Get a shotgun and a shovel. Use the shovel to dig up and cut the lines. Then use the shotgun to impress upon the phone company exactly how you feel about them digging up your yard to run their fiber when they come by to fix the break.
My ex-girlfriend's best friend and husband used to eat the stuff. They'd fry it and then eat it with maple syrup. I can't imagine what that tastes like. Truly frightening.
At any rate, when I was a child there was a similar product called "TREET" (or something similar). I think that it was made by Armour instead of Hormel, and may have been a competitor to SPAM. We used to eat it quite a lot when I was growing up, and I loved it. I don't think that you can find it in the stores anymore.
A couple years ago I was at the grocery and on a whim decided to try SPAM and see if it was actually any good. I knew that it was some kind of pork product, so I fried up a couple slices like you would a sausage patty and then made a sandwich of it (with lots of mustard, as you would with a sausage sandwich). It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing that I have memory of eating. After a few bites I actually threw the SPAM away and had a mustard sandwich.;-)
But I'm hardly objective since I tend to dislike pork products anyway (with the exception of bacon and some sausages).
It wouldn't suprise me if this sort of thing is being investigated somewhere as a speculative new military tool.
Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid. But given the military's obsession with technological superiority, I doubt it...
I know that I'm going to regret saying this almost as soon as I save it, but I doubt that the US military is looking at making at anti-matter bomb. I mean, realistically speaking, we already have big enough bombs. We already have so much destructive power that we'll never have a need to use even half of it, even in a Really Big War. Building an anti-matter bomb just doesn't make sense, even if we do get more "bang for the buck" than we do with nukes.
What the military needs is smart weapons. You know the old quote, "Work smarter, not harder." Sure, you could build a single bomb that is capable of levelling a city the size of NYC, Rome, or London. But why? What are the odds that you'll ever need to destroy something that big during combat? The threats to world peace are no longer (for the most part) nations of mindless fanatics. They are individual groups of up to a couple hundred individuals. The weapons that make the most sense are not the ones that indiscriminantly kill hundreds of thousands of people, but the ones that allow you to target a specific building or vehicle in a city filled with hundreds of thousands people.
Unless, of course, Dubby decides that he needs a way around all those "nook-yoo-ler" weapons treaties (but he's already proven his willingness to break them, so I doubt that's even an issue).
If you're not paranoid yet, then you're obviously not paying attention.
Anyone else surprised by the size of the AOL install? I have never used AOL, so maybe it has a lot of nifty features, but that seems incredibly large. I still remember when AOL was distributed on floppy disks.
Yes, but that was in the Windows 3.1 days. And even then it would download additional artwork and other "features" when necessary. I recall back in the days there being several areas of AOL that would take 30 minutes or more to access for the first time because it had to download all the information for that area. In today's world of big hard disks and CD-ROM distributions, it makes sense to distribute as much of the data as possible on media instead of downloading it, especially when you remember that the overwhelming majority of AOL users are still using dial-up access instead of broadband.
Besides, IE5.5 by itself is a 20-30 MB download (depending on options installed). How big do you think that un-compresses to?
Don't you guys remember Reagan's big pre-satellite feed faux pas? He was getting ready to make a statement from the oval office, and before the satellite feed was supposed to have come on he said (laughing and abviously joking), "My fellow Americans. I have declared war on Russia. The bombing starts in 10 minutes."
Someone was watching the live feed and taped it, it's been making the rounds on "presidential blooper" tapes for years.
It costs from $30,000 to $100,000 to produce a
single print of a movie onto film. Just think
about how much you'd pay for enough 35mm film to
shoot 24 frames per second for several hours
continuously.
Talk about total nonsense! By your reasoning an opening weekend run of 2000 theatres (not uncommon for modern movie releases) would cost $60,000,000 to $200,000,000 just to make the prints! How pig-brained could you possibly be?
Count up all the rolls of 35mm film it would take? Dude, the reason that a 24 exposure roll of 35mm film costs $4 isn't because the celluloid is expensive, it's because the packaging is expensive. It's a pain in the ass to cut huge reels of celluloid into 24-36 frame strips and then package them in a little canister with gears and then box that up and market it and sell it. If you're buying the stuff by the reel, it's much much much much cheaper.
OK everybody...turn on your sarcasm detectors and read ergo98's post again. I can't believe that nobody who has replied to it has realized that it was obviously meant as a joke!!!
CodeFreeDVD.com sell DVD players which have been modified to play DVDs from all regions, Region 1 thru Region 6.
So then my choice is to either a) buy a DVD player for $799 USD, or b) get someone to break the illegal stranglehold that the big movie distrubutors have on distribution and then buy one of the $199 USD DVD players. Sounds like I'm fucked either way. Long live VHS!
"Regional codes are entirely optional for the maker of a disc. Discs without region locks will play on any player in any country."
Sure they are. In theory yes, but in practice you won't find anybody producing region-free DVDs. Just because it's theoretically possible doesn't make it so, and Hollywood still holds the keys to DVD and region coding.
It's most likely to mean legal zone modified players, however that would be in direct opposition to the new digital copyright circumvention laws.
Isn't that exactly what we want? Don't we need governments to say that the new digital copyright circumvention laws are overbroad and protect monopoly interests while degrading the legal rights of the consumers? I can't think of anything more perfect.
The movie industry is different because the movies aren't launched at theatres in other countries than US until it has finished playing in the US (due to the high production cost of the film rolls, and the translation/dubbing/texting involved). So, if they didn't have the zones, people could buy the DVDs before the movie had been shown at the theatres and so they would loose a lot of money on that.
What you meant to say was that they are able to milk less money from it than they would otherwise. Let's see here...buy a movie on DVD for $35 or pay $7 to go see it in a theatre. Tell me, where are they making the money now?
And it's not that expensive to make another copy of the film. Even if it cost $1,000,000 (pulling a ludicrously large number out of my ass)to make enough copies to cover all first-run theatres in Australia, it's still a small price to pay compared to the potential of picking up another $10,000,000 in ticket sales.
The bottom line is that the big studios and their puppets the MPAA don't want to compete with other smaller studios, so they have constructed a system to block everyone else out. They have no incentive to release in multiple countries simultaneously if "the system" allows them to milk each individually as they go.
My guess is that the courts will (assuming they rule in favor of the GPL) tell SloMedia that they either have to remove the code immediately or bring themselves into compliance with the license. I seriously doubt they will attempt to force SloMedia to open up their own source regardless of what they do to remedy the problem.
Dunno. Seems to me that if they cannot guarantee that they can remove from circulation all of the copies of the software/distribution that have GPL'd code in it, then they would need to release the code to those versions. But then I'm not a lawyer or a judge, and it would be an obvious blow to Vidomi's business to have to release the source to their product. Then again, maybe it's not their source anyways...
I'd say the russians have plenty of room for their space program in Siberia. So why lug all their heavy rockets and stuff over to australian Islands? I'd say the aussies got invited in for the money. Either that, or the russian kosmonauts have to thaw...
Ever try to launch a rocket in freezing weather? If I'm not mistaken the cold weather was one of the key factors in causing the o-ring on the Challenger's booster rocket to fail. We all know how that ended.
I'm sorry I've heard abotu this and heard ppl trying to market teh idea, but if parents arent' even watchign their kids at home, why woudl they watch them at school. my sister, my mom, my gf mom, well there are many teachers inmy family and the biggest complaints are parents who are non existent when it comes to monitoring their childs behavior. be on purpose or not, if there isn't time to do this and spend time with kids whats th epoint now all you will have is kids that are carefully watched by some online snoopy parent but rarely gets the physical interaction they need. and I'm not even going to talk about the perverts who will tap into this to watch kids.
So to paraphrase your incredibly relevant point, you are basically saying that the people who are likely to make use of this system are going to be the ones who need it the least because their children aren't problem students? I'd buy that.
Look at the example they gave:
Some kid is eating too much junk food at school and not healthy lunches. Parents get the notion from being involved in their son's life that he's not eating healthy lunches. Parents look it up online and see that he's eating crap at school. Parents call the school, get the kid banned from being served junk-food lunches. Hooray!!! The system works.
Meanwhile Chris Columbine is an angry and neglected young man. He has a habit of writing dark stories and drawing pictures about murder. He is bullied and picked on by other students and feels rejected. He quietly plots revenge on the students who tormented him, and his disinterested parents never notice and fail to care what he's up to. Since they don't even take the time to talk to him and find out what's going on in his life, they certainly don't log onto the school's web site to see if there might be problems at school. One day Chris comes in with a backpack full of handguns and starts shooting students. Boo! The system failed. No, wait a minute. The system didn't fail, the parents failed. The system just doesn't offer any way to make those bad parents any better at being parents.
As a Taxpayer I think the schools should put up all the data as a whole, sans the identify of the students. Then I as a taxpayer can hold the school board more accountable.
As a taxpayer I don't want my tax money lining the pockets of some clever programmer who wrote some spyware and marketed and sold it to gullible schools and parents in the name of "good parenting." Good parents won't need this software. The article quoted a pricetag of some $20 million dollars for this program. I'd rather they spent the money on some teachers that actually care about helping students learn or on creating tougher educational standards. As a taxpayer, I don't want to see my money wasted, and we should hold school boards and state legislatures responsible for this kind of horseshit.
I could call the school tie up some mid level educrat every day and find out all this information.
If you would/are doing that, then you have far worse problems than figuring out what little Johnnie is doing.
. If I want to use technology to know where my children are then that is my perogative.
You cannot find a technological solution to a social problem. If your kids are misbehaving, they will still continue to misbehave. If your kids are star students, they will still continue to behave as star students. Monitoring will make no difference because the absence of monitoring is not the cause of the problems.
Good parents know that. Good parents have raised their children to the point that when they are in high school they don't need constant monitoring. Good parents have open, communicative relationships with their children and will know (without having to log into a web site) how their children are doing in school.
This is not a privacy issue, as children have no right to expect privacy from their parents.
Well...it's not a privacy issue until someone hacks the web server and makes the private information available to anyone who wants it. Or maybe the smart nerdy kids that always gets bullied decides that he wants to get a little revenge on the bullies. Maybe he hacks the server and posts the bullies information for all the students to see. Or maybe he just changes some of the information to make the bully look worse than he really is, with nobody (but the bully) being the wiser. There are certainly some interesting prospects for abuse here. Especially considering that many script kiddies are high school students...
Positional trackers are a little strong IMHO. But I like the webcam idea not so I can check on my kid's care givers, but because I simply miss the little bugger and like the idea of seeing what he is up to
Well, I miss my girlfriend and my pet dog while I'm not with them, but I'd be fired if I had a webcam open on my computer all day that showed me what they were doing while I was at work. Now, I know this is going to come off as a troll, but I don't intend it to. And it isn't directed specifically at i8msft. But here are my thoughts on this:
Oh boy, another way parents can waste time at/get out of doing work while all of the single people have to pick up the slack for them. And yes, that sounds nasty, but it's true.
According to the 2000 US Census, the households in this country are split almost equally (something like 48%/52%) between families and single adults. Single adults make up a huge portion of the workforce, yet we get nothing resembling the liberties (at work) that parents get. Little Johnny has a softball game this afternoon and your development team is scheduled to work 14-hour days this week to make RTM? Sure, take off anyways. What? Little Susie is sick at school? Sure, go pick her up and take her home. The kids are at home today and Bobby won't stop picking on Stevie? Sure, take a 15-minute break from work to play referee over the phone. No problem. Oh, you want to monitor your child at daycare/school over the Internet, even though the company has a strict policy of using the Internet for business purposes only? Sure, we can overlook that.
But god forbid a single non-parent should want to take a second to review the sports scores from last night or check his stock portfolio online, or even read Slashdot. I'm sorry, did you say that you need to take a long lunch today so that you could renew your driver's license? Well, we really can't afford for you to take any extra time off, we're just too busy.
Fucking parents...all you have to do is get knocked up and your governmentally proctected rights in the workplace double instantly. Meanwhile, the more productive and less expensive to employ single non-parents get shafted so that you can dick around with trying to remote-raise your children. I mean honestly, if you really want to be a parent bad enough to have kids, then quit your job and stay at home with them and be a parent. Don't try to hold down a job too. It's people who try to be part-time parents that end up raising "Columbine Killers."
Anyway, to make this post relevant: I do monitor and control use of our proxy server at work, and I will be blocking sites like these as I discover that they are being used. After all, our Internet connection is for business purposes only.
Let's face it, a lot of people are bound to say "f* this. If I can't be a jedi, what's the point in playing it?"
This is true. Game developers always have to delicately balance fairness, gameplay balance, and player interests. Hopefully they will design a lot of other equally interesting professions. Otherