source: kotaku.com - They actually have a whole section on ethics including one bribe that I'm sure is utterly reasonable.
Slashdot takes it, just admit it.
I think you're thinking of Cowboy Neal. And that was never conclusively proved.
A motherboard designed for a server closet can be as noisy as it damn well pleases - performance and reliability is the goal here and a good way to up those is to get heat the hell off the components and a big noisy fan does that pretty well.
If the media server sits in another room and all that sits near the TV is a passively cooled, deliberately underpowered system with a high speed network connection to the other room, system noise is a total non issue.
But, if you're planning on just using one box by the TV, sound is likely to be a serious issue for real movie enjoyment (assuming this isn't the pron storage everyone else jokes about). If that's the case, the range between the insane fans some northbridge chips use (some NForce4 models come to mind, though this obviously isn't the server class you're talking about) and a passively cooled one (or one you can swap out to water cooled) is pretty dramatic.
Given that you can now get totally passively cooled PSUs and a simple kit like Zalman's reserator will passively cool your processor and GPU, literally your only remaining sources of noise will be drive noise and motherboard fans. It would truly suck to get an otherwise utterly silent system and then listen to a motherboard whirring away because it was designed for a server closet.
The majority of volunteers don't know what the majority of volunteers believe.
Everyone believes their opinions are the majority view. They poll their friends, people with similar views, and they get corroborating evidence.
Even in broader pollings, no one really knows what the majority believes - the majority tends to actually be pretty centerist in most arguments but it's only the polarized extremes who care enough to take the time to fill in otherwise pointless polls.
Say you have a question where you're asking if people like X or not. 3 people hate X, 4 people love X, 93 people don't give a damn about X either way. When invited to take a poll, 93 people shake their heads and walk on by. The poll then finds "43% of people hate X, 57% love X... The majority has spoken. They love X." B.S. The majority don't give a damn either way. The majority of those polled love X but that's it.
In the same way, military reunions are going to, by definition, reflect those with powerful feelings about their time in the forces. Documentaries calling up veterans are only going to get those with polarized views - those who want to just get on with life are busy... just getting on with life.
During the last election, it was portrayed that the majority of swift boat veterans hated Kerry for daring to not have serious enough injuries, the three times he was wounded. It was portrayed that there was a near rabid hatred against a man who at least had the balls to show up and did get wounded three times - albeit "not seriously enough" - giving the vote instead to a coward whose daddy pulled strings to get him in a backwater Air National Guard unit that he even then only showed up to when it suited him. Something smells funny there. But it does make great TV for the news channels while the small minority of veterans who chose to be vocal proudly proclaimed they spoke for the masses.
So, in short... It's virtually impossible to legitimately claim you know what the absolute majority thinks. I just have the honesty to admit that in the first place.
That Vietnam was winnable, were the shackles Washington placed on the armed forces removed, is a common enough viewpoint to be held by a significant portion of those who voluntarily served. Significant minority, majority, quorum, whatever... It is commonly held and that much remains true.
If you're saying that most... Common != Most
It was a common belief in 2000 and particularly 2004 that Bush was a moronic puppet for a bunch of evil bastards that profited immensely from the war *cough*cheney*cough*stillownsstockinhalliburton*c
I deliberately avoided the word "most."
The truth is, many (38% by the end of '68, 48% were draftees or draft motivated by '71) didn't want to be there in the first place. That alone makes any statement about "most" American troops, when really talking about those who were a willing and voluntary part of the U.S. presence, almost impossible.
However, of the half to two thirds of troops who were there voluntarily, professional soldiers if you will, a very common belief amongst them is that political hamstringing turned a winnable war in to an unwinnable one.
I deliberately didn't claim "most" - the draft percentages alone make any such statement almost untennable. But "common" is certainly true.
McCain is a veteran and a P.O.W. who experienced torture first hand.
From his perspective: If you're going to commit to a war, commit to it.
He's admittedly avoiding questions about whether we should have gone in the first place (realities being what they are, there's absolutely no way he could get the republican nomination if he went that far against the republican president.
