Korea makes a huge amount of different kind of embedded electronics. For example, they export a huge number of the ATMs in use in the United States. If I remember correctly (and I may not) Chung Ho electronics makes a big perecentage of them. Glory brand ATMs are also manufactured in Korea, IIRC.
You *will* be screwed by this ruling, regardless of where you live. Prices for various electronics will be going up.
I remember playing smb3 in a 'Choice 10' machine for a few months before 'The Wizard' hit theaters. I felt like such an elite gamer because I knew everything that was supposed to happen in the game before the kids played it in the movie.
I'd rather not have my house p'wned by some l33t electronic theives, thanks. Heaven help you when CodeRedVII hits and makes everyone's house vulnerable to the 'StealyourTVandStereo' exploit.
Step 1: Buy caffenated drinks in bulk from a nearby warehouse club or bottler. Step 2: Mark them up to $.50-$.75 Step 3: Wait for gamers to grow agitated and tired. Step 4: Sell caffenated drinks to help recoup the costs of your marathon.
Just like the phone companies, these taxes can be used to bilk the customers. As you get more and more line items on your bill-- taxes, fees, etc... the provider has more room to inflate the bills with hidden charges. More than one phone provider and companies with access to bill phone providers have been accused of including obsolete, illegal, and fraudulent fees on phone bills. Are we seriously supposed to beleive that cables companies won't do the same thing?
While the above is funny, it's important to remember that movie and comic book physics are nothing like real-world physics.
Like many fantasy characters, Wolverine casually violates the laws of physics and biology. Compare Logan to the cyclopses and giants of mythology, which were almost certainly based on deformed or diseased humans. Most descriptions of giants have them towering above humans. Since volume (and therefore mass of similar density material) increases with the cube of radius, most fantasy giants would not really be able to support their own weight. Their bones would shatter and their muscles would tear under the stress of standing up. Their hearts would also likely burst from the strain of pumping blood to their heads. Zoology and Palentology support this. Whales, truly massive creatures, are crushed to death under their own weight when beached. Elephants, land mammals with extraordinary size and mass, have incredibly thick bone structures and move ponderously. Dinousaur skeletons that appear to be fossils of huge creatures also appear to be adapted to live in shallow coastal areas or swamps.
Not only would Wolverine's metal-coated skeleton (which is coated with a fantasy metal, BTW) cook him in many cirumstances-- Don't get too close to that microwave, Logan!-- but it would take an incredible amount of energy to survive being internally immolated with molten metal, as it he is described as having done.
Guidelines for wound care reccomend that patients take in 150% calories during recuperation from severe wounds. If most of Wolverine's cells were burned, he would have to use more than his body-mass in terms of fat and protein in order to heal.
Even assuming he could take in that many calories during the procedure, a coated skeleton would also keep many of his body systems from working properly, including his immune system and circulatory system. Red blood cells are created inside long-bones and ribs, remember? If Wolverine's are sealed inside adamantium, then how can he generate new blood cells? Do his tendons and ligaments attach to bone through the adamantium? Do they directly attach to the non-organic metal? What about Wolverine's spine? Does the Adam Ant cover his spinal disks? If so, are there holes for his spinal nerves to exit his spine? If not, why aren't Wolvie's neck and back his weak spots, easily broken or cut under the kind of stress he survives?
Wolverine is a fantasy creature and cannot be held to the same scientific principles as you and I.
This has been modded funny, but technological advances are the real winners in the 'Copyright War' so to speak.
It's been said that the best way to get an unjust law struck down is to enforce it rigorously. This proved *very* true during the Prohibition era. It's proving true now, as well. The fact that the country and media intrests are trying to absolutely enforce copyright edicts means that more people will see them as evil, unecessary, and ridiculous. More people will break the law willfully and let their conscience guide them instead, for good or ill.
Napster, Morpheus, Gnutella, Kazaa, WASTE, IRC, Usenet and other P2P trading media are the logical outgrowth of this effect. They are the modernday equivalent to the 1920's 'Speakeasy' club. Everyone knows someone else who uses them, but nobody does it themselves... at least when anyone in authority is around. The fact that they can't be stomped out no matter what pressure the media industries apply is the greatest victory opponents to unfair copyright statutes can have.
