The entire subprime market, if every single person defaulted, amounts to only $650 billion - A drop in the GDP bucket.
In reality, the current numbers look like only around 10% of those will default... So about the same cost as a month in Iraq.
Fuel costs are high. Fuel costs come from instability in the middle east
Considering that we (in the US) get most of our oil from South America, the Middle East has little to do with the
price of fuel at the pump. The price of crude depends on nothing more than speculation (supply and demand influences
that, but at the end of the day, the magic price-per-barrel you hear on the news comes from Wall Street, not Opec).
And the price of refined grades of fuel and heating oil - Well, Exxon didn't make record profits the last few years
by benevolently buffering the world through the ups and downs in supply and refining capacity...
let the local dictators do whatever they want to their people, as long as they keep selling us oil
That still looks pretty much like our policy, with the added clause "and let us have a military base in their country".
We let royal sponsors of 9/11 keep their little theocratic regime, while deposing a man who managed to keep three
groups that hate each other more than they hate us, together under relatively peaceful conditions. More people die
in the new-and-improved Iraq each month than died in the entirety of Saddam's rule.
Do you really think those guys would have made a difference?
In eight years, one man in that office took us from having a strong economy and
reasonably decent foreign relations, to the pariah of the world with an economy
so weak even the CANADIAN dollar beats our own.
So yeah, the right person in that office could certainly go a long way toward
improving things. Not to say I consider any of the named people that
impressive (I liked RP, but don't know that he would have had the cooperation
to even start to undo Bush's damage), but as proof of concept, you have
to concede the point.
Building a business, building a team, management -- they're all forms of creative problem
solving every bit as "fun" or creative as programming is.
Er, no.
I've seen how management-types "solve" those problems - And I don't mean the stereotypical PHB
management, I mean real, decent, hard-working management types.
And it makes me want to cry, to think that my financial stability depends on people who'll drop
a million without blinking, on a consultant who will tell them a year later what any engineer
in the company could have said for free.
Management doesn't approach problems in a rational manner. They try to apply the currently-fashionable
management paradigms to any problem that comes up, regardless of how inappropriately. And all the while,
they'll repeat the mantra "past performance does not guarantee future results", apparently without any
clue of the irony expressed.
Simple example - Multitasking. For about a decade, companies have loved that word. And now, suddenly,
Forbes (or some other management-rag) says it turns out humans can't actually multitask efficiently. Gee,
any engineer, psychologist, physicist, biologist, or mathematician could have told them that a decade
ago. We've known for half a century that as the number of connections in a parallel processing system increases,
the number of simultaneous processes you can run decreases and cost of a context-switch increases... And humans
have in their heads the single most massively parallel CPU known to exist at this time. Imagine that - For a decade,
management types chose pseudo-scientific buzzwords over reality, and have only now "seen the light" thanks to fashion, not
physics.
In fact, imaging programming for a CPU whose instructions have unpredictable execution speeds and results.
That's right. Why adjust the dress code slightly when you can install expensive
refrigeration and hike up the energy bills.
Hey, in August, you can never spend enough time in the server room. Especially if your
tightwad boss tells everyone to turn their ACs up to 78 (or you don't even have AC
in your room).
You might need hearing protection, but you can have all the AC you could ever hope for, and
even the stingiest of bosses won't sacrifice $100k+ in hardware to shave a few bucks off
the electric bill.
Dear mods - Please learn the difference between "I do not agree, you
have offended my delicate sensitivities", from "Troll" and "Flamebait".
Though confusingly similar to the untrained eye, people can legitimately
disagree with your personal worldview without trolling.
Although metamoderation almost always vindicates me, and I couldn't care less
about my karma ("excellent", BTW) I do find it somewhat discouraging
that zealots (whether religious, political, or Apple) manage to silence any
discussion on topics they don't like by modding to below the default visible
threshold.