Still, accepting that it has happened, there are basically three choices: get the hell out and deal with the fallout (becoming the more popular view), stay with your head burried in the sand (the administration policy for the last 4 years), stay and do what needs doing to do it right (McCain's choice). That's pretty common amongst Vietnam vets who are largely convinced Vietnam was winnable had the politicians not hamstrung them at every turn.
The interesting thing about McCain is his ethics on how you go about winning that war. Month on month, the war in Iraq has become more of a failure and more insurgents are turning up. Surely if you kill or capture the numbers the U.S. do, that number should go down? No, you piss away all credibility by torturing people, you piss off far more people who would never otherwise have been insurgents - torturing and abandonning ethics recruits for the other guy far better than anything he could do. As a P.O.W. who was tortured, McCain's been vocal that it's never justified (sure, you might prevent an attack that kills 5,000 now but you radicalize enough people to kill 50,000 over time).
Personally, I think the war in Iraq was an horrific lie fed to the American people - Bin Laden never had real ties, Saddam never had real ties to 911, they never tried to buy yellowcake uranium and the chemical weapons that we sold to them were destroyed after the first gulf war. I think the current method of occupation is a great way to make the situation in the middle east worse and kill a lot of young Americans along with thousands of Iraqi civilians. I also think that getting out [sensibly] is the right thing to do...
So, I'd prefer a democrat that gets us out of the war entirely. Still, if I have to have a republican that keeps us there, let's get one with an actual clue about how to do something positive.
Build a script to generate madlibs style random job specs.
Tell them you'd love to work with them. You have 20 positions open right now. Send 20 random specs over.
Pick ten random applicants for each position. Ask for the company to send them to all come for a day of interviews.
Have security explain why you were forced to take these measures. Escort them from the building.
Ask the company if they'd like to play this game some more.
So, let me get this straight...
They're upset that someone else is using their IP, [generally] ignoring copyrights and trademarks of the work they created by using someone else's IP, [generally] ignoring copyrights and trademarks?
How utterly unprecedented!
You don't have permission to access
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.37 Server at tech.blorge.com Port 80
Taking a look at the credits list for one of the major MMOs I was involved with, there were a ten programmers, two additional programming credits, two lead engineers and a tech director listed. Call that 15-20 people, a few more if you add in the DB teams etc.
Compare that to over 30 designers, design assistants and additional game design credits, 4 writers, 7 world/architecture personel, 9 characters/creatures folks, 5 animators, 19 motion capture personel (before the three actors) and one George Lucas.
Companies go bust over late games. Sigil's gone in large part because they kept overrunning Microsoft's willingness to add another six months and another million or two in salaries, leading to Microsoft pulling out (and a lot more politics beyond). If the real cause of games running late was coding, an area that takes maybe 10% of the production budget, don't you think they'd throw double, even triple the resources at it (even if that means only a few more guys but hugely paid parallel coding geniuses) to avoid the massive costs associated with a delay?
Think about it: A typical MMO lifecycle is around five years with a geared up team for maybe the last three. You run late by a year, you're paying 20-30% extra in salaries. If it was really a coding issue, wouldn't you triple the resources and pay less overall?
The biggest challenge for most games is getting the game balance tweaked so it's atually fun, scrapping all the ideas you ran with for a year or two that seemed great but didn't work once lots of people were playing together, and populating enough content to stand up against games that have been out for half a decade and ship with ten expansion packs in one box set for less than the cost of your new release.
Getting code to run in parallel isn't to be diminished... But the scale of where resources are put shows far more is invested in to art, design and content than ever goes near programming. If programming were really a bottleneck, it's an easy one to fix (even accepting that double the money doesn't equal half the time due to scaling issues).
Amazing isn't necessarily the same as "fun" ;)
Populous amazed for its time - and was actually a huge amount of fun for the era.
Syndicate - a truly fun strategy based RTS before anyone coined the term RTS.
Magic Carpet - Any game, especially considering how long ago it was, that can render stereograms in real time to give genuine 3D (even if it sucks in practice) will manage to amaze me.
Dungeon Keeper - Regularly amazed with moments of humor and turning the dungeon crawl on its head.
Black And White - Admittedly didn't manage to hold interest across the full game but I'm yet to meet anyone who wasn't amazed the first time their creature decided to sit down and eat his own fecal matter.
Fable - OK, didn't play that one.
The Movies - If the goal is to amaze, look at the wealth of machinima that game opened up to people who'd never even thought of the medium before (granted, Stunt Island (way back in the day) and The Sims also both did that).
Each of his games contains innovation that makes you sit back, blink, and think "Wow". That, to me is amazement and therefore amazing.
Even looking at the games as a whole, not just for their one great moment... I'm not convinced any of them have been bad games. If anything, they've suffered from having a few truly innovative features that, unfortunately, blow their load in the first hour or two, making an otherwise reasonable game seem much poorer in comparison.
Dungeon Keeper was arguably the first of his games to start suffering like this. Had it not had the flourishes of genius that it got out of the way early on, it would have been a reasonably playable, 80% rating, kind of a game that quite a few people would happily play through to conclusion. Instead, we were so gorged on the dark humor, the plays on torture, etc. that the game that would have otherwise been perfectly fun seemed like a letdown from there on out.
Black and White was much the same. At its heart, it was still the same Populous game we'd always loved. Had it not been for the creatures, we'd have called it a decent if not inspiring game that a lot of people would have played through to the end anyway (albeit with lower overall sales). Instead, we wowed at the creatures, we played with the spells, we blew stuff up, then realized the next 20-30 hours weren't going to keep surprising us like the first few and gave up on a game that wasn't terrible - it just wasn't going to keep delivering the "ooh-shiny" hits.
It's a shame in some ways because each of his games have actually been amazing, particularly in terms of innovation, in their own right. They just always fall short of the fantasies he had in his head and described to the press and so always get judged accordingly. It's like a high jumper setting the bar at a mile in to the sky then jumping twice as high as the previous world record - everyone leaves disappointed that he failed to reach the bar he set for himself rather than impressed by what was still a great jump.
I'd argue against it but, frankly, without it, Paris Hilton's, "Like, uh, I'm rich! My nail buffer said I could like totally keep driving with a suspended license. I, like, had no idea that was bad." would have been a valid defense.
How about: There was a case featured in the November 1996 issue of "Marie Claire" involving an Atlanta wife who tried to have her soon-to-be ex-husband charged with rape. She had persuaded her then hubby to tie her up and later used the bondage as a means of proving that the sex had not been consensual. Her sister came forward and informed the court of the plot against the man, but there was another twist in the story.
Although the man was acquitted on the rape charge, the man was sentenced to five years in jail for having performed oral sex on the woman. He had admitted to that during the course of the case and so he was charged and sentenced under Georgia law. Source
From the same article:
Oral sex is illegal in: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington D.C. (OK, I admit, I got great head in MN)
An erection that shows through a man's clothing is illegal in: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington D.C. and Wisconsin. (Lock me up for pretty much every time I had to read to the class in French classes during my teens)
In Missouri sexually deviant behavior between people of the same sex is classified as a class A misdemeanor.
In Willowdale, Oregon it is against the law for a husband to talk to dirty in his wife's ear during sex.
In Washington State there is a law against having sex with a virgin under any circumstances (including the wedding night!).
Newcastle, Wyoming it is illegal to have sex in a butcher shop's meat freezer.
In Washington D.C. there is a law against having sex in any position other than face to face.
Source
I say lock the dirty bastards up and throw away the key!
Or, alternatively, accept that demonising people for being sexual deviants, without classification as to the act, is complete b.s.
Up until the last couple of years, consensual homosexual acts have been able to put you on the sex offenders register in many states. Sex with a consenting partner, in a park, after midnight, when all children should long since be in bed - you're a sex offender. Oral sex in Utah? Mississippi's ludicrous "sex with a minor unless you can prove she was not of previously virtuous character.."? They all merit a place on the list.
I don't dispute that identifying those who prey on children may have its merits. Given the sex offender registry is a great way of stitching red letters on the chests of anyone that offends good conservative taste, that is hardly its sole effect.
Given how open to abuse the system is, how long before the MPAA figures, "Hey, there's hardcore porn on them there torrents. I wonder if we could get anyone that uses them labeled a sex offender, destroy their lives, and kill off torrents that way, without worrying about trying to prove actual piracy."?
I've never got caught having sex in public nor getting a blowjob in Utah. I also happen to be straight. Still, even if I had been caught for any of those acts, it's absolutely none of their business whether I use MySpace.