This is a misnomer. The design of keyboards wasn't supposed to slow typists, but to reduce the number of repetitive strikes against the paper from the same side of the keyboard to reduce stuck keys.
Type a an entire paragraph of text and you'll see that for a lot of words, you frequently alternate hands every keystroke.
While it may slow typing down some for some people, the familiar qwertyuiop layout is actually fairly intelligently designed. Letters used frequently together are placed so that they are 'logically' next to eachother. Most commonly used letters are placed on the 'home' and top row and least commonly used letters are placed on the bottom.
Are there 'faster' or less strainful keyboard layouts? Yup. Is Qwerty designed to slow you down? No, they're not.
This would assume that there is only one type of MMORPG player - those who want the highest level character possible in order to play and experience the pinnacle of the game despite having little or no room for advancement.
In fact, this is not the case. There are many, many reasons people play MMORPGs, including the thrill of advancement, social interaction, exploration, strategy, and tactics. All of those reasons for playing will encourage a character to start out on his or her own and advance a character through the mechanisms in the game rather than just buying a pre-leveled/advanced character.
Social interaction, for example, is pretty difficult when you have friends you don't know about -- those the person you bought your character from happened to make during his advancement -- and you have to gain the trust of people who've learned not to trust new faces at the 'high end' of any given MMORPG.
User-based Search and Share is the defining feature of other P2P apps like Kazaa and Gnutella. While Bittorrent is more of a swarm downloading protocol, do you have any plans to impliment a user front-end to do something like user-based hosting or searching or tracking of.torrent files?
And most of them are a result of the target audience that you're designing the game for.
Look at The Sims, for example, one of the first games to be massively popular with females 12-34. It can be, for all intents and purposes, a virtual doll house where your dolls interact on their own. One of the reasons the Sims Online has had difficulties is that most of the customizability that made the game so popular has been stripped out of the game in favor of anti-cheating and multi-player capabilities.
There is very little to do with violence in The Sims and a lot to do with role-playing, dress-up, and relationship management. I once heard a female cooworker describing how much better the game would be if the dolls could be made to be more customizable or if you could change clothes, jewelry or hair in-game.
For that matter, look at relationship and dating sims, which are very popular in Asia. These games range from tame and cutsey to pornographic. While it may be pretty lame and pathetic to interact with a virtual girl instead of a real one, that doesn't change the fact that these games are *very* popular and simply haven't been widely unleashed on NA audiences yet.
Another kind of game that is gaining more wide-spread acceptance in N.A. are the various profession sims or management sims. Most of these are builders, like the popular 'Roller-Coaster Tycoon' variants. Some are more detailed. I can't remember the title off-hand (Was it '911 Paramedic'), but there was a game recently in which the player took the role of a medical professional and had to make decisions on what kind of treatment a patient needed.
The different genres are out there, they just have to be explored more fully.
One of the most important features of Bittorrent is that it is almost completely decentralized. Rather than even p2p sharing, it's just swarm downloading. This decentralization is ultimately what will protect it from the incredible litigation powers of the MPAA and RIAA.
Also of note is its noted ability to be used for non-infringing purposes, such as the download of the aforementioned Redhat 9 ISOs. I'm certain that Redhat is *gleeful* that the ISOs are available over Bittorent rather than everyone trying to pull them off of their server and their mirrors. This non-infringing use will be a saving grace when legal-types start examining bittorrent for lawsuit fodder.
European Drug Distributor: Hello, Mister Colombian Drug Lord. Here is the money, I promised you.
Drug Lord: Hola, my French friend. I assume you've prepared the money as I specified?
Distributor: Indeed! Not only are these new notes, freshly received through my cover business, but they have been washed in muddy water, microwaved, and then dried in my daughter's basement.
Drug Lord: Ecellent! Here is the ten kilos of my finest cocaine. Good day to you!
