When we die we are judged and that is it. If we believed and trusted in him we will live with him forever, and if we don't, we go to hell. It's not a hard theology to grasp. Furthermore we are told he is just...
It may not be a hard theology to grasp, but it's hard to grasp how people can find that anything but absurd and contradictory. I don't belive in God. Yet I'm pragmatically moral, considerably moreso than many of those that do "believe and trust" in him. Yet, according to this doctrine, I'm going to hell.
And yet in the very next sentance you claim that he's just? Does that REALLY make any sense to you?
Just because a person comes from a high risk crime group, doesn't mean that the person in question is going to commit a crime.
No, but it does mean that they're more likely to be involved in a crime than other people (thus the "high risk" part you mentioned), so they might be worth checking out before other folks.
Everytime a crime in a certain area is comitted they will be instant suspects. The cops will first go to them, and ask where they were, what they were doing, establish alibi's, etc. This is a removal of due process.
Wouldn't shady people in the area of a crime be suspects anyway? Or at least worth questioning? That's not removal of due process; no one's being convicted of anything.
Second, you are protected against searches of your "person and effects". A complete description, demographics, photo, vital statistics and possibly a blood/urine/DNA sample inconjunction with fingerprinting are your "effects".
You couldn't be more wrong. "Person and effects" refers to bodily searches and searches of your property. What your name is and what you look like aren't in any way private data. Your legal existance in this country requires that you make at least your name public, and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy of your visage, given that it's regularly displayed in public.
FWIW, I'm no big fan of this "plan", but you're getting a big hyperbolic.
Since HD content at broadcast-level bitrates (19.2Mbps) require 8.6GB/hr, these discs would be the ideal format to use for HD-DVD. Even three hour movies would comfortably fit on the 40GB version, with plenty of room for DD5.1, DTS, a couple commentaries, and plenty of other extras.
Heck, for most movies you could even match DVHS's bitrate of 28.2Mbps (12.7GB/hr) comfortably.
Sure sounds better than the red-laser "solution" the studios have been pushing.
As such, I do think children should NOT be able to buy any violent video games.
Well, feel free to make your opinions known to EB. If they want to have a policy of not selling M-rated games to minors, that's their call.
Where I do draw the line is bringing legislation into the mix. In particular because then an independant organization (the ESRB) would then be in the position of deciding what is and is not legal, simply by rating games -- and I'd rather reserve that right for the government, thank you very much.
Consumers are all too happy to pay more for the superior picture and sound on a disk that actually costs the industry less to mass produce and ship than VHS tapes.
Remember that DVDs are also more convenient to use (instant access and no rewinding). And they typically provide suppliments like feature-length commentaries, cast interviews, trailers, and other previews.
Finally, just about all DVDs these days are sporting new anamorphic transfers (often made from a new HD transfer straight from the original interpositive). Manufacturing costs aren't all that's involved in the price of DVDs, and yeah, I'm willing to pay more (and even pay better margins to the studios) for better quality.
The higher price and the mandatory five-minute commercials (which one could FFWD through on a VCR) are accepted as the "tradeoff" for these great benefits.
Mandatory five-minute commercials? You're kidding, right? I watch probably five new DVDs every week (NetFlix rules), and I've never seen a mandatory commercial. In fact, the only mandatory portion of any DVDs that I've seen are the FBI Warnings, and even those are often skippable.
It's a nice rant and all, but you should at least try to be factually correct.
Then again, Warcraft 3 also uses CD-Key-based copy-protection for playing online games, which is far more difficult to get around. Sure, there are key generators out there, but they're easier for Blizzard to detect and deal with
You also (conveniently) didn't mention casual copiers, which things like SecuRom are really targetted at. Joe Average who got a CD-burner with his latest Dell and doesn't know how to get to all the warez sites will be effectively thwarted. And I'd bet there's a lot more casual copying going on than warezing.
Sure, hardcore pirates just aren't going to be thwarted, but focusing on them misrepresents the actual piracy situation.
Worship I think was the inspiration for the demented skew many of the games took -- it was the first one to really latch onto the demented possibilities of the 100,000 guy god game.
And the one you forgot the name to is Wrath, the one Brian Sharp and I wrote. Yes, you want to convert as many people as you'd like to your side (Saved vs Damned) and then kill them to get them to Heaven or Hell. Programming for three days straight breeds strange themes.:-)
To be fair, a number of the games that were patterned after existing games were done by the folks running the Jam, not those there doing the experimental gameplay parts.
And has others have said, some games become very different with 100,000 guys, even if they are based on other game ideas. The super-RTS, for example, became much more like a fluid control game than a micromanagement exercise.
Ah, but you're talking about the high-end of first-generation film. What multiplexes get is many generations from the original interpositive, and it certainly appears to impact the quality substantially.
Maybe there are other issues: focus, lens quality, grime on the projector window, I don't know. What I do know is that Gladiator shown in 1080i HD on my home theater (102" wide screen, D-ILA 1360x768 res) absolutely blows away anything I've ever seen in a theater, excepting IMAX. It wasn't even close -- HD was like looking through a window. No flicker, pure colors, razor sharpness.
Maybe the general ineptness of multiplex employees is why the quality is lower, and going digital won't help that. But at this point, I've seen digital high-definition images that are head-and-shoulders above any 35mm print I've ever seen.
As I understand it, most projectors already show each frame twice -- the film is at 24 fps, but the projector actually shows a frame every 1/48th of a second. Otherwise the flicker would be unbearable.
Reading the article, it's unclear how Maxivision48 differs from this.
Re:GeForce 4mx is an abomination
on
nForce2 Preview
·
· Score: 1
Ack, used an "it's" when I meant "its". I hate that. Apologies all around.
That's what I get for not using the Preview button.
GeForce 4mx is an abomination
on
nForce2 Preview
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· Score: 3, Informative
nVidia's marketing department should be ashamed; the name of this piece of hardware is blatantly misleading. Every other "mx" version of their cards contained the same featureset of it's GeForceX line, but had slower/less memory.
The GeForce4mx, on the other hand, is missing the priciple feature of the GeForce3, that being hardware vertex and pixel shader support. The GeForce4mx is basically a really fast GeForce2. It's a sham.
It screws developers (no longer can we say "GeForce3 and up", we have to qualify by specifically excluding the GeForce4mx). It screws customers by making them think they get a better card than they are. It's just bad all around.
When I talked to an nVidia rep at this year's GDC he acknowledged it's hatefulness and gave the impression that it would be going away shortly. Given the number of these cards I see in stores and this announcement, I'm starting to doubt him.
Note to nVidia: when your marketing department starts screwing developers and customers, we developers stop wanting to support your cards. You've been at the head of the pack for a while now. Crap like this isn't how to stay there.
Well, you're not forwarding mail, you're forwarding visitors to your house to Bill Gates' house. And Bill Gates can simply lock his gate.
But the issue is whether there's a reasonable perception that said forwarding was done by Bill Gates himself, and if so, whether he should have a say into whether it should be allowed to exist.
Though Ford clearly didn't have a very reasonable response, I can see their point that most web users would assume that it was done by Ford itself.
Regarding a programmatic check, would they have to explicitly disallow every objectionable domain-forwarder individually? Or could they stop them en masse? But what about links from legit sources like search engines that they do want? (I honestly don't know how it works, these aren't rhetorical questions).
1) Employers, insurers and financial institutions have access to your credit records
Do they have access to your credit records or your credit report? The former implies that they know exactly what you're buying and what you're paying for items, which I don't believe my employer has access to.
Imagine for a moment what a good-looking picture on your big-screen TV might looks like.
I don't have to imagine, I've seen it, and it's absolutely stunning! I've got a D-ILA projector that can do 1360x768 (which is less than the 1920x1080 or 1280x720 of the HD signal, but it's got some wacky temporal aliasing scheme that does wonders), and on my 120" screen it honestly looks better than my local cinemas. Whenever I demo any HD material for folks that haven't been previously exposed to HD, their response is -- without fail -- "Oh my God".
I think these will be every happy times in 5-10 years once the technology will have matured a bit.
These are happy times now if you're willing to do the research and deal with the typical hassles of the early adopter. ABC and CBS are doing most of their primetime lineup in HD, NBC has committed to all their new shows in the fall being in HD (and rumors of 11 total primtime hours), and the WB is even doing 3-4 hours of HD this fall. Add HDNet showing sports and the Olympics, Discovery HD Theater starting up on the 17th of this month, HD-HBO and HD-Showtime...
If your local affiliates are up to speed (this biggest question mark at the moment, IMO), or you've got Dish or DirecTV, there's quite a bit of astoundingly impressive HD content out there right now, and with HD sets in the sub-$2K range, it's more accessable than most people think.
The ruling isn't saying "all games aren't speech." It's saying "game's aren't always protected speech."
No, he's saying that games, categorically, aren't protected speech. That is, any individual game can not be considered protected speech.
I for one and quite happy with "mature" video games being regulated as "adult content." Especially when the law rests on the permission of the parents, who in my day were the ones actually purchasing the games anyway.
Honestly I wouldn't mind it either if the ESRB had a little more common sense when rating games -- the standards for games are vastly more restrictive than films. Try saying "shit" a few times in a game or "fuck" even once and see if you don't get an M rating. Try showing a flash of nudity and not get an M. Try having anyone die in anything resembling a real manner and not get an M. Any one of those things would get you a PG-13 in a movie.
When a game like Thief, which actively discourages violence in a number of ways, has fairly inexplicit depictions of violence (certainly no worse than PG-13 movies, probably no worse than many PGs), no language, and no sexual material receives the harsest non-pr0n rating available (M), something's wrong. To lump Thief in with something like Soldier of Fortune (or films like Fight Club) is shameful.
I don't mind having ratings, but the overly broad M rating that gets all the bad press seriously needs some subdivision.
Bounds checking is absolutely evil. An STL vector will perform exactly the same as a standard C array. If bounds checking was introduced, a vector would be between 3 and probably 20 times slower depending on the inliner.
On the contrary, bounds checking is a necessary part of any solid app. Yes, it incurs a performance penalty, but that's what Debug builds are for! You obviously disable it in Release builds, but it's invaluable for catching over/underruns during development.
Until your kid tells someone else they watched naked people doing weird stuff on the tv at home and child protective services comes along, slapping you with child endangerment. Doesn't even have to be that clear cut, CPS was called on a divorced friend of mine. Her kid saw pornos at daddy's house and came home with a filthy mouth. CPS came, inspected *THE MOTHER's* house, told her if she didn't shape up they'd take the kid away. Her house is impeccable. They then went to daddy's house. She called him ahead of time and warned him, but he didn't bother to put the videos away. They made him throw away the videos and secure all the weapons he had lying around, but he only got a slap on the wrist.
Your problem is clearly then that CPS are morons, not that the kids were watching porn. I mean, if you accept that kids watching porn is bad, is there any issue here beyond the difference in treatment between the mother and father?
One other place this is really screwing customers at the moment is restricting the ability to get distant high-definition feeds.
Here is Austin only our NBC affiliate is broadcasting in HD. CBS and ABC are both not scheduled to be have their digital (much less HD) signals up until May 2003. And I'm totally unable to go elsewhere to see any of their programming in HD. Local news feeds don't even enter into the equation for me, yet I'm getting screwed out of watching shows in HD.
On the topic of local news, Austin has "News 8 Austin", which is a station financed by Time Warner Cable (I think) that does nothing but run looping local News/Weather/Sports/Traffic, updated a few times a day. The rare times that I'm interested in local info, this is the place I go. Screw waiting until 6:00, screw three redundant broadcasts.
The point is that while DVD looks great on most standard TV's, HDTV's are another matter. Suddenly you can see lots of compression artifacts.
I'd suggest you get a better DVD player. On anything but a poorly transfered non-anamorphic DVD, I see no artifacts. And I'm using a calibrated JVC G15 projector to display a 110" wide image using a HTPC and the Cinemaster video decoder. It's clearly softer than HD (particularly good HD), but it's very smooth and artifact-free.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for HD-DVD, but the reason should be sharpness -- you shouldn't be seeing artifacts now.
In my mind it's a very simple issue: uncompressed HD content can occupy as much as 3 times the space compared to non-HD content (720p signal versus 480i gives (720*2)/480 = 3 or 1080i vs 480i gives 1080/480 = 2.25).
HD content can occupy as much as 6.75 times as much space as SD content (1920x1080 / 640x480). 720p is slightly less than that (6x).
Okay, so I'm sure this will come across as a Troll, but what's so bad about the government having a backdoor on crypto?
And no fair talking about slippery slopes -- let's keep this focused on the question at hand.
Most of what I've heard in this thread so far is a basic distrust of government -- but it seems to me that ship has already sailed. If the government wants to search your house, or tap your phone, it can do so, and you possibly wouldn't even know it happened.
Sure, you absolutely have a right against unreasonable searches and seizures, but the things is: the government makes that call already. You don't get to make your house impermiable to a search warrant, nor do you get to make your phone untappable. So what's so different about crypto? My privacy is already in the government's hands, and probably in more ways than I realize.
So I guess what I'm getting at is this: Is there something about crypo that separates it from wiretapping and physical search warrants? Or is it just that the power happened to be in your hards to begin with, and you're unwilling to give it up?
Slashdot Mirror
When we die we are judged and that is it. If we believed and trusted in him we will live with him forever, and if we don't, we go to hell. It's not a hard theology to grasp. Furthermore we are told he is just...
It may not be a hard theology to grasp, but it's hard to grasp how people can find that anything but absurd and contradictory. I don't belive in God. Yet I'm pragmatically moral, considerably moreso than many of those that do "believe and trust" in him. Yet, according to this doctrine, I'm going to hell.
And yet in the very next sentance you claim that he's just? Does that REALLY make any sense to you?
Just because a person comes from a high risk crime group, doesn't mean that the person in question is going to commit a crime.
No, but it does mean that they're more likely to be involved in a crime than other people (thus the "high risk" part you mentioned), so they might be worth checking out before other folks.
Everytime a crime in a certain area is comitted they will be instant suspects. The cops will first go to them, and ask where they were, what they were doing, establish alibi's, etc. This is a removal of due process.
Wouldn't shady people in the area of a crime be suspects anyway? Or at least worth questioning? That's not removal of due process; no one's being convicted of anything.
Second, you are protected against searches of your "person and effects". A complete description, demographics, photo, vital statistics and possibly a blood/urine/DNA sample inconjunction with fingerprinting are your "effects".
You couldn't be more wrong. "Person and effects" refers to bodily searches and searches of your property. What your name is and what you look like aren't in any way private data. Your legal existance in this country requires that you make at least your name public, and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy of your visage, given that it's regularly displayed in public.
FWIW, I'm no big fan of this "plan", but you're getting a big hyperbolic.
Since HD content at broadcast-level bitrates (19.2Mbps) require 8.6GB/hr, these discs would be the ideal format to use for HD-DVD. Even three hour movies would comfortably fit on the 40GB version, with plenty of room for DD5.1, DTS, a couple commentaries, and plenty of other extras.
Heck, for most movies you could even match DVHS's bitrate of 28.2Mbps (12.7GB/hr) comfortably.
Sure sounds better than the red-laser "solution" the studios have been pushing.
As such, I do think children should NOT be able to buy any violent video games.
Well, feel free to make your opinions known to EB. If they want to have a policy of not selling M-rated games to minors, that's their call.
Where I do draw the line is bringing legislation into the mix. In particular because then an independant organization (the ESRB) would then be in the position of deciding what is and is not legal, simply by rating games -- and I'd rather reserve that right for the government, thank you very much.
Consumers are all too happy to pay more for the superior picture and sound on a disk that actually costs the industry less to mass produce and ship than VHS tapes.
Remember that DVDs are also more convenient to use (instant access and no rewinding). And they typically provide suppliments like feature-length commentaries, cast interviews, trailers, and other previews.
Finally, just about all DVDs these days are sporting new anamorphic transfers (often made from a new HD transfer straight from the original interpositive). Manufacturing costs aren't all that's involved in the price of DVDs, and yeah, I'm willing to pay more (and even pay better margins to the studios) for better quality.
The higher price and the mandatory five-minute commercials (which one could FFWD through on a VCR) are accepted as the "tradeoff" for these great benefits.
Mandatory five-minute commercials? You're kidding, right? I watch probably five new DVDs every week (NetFlix rules), and I've never seen a mandatory commercial. In fact, the only mandatory portion of any DVDs that I've seen are the FBI Warnings, and even those are often skippable.
It's a nice rant and all, but you should at least try to be factually correct.
Then again, Warcraft 3 also uses CD-Key-based copy-protection for playing online games, which is far more difficult to get around. Sure, there are key generators out there, but they're easier for Blizzard to detect and deal with
You also (conveniently) didn't mention casual copiers, which things like SecuRom are really targetted at. Joe Average who got a CD-burner with his latest Dell and doesn't know how to get to all the warez sites will be effectively thwarted. And I'd bet there's a lot more casual copying going on than warezing.
Sure, hardcore pirates just aren't going to be thwarted, but focusing on them misrepresents the actual piracy situation.
Worship I think was the inspiration for the demented skew many of the games took -- it was the first one to really latch onto the demented possibilities of the 100,000 guy god game.
:-)
And the one you forgot the name to is Wrath, the one Brian Sharp and I wrote. Yes, you want to convert as many people as you'd like to your side (Saved vs Damned) and then kill them to get them to Heaven or Hell. Programming for three days straight breeds strange themes.
To be fair, a number of the games that were patterned after existing games were done by the folks running the Jam, not those there doing the experimental gameplay parts.
And has others have said, some games become very different with 100,000 guys, even if they are based on other game ideas. The super-RTS, for example, became much more like a fluid control game than a micromanagement exercise.
Ah, but you're talking about the high-end of first-generation film. What multiplexes get is many generations from the original interpositive, and it certainly appears to impact the quality substantially.
Maybe there are other issues: focus, lens quality, grime on the projector window, I don't know. What I do know is that Gladiator shown in 1080i HD on my home theater (102" wide screen, D-ILA 1360x768 res) absolutely blows away anything I've ever seen in a theater, excepting IMAX. It wasn't even close -- HD was like looking through a window. No flicker, pure colors, razor sharpness.
Maybe the general ineptness of multiplex employees is why the quality is lower, and going digital won't help that. But at this point, I've seen digital high-definition images that are head-and-shoulders above any 35mm print I've ever seen.
As I understand it, most projectors already show each frame twice -- the film is at 24 fps, but the projector actually shows a frame every 1/48th of a second. Otherwise the flicker would be unbearable.
Reading the article, it's unclear how Maxivision48 differs from this.
Ack, used an "it's" when I meant "its". I hate that. Apologies all around.
That's what I get for not using the Preview button.
nVidia's marketing department should be ashamed; the name of this piece of hardware is blatantly misleading. Every other "mx" version of their cards contained the same featureset of it's GeForceX line, but had slower/less memory.
The GeForce4mx, on the other hand, is missing the priciple feature of the GeForce3, that being hardware vertex and pixel shader support. The GeForce4mx is basically a really fast GeForce2. It's a sham.
It screws developers (no longer can we say "GeForce3 and up", we have to qualify by specifically excluding the GeForce4mx). It screws customers by making them think they get a better card than they are. It's just bad all around.
When I talked to an nVidia rep at this year's GDC he acknowledged it's hatefulness and gave the impression that it would be going away shortly. Given the number of these cards I see in stores and this announcement, I'm starting to doubt him.
Note to nVidia: when your marketing department starts screwing developers and customers, we developers stop wanting to support your cards. You've been at the head of the pack for a while now. Crap like this isn't how to stay there.
I assumed it was the fence keeping people away from the launch pad.
Well, you're not forwarding mail, you're forwarding visitors to your house to Bill Gates' house. And Bill Gates can simply lock his gate.
But the issue is whether there's a reasonable perception that said forwarding was done by Bill Gates himself, and if so, whether he should have a say into whether it should be allowed to exist.
Though Ford clearly didn't have a very reasonable response, I can see their point that most web users would assume that it was done by Ford itself.
Regarding a programmatic check, would they have to explicitly disallow every objectionable domain-forwarder individually? Or could they stop them en masse? But what about links from legit sources like search engines that they do want? (I honestly don't know how it works, these aren't rhetorical questions).
If your local affiliates are up to speed (this biggest question mark at the moment, IMO), or you've got Dish or DirecTV, there's quite a bit of astoundingly impressive HD content out there right now, and with HD sets in the sub-$2K range, it's more accessable than most people think.
The ruling isn't saying "all games aren't speech." It's saying "game's aren't always protected speech."
No, he's saying that games, categorically, aren't protected speech. That is, any individual game can not be considered protected speech.
I for one and quite happy with "mature" video games being regulated as "adult content." Especially when the law rests on the permission of the parents, who in my day were the ones actually purchasing the games anyway.
Honestly I wouldn't mind it either if the ESRB had a little more common sense when rating games -- the standards for games are vastly more restrictive than films. Try saying "shit" a few times in a game or "fuck" even once and see if you don't get an M rating. Try showing a flash of nudity and not get an M. Try having anyone die in anything resembling a real manner and not get an M. Any one of those things would get you a PG-13 in a movie.
When a game like Thief, which actively discourages violence in a number of ways, has fairly inexplicit depictions of violence (certainly no worse than PG-13 movies, probably no worse than many PGs), no language, and no sexual material receives the harsest non-pr0n rating available (M), something's wrong. To lump Thief in with something like Soldier of Fortune (or films like Fight Club) is shameful.
I don't mind having ratings, but the overly broad M rating that gets all the bad press seriously needs some subdivision.
Bounds checking is absolutely evil. An STL vector will perform exactly the same as a standard C array. If bounds checking was introduced, a vector would be between 3 and probably 20 times slower depending on the inliner.
On the contrary, bounds checking is a necessary part of any solid app. Yes, it incurs a performance penalty, but that's what Debug builds are for! You obviously disable it in Release builds, but it's invaluable for catching over/underruns during development.
I suppose you're against Assertions as well?
Until your kid tells someone else they watched naked people doing weird stuff on the tv at home and child protective services comes along, slapping you with child endangerment. Doesn't even have to be that clear cut, CPS was called on a divorced friend of mine. Her kid saw pornos at daddy's house and came home with a filthy mouth. CPS came, inspected *THE MOTHER's* house, told her if she didn't shape up they'd take the kid away. Her house is impeccable. They then went to daddy's house. She called him ahead of time and warned him, but he didn't bother to put the videos away. They made him throw away the videos and secure all the weapons he had lying around, but he only got a slap on the wrist.
Your problem is clearly then that CPS are morons, not that the kids were watching porn. I mean, if you accept that kids watching porn is bad, is there any issue here beyond the difference in treatment between the mother and father?
One other place this is really screwing customers at the moment is restricting the ability to get distant high-definition feeds.
Here is Austin only our NBC affiliate is broadcasting in HD. CBS and ABC are both not scheduled to be have their digital (much less HD) signals up until May 2003. And I'm totally unable to go elsewhere to see any of their programming in HD. Local news feeds don't even enter into the equation for me, yet I'm getting screwed out of watching shows in HD.
On the topic of local news, Austin has "News 8 Austin", which is a station financed by Time Warner Cable (I think) that does nothing but run looping local News/Weather/Sports/Traffic, updated a few times a day. The rare times that I'm interested in local info, this is the place I go. Screw waiting until 6:00, screw three redundant broadcasts.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for HD-DVD, but the reason should be sharpness -- you shouldn't be seeing artifacts now.
Granted, they're pre-release dev japanese gamepads, but I've been using them on my retail US Xbox since November...
Okay, so I'm sure this will come across as a Troll, but what's so bad about the government having a backdoor on crypto?
And no fair talking about slippery slopes -- let's keep this focused on the question at hand.
Most of what I've heard in this thread so far is a basic distrust of government -- but it seems to me that ship has already sailed. If the government wants to search your house, or tap your phone, it can do so, and you possibly wouldn't even know it happened.
Sure, you absolutely have a right against unreasonable searches and seizures, but the things is: the government makes that call already. You don't get to make your house impermiable to a search warrant, nor do you get to make your phone untappable. So what's so different about crypto? My privacy is already in the government's hands, and probably in more ways than I realize.
So I guess what I'm getting at is this: Is there something about crypo that separates it from wiretapping and physical search warrants? Or is it just that the power happened to be in your hards to begin with, and you're unwilling to give it up?