If you disagree with me, say so. You might even convince me of the error
of my ways. Modding me down just reinforces the view that those who
silently disagree with me really have no rational arguments worth
hearing.
According to OSHA guidelines, an astronaut is not to remain in space for more than 18 months per 4 year period. [...] Because
a round trip to mars takes 21 months, the next rover will not be deployed with any dust cleaning device.
No, it means no rovers will have an American dust cleaning device.
And as happens more and more, the rest of the world will laugh at us as we legislate ourselves into
a third-world mediocrity.
As an aside - OSHA actually has guidelines for one of the rarest of human professions in all history,
but they can't keep coal miners safe? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Pissed off at your sister? Commit a crime. You'll get a trivial sentence while your sister
gets gang raped. Wait... what's that? All cultures are of equal value? Oh, OK. Sorry.
Hey now, just because we Western civilized folk don't consider it okay to rape someone's
sister for their petty crimes, doesn't make our view right and their wrong.
Why, no doubt raping innocent women acts as quite a deterrent to these upstanding young
lads, who uh frequently honor-kill their own sisters for looking at a boy the wrong
way in public (the wanton whores!) anyway.
So really, lets show a bit more tolerance for the Religion of Peace. Why can't we all just
get along, Muslims and Dhimmi alike?
Don't sweat the small stuff, people. At the moment, the insurance companies can't accurately enough
correlate your DNA to your future expected healthcare costs - Your familial history and general current
health indicates that far more accurately.
So don't worry about taking your curiosity underground, the evil bastards simply don't care yet; and
when they do, you'll simply get your test date in the mail (or the option to drop your coverage).
Nobody likes the new comment ordering system, not one person
I do, I'll admit it.
I hated it at first, but the slidey-thing to pick your comment threshold
really makes it quite a lot easier to filter out the crap, whether a thread has
30 or 300 comments.
Now, finding the "reply" button sometimes seems like an impossibility (I don't
know why, but sometimes the slidebar seems to vanish, taking away the ability
to start a reply), but a reload usually fixes that.
If your parents are totally and completely incompetent
"Unable to grasp how to admin a computer" doesn't necessarily mean
"incompetent to raise a child".
Most kids have a much better understanding of modern technology
than their parents (and I suspect that has always held true).
She may legitimately worry that, in their laughable attempts to snoop
on her activity, they'll actually cause some damage. The very fact that
the FP involves her brother giving her a computer rather than
her parents would tend to support this view.
quit undermining your parents and let them raise your sister.
I can tell by your tone that you won't agree with this, but like it or
not, kids have a right to privacy. You can either honor that and perhaps
they'll come to you when they have a real problem, or you can have them
do the same things behind your back and consider you the "enemy" and the
last person to go to when in trouble.
It always amazes me how selectively people forget their own childhood
when they become parents - They seem to remember all the crap they pulled and
want to lock the little bastards in their rooms until age 18, without remembering
that when their own parents tried to do so, it provided the motivation to learn
to pick locks.
Don't expect to have time to do anything if the feds bust down your
door and want your boxes.
I do not ever physically leave my machine while I have a TC volume
mounted (it takes about half a second to do a dismount all). I also don't
have my computer in the same room as my front door. If they knock to get
me away from the machine, volume unmounted. If they break down the door,
it takes considerably more than half a second to get to my computer room.
That said, your link looks pretty impressive - I've can't count
how many times I've wished I had something like that, to move machines
to another room (or from a failing UPS to a replacement). Out of my
price range, but pretty cool none-the-less!
I'm waiting for the anti-(anti-missile missile) missile
Though you got a "+5 Funny", you should have gotten "Insightful"
instead.
As the result of any arms race, we get a never-ending
series of anti-anti-anti-whatever devices/programs/laws...
Right up until one side comes up with something so absolutely
victorious that continuing the race no longer matters.
With weapons, the atomic bomb pretty much ended any meaningful
further escalation - Sure, the US and USSR kept up their pissing
contest with multiples of times they could destroy the planet, but
as far as tactical advantage went, it all ended at Hiroshima. Even
the impressive "MOAB" merely makes a weak mockery of the real explosive
force we have available, to get around various antinuclear treaties.
With DRM, the ready availability of a working QPU will effectively
put the battle to an end (although it will also lead to truly
uncrackable encryption, that can only ever work on single-use
point-to-point messages, not mass-produced reuseable media).
And with the Bastard Child of Reagan's Star Wars, we have one and only one
logical outcome (which we'd better hope no one ever uses) - The
gravel bomb, which effectively "sends us to our room" for the next
few thousand years as far as space exploration goes.
Every time this dude releases a hack I'm not interested in using, I end up being forced
to download a new patch from Apple for my iTunes/iPod if I want to buy new music.
And every time you sheep blindly install a new patch containing no actual
end-user functionality rather than telling Jobs to go fuck himself, we need
to wait for a new hack from the likes of DVD-Jon.
I'd consider us even, but you (and others similarly complacent) rolling over and
accepting DRM in the first place has led to the situation we have now where we need
cracks just to listen to music we legitimately own however we want. Baaa-aaa-aaa!
It's probably cheaper for Ebay to simply acquiesce to the
CoS demands than to meet them in court.
Can we please stop using that acronym to refer to Xenu's Chosen Ones?
I've known several members of the Church of Satan (basically a secular organization,
not actually people who worship the token Christian bad guy), and they don't
deserve the negative association with Scientology.
Beside which, Scientology has as much to do with "church" as Amway does.
it became clear that we should create a new, fully integrated system,
with rules that would support our online applications
Translation - You used to have the ability to buy the core book and then
nothing else. Not anymore, suckers!
Seriously, these guys have made a lot of money by finding ways to
turn ordinary RPGs into "value added" schemes requiring constant upgrades
and boosters and the like.
Would Wizards of the Coast have released 3.5 if we knew at the time
that 4th Edition was coming?
Uhhh... What? If they don't know, who does?
The struggle between playability and tactical depth is a constant one
for any game designer [...] A player who prefers simple options can select
those and still feel like he's creating an effective character
D&D started as a game by a company called "Tactical Studies Rules" for a
reason. Can't hack the depth? Don't play. Go buy a deck of booster
cards for one of WotC's many RPGs-of-chance and stay out of the world of
"real" RPGs.
We constantly re-evaluate the role of older settings in our business
plans and product schedules
Notice that doesn't mention "player interest" or "fun". Business plans.
Product Schedules. Profit.
Overall, I would like to see "Who are you trying to please" re-asked. 15 years
ago, you could go back and forth between vanilla D&D to AD&D 2nd E, and not get
confused about the rules. Now, except for the name you can barely even recognize
it as the same game.
This sad excuse for a Q&A response boils down to them doing their best not to
come out and say "we need you to buy new books and value-added content". And
I don't say that merely as an old-school gamer who doesn't want to learn a new
set of rules (I've learned so many at this point, I can't even count them without
a checklist) - I say it as a gamer that, at this point in life actually has
money to spend on such content, and will not do so to support
change-for-its-own-sake (or for boosting profit).
the Open Access movement is busily restructuring academic publishing
Well, let's see... With scientific journals, the author pays to publish, has to pay
if they want to receive the journal, and the journal retains all the copyrights. So...
and the commercial entities that provide the distribution channel for that act of sharing
I'd say this sounds pretty clear-cut - If you want your personal data to stay personal, pay
for your own hosting with a privacy-friendly (which usually also means spammer-friendly, unfortunately)
comapany. If you want free hosting, all your base are belong to Facebook.
Call me back when they have released something based on version 5.0 that "works" with Linux.
Why would they bother, except as a sort of read-only compatibility mode to recover Windows volumes?
Under Linux, you already have stable loopback device support. You can literally encrypt (or compress,
or snoop, or whatever filter you can think of applying to block-device traffic) anything, without
needing another tool to do it.
An inventor in British Columbia wants to be the first to launch a pop bottle rocket into space. 'This could be impossible
I have no doubt whatsoever that you could launch a 2-liter bottle into space.
Now, if you limit yourself to on-board propulsion, we may have a problem. But if you accept some form
of external acceleration, say to 11.2km/s, then you can launch a soda bottle, or a rock, or a dead rabbit
into space, for all the object's own composition matters.
Of course, it may not make it to orbit in one piece due to frictional heating from air resistance, though we could most
likely come up with some form of sabot to minimize that effect. But get it there in some form? Yup. Absolutely!
why buy shares unless you know something... that others don't?
Well, dividend-paying stocks give you a regular return - As long as you feel fairly confident
that the company won't go under, you'll make a hell of a lot more than you would leaving the
money in your savings account (and if you chose well and occasionally reallocate your portfolio,
without requiring otherwise-unknown data, you can do a good bit better than a CD or even
investment-grade bonds.
you're effectively just making a bet - you might as well buy a lottery ticket.
In many cases, you have it correct - With two (obvious) exceptions.
First, the market as a whole tends to go up or down for long periods at a time. If, in a
bull market, you buy something reasonably big and safe (or better, ETFs covering the most
bullish segments), your investment will tend to grow; If, in a recession, you short the
same (and again, ETFs exist that will let you do that without the hassle and risk of actually
holding a short position), you will make money, on average.
Second, unlike a lottery ticket, playing the market very rarely counts as an all-or-nothing
bet. You may lose money on a given trade, but with some care (and the magic of trailing stops)
you can limit your losses while allowing your gains to grow unbounded - Kinda like a $1 lottery
ticket with a minimum payment of $0.95.
If not for those two facts, your 401k would also amount to nothing more than a lottery
ticket - Though since July, some people might have started considering it just that.;-)
Having said that, I use Linux so my next card probably will be an nVidia because of
the better drivers. Unless ATI get better in the one/two/three years until I buy a new card.
AMD has open sourced their Radeon drivers. What more could you ask for than that?
I don't know what planet they were planning to use these vehicles on, but on *this* one, CO2 is a GAS.
Ever seen dry ice?
Or, for that matter, a fire extinguisher? CO2 has a liquid phase at pressures
above 5.1 atmospheres - A fact that some of the earliest fire extinguishers (and
a few modern ones) made use of to store their charge at ordinary ol' room temperature.
You've got to have some serious refrigeration (requiring, uh oh, ENERGY) and
some darned high pressure to store liquid CO2.
No, pressure alone will suffice - And internal combustion engines excel at producing just that.
In fact, every other form of energy they produce requires the conversion of pressure into
something else.
It's funny that in 2008 there are tons of games being
developed that play with.... a keyboard!
Although I agree with you in spirit (I find that I play more
small flash games these days than I do "real" games), I can't
stand games that use keyboard input (unless they either use
only one or two buttons, or truly require dozens of keys). But
if a game has four-way motion and one or two "action" keys - It
damned well better let me use the joystick to play.
Fortunately, you can "fix" most such games, thanks to
JoyToKey,
which lets you map your joystick's inputs (any inputs - It
has input types I've never even heard of) to arbitrary
keyboard and mouse combinations. Not to shamelessly plug it
too much (I have nothing to do with its development, BTW), but
I've actually told games that do have crude joystick support
to use keyboard input instead because JoyToKey let me map the
inputs to much more ergonomically-friendly combinations.
the crypto can sometimes be the bottleneck instead of the wire speed.
Between two devices on my gigabit home LAN, the CPU barely even registers while
SCP'ing a large file (and that with every CPU-expensive protocol option
turned on, including compression). What sort of connection do these guys have,
that the CPU overhead of en/decryption throttles the transfer???
Coming next week: SSH compromised via a thread injection attack, thanks to
a "feature" that only benefits those of us running our own undersea fiber.
Slashdot Mirror
A housing bubble imploded
The entire subprime market, if every single person defaulted, amounts to only $650 billion - A drop in the GDP bucket. In reality, the current numbers look like only around 10% of those will default... So about the same cost as a month in Iraq.
Fuel costs are high. Fuel costs come from instability in the middle east
Considering that we (in the US) get most of our oil from South America, the Middle East has little to do with the price of fuel at the pump. The price of crude depends on nothing more than speculation (supply and demand influences that, but at the end of the day, the magic price-per-barrel you hear on the news comes from Wall Street, not Opec). And the price of refined grades of fuel and heating oil - Well, Exxon didn't make record profits the last few years by benevolently buffering the world through the ups and downs in supply and refining capacity...
let the local dictators do whatever they want to their people, as long as they keep selling us oil
That still looks pretty much like our policy, with the added clause "and let us have a military base in their country". We let royal sponsors of 9/11 keep their little theocratic regime, while deposing a man who managed to keep three groups that hate each other more than they hate us, together under relatively peaceful conditions. More people die in the new-and-improved Iraq each month than died in the entirety of Saddam's rule.
I just can bring myself to call that "better".
Do you really think those guys would have made a difference?
In eight years, one man in that office took us from having a strong economy and reasonably decent foreign relations, to the pariah of the world with an economy so weak even the CANADIAN dollar beats our own.
So yeah, the right person in that office could certainly go a long way toward improving things. Not to say I consider any of the named people that impressive (I liked RP, but don't know that he would have had the cooperation to even start to undo Bush's damage), but as proof of concept, you have to concede the point.
Building a business, building a team, management -- they're all forms of creative problem solving every bit as "fun" or creative as programming is.
Er, no.
I've seen how management-types "solve" those problems - And I don't mean the stereotypical PHB management, I mean real, decent, hard-working management types.
And it makes me want to cry, to think that my financial stability depends on people who'll drop a million without blinking, on a consultant who will tell them a year later what any engineer in the company could have said for free.
Management doesn't approach problems in a rational manner. They try to apply the currently-fashionable management paradigms to any problem that comes up, regardless of how inappropriately. And all the while, they'll repeat the mantra "past performance does not guarantee future results", apparently without any clue of the irony expressed.
Simple example - Multitasking. For about a decade, companies have loved that word. And now, suddenly, Forbes (or some other management-rag) says it turns out humans can't actually multitask efficiently. Gee, any engineer, psychologist, physicist, biologist, or mathematician could have told them that a decade ago. We've known for half a century that as the number of connections in a parallel processing system increases, the number of simultaneous processes you can run decreases and cost of a context-switch increases... And humans have in their heads the single most massively parallel CPU known to exist at this time. Imagine that - For a decade, management types chose pseudo-scientific buzzwords over reality, and have only now "seen the light" thanks to fashion, not physics.
In fact, imaging programming for a CPU whose instructions have unpredictable execution speeds and results.
Engineers call that "broken", not "fun".
That's right. Why adjust the dress code slightly when you can install expensive refrigeration and hike up the energy bills.
Hey, in August, you can never spend enough time in the server room. Especially if your tightwad boss tells everyone to turn their ACs up to 78 (or you don't even have AC in your room).
You might need hearing protection, but you can have all the AC you could ever hope for, and even the stingiest of bosses won't sacrifice $100k+ in hardware to shave a few bucks off the electric bill.
Dear mods - Please learn the difference between "I do not agree, you have offended my delicate sensitivities", from "Troll" and "Flamebait".
Though confusingly similar to the untrained eye, people can legitimately disagree with your personal worldview without trolling.
Although metamoderation almost always vindicates me, and I couldn't care less about my karma ("excellent", BTW) I do find it somewhat discouraging that zealots (whether religious, political, or Apple) manage to silence any discussion on topics they don't like by modding to below the default visible threshold.
If you disagree with me, say so. You might even convince me of the error of my ways. Modding me down just reinforces the view that those who silently disagree with me really have no rational arguments worth hearing.
According to OSHA guidelines, an astronaut is not to remain in space for more than 18 months per 4 year period. [...] Because a round trip to mars takes 21 months, the next rover will not be deployed with any dust cleaning device.
No, it means no rovers will have an American dust cleaning device.
And as happens more and more, the rest of the world will laugh at us as we legislate ourselves into a third-world mediocrity.
As an aside - OSHA actually has guidelines for one of the rarest of human professions in all history, but they can't keep coal miners safe? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Pissed off at your sister? Commit a crime. You'll get a trivial sentence while your sister gets gang raped. Wait... what's that? All cultures are of equal value? Oh, OK. Sorry.
Hey now, just because we Western civilized folk don't consider it okay to rape someone's sister for their petty crimes, doesn't make our view right and their wrong.
Why, no doubt raping innocent women acts as quite a deterrent to these upstanding young lads, who uh frequently honor-kill their own sisters for looking at a boy the wrong way in public (the wanton whores!) anyway.
So really, lets show a bit more tolerance for the Religion of Peace. Why can't we all just get along, Muslims and Dhimmi alike?
Don't sweat the small stuff, people. At the moment, the insurance companies can't accurately enough correlate your DNA to your future expected healthcare costs - Your familial history and general current health indicates that far more accurately.
So don't worry about taking your curiosity underground, the evil bastards simply don't care yet; and when they do, you'll simply get your test date in the mail (or the option to drop your coverage).
Nobody likes the new comment ordering system, not one person
I do, I'll admit it.
I hated it at first, but the slidey-thing to pick your comment threshold really makes it quite a lot easier to filter out the crap, whether a thread has 30 or 300 comments.
Now, finding the "reply" button sometimes seems like an impossibility (I don't know why, but sometimes the slidebar seems to vanish, taking away the ability to start a reply), but a reload usually fixes that.
If your parents are totally and completely incompetent
"Unable to grasp how to admin a computer" doesn't necessarily mean "incompetent to raise a child".
Most kids have a much better understanding of modern technology than their parents (and I suspect that has always held true). She may legitimately worry that, in their laughable attempts to snoop on her activity, they'll actually cause some damage. The very fact that the FP involves her brother giving her a computer rather than her parents would tend to support this view.
quit undermining your parents and let them raise your sister.
I can tell by your tone that you won't agree with this, but like it or not, kids have a right to privacy. You can either honor that and perhaps they'll come to you when they have a real problem, or you can have them do the same things behind your back and consider you the "enemy" and the last person to go to when in trouble.
It always amazes me how selectively people forget their own childhood when they become parents - They seem to remember all the crap they pulled and want to lock the little bastards in their rooms until age 18, without remembering that when their own parents tried to do so, it provided the motivation to learn to pick locks.
Don't expect to have time to do anything if the feds bust down your door and want your boxes.
I do not ever physically leave my machine while I have a TC volume mounted (it takes about half a second to do a dismount all). I also don't have my computer in the same room as my front door. If they knock to get me away from the machine, volume unmounted. If they break down the door, it takes considerably more than half a second to get to my computer room.
That said, your link looks pretty impressive - I've can't count how many times I've wished I had something like that, to move machines to another room (or from a failing UPS to a replacement). Out of my price range, but pretty cool none-the-less!
I'm waiting for the anti-(anti-missile missile) missile
Though you got a "+5 Funny", you should have gotten "Insightful" instead.
As the result of any arms race, we get a never-ending series of anti-anti-anti-whatever devices/programs/laws... Right up until one side comes up with something so absolutely victorious that continuing the race no longer matters.
With weapons, the atomic bomb pretty much ended any meaningful further escalation - Sure, the US and USSR kept up their pissing contest with multiples of times they could destroy the planet, but as far as tactical advantage went, it all ended at Hiroshima. Even the impressive "MOAB" merely makes a weak mockery of the real explosive force we have available, to get around various antinuclear treaties.
With DRM, the ready availability of a working QPU will effectively put the battle to an end (although it will also lead to truly uncrackable encryption, that can only ever work on single-use point-to-point messages, not mass-produced reuseable media).
And with the Bastard Child of Reagan's Star Wars, we have one and only one logical outcome (which we'd better hope no one ever uses) - The gravel bomb, which effectively "sends us to our room" for the next few thousand years as far as space exploration goes.
Every time this dude releases a hack I'm not interested in using, I end up being forced to download a new patch from Apple for my iTunes/iPod if I want to buy new music.
And every time you sheep blindly install a new patch containing no actual end-user functionality rather than telling Jobs to go fuck himself, we need to wait for a new hack from the likes of DVD-Jon.
I'd consider us even, but you (and others similarly complacent) rolling over and accepting DRM in the first place has led to the situation we have now where we need cracks just to listen to music we legitimately own however we want. Baaa-aaa-aaa!
It's probably cheaper for Ebay to simply acquiesce to the CoS demands than to meet them in court.
Can we please stop using that acronym to refer to Xenu's Chosen Ones?
I've known several members of the Church of Satan (basically a secular organization, not actually people who worship the token Christian bad guy), and they don't deserve the negative association with Scientology.
Beside which, Scientology has as much to do with "church" as Amway does.
it became clear that we should create a new, fully integrated system, with rules that would support our online applications
Translation - You used to have the ability to buy the core book and then nothing else. Not anymore, suckers!
Seriously, these guys have made a lot of money by finding ways to turn ordinary RPGs into "value added" schemes requiring constant upgrades and boosters and the like.
Would Wizards of the Coast have released 3.5 if we knew at the time that 4th Edition was coming?
Uhhh... What? If they don't know, who does?
The struggle between playability and tactical depth is a constant one for any game designer [...] A player who prefers simple options can select those and still feel like he's creating an effective character
D&D started as a game by a company called "Tactical Studies Rules" for a reason. Can't hack the depth? Don't play. Go buy a deck of booster cards for one of WotC's many RPGs-of-chance and stay out of the world of "real" RPGs.
We constantly re-evaluate the role of older settings in our business plans and product schedules
Notice that doesn't mention "player interest" or "fun". Business plans. Product Schedules. Profit.
Overall, I would like to see "Who are you trying to please" re-asked. 15 years ago, you could go back and forth between vanilla D&D to AD&D 2nd E, and not get confused about the rules. Now, except for the name you can barely even recognize it as the same game.
This sad excuse for a Q&A response boils down to them doing their best not to come out and say "we need you to buy new books and value-added content". And I don't say that merely as an old-school gamer who doesn't want to learn a new set of rules (I've learned so many at this point, I can't even count them without a checklist) - I say it as a gamer that, at this point in life actually has money to spend on such content, and will not do so to support change-for-its-own-sake (or for boosting profit).
Fail, WotC.
the Open Access movement is busily restructuring academic publishing
Well, let's see... With scientific journals, the author pays to publish, has to pay if they want to receive the journal, and the journal retains all the copyrights. So...
and the commercial entities that provide the distribution channel for that act of sharing
I'd say this sounds pretty clear-cut - If you want your personal data to stay personal, pay for your own hosting with a privacy-friendly (which usually also means spammer-friendly, unfortunately) comapany. If you want free hosting, all your base are belong to Facebook.
Call me back when they have released something based on version 5.0 that "works" with Linux.
Why would they bother, except as a sort of read-only compatibility mode to recover Windows volumes?
Under Linux, you already have stable loopback device support. You can literally encrypt (or compress, or snoop, or whatever filter you can think of applying to block-device traffic) anything, without needing another tool to do it.
Escape velocity applies to projectiles, not rockets.
Exactly my point.
An inventor in British Columbia wants to be the first to launch a pop bottle rocket into space. 'This could be impossible
I have no doubt whatsoever that you could launch a 2-liter bottle into space.
Now, if you limit yourself to on-board propulsion, we may have a problem. But if you accept some form of external acceleration, say to 11.2km/s, then you can launch a soda bottle, or a rock, or a dead rabbit into space, for all the object's own composition matters.
Of course, it may not make it to orbit in one piece due to frictional heating from air resistance, though we could most likely come up with some form of sabot to minimize that effect. But get it there in some form? Yup. Absolutely!
why buy shares unless you know something ... that others don't?
;-)
Well, dividend-paying stocks give you a regular return - As long as you feel fairly confident that the company won't go under, you'll make a hell of a lot more than you would leaving the money in your savings account (and if you chose well and occasionally reallocate your portfolio, without requiring otherwise-unknown data, you can do a good bit better than a CD or even investment-grade bonds.
you're effectively just making a bet - you might as well buy a lottery ticket.
In many cases, you have it correct - With two (obvious) exceptions.
First, the market as a whole tends to go up or down for long periods at a time. If, in a bull market, you buy something reasonably big and safe (or better, ETFs covering the most bullish segments), your investment will tend to grow; If, in a recession, you short the same (and again, ETFs exist that will let you do that without the hassle and risk of actually holding a short position), you will make money, on average.
Second, unlike a lottery ticket, playing the market very rarely counts as an all-or-nothing bet. You may lose money on a given trade, but with some care (and the magic of trailing stops) you can limit your losses while allowing your gains to grow unbounded - Kinda like a $1 lottery ticket with a minimum payment of $0.95.
If not for those two facts, your 401k would also amount to nothing more than a lottery ticket - Though since July, some people might have started considering it just that.
Having said that, I use Linux so my next card probably will be an nVidia because of the better drivers. Unless ATI get better in the one/two/three years until I buy a new card.
AMD has open sourced their Radeon drivers. What more could you ask for than that?
I don't know what planet they were planning to use these vehicles on, but on *this* one, CO2 is a GAS.
Ever seen dry ice?
Or, for that matter, a fire extinguisher? CO2 has a liquid phase at pressures above 5.1 atmospheres - A fact that some of the earliest fire extinguishers (and a few modern ones) made use of to store their charge at ordinary ol' room temperature.
You've got to have some serious refrigeration (requiring, uh oh, ENERGY) and some darned high pressure to store liquid CO2.
No, pressure alone will suffice - And internal combustion engines excel at producing just that. In fact, every other form of energy they produce requires the conversion of pressure into something else.
It's funny that in 2008 there are tons of games being developed that play with.... a keyboard!
Although I agree with you in spirit (I find that I play more small flash games these days than I do "real" games), I can't stand games that use keyboard input (unless they either use only one or two buttons, or truly require dozens of keys). But if a game has four-way motion and one or two "action" keys - It damned well better let me use the joystick to play.
Fortunately, you can "fix" most such games, thanks to JoyToKey, which lets you map your joystick's inputs (any inputs - It has input types I've never even heard of) to arbitrary keyboard and mouse combinations. Not to shamelessly plug it too much (I have nothing to do with its development, BTW), but I've actually told games that do have crude joystick support to use keyboard input instead because JoyToKey let me map the inputs to much more ergonomically-friendly combinations.
the crypto can sometimes be the bottleneck instead of the wire speed.
Between two devices on my gigabit home LAN, the CPU barely even registers while SCP'ing a large file (and that with every CPU-expensive protocol option turned on, including compression). What sort of connection do these guys have, that the CPU overhead of en/decryption throttles the transfer???
Coming next week: SSH compromised via a thread injection attack, thanks to a "feature" that only benefits those of us running our own undersea fiber.
Is Microsoft Office Adware?
Of course not - If so, Windows Defender would block it. Which it doesn't. So no problem, right?