This could be also because while studies have shown the effect of games in some cases (like this one, even if I fail to see the importance of being a video game, or other cases where people with phobias are "trained" around them using games), studies which find links between videogames and violence are non-existant.
And still, it should be VERY easy to prove, just by looking at the percentage of minors in jail for violent crimes which are avid violent videogame players.
I'm also sure you remember the statistics (posted here on slashdot) showing that in the years after the release of Doom, violent crime went down.....
Another Korean MMO player here (I play rappelz).
The business model is interesting: basically there is nothing ingame which forces you to buy anything, but buy-only items help in leveling or make you more powerful for a short time, or provide decoration to personalize your character.
From what I've seen it works well. There's a large part of population which is ready to spend a lot of money (I've heard people hitting the cap, which is something like $500/month) either for powerleveling or just to have the cool gear. Another approach is to use this as a money-making approach: want to buy some nice item? Go buy stuff with real money and then sell/trade it to get the nice item you want. This happens a lot, and makes game maker hate RMT ("gold farmers") because they cut into their profits.
What is not clear is the long-term effect. I mean: as the server population increases in level, they have access to a lot of in-game money, allowing them to buy basically anything, and lowering their need to spend real money. Unless there's a fresh arrival of new players who will spend money for the buy-only items the profits will go down. Also, there's a "saturation effect": the decorative items are often buy-once-use-forever: when everyone has one then it's over, forcing the company to keep putting up other (usually more powerful) items.
Use a slow machine with little free memory to test your code. It teaches you to be efficient. That is why 1GB of ram is not enough for an office anymore.
This is probably the best message I've read on slashdot in the last 6 months....
Well, this looks more like a list that shows that unions work very well at defending the worker's rights. All the employers preferred to abandon and move offshore rather than accepting to negotiate with their workers.....
Uh?????
who'd want to work with gravity pulling you gently towards the open window?
Do you think it's an office building or what? It's a bell tower. As long as it doesn't fall it serves it purpose. What is funny is that there are many other leaning towers around, but for some reason the one in Pisa has become "The" leaning tower.
Compare it to the other economic/political structures where one or both freedoms are missing.
They are the same. In both cases you have a social system which encourages predatory behavior towards its own members, something which tends not to be a great strategy if you want long-term stability.
As a matter of fact, the other economic/political structures you refer to aren't faring too well right now, but this does not mean capitalism works well, only that it takes longer since exploiting it is more complex.
Yes, it's light on detail, but sounds very similar to a two-photon 3D storage technique which was presented some time ago. I can't remember the name of the company, but basically they used two laser beams of different wavelength and different direction to perform the 3D selection. Two-photon absorption of the beams (one photon from each) provides the writing capability. It looked somewhat vaporous, and I've searched a bit on google but I can't find the company website, which reinforces the vaporous side of the thing..... Two-photon processes for data storage are a hot topic, anyway, you can search "two photon data storage" on google and get links to some good papers on the subject.
To my suprise yesterday evening I saw in german public TV ZDF a very unbiased view to the whole issue and the general consensous in the press so far seems, that lets do a more rigorous ban on something those guys simply do not understand is not the solution you only remove a small part of the puzzle why the causes themselves seem to be elsewhere.
Same in France. I was very surprised a couple weeks ago, while watching some hi-rating newscast where they interviewed a child physchologyst about video games. I braced for the usual "videogames are the root of all evil", and was pleasantly shocked to hear the guy answer something on the line: "if you parents find that videogames are eating up too much of your kid's time, look at their environment: if they are finding refuge from reality in a game, this means that something is wrong in the environment they live". It's good to see that after the initial wave of demonizing, games are seen as a symptom and not a cause.
Cheap psychology answer: the same reason why a lot of people like to think that if you're ill then it's your lifestyle/choice/fault/whatever. They reassure themselves by thinking that if they don't do [something], then they won't be ill. This is easier to handle than thinking that you could wake up tomorrow and find you have cancer because you just had bad luck.
The information on the provided links is fuzzy, messy and scaremongering at its best. If you read the link to the actual proposal, it says that it plans to put on the same level as counterfaiting the creation of software which can be used to exchanged copyrighted data. The text is so vague that all IM software, IRC, news and even Windows itself (shares) will fall under it. It has nothing to do with free software licenses as much as I can read.... (BTW France's government is moving slowly to free software - OO, Mandriva, etc.) and I don't understand why FSF France would word their article that way. They say it's based on some rejected american law called CBDTPA (check wikipedia for a description) which aimed at disallowing all non DRM-enabled technology.
Also X2 isnt exactly old, it has been out for 18 months. X3 is yet to be released for Windows.
It's true that X2 is a long-lived game. The scripting ability it contains provides a lot of expansion, and the community has put out a lot of mods. Still, 18 months is a long time in videogame terms. From my point of view: I was interested in the game and already bought the Windows version. It's still installed, but I have not been playing it for months...... This is the main problem with linux porting: people who are interested usually already have the game for windows, and by the time the linux port comes out they have moved on to some other game. I'll probably buy X2/linux to support LGP, but this kind of shopping is not a market you can really target.
Can you give me an idea of how complex (in man-months) is porting a game like X2 to linux? I'm curious by nature:) and I've asked on the Egosoft forums, but without much success.
Someone with mod points please send this bullshit to -1. It's standard anti-free software flamebait and it's also quite transparently so. Not only it's completely off-topic, but it's clearly written to give rise to an endless stream of replies. Shame on those who modded this up for being so stupid.
Actually, even the people who care about "freedom" care more about interoperability than closed systems. As long as the images are exported in an open format, readable by anything, I don't care at all if the camera is completely closed, since this does not limit my ability to do what I want in any way.
You are 100% right on it. When France discussed a possible tax on storage media (including HDs!) the response was the same: since we pay a tax on copying, this means we can do it.
Mandrake provides BT torrents for MandrakeClub members to allow download of iso images (CDs and DVDs). Donwload times are around 10 times shorter now compared to when they were using ftp servers. In particular, when a new distribution is announced and a zillion of people start downloading I can now be in the 200kb/sec range, thanks to the swarming approach of BT.
I'd like to suggest first that even if corporations like Wal-Mart are evil, they might still be right about privatising schools or lowering the minimum wage. Assuming an idea is bad because one of its proponents is bad is called the ad hominem fallacy.
From what I understand, he's criticizing the method, i.e. using money to fund a fake grassroots movement to push an agenda so that it doesn't look like it's coming from a corporation.
I definitely agree with you that 20-21 is a very good temperature....
I wonder if they also had a look at relative humidity, which (for me) makes much more of a difference between a pleasant and an unbearable environment.
(don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today)
Then get a developement board for one of the 8-bit microcontrollers which are on the market (I'm thinking PICs or Atmels). I also recall with fondness programming the 6502 in my Atari and playing with the PIC18Fs (programming strictly in asm, of course:) is a lot of fun. Microcontrollers are good because they have on-chip everything needed to interface to the outside world (from I/O to serial to I2C, etc. etc.) so basically they don't need anything beyond +5V and GND.... There are also tons of amateur websites with small projects to copy or hack.
Well, the article says that there are 150+ other compounds which can act as fire retardant, so it's just a matter of choosing another one instead of disposing of all the electronics equipment.....
Slashdot Mirror
This could be also because while studies have shown the effect of games in some cases (like this one, even if I fail to see the importance of being a video game, or other cases where people with phobias are "trained" around them using games), studies which find links between videogames and violence are non-existant. And still, it should be VERY easy to prove, just by looking at the percentage of minors in jail for violent crimes which are avid violent videogame players. I'm also sure you remember the statistics (posted here on slashdot) showing that in the years after the release of Doom, violent crime went down.....
Another Korean MMO player here (I play rappelz).
The business model is interesting: basically there is nothing ingame which forces you to buy anything, but buy-only items help in leveling or make you more powerful for a short time, or provide decoration to personalize your character. From what I've seen it works well. There's a large part of population which is ready to spend a lot of money (I've heard people hitting the cap, which is something like $500/month) either for powerleveling or just to have the cool gear. Another approach is to use this as a money-making approach: want to buy some nice item? Go buy stuff with real money and then sell/trade it to get the nice item you want. This happens a lot, and makes game maker hate RMT ("gold farmers") because they cut into their profits.
What is not clear is the long-term effect. I mean: as the server population increases in level, they have access to a lot of in-game money, allowing them to buy basically anything, and lowering their need to spend real money. Unless there's a fresh arrival of new players who will spend money for the buy-only items the profits will go down. Also, there's a "saturation effect": the decorative items are often buy-once-use-forever: when everyone has one then it's over, forcing the company to keep putting up other (usually more powerful) items.
Use a slow machine with little free memory to test your code. It teaches you to be efficient. That is why 1GB of ram is not enough for an office anymore. This is probably the best message I've read on slashdot in the last 6 months....
Well, this looks more like a list that shows that unions work very well at defending the worker's rights. All the employers preferred to abandon and move offshore rather than accepting to negotiate with their workers.....
Do you think it's an office building or what? It's a bell tower. As long as it doesn't fall it serves it purpose. What is funny is that there are many other leaning towers around, but for some reason the one in Pisa has become "The" leaning tower.
Compare it to the other economic/political structures where one or both freedoms are missing.
They are the same. In both cases you have a social system which encourages predatory behavior towards its own members, something which tends not to be a great strategy if you want long-term stability. As a matter of fact, the other economic/political structures you refer to aren't faring too well right now, but this does not mean capitalism works well, only that it takes longer since exploiting it is more complex.
Accepting a grant from a company is not the same as accepting results from a company.
Time to watch that Star Trek episode again....
(for reference: Voyager, season 5, episode 25, Warhead")
Yes, it's light on detail, but sounds very similar to a two-photon 3D storage technique which was presented some time ago. I can't remember the name of the company, but basically they used two laser beams of different wavelength and different direction to perform the 3D selection. Two-photon absorption of the beams (one photon from each) provides the writing capability. It looked somewhat vaporous, and I've searched a bit on google but I can't find the company website, which reinforces the vaporous side of the thing.....
