I'm sorry, what's the confusion here? Trump said he wanted to cut the EPA. That is exactly like saying that he wants to eliminate the EPA. Do you not know what the word cut means?
Slashdot changed the headline to reflect the new statement made by the USDA's deputy administrator. A statement which is, frankly, backpedaling. When the original order was "Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents." the submitted headline was accurate, albeit overly specific.
Is it really surprising to anyone that with a major change of control in the US, that departments want to keep a tighter rain on anything that could look like
policy statements for a while?
Yes. Typically when a new president takes office there are some minor changes to EPA rules. Nothing like this. Couple that with Trump's stated goal of eliminating the EPA entirely and this does look like real cause for concern.
I haven't really wanted to live in San Francisco before, but this article is making a pretty good case for it. Are there other cities, worldwide, which are largely childless? Is there a list? I am willing to learn a new language.
You could have made an argument for nuclear ten years ago, but at this point it's just a bad investment. Solar has dropped by 92% since 2008 and is still going down. It's now only a little more expensive than nuclear, and has none of the huge upfront cost or multiple-decades commitment. Wind is cheaper than coal, nuclear, or anything else except for natural gas (basically tied with wind) and geothermal (cheapest option).
I do not want reasons why developers might shun the Switch. I never asked for any such reasons. I have made no indication at any point that I was seeking these reasons.
This thread started with someone claiming that system architecture would be a barrier to porting between home consoles and the Switch, i pointed out that that really wasn't true and the rest of this conversation has just been fanboi garbage.
Also: your reasons are terrible. I mean, come on - you're citing zero userbase on a product which hasn't been released. There are some reasons why the Switch might not do well, but they're mostly about marketing. There are no technical barriers to its success.
(I know this is flamebait, that's unintentional. I literally just searched for "Rich Pathetic Sociopathic Bastard" - first link is Lance Armstrong, second link is nothing, Trump is next. I guess I could have said Armstrong, but... he's not pathetic.)
That is basically what I was saying, yes. Though the PS4/Switch use OpenGL, while the Xbox only uses DirectX... That's a quibble though - the barrier which that poses is nothing compared to previous generations of consoles.
Yes, there are many what? You have not given any technical reasons why third parties wouldn't flock to this thing. Sure there are plenty of other potential pitfalls, I would never claim otherwise, but as you say: "3rd parties flocked to 3DS mostly because there's no other option around. Except in Japan, the only other portable system around is mobile." This remains true for the Switch.
This is circular logic: "AAA products won't be designed for ARM because AAA products are not designed for ARM." The fact that it hasn't been done so far means squat, this is the first time that a major gaming console is... Actually, no it isn't the first time. There have been a ton of major gaming products designed for ARM - the DS, 3DS, and PS Vita are all ARM based.
Regardless, even if all that you care about is ports of other console games the fact that everyone is currently developing for ARM means that the tools for porting from x86 are already in place. Most major gaming engines support both: Unreal, Gamebryo, Blitztech, CryEngine, etc. Really, out of every generation of consoles to date, this seems like the one for which porting will be the easiest - support for porting between ARM and x86 is certainly at a much more mature state than porting between PowerPC (Xbox 360) and Cell (PS3), for example.
I can think of a few, but that doesn't matter: (almost) every studio makes ARM games now, regardless of their budget, and that means that (almost) every studio has ARM experience. Thus, ARM does not pose a barrier to entry.
Where did you get the idea that they were just competing with mobile? That doesn't make any sense.
I'm a little excited for the Switch for exactly the reason you hint at: I see this as maybe a chance to raise the bar on mobile gaming. Mobile games are, as you say, shit. If devs start porting over Switch games though, real games, it could perhaps help to pull mobile gaming out of that hole. At least to some degree.
Probably not. This may just be wishful thinking on my part, the interface is different between the Switch and mobile and that's really more important than architecture, but... Maybe? I hope.
Switch is competing with the Xbox and PS, among other platforms. At this point there are basically two architectures for gaming: x86 on PC, Xbox, and PS, and ARM on Switch and mobile. Both are very big, very well established architectures with extensive development tools available - neither pose any significant obstacles for developers. Nintendo may have a small edge in this respect, since ARM is the big thing right now.
Nintendo has struggled with third parties in some cases in the past because of some difficulty with supporting their architecture and interface choices. Lack of third party support is certainly not a given with Nintendo, however. Let me remind you that they were masters of third party support in the 8 and 16 bit generations, and continue to completely dominate portable console gaming with no shortage of third party support.
Neither of these issues apply to the switch: completely standard architecture, and almost completely standard interface. There is no technical reason why third parties wouldn't flock to this thing.
First of all, I'm not here to make a case for Gail Ruben's position. Arguing against it is meaningless in the context of this conversation.
Second, you're jumping to conclusions with the hormones thing. Hormones are not the only biological element which distinguishes the sexes, and while they have some influence on our motivations that doesn't translate directly to behaviors or expectations like machismo. Rather, machismo is a socially constructed mechanism to express some of the feelings which hormones may generate. I believe that Ruben's position was that linking these expectations to a person's sex was a falsehood since, e.g., women can also sometimes feel like acting macho.
This is not the argument. The argument is that gender is not biologically anything at all - it has nothing to do with hormones, it's a set of expectations. If you are male (sex) then you are expected to be macho (gender).
They are mutually exclusive in common language, which is the only place where the word "vegetable" is specifically talking about food. So claiming that they're not mutually exclusive would require mixing definitions between the technical jargon and common language. Or you could just say that all fruits are vegetables. But that's pretty pointless.
Here's a reference for what I said. If the two definitions were different since they were coined, as you say, then when and why did they merge? (I don't necessarily expect you to know the answer to this, but an answer should exist.)
The Black's citation is interesting. I tried looking up a few other controversial words: apparently marriage is indeed between a man and a woman. Didn't know that. Apparently an infant is anyone under twenty-one years of age... Rape requires force, and abortion after the point of viability is not abortion at all. (Though it's also explicitly not murder. I couldn't figure out what it is, though the dictionary has a definition for something called foeticide which applies only if the abortion is illegal.)
Still, you made your point. I'd like to know how Black's comes up with these definitions, and what exactly they mean in a legal context. I have no legal training though. Seems like something I would enjoy.
her gender (not biological sex; those are medically and legally different things)
What? This is the first time I've heard that claim, and I find it hard to believe. I can buy it for a medical definition (though I expect that it must be a recent change), those people mostly only care about what's best for the patient, but legally? In this political climate? In what state? In what country?
My understanding is this: Robert Stoller started distinguishing between the words sex and gender back in the sixties because he found it convenient for his research on transexuality. Some feminists starting picking up the idea in the seventies, when Gail Ruben argued that gender was a social imposition rather than anything tied to biology, and she used the two words separately in her argument. Since then the sex/gender distinction has become common jargon in feminist literature... And that's it. That's as far as it goes. The two words are distinguished in certain academic jargon, but they are synonyms outside of that.
Is there more to this that I'm unaware of? I ask because I've seen this declaration that gender means one thing and sex means something else a lot lately, and it seems so... dumb. It's like that guy who declares that green beans aren't vegetables because they're actually fruits. And technically it's true that green beans are fruits in the jargon of certain academic fields, but this fact doesn't make that guy right. That guy is still dumb. Outside of a textbook: green beans are vegetables.
Or, for that matter, sex and gender have different meanings in linguistic jargon than they do in feminist jargon. Saying that one definition is "correct" is just myopic.
Well... This may be a reasonable thing to say under the circumstances. It has the tablet form factor and a touch screen, but reportedly not one of the launch titles make use of the touch screen. Also since games are intended to be playable docked, with no touch screen available, we can probably expect the touch functionality to be limited to menus.
With no touch and no touch-based software, nothing about this thing resembles an oversized smartphone. "Don't call it a tablet." seems to be accurate.
Because then the police would read it and say, "What?" And they would send officers to Razor to try and figure out what was going on, etc. Eventually Razor gets fined for... something. Annoying the police.
Only if they (eventually) produce and sell these things for real. They were probably only stolen because they were concept devices which would never get produced, and were therefore valuable for their uniqueness. I would bet that all of the free publicity from this is making their eventual production somewhat more likely.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, what's the confusion here? Trump said he wanted to cut the EPA. That is exactly like saying that he wants to eliminate the EPA. Do you not know what the word cut means?
Slashdot changed the headline to reflect the new statement made by the USDA's deputy administrator. A statement which is, frankly, backpedaling. When the original order was "Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents." the submitted headline was accurate, albeit overly specific.
Is it really surprising to anyone that with a major change of control in the US, that departments want to keep a tighter rain on anything that could look like policy statements for a while?
Yes. Typically when a new president takes office there are some minor changes to EPA rules. Nothing like this. Couple that with Trump's stated goal of eliminating the EPA entirely and this does look like real cause for concern.
All right, I should have known consoles would be fully proprietary. Thanks for filling me in.
I haven't really wanted to live in San Francisco before, but this article is making a pretty good case for it. Are there other cities, worldwide, which are largely childless? Is there a list? I am willing to learn a new language.
You could have made an argument for nuclear ten years ago, but at this point it's just a bad investment. Solar has dropped by 92% since 2008 and is still going down. It's now only a little more expensive than nuclear, and has none of the huge upfront cost or multiple-decades commitment. Wind is cheaper than coal, nuclear, or anything else except for natural gas (basically tied with wind) and geothermal (cheapest option).
I do not want reasons why developers might shun the Switch. I never asked for any such reasons. I have made no indication at any point that I was seeking these reasons.
This thread started with someone claiming that system architecture would be a barrier to porting between home consoles and the Switch, i pointed out that that really wasn't true and the rest of this conversation has just been fanboi garbage.
Also: your reasons are terrible. I mean, come on - you're citing zero userbase on a product which hasn't been released. There are some reasons why the Switch might not do well, but they're mostly about marketing. There are no technical barriers to its success.
Wait, so what does Trump mean then?
(I know this is flamebait, that's unintentional. I literally just searched for "Rich Pathetic Sociopathic Bastard" - first link is Lance Armstrong, second link is nothing, Trump is next. I guess I could have said Armstrong, but... he's not pathetic.)
That is basically what I was saying, yes. Though the PS4/Switch use OpenGL, while the Xbox only uses DirectX... That's a quibble though - the barrier which that poses is nothing compared to previous generations of consoles.
Yes, there are many what? You have not given any technical reasons why third parties wouldn't flock to this thing. Sure there are plenty of other potential pitfalls, I would never claim otherwise, but as you say: "3rd parties flocked to 3DS mostly because there's no other option around. Except in Japan, the only other portable system around is mobile." This remains true for the Switch.
This is circular logic: "AAA products won't be designed for ARM because AAA products are not designed for ARM." The fact that it hasn't been done so far means squat, this is the first time that a major gaming console is... Actually, no it isn't the first time. There have been a ton of major gaming products designed for ARM - the DS, 3DS, and PS Vita are all ARM based.
Regardless, even if all that you care about is ports of other console games the fact that everyone is currently developing for ARM means that the tools for porting from x86 are already in place. Most major gaming engines support both: Unreal, Gamebryo, Blitztech, CryEngine, etc. Really, out of every generation of consoles to date, this seems like the one for which porting will be the easiest - support for porting between ARM and x86 is certainly at a much more mature state than porting between PowerPC (Xbox 360) and Cell (PS3), for example.
I can think of a few, but that doesn't matter: (almost) every studio makes ARM games now, regardless of their budget, and that means that (almost) every studio has ARM experience. Thus, ARM does not pose a barrier to entry.
Where did you get the idea that they were just competing with mobile? That doesn't make any sense.
I'm a little excited for the Switch for exactly the reason you hint at: I see this as maybe a chance to raise the bar on mobile gaming. Mobile games are, as you say, shit. If devs start porting over Switch games though, real games, it could perhaps help to pull mobile gaming out of that hole. At least to some degree.
Probably not. This may just be wishful thinking on my part, the interface is different between the Switch and mobile and that's really more important than architecture, but... Maybe? I hope.
Switch is competing with the Xbox and PS, among other platforms. At this point there are basically two architectures for gaming: x86 on PC, Xbox, and PS, and ARM on Switch and mobile. Both are very big, very well established architectures with extensive development tools available - neither pose any significant obstacles for developers. Nintendo may have a small edge in this respect, since ARM is the big thing right now.
Nintendo has struggled with third parties in some cases in the past because of some difficulty with supporting their architecture and interface choices. Lack of third party support is certainly not a given with Nintendo, however. Let me remind you that they were masters of third party support in the 8 and 16 bit generations, and continue to completely dominate portable console gaming with no shortage of third party support.