Yeah, a real drug transaction isn't going to go nearly like this, but having the money check what kind of transactions its going through isn't going to work if there is *any* kind of money laundering going on and if *any* kind of competant disabling of RFID tags takes place.
I agree on so many lives. Live action EVA is bad, wrong, and stupid. Are they going to have a tall, busty Japanese woman playing Misato? Are they going to have fourteen-year-olds in skin-tight vinyl? Are they going to have a penguin? Are they going to have lots of Rei clones? Are they going to invoke the wrath of the Christian right with the decidedly mangled Christian imagery in Evangelion? Is Misato going to die in the second reel? How about Touji? Is Gendou going to cheat on his cute pregnant wife (who will almost have to be played by the same actress as the various Reis) with Ritsuko and her mom? Will Shinji be allowed to oedipally fantasize about all the-- again, fourteen year old-- girls on the cast?
Unless the scriptwriter, director, and producer are willing to portray this story in all its gory beauty, they shouldn't even bother. I can't see them doing *HALF* of the things I listed above, and you really need *ALL* of them to get the story right.
You code in the shower in the morning and transcribe your ideas into your IDE. You take long breaks at work to figure out problems. You think best when your hands are occupied or when some other minor task is distracting you slightly. You frequently work late or at home because thats when your mind is working. You are paid based on an avarge number of the lines of code you write per time measured. Big, time-consuming projects are intersperesed with smaller, less intenstive projects.
Your Boss's Fansty World:
From 8:00AM to 5:00PM your mind belongs to the company. You are able to transform business ideas into code every minute of that time and can do so without fail, regardless of the problem being presented. You are interchangable with other programmers and need not understand the whole project you're working on at any given time. You are capable of producing bug-free code on the first revision given normal working conditions. Application code is a commodity and is of the same quality, regardless who wrote it. You frequently work late because you are a salary employee and can be demanded to make more application code per work-day. You are paid per workday rather than code per average unit time.
The result: You sneak goofing off when you're able and end up working more 'off the clock' hours.
A while back, Terry Pratchett wrote a book called 'Strata' in which the main plot premise was that Humans were terraforming the entire galaxy planet by planet, leaving 'history' inside those planets in the form of fake fossils and layers of rock. Occasionally, a 'prank' would slip through like the boot-prints in the sediment-strata or a digitial watch embedded in a seam of coal.
I think the piece of hardware is quite interesting and worthy of a post on Slashdot. Unfortuneately, I nearly passed it up for seeing it as 'Oh, god. Yet another RIAA article.'
I know, this story is not good enough to be posted just as hardware or audio news.
What's otherwise a fairly interesting piece of hardware has no relation to the RIAA, so it's given one to make it more interesting.
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it...
on
Life on Mars? Why Not?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There may be things that reproduce and show signs of life on Mars, but we'll spend a lot of time trying to cram the stuff on Mars into the categories we have on Earth.
Hint: Chances are, no matter what we do, we're never gonna see a green spectral line or test for clorophyll.
Instead, we need to examine soil for the most basic types of life we know of... creatures or cells similar to viruses, bacteria, and amoeba.
Manga writers have experimented with this exact concept.
'Chobits' by the CLAMP girls is about android computers in the shape of cute girls. The story is actually pretty relevant. It's primary theme is the positive and negative things that happen when people start interacting more and more with virtual worlds and peope and less with the real world and real people.
Slashdot Mirror
They lie to their developers when they say 'All we need is this one feature to make customer 'X' happy'.
They lie to their customers when they say 'And this feature our developers just put in will make your life easier'.
The hell of it is that when developers put in 60-80 hour weeks coding bloat features, the salesmen are the ones who get bonuses for making a big sale.
The problem here is not so hard to see.
Korea makes a huge amount of different kind of embedded electronics. For example, they export a huge number of the ATMs in use in the United States. If I remember correctly (and I may not) Chung Ho electronics makes a big perecentage of them. Glory brand ATMs are also manufactured in Korea, IIRC.
