If a pledge / donation system was setup - and they reached the target quickly - then that would also send a strong message to the RIAA and their ilk that their "potential" customer base don't agree with the verdict.
Swedish jails are more like holiday camps anyway - so I think the founders will survive more than intact.
When I started programming - as a junior consultant - my first assignment with my new company was at a cigarette manufacturers - I'm a non smoker - but didnt like to object before I even started working at the site. I was placed in a portacabin in their parking lot with a room of 15 or so employees / consultants. All employees / consultants were given 30 free packs of cigs a month! In the portacabin where I worked I could barely see the person sitting opposite me due to the smoke - and my asthma attacks became frequent. At this site - they had ashtrays in the kitchens, in the toilets - bloody everywhere! It got so bad that after a month I had had far more than enough, and wrote a strong letter to my company demanding a new placement on health grounds alone - this wasnt an easy situation for me to get out of due to my junior status. These days I would not have set foot through the door in the 1st place.
Well I will applaud EA for this decision - even though I hate the Sims and its add ons - this decision is a step in the right direction. EA has produced some classic games over the years. Personally I was seriously considering buying Spore - but didn't because of the limit on installs - that for me was a deal breaker - as I cannot count the number of times I end up rebuilding / reformatting my pc. I hope EA has really learnt to listen to their customer base - and that all future products from them will follow similar reasoning. I also hope other publishers are paying attention...
But GTA was inspired first by Siren City on the C64 - this is something that the developers alluded to in GTA Vice City - where the bootup screen was a mockup of a C64 loading screen - so to me that honour should goto Siren City - and its developer Ian Gray.
I agree with Dune / Dune 2 being on the list - as it was the forerunner of the modern RTS.
Then before Doom there was Wolfenstein...
thats with 2 seconds of thought - clearly less has gone into this list...
I know a phd educated scientist who believes in creationism and fundamentally does not accept Darwinism - and it is entirely tied to his Russian Orthodox beliefs - creationism doesnt just thrive in America - it is a religious thing - hundreds of years ago they were aguing about a round Earth, we move on to Darwinism - I wonder what science christianity will object to next...
In case I missed something there are multiple parties in the UK who will contest the next election - there are no certainties. Whilst the Tories may have a strong lead now in the polls anything could happen between now and the election.
In answer to 3. above - I have windows vista 64 ultimate with all of the latest updates - and there is a common bug - that has been there since release (over 2 years ago!) and is still not resolved, where windows frequently loses the EDID information of your monitor that you have connected - and then whenever it boots up with any Nvidia driver enabled it boots to a black screen. As Nvidia have half of the market for graphics cards - this would seem to be a fairly widespread problem you would think. The only sure fire way to resolve this currently is to restore the system from a restore point, others recommend pulling the power cable from the monitor for 30 mins (doesnt work for me). I get this problem about once a week - and there are many many others with this problem - which is a direct result of the DRM trying to find out what monitor hardware I have. I'm willing to bet this will still be an issue with windows 7 too. See: http://cyleft.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/horrible-problems-with-nvidia-geforce-drivers-and-vista-x64/
When I was at college we learnt oo programming with smalltalk - it is a language that runs in an interpreter environment - and is pretty easy to generate simple graphics quickly with relatively little effort - it is also one of the cleanest implementations of oo I can think of.
There are photodesk editors with experience who claim to be able to identify the camera model, the lens used and the post processing software used to produce the jpeg / tif file. This is possible due to various characteristics that are introduced at each stage in the digital photographic process. Giveaways for the camera body used are the base resolution, any colour casts in the image, iso performance, dynamic range. For instance many Canon DSLRs are criticised for producing muddy greens in their images - especially at higher ISOs as the dynamic range is pushed to extremes. Then you can usually work out the lens - by the obvious field of view first, then the flaws in the shot - various lenses from various manufacturers have different flaws. For instance the 70-200 f/2.8 from Nikon has characteristic vignetting that can often be noticed even after post processing, then other cheaper lenses give various defects to the image such as chromatic aberation. The flaws in the image give away the body and lens. Also the sensor used gives certain image characteristics that are fairly easy to spot even to the keen amateur photogs eye - for instance telling the difference between a full frame sensor and a smaller APS sized sensor - the full frame image typically has a much smoother more film like attributes with less digital artifacts. Also the same can be said for post processing. This software usually leaves various characteristics - that remain with the image, and this varies for each different software vendor.
So this is all possible to a well trained human eye - don't see why it shouldn't be possible in software - but not sure of the real benefits of being able to identify this - as many photogs often leave the exif data - and that tells you everything.
It would be really cool if they could send back a nice high res picture of one of the old Apollo missions - just to kill of the conspiracy theories once and for all. Although the theorists would no doubt immediately claim them as fakes...
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
From what I've read here: http://exoplanets.org/aasjune07s/pr_280507.htm there have been some 236 exoplanets detected to date. I believe that they have the ability to see if these exoplanets are in highly eliptical orbits or not - so how does this simulation tie with the observed reality? The description of Gliese 436 for example seems to also be an exception to this simulation model - so if out of 236 finds we are already finding systems similar to sol - then this simulation model must be at fault or?
They have a blanket ban on all iplayer material outside of the UK - when really all they need to do is to ban the material which they intend to sell to external markets. They could make more material openly available than they do currently - have an international version of iplayer for the material that they do not wish to resell - and that does not affect foreign market profits.
Just don't ever move overseas then - cos if you do - you can forget the BBC - seems to me quite a restriction on your future freedoms that you're happily prepared to accept. I agree entirely that the vast majority of commercial channels are woeful in their content - and that the licensing system has produced good quality content - but what I donot understand is why the licensing system has to be region / country based - and why any changes at all to the licensing system will lead to the bbc being a full commercial channel. There must be alternatives - why not explore them a little. I can bet that there are millions of expats worldwide - and others who would be interested in paying for BBC content. In fact there are some illegal sites already setup - and exploiting this - by streaming bbc content to anyone with a visa card. Why the BBC cannot take control of this process - by being the legal content providers to the world? - seems to me to be the question.
I really think that this whole DRM country-locked content issue is a big unfunny joke. It is not possible to access BBC open player content from outside of the UK - except perhaps via proxy servers - most of these appear blocked. The BBC has this outdated license payer model - that means that their content is only legally distributed to the UK. For any expats out there wanting to watch - there is no legal way they can get BBC content - except perhaps by a very large satellite dish. There is no expat license fee. Can this model really survive in the future? The only way for now they can acheive this is by using the strongest DRM they can get their hands on - and by blacklisting any proxy servers they find on UK soil - and even with all this the shows are appearing in the torrent sites shortly afterwards. Is this a sound long term strategy for them to follow - or should the whole TV license model be rethought for the 21st century?
What pisses me off is the over-patriotic broadcasting of whichever country you're in. If you're in Sweden- they mostly show heats that have Swedish athletes involved - all the other heats are judged uninteresting - and so they prefer to spend their time building up in the studio to the next time when a Swede appears in a heat. As I recall coverage in the UK was similarly biased to UK athletes - perhaps things have changed more recently. If you want to follow the progress of another country other than the one you reside in - you need to pay for Eurosport or something similar. Why cant they just stream the whole thing free on the web so we can choose what we want to watch and when?
Clearly the plant to use is Petunias - and preferably a bowl of them sent to the moon. Then of course we need to establish exactly what the Petunias are thinking
Compact cameras still have quite a way to go to catch up with the image quality on offer by even the cheapest DSLR and a cheap prime lens IMHO. This is mostly a result of the small sensor size and restrictions on the optic size which forces compromise on image quality that is possible for a compact camera. Also be wary of maxing out on the megapixels and on the zoom range of the lens - as the negative effects of a small poor quality lens will be far more apparent the more megapixels you place behind it. Small lenses will exhibit more image floors the more glass elements that are in them - so a big zoom range - whilst sounding appealing to the beginner - will lead to image issues - especially at the extremes of the lens - both in range and in aperture. Which is why I recommend a fixed focal point lens if possible - as these typically offer the optimum in image quality and cost less...
That said there are some compacts that are beginning to offer SLR sized / quality sensors with restricted range zooms or even prime optics - the panasonic mentioned above is one of these - and certainly looks very appealing. Sigma have also been working on placing their DSLR sensor in a compact body - with a fixed 16mm optic - that to me could be the compact camera of choice for keen photographers - this camera has been delayed quite a bit - but looks to have been worth the wait - see http://www.dpreview.com/news/0801/08013108sigmadp1.asp Then there is the canon G9 http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong9/ - this looks to be pretty capable at lower isos but dont expect too much over iso 400.
Personally I think currently the best travel camera is maybe one of the olympus DSLRs http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympuse3/ (they're a bit smaller than the other brands) - which offer great value for the camera and optics although still pretty pricey - The Nikon D40X / Canon Digital Rebel should not be overlooked either. Then combine this DSLR with a cheap wide angled prime - and the DSLR isn't as heavy as you might think...
I think Web Sheriff are going to find this a hard sell in a Swedish civil court. I live in Sweden and I cannot think of a single instance where there has been a large award as a result of a civil law suit. The culture of filing suit for large scale damages simply does not exist in Swedish courts, all this will achieve is to publicize the pirate bay even more. It seems they also plan to sue in the US - and I'm guessing they are more likely to get results there - but is a civil case won in the US enforceable in Sweden - as far as I know the pirate bay does not physically operate in the US at all.
"Isn't _______ (space program, particle physics, string theory, insert science program that isn't directly applicable to everyday life here) totally useless and a huge waste of money?"
Yeah I agree - close down Nasa - and leave space to the Chinese and Indians - and cut a percent or 2 off of taxes - so that you can buy more of those Chinese / Indian manufactured goods you crave.
I heard from a safety expert in the oil industry that fire survival was the biggest problem - and he suggested that all airliners should issue their passengers with oven proof turkey bags - to place over your head should a fire breakout - by his reckoning - it would give a minute or 2 extra survival time to make an exit from the plane. Also he commented that life jackets are almost a complete waste of space on a commercial airliner - their have been very few recorded instances of them being successfully used in a crash situation.
1. the plane has to slow down dramatically to allow the jumpers a safe exit and even then when you're sitting in the door it feels like a hurricane is blowing outside - even from a small single prop aircraft
2. the plane must be at a safe altitude for jumping
3. there are very few jet airliners that it is considered possible to make a safe exit from - from conversations with some old skydiving buddies I recall that a 707 is one of them - with most airliners you are most likely to get sucked back into the rear of the aircraft - and that would be very terminal
So to summarize - jumping from an airliner is something that an expert skydiver would think twice about - and so its definitely not an option for your average passenger.
Slashdot Mirror
If a pledge / donation system was setup - and they reached the target quickly - then that would also send a strong message to the RIAA and their ilk that their "potential" customer base don't agree with the verdict.
Swedish jails are more like holiday camps anyway - so I think the founders will survive more than intact.
When I started programming - as a junior consultant - my first assignment with my new company was at a cigarette manufacturers - I'm a non smoker - but didnt like to object before I even started working at the site. I was placed in a portacabin in their parking lot with a room of 15 or so employees / consultants. All employees / consultants were given 30 free packs of cigs a month! In the portacabin where I worked I could barely see the person sitting opposite me due to the smoke - and my asthma attacks became frequent. At this site - they had ashtrays in the kitchens, in the toilets - bloody everywhere! It got so bad that after a month I had had far more than enough, and wrote a strong letter to my company demanding a new placement on health grounds alone - this wasnt an easy situation for me to get out of due to my junior status. These days I would not have set foot through the door in the 1st place.
Well I will applaud EA for this decision - even though I hate the Sims and its add ons - this decision is a step in the right direction. EA has produced some classic games over the years. Personally I was seriously considering buying Spore - but didn't because of the limit on installs - that for me was a deal breaker - as I cannot count the number of times I end up rebuilding / reformatting my pc. I hope EA has really learnt to listen to their customer base - and that all future products from them will follow similar reasoning. I also hope other publishers are paying attention...
apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health?
But GTA was inspired first by Siren City on the C64 - this is something that the developers alluded to in GTA Vice City - where the bootup screen was a mockup of a C64 loading screen - so to me that honour should goto Siren City - and its developer Ian Gray.
I agree with Dune / Dune 2 being on the list - as it was the forerunner of the modern RTS.
Then before Doom there was Wolfenstein...
thats with 2 seconds of thought - clearly less has gone into this list...
I know a phd educated scientist who believes in creationism and fundamentally does not accept Darwinism - and it is entirely tied to his Russian Orthodox beliefs - creationism doesnt just thrive in America - it is a religious thing - hundreds of years ago they were aguing about a round Earth, we move on to Darwinism - I wonder what science christianity will object to next...
In case I missed something there are multiple parties in the UK who will contest the next election - there are no certainties. Whilst the Tories may have a strong lead now in the polls anything could happen between now and the election.