Neither of these issues apply to the switch: completely standard architecture, and almost completely standard interface. There is no technical reason why third parties wouldn't flock to this thing.
The Switch is an ARM SoC. Everyone but everyone is developing for ARM right now - if anything I'd be more worried about the other two.
First of all, I'm not here to make a case for Gail Ruben's position. Arguing against it is meaningless in the context of this conversation.
Second, you're jumping to conclusions with the hormones thing. Hormones are not the only biological element which distinguishes the sexes, and while they have some influence on our motivations that doesn't translate directly to behaviors or expectations like machismo. Rather, machismo is a socially constructed mechanism to express some of the feelings which hormones may generate. I believe that Ruben's position was that linking these expectations to a person's sex was a falsehood since, e.g., women can also sometimes feel like acting macho.
If sex and gender are biologically distinct
This is not the argument. The argument is that gender is not biologically anything at all - it has nothing to do with hormones, it's a set of expectations. If you are male (sex) then you are expected to be macho (gender).
They are mutually exclusive in common language, which is the only place where the word "vegetable" is specifically talking about food. So claiming that they're not mutually exclusive would require mixing definitions between the technical jargon and common language. Or you could just say that all fruits are vegetables. But that's pretty pointless.
You may want to look up "sexual assault" as well though.
Okay, I did. It's a recursive definition:
"These are the advances physically of one person from another in a sexual way that can lead to a sexual assault."
And on the site there's a link there, to itself. What the hell? That's just lazy.
Here's a reference for what I said. If the two definitions were different since they were coined, as you say, then when and why did they merge? (I don't necessarily expect you to know the answer to this, but an answer should exist.)
The Black's citation is interesting. I tried looking up a few other controversial words: apparently marriage is indeed between a man and a woman. Didn't know that. Apparently an infant is anyone under twenty-one years of age... Rape requires force, and abortion after the point of viability is not abortion at all. (Though it's also explicitly not murder. I couldn't figure out what it is, though the dictionary has a definition for something called foeticide which applies only if the abortion is illegal.)
Still, you made your point. I'd like to know how Black's comes up with these definitions, and what exactly they mean in a legal context. I have no legal training though. Seems like something I would enjoy.
her gender (not biological sex; those are medically and legally different things)
What? This is the first time I've heard that claim, and I find it hard to believe. I can buy it for a medical definition (though I expect that it must be a recent change), those people mostly only care about what's best for the patient, but legally? In this political climate? In what state? In what country?
My understanding is this: Robert Stoller started distinguishing between the words sex and gender back in the sixties because he found it convenient for his research on transexuality. Some feminists starting picking up the idea in the seventies, when Gail Ruben argued that gender was a social imposition rather than anything tied to biology, and she used the two words separately in her argument. Since then the sex/gender distinction has become common jargon in feminist literature... And that's it. That's as far as it goes. The two words are distinguished in certain academic jargon, but they are synonyms outside of that.
Is there more to this that I'm unaware of? I ask because I've seen this declaration that gender means one thing and sex means something else a lot lately, and it seems so... dumb. It's like that guy who declares that green beans aren't vegetables because they're actually fruits. And technically it's true that green beans are fruits in the jargon of certain academic fields, but this fact doesn't make that guy right. That guy is still dumb. Outside of a textbook: green beans are vegetables.
Or, for that matter, sex and gender have different meanings in linguistic jargon than they do in feminist jargon. Saying that one definition is "correct" is just myopic.
Well... This may be a reasonable thing to say under the circumstances. It has the tablet form factor and a touch screen, but reportedly not one of the launch titles make use of the touch screen. Also since games are intended to be playable docked, with no touch screen available, we can probably expect the touch functionality to be limited to menus.
With no touch and no touch-based software, nothing about this thing resembles an oversized smartphone. "Don't call it a tablet." seems to be accurate.
The Las Vegas police, dipshit.
Because then the police would read it and say, "What?" And they would send officers to Razor to try and figure out what was going on, etc. Eventually Razor gets fined for... something. Annoying the police.
Only if they (eventually) produce and sell these things for real. They were probably only stolen because they were concept devices which would never get produced, and were therefore valuable for their uniqueness. I would bet that all of the free publicity from this is making their eventual production somewhat more likely.