You *will* be screwed by this ruling, regardless of where you live. Prices for various electronics will be going up.
I remember playing smb3 in a 'Choice 10' machine for a few months before 'The Wizard' hit theaters. I felt like such an elite gamer because I knew everything that was supposed to happen in the game before the kids played it in the movie.
God, what a geek I was.
I'd rather not have my house p'wned by some l33t electronic theives, thanks. Heaven help you when CodeRedVII hits and makes everyone's house vulnerable to the 'StealyourTVandStereo' exploit.
Step 1: Buy caffenated drinks in bulk from a nearby warehouse club or bottler.
Step 2: Mark them up to $.50-$.75
Step 3: Wait for gamers to grow agitated and tired.
Step 4: Sell caffenated drinks to help recoup the costs of your marathon.
Just like the phone companies, these taxes can be used to bilk the customers. As you get more and more line items on your bill-- taxes, fees, etc... the provider has more room to inflate the bills with hidden charges. More than one phone provider and companies with access to bill phone providers have been accused of including obsolete, illegal, and fraudulent fees on phone bills. Are we seriously supposed to beleive that cables companies won't do the same thing?
g .h tm
Phone bill fraud by third parties:
http://www.fraud.org/tips/telemarketing/crammin
In Japanese, use of the English 'Parody' often refers to any fan-made derivative material as well as critical works.
While the above is funny, it's important to remember that movie and comic book physics are nothing like real-world physics.
Like many fantasy characters, Wolverine casually violates the laws of physics and biology. Compare Logan to the cyclopses and giants of mythology, which were almost certainly based on deformed or diseased humans. Most descriptions of giants have them towering above humans. Since volume (and therefore mass of similar density material) increases with the cube of radius, most fantasy giants would not really be able to support their own weight. Their bones would shatter and their muscles would tear under the stress of standing up. Their hearts would also likely burst from the strain of pumping blood to their heads. Zoology and Palentology support this. Whales, truly massive creatures, are crushed to death under their own weight when beached. Elephants, land mammals with extraordinary size and mass, have incredibly thick bone structures and move ponderously. Dinousaur skeletons that appear to be fossils of huge creatures also appear to be adapted to live in shallow coastal areas or swamps.
Not only would Wolverine's metal-coated skeleton (which is coated with a fantasy metal, BTW) cook him in many cirumstances-- Don't get too close to that microwave, Logan!-- but it would take an incredible amount of energy to survive being internally immolated with molten metal, as it he is described as having done.
Guidelines for wound care reccomend that patients take in 150% calories during recuperation from severe wounds. If most of Wolverine's cells were burned, he would have to use more than his body-mass in terms of fat and protein in order to heal.
Even assuming he could take in that many calories during the procedure, a coated skeleton would also keep many of his body systems from working properly, including his immune system and circulatory system. Red blood cells are created inside long-bones and ribs, remember? If Wolverine's are sealed inside adamantium, then how can he generate new blood cells? Do his tendons and ligaments attach to bone through the adamantium? Do they directly attach to the non-organic metal? What about Wolverine's spine? Does the Adam Ant cover his spinal disks? If so, are there holes for his spinal nerves to exit his spine? If not, why aren't Wolvie's neck and back his weak spots, easily broken or cut under the kind of stress he survives?
Wolverine is a fantasy creature and cannot be held to the same scientific principles as you and I.
This has been modded funny, but technological advances are the real winners in the 'Copyright War' so to speak.
It's been said that the best way to get an unjust law struck down is to enforce it rigorously. This proved *very* true during the Prohibition era. It's proving true now, as well. The fact that the country and media intrests are trying to absolutely enforce copyright edicts means that more people will see them as evil, unecessary, and ridiculous. More people will break the law willfully and let their conscience guide them instead, for good or ill.
Napster, Morpheus, Gnutella, Kazaa, WASTE, IRC, Usenet and other P2P trading media are the logical outgrowth of this effect. They are the modernday equivalent to the 1920's 'Speakeasy' club. Everyone knows someone else who uses them, but nobody does it themselves... at least when anyone in authority is around. The fact that they can't be stomped out no matter what pressure the media industries apply is the greatest victory opponents to unfair copyright statutes can have.