Mind you, I also grew up in England where, after the Daily Mail posted a list of 1,000 sex offenders, including some errors, a paediatrician got their house burned down. Dirty paediatricians! I hate the way they look at and touch children!
It's one thing if you're making and distributing content for free.
If napisy.org was ad supported and made money from the ads, even if it gave away the content for free, they're still profitting from someone else's intellectual property - no one would view the ads and thus they'd bring in no money if it wasn't for the free content.
That said, I'd go after the owners of the site and any profits they made rather than users who really were offering their translation services for free.
There's also the good question about how it affects the revenue available to provide quality translations. This came up with the whole online guitar tabs discussion earlier in the week:
If there is a free, albeit poor, version - does that reduce the number of sales of a higher quality but costly version?
In a world with economies of scale, what effect does that have in the long run?
Example with made up numbers:
A professional translation and remastering the disc to include it costs $50,000.
A given movie gets around 50,000 Polish language sales.
The English/French/Spanish standard version of the DVD is $15. Figuring all Polish people want a Polish version, they can bump the cost to $16 and split the $50,000 equally amongst 50,000 sales.
Now a free, albeit poorer version is available. Half the people save cash by getting the cheaper option. Now they have to split the same $50,000 across only 25,000 Polish language sales. To recoup costs, the price margin is now $2 greater instead of $1.
Over time, that $2 rankles half the remaining people. Now Polish language DVDs are $19 for the 12,500 copies sold. That price difference gets big enough that just over half of the remaining users defect to the English plus generic versions. The remaining 5,000 Polish users are now dropping $10 in translation fees per disc just to pay their share while the other 45,000 are buying the English version for barely half the price.
At this point, with $15 English plus poor translation or $25 for a decent Polish copy, most of the 5,000 who have no idea how to run the software simply give up. With no market, the film company doesn't even bother paying for a Polish release.
Now every Pole gets to buy an English copy and read ban Polrish (deliberate typo) subtitles whilst bitching about how terrible the movie industry is for never releasing Polish subtitles.
I've no idea if it actually works out that way, how the numbers move, etc. But it's that fear that printed tab publishers have tried to exploit and it is at least worth considering the potential hidden costs of something that appear free on the surface.
Sure, we scoff now.
You forget, Vista was originally announced when 8 bit CPUs were common. It was only delay after delay that held them up until 32 bit CPUs were the low end and 64 bit ones were pretty common.
In 2088, when they finally ship their new version, we'll likely all be running megabit CPUs. We still won't have our long promised flying cars however. This of course assumes Moore's law - which will still have regular discussions on Slashdot about how it's reached its limits.
Yes... But you get weird looks if you ask for extra pickle in it.
They do have a good point on the quality side of things...
Very, very few tabs on sites like Olga come even close to the quality of a decent tab book.
F5, A#5, G5, C5 may well be the chords to the main part of Teen Spirit but tells me nothing about strum patterns, rhythm, which strings I should be missing on certain strums, etc. It tells me nothing about C and F notes that chime out afterwards.
Ironically, for all the claims of "I'm not good enough to figure out how to play a song by ear..." - to use most online tabs, aside from getting pointed in the right direction, you really do need to have an ear for rhythm, an ear for when exactly the chord changes happen, what the strum patterns are, when to use up vs. downstrokes, etc.
There is a major problem in the printed music world that only better known artists merit the expense of producing a good tab book and that most of those books are only available via special order. Still, when they do exist, when you can find them (this is starting to sound like the A-Team), the world of difference between them and the average tab is astronomical.
I'm caught in the middle: I'd hate to see high quality publishing disappear but I also don't see low quality, text based tabs (that often have five different, all disagreeing, version) really being that much of a threat.
Then again, in a world where record companies are trying to shore up CD sales, about about including a DVD with video files of exactly what the artists' hands did when playing the songs, lyrics and scores included? Given the choice between iTunes' $0.99 a limited song and $1.29 an unlocked one, I'd rather drop $15 on an album that'll teach me how to play its content as well. Sure, on a one-off basis, those costs would be huge but if it were done for every album, economies of scale could turn it in to a day's filming, a quick editing job and a day or two of a cheap person transcribing it.