Two-photon processes for data storage are a hot topic, anyway, you can search "two photon data storage" on google and get links to some good papers on the subject.
To my suprise yesterday evening I saw in german public TV ZDF a very unbiased view to the whole issue and the general consensous in the press so far seems, that lets do a more rigorous ban on something those guys simply do not understand is not the solution you only remove a small part of the puzzle why the causes themselves seem to be elsewhere.
Same in France. I was very surprised a couple weeks ago, while watching some hi-rating newscast where they interviewed a child physchologyst about video games. I braced for the usual "videogames are the root of all evil", and was pleasantly shocked to hear the guy answer something on the line: "if you parents find that videogames are eating up too much of your kid's time, look at their environment: if they are finding refuge from reality in a game, this means that something is wrong in the environment they live".
It's good to see that after the initial wave of demonizing, games are seen as a symptom and not a cause.
Cheap psychology answer: the same reason why a lot of people like to think that if you're ill then it's your lifestyle/choice/fault/whatever.
They reassure themselves by thinking that if they don't do [something], then they won't be ill. This is easier to handle than thinking that you could wake up tomorrow and find you have cancer because you just had bad luck.
Makes one wonder why you keep on reading his books if they're all the same...
Because, unfortunately, you only know that they're the same AFTER reading them.... I stopped after the second one.
The information on the provided links is fuzzy, messy and scaremongering at its best. If you read the link to the actual proposal, it says that it plans to put on the same level as counterfaiting the creation of software which can be used to exchanged copyrighted data. The text is so vague that all IM software, IRC, news and even Windows itself (shares) will fall under it. It has nothing to do with free software licenses as much as I can read.... (BTW France's government is moving slowly to free software - OO, Mandriva, etc.) and I don't understand why FSF France would word their article that way.
They say it's based on some rejected american law called CBDTPA (check wikipedia for a description) which aimed at disallowing all non DRM-enabled technology.
Also X2 isnt exactly old, it has been out for 18 months. X3 is yet to be released for Windows.
It's true that X2 is a long-lived game. The scripting ability it contains provides a lot of expansion, and the community has put out a lot of mods. Still, 18 months is a long time in videogame terms. From my point of view: I was interested in the game and already bought the Windows version. It's still installed, but I have not been playing it for months...... This is the main problem with linux porting: people who are interested usually already have the game for windows, and by the time the linux port comes out they have moved on to some other game. I'll probably buy X2/linux to support LGP, but this kind of shopping is not a market you can really target.
Can you give me an idea of how complex (in man-months) is porting a game like X2 to linux? I'm curious by nature :) and I've asked on the Egosoft forums, but without much success.
Someone with mod points please send this bullshit to -1. It's standard anti-free software flamebait and it's also quite transparently so. Not only it's completely off-topic, but it's clearly written to give rise to an endless stream of replies. Shame on those who modded this up for being so stupid.
Now kill it and let's move on.
Actually, even the people who care about "freedom" care more about interoperability than closed systems. As long as the images are exported in an open format, readable by anything, I don't care at all if the camera is completely closed, since this does not limit my ability to do what I want in any way.
You are 100% right on it.
When France discussed a possible tax on storage media (including HDs!) the response was the same: since we pay a tax on copying, this means we can do it.
Mandrake provides BT torrents for MandrakeClub members to allow download of iso images (CDs and DVDs). Donwload times are around 10 times shorter now compared to when they were using ftp servers. In particular, when a new distribution is announced and a zillion of people start downloading I can now be in the 200kb/sec range, thanks to the swarming approach of BT.
I'd like to suggest first that even if corporations like Wal-Mart are evil, they might still be right about privatising schools or lowering the minimum wage. Assuming an idea is bad because one of its proponents is bad is called the ad hominem fallacy.
From what I understand, he's criticizing the method, i.e. using money to fund a fake grassroots movement to push an agenda so that it doesn't look like it's coming from a corporation.
I definitely agree with you that 20-21 is a very good temperature....
I wonder if they also had a look at relative humidity, which (for me) makes much more of a difference between a pleasant and an unbearable environment.
(don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today)
:) is a lot of fun. Microcontrollers are good because they have on-chip everything needed to interface to the outside world (from I/O to serial to I2C, etc. etc.) so basically they don't need anything beyond +5V and GND.... There are also tons of amateur websites with small projects to copy or hack.
Then get a developement board for one of the 8-bit microcontrollers which are on the market (I'm thinking PICs or Atmels). I also recall with fondness programming the 6502 in my Atari and playing with the PIC18Fs (programming strictly in asm, of course
Actually, I was surprised to see that the QDF file search only gives 24 hits. I had expected at least 100 times more.....
While I believe that filesharing should not be illegal, I can't help noticing that one could formulate a similar argument about all property.
Not even remotely. Try making a copy of a plot of land..... Not all resources can be copied at near-zero cost.
Well, the article says that there are 150+ other compounds which can act as fire retardant, so it's just a matter of choosing another one instead of disposing of all the electronics equipment.....