This is a misnomer. The design of keyboards wasn't supposed to slow typists, but to reduce the number of repetitive strikes against the paper from the same side of the keyboard to reduce stuck keys.
Type a an entire paragraph of text and you'll see that for a lot of words, you frequently alternate hands every keystroke.
While it may slow typing down some for some people, the familiar qwertyuiop layout is actually fairly intelligently designed. Letters used frequently together are placed so that they are 'logically' next to eachother. Most commonly used letters are placed on the 'home' and top row and least commonly used letters are placed on the bottom.
Are there 'faster' or less strainful keyboard layouts? Yup. Is Qwerty designed to slow you down? No, they're not.
This would assume that there is only one type of MMORPG player - those who want the highest level character possible in order to play and experience the pinnacle of the game despite having little or no room for advancement.
In fact, this is not the case. There are many, many reasons people play MMORPGs, including the thrill of advancement, social interaction, exploration, strategy, and tactics. All of those reasons for playing will encourage a character to start out on his or her own and advance a character through the mechanisms in the game rather than just buying a pre-leveled/advanced character.
Social interaction, for example, is pretty difficult when you have friends you don't know about -- those the person you bought your character from happened to make during his advancement -- and you have to gain the trust of people who've learned not to trust new faces at the 'high end' of any given MMORPG.
User-based Search and Share is the defining feature of other P2P apps like Kazaa and Gnutella. While Bittorrent is more of a swarm downloading protocol, do you have any plans to impliment a user front-end to do something like user-based hosting or searching or tracking of .torrent files?
And most of them are a result of the target audience that you're designing the game for.
Look at The Sims, for example, one of the first games to be massively popular with females 12-34. It can be, for all intents and purposes, a virtual doll house where your dolls interact on their own. One of the reasons the Sims Online has had difficulties is that most of the customizability that made the game so popular has been stripped out of the game in favor of anti-cheating and multi-player capabilities.
There is very little to do with violence in The Sims and a lot to do with role-playing, dress-up, and relationship management. I once heard a female cooworker describing how much better the game would be if the dolls could be made to be more customizable or if you could change clothes, jewelry or hair in-game.
For that matter, look at relationship and dating sims, which are very popular in Asia. These games range from tame and cutsey to pornographic. While it may be pretty lame and pathetic to interact with a virtual girl instead of a real one, that doesn't change the fact that these games are *very* popular and simply haven't been widely unleashed on NA audiences yet.
Another kind of game that is gaining more wide-spread acceptance in N.A. are the various profession sims or management sims. Most of these are builders, like the popular 'Roller-Coaster Tycoon' variants. Some are more detailed. I can't remember the title off-hand (Was it '911 Paramedic'), but there was a game recently in which the player took the role of a medical professional and had to make decisions on what kind of treatment a patient needed.
The different genres are out there, they just have to be explored more fully.
Who modded the parent redundant?
One of the most important features of Bittorrent is that it is almost completely decentralized. Rather than even p2p sharing, it's just swarm downloading. This decentralization is ultimately what will protect it from the incredible litigation powers of the MPAA and RIAA.
Also of note is its noted ability to be used for non-infringing purposes, such as the download of the aforementioned Redhat 9 ISOs. I'm certain that Redhat is *gleeful* that the ISOs are available over Bittorent rather than everyone trying to pull them off of their server and their mirrors. This non-infringing use will be a saving grace when legal-types start examining bittorrent for lawsuit fodder.
European Drug Distributor: Hello, Mister Colombian Drug Lord. Here is the money, I promised you.
Drug Lord: Hola, my French friend. I assume you've prepared the money as I specified?
Distributor: Indeed! Not only are these new notes, freshly received through my cover business, but they have been washed in muddy water, microwaved, and then dried in my daughter's basement.
Drug Lord: Ecellent! Here is the ten kilos of my finest cocaine. Good day to you!