In answer to 3. above - I have windows vista 64 ultimate with all of the latest updates - and there is a common bug - that has been there since release (over 2 years ago!) and is still not resolved, where windows frequently loses the EDID information of your monitor that you have connected - and then whenever it boots up with any Nvidia driver enabled it boots to a black screen. As Nvidia have half of the market for graphics cards - this would seem to be a fairly widespread problem you would think. The only sure fire way to resolve this currently is to restore the system from a restore point, others recommend pulling the power cable from the monitor for 30 mins (doesnt work for me). I get this problem about once a week - and there are many many others with this problem - which is a direct result of the DRM trying to find out what monitor hardware I have. I'm willing to bet this will still be an issue with windows 7 too.
See:
http://cyleft.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/horrible-problems-with-nvidia-geforce-drivers-and-vista-x64/
When I was at college we learnt oo programming with smalltalk - it is a language that runs in an interpreter environment - and is pretty easy to generate simple graphics quickly with relatively little effort - it is also one of the cleanest implementations of oo I can think of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
For the origins of rugby - and football for that matter - see here:
http://rugbyfootballhistory.com/originsofrugby.htm
There are photodesk editors with experience who claim to be able to identify the camera model, the lens used and the post processing software used to produce the jpeg / tif file. This is possible due to various characteristics that are introduced at each stage in the digital photographic process. Giveaways for the camera body used are the base resolution, any colour casts in the image, iso performance, dynamic range. For instance many Canon DSLRs are criticised for producing muddy greens in their images - especially at higher ISOs as the dynamic range is pushed to extremes. Then you can usually work out the lens - by the obvious field of view first, then the flaws in the shot - various lenses from various manufacturers have different flaws. For instance the 70-200 f/2.8 from Nikon has characteristic vignetting that can often be noticed even after post processing, then other cheaper lenses give various defects to the image such as chromatic aberation. The flaws in the image give away the body and lens. Also the sensor used gives certain image characteristics that are fairly easy to spot even to the keen amateur photogs eye - for instance telling the difference between a full frame sensor and a smaller APS sized sensor - the full frame image typically has a much smoother more film like attributes with less digital artifacts. Also the same can be said for post processing. This software usually leaves various characteristics - that remain with the image, and this varies for each different software vendor.
So this is all possible to a well trained human eye - don't see why it shouldn't be possible in software - but not sure of the real benefits of being able to identify this - as many photogs often leave the exif data - and that tells you everything.
It would be really cool if they could send back a nice high res picture of one of the old Apollo missions - just to kill of the conspiracy theories once and for all. Although the theorists would no doubt immediately claim them as fakes...
If its coming from Atari don't set your expectations high - expect a mess something along the lines of 2 of their flagship titles:
DRIV3R
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/driv3r?q=driv3r
or even worse Alone in the Dark!
http://pc.ign.com/articles/887/887197p1.html
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
From what I've read here: http://exoplanets.org/aasjune07s/pr_280507.htm there have been some 236 exoplanets detected to date. I believe that they have the ability to see if these exoplanets are in highly eliptical orbits or not - so how does this simulation tie with the observed reality?
The description of Gliese 436 for example seems to also be an exception to this simulation model - so if out of 236 finds we are already finding systems similar to sol - then this simulation model must be at fault or?
They have a blanket ban on all iplayer material outside of the UK - when really all they need to do is to ban the material which they intend to sell to external markets. They could make more material openly available than they do currently - have an international version of iplayer for the material that they do not wish to resell - and that does not affect foreign market profits.
Just don't ever move overseas then - cos if you do - you can forget the BBC - seems to me quite a restriction on your future freedoms that you're happily prepared to accept. I agree entirely that the vast majority of commercial channels are woeful in their content - and that the licensing system has produced good quality content - but what I donot understand is why the licensing system has to be region / country based - and why any changes at all to the licensing system will lead to the bbc being a full commercial channel. There must be alternatives - why not explore them a little. I can bet that there are millions of expats worldwide - and others who would be interested in paying for BBC content. In fact there are some illegal sites already setup - and exploiting this - by streaming bbc content to anyone with a visa card. Why the BBC cannot take control of this process - by being the legal content providers to the world? - seems to me to be the question.
I really think that this whole DRM country-locked content issue is a big unfunny joke. It is not possible to access BBC open player content from outside of the UK - except perhaps via proxy servers - most of these appear blocked. The BBC has this outdated license payer model - that means that their content is only legally distributed to the UK. For any expats out there wanting to watch - there is no legal way they can get BBC content - except perhaps by a very large satellite dish. There is no expat license fee. Can this model really survive in the future? The only way for now they can acheive this is by using the strongest DRM they can get their hands on - and by blacklisting any proxy servers they find on UK soil - and even with all this the shows are appearing in the torrent sites shortly afterwards. Is this a sound long term strategy for them to follow - or should the whole TV license model be rethought for the 21st century?