Yeah, a real drug transaction isn't going to go nearly like this, but having the money check what kind of transactions its going through isn't going to work if there is *any* kind of money laundering going on and if *any* kind of competant disabling of RFID tags takes place.
I agree on so many lives. Live action EVA is bad, wrong, and stupid. Are they going to have a tall, busty Japanese woman playing Misato? Are they going to have fourteen-year-olds in skin-tight vinyl? Are they going to have a penguin? Are they going to have lots of Rei clones? Are they going to invoke the wrath of the Christian right with the decidedly mangled Christian imagery in Evangelion? Is Misato going to die in the second reel? How about Touji? Is Gendou going to cheat on his cute pregnant wife (who will almost have to be played by the same actress as the various Reis) with Ritsuko and her mom? Will Shinji be allowed to oedipally fantasize about all the-- again, fourteen year old-- girls on the cast?
Unless the scriptwriter, director, and producer are willing to portray this story in all its gory beauty, they shouldn't even bother. I can't see them doing *HALF* of the things I listed above, and you really need *ALL* of them to get the story right.
Reality:
You code in the shower in the morning and transcribe your ideas into your IDE. You take long breaks at work to figure out problems. You think best when your hands are occupied or when some other minor task is distracting you slightly. You frequently work late or at home because thats when your mind is working. You are paid based on an avarge number of the lines of code you write per time measured. Big, time-consuming projects are intersperesed with smaller, less intenstive projects.
Your Boss's Fansty World:
From 8:00AM to 5:00PM your mind belongs to the company. You are able to transform business ideas into code every minute of that time and can do so without fail, regardless of the problem being presented. You are interchangable with other programmers and need not understand the whole project you're working on at any given time. You are capable of producing bug-free code on the first revision given normal working conditions. Application code is a commodity and is of the same quality, regardless who wrote it. You frequently work late because you are a salary employee and can be demanded to make more application code per work-day. You are paid per workday rather than code per average unit time.
The result: You sneak goofing off when you're able and end up working more 'off the clock' hours.
A while back, Terry Pratchett wrote a book called 'Strata' in which the main plot premise was that Humans were terraforming the entire galaxy planet by planet, leaving 'history' inside those planets in the form of fake fossils and layers of rock. Occasionally, a 'prank' would slip through like the boot-prints in the sediment-strata or a digitial watch embedded in a seam of coal.
What's the most popular thing to do on a computer?
That's right. Look at pr0n.
What do you need to look at pr0n?
Lots of tissue paper.
What are tissue papers made of?
Trees.
What do trees do?
Take Carbon Dioxide out the air.
What's Carbon Dioxide responsible for?
Global Warming.
Thus, computers are responsible for Global Warming. QED.
I wish I had an option to mod this +1, Disgusting...
Ganndallf_00312 says out of character 'L22 Wizzard LFG in Rivendale'.
Aarragone says out of character 'Ranger and Rogue group needs Wiz for Ring Quest.'
Hobbitbone_05 says out of character 'Not another 'Fellowship' group. L4m3rs!'
(Actually, I wrote a while back for an EQ website.
I think the piece of hardware is quite interesting and worthy of a post on Slashdot. Unfortuneately, I nearly passed it up for seeing it as 'Oh, god. Yet another RIAA article.'
I know, this story is not good enough to be posted just as hardware or audio news.
What's otherwise a fairly interesting piece of hardware has no relation to the RIAA, so it's given one to make it more interesting.
There may be things that reproduce and show signs of life on Mars, but we'll spend a lot of time trying to cram the stuff on Mars into the categories we have on Earth.
Hint: Chances are, no matter what we do, we're never gonna see a green spectral line or test for clorophyll.
Instead, we need to examine soil for the most basic types of life we know of... creatures or cells similar to viruses, bacteria, and amoeba.
Manga writers have experimented with this exact concept.
'Chobits' by the CLAMP girls is about android computers in the shape of cute girls. The story is actually pretty relevant. It's primary theme is the positive and negative things that happen when people start interacting more and more with virtual worlds and peope and less with the real world and real people.