What pisses me off is the over-patriotic broadcasting of whichever country you're in. If you're in Sweden- they mostly show heats that have Swedish athletes involved - all the other heats are judged uninteresting - and so they prefer to spend their time building up in the studio to the next time when a Swede appears in a heat. As I recall coverage in the UK was similarly biased to UK athletes - perhaps things have changed more recently. If you want to follow the progress of another country other than the one you reside in - you need to pay for Eurosport or something similar. Why cant they just stream the whole thing free on the web so we can choose what we want to watch and when?
Clearly the plant to use is Petunias - and preferably a bowl of them sent to the moon.
Then of course we need to establish exactly what the Petunias are thinking
Compact cameras still have quite a way to go to catch up with the image quality on offer by even the cheapest DSLR and a cheap prime lens IMHO.
This is mostly a result of the small sensor size and restrictions on the optic size which forces compromise on image quality that is possible for a compact camera.
Also be wary of maxing out on the megapixels and on the zoom range of the lens - as the negative effects of a small poor quality lens will be far more apparent the more megapixels you place behind it.
Small lenses will exhibit more image floors the more glass elements that are in them - so a big zoom range - whilst sounding appealing to the beginner - will lead to image issues - especially
at the extremes of the lens - both in range and in aperture. Which is why I recommend a fixed focal point lens if possible - as these typically offer the optimum in image quality and cost less...
That said there are some compacts that are beginning to offer SLR sized / quality sensors with restricted range zooms or even prime optics - the panasonic mentioned above
is one of these - and certainly looks very appealing. Sigma have also been working on placing their DSLR sensor in a compact body - with a fixed 16mm optic - that to me
could be the compact camera of choice for keen photographers - this camera has been delayed quite a bit - but looks to have been worth the wait - see http://www.dpreview.com/news/0801/08013108sigmadp1.asp
Then there is the canon G9 http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong9/ - this looks to be pretty capable at lower isos but dont expect too much over iso 400.
Then there's the Ricoh GRII which looks potentially interesting - but not enough info is out on this yet... http://www.dpreview.com/news/0710/07103001ricohgrd2.asp
Personally I think currently the best travel camera is maybe one of the olympus DSLRs http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympuse3/ (they're a bit smaller than the other brands) - which offer great value for the camera and optics although still pretty pricey - The Nikon D40X / Canon Digital Rebel should not be overlooked either. Then combine this DSLR with a cheap wide angled prime - and the DSLR isn't as heavy as you might think...
I think Web Sheriff are going to find this a hard sell in a Swedish civil court. I live in Sweden and I cannot think of a single instance where there has been a large award as a result of a civil law suit. The culture of filing suit for large scale damages simply does not exist in Swedish courts, all this will achieve is to publicize the pirate bay even more.
It seems they also plan to sue in the US - and I'm guessing they are more likely to get results there - but is a civil case won in the US enforceable in Sweden - as far as I know the pirate bay does not physically operate in the US at all.
"Isn't _______ (space program, particle physics, string theory, insert science program that isn't directly applicable to everyday life here) totally useless and a huge waste of money?"
Yeah I agree - close down Nasa - and leave space to the Chinese and Indians - and cut a percent or 2 off of taxes - so that you can buy more of those Chinese / Indian manufactured goods you crave.
I heard from a safety expert in the oil industry that fire survival was the biggest problem - and he suggested that all airliners should issue their passengers with oven proof turkey bags - to place over your head should a fire breakout - by his reckoning - it would give a minute or 2 extra survival time to make an exit from the plane. Also he commented that life jackets are almost a complete waste of space on a commercial airliner - their have been very few recorded instances of them being successfully used in a crash situation.
+ if you've ever tried parachuting at all -
1. the plane has to slow down dramatically to allow the jumpers a safe exit and even then when you're sitting in the door it feels like a hurricane is blowing outside - even from a small single prop aircraft
2. the plane must be at a safe altitude for jumping
3. there are very few jet airliners that it is considered possible to make a safe exit from - from conversations with some old skydiving buddies I recall that a 707 is one of them - with most airliners you are most likely to get sucked back into the rear of the aircraft - and that would be very terminal
So to summarize - jumping from an airliner is something that an expert skydiver would think twice about - and so its definitely not an option for your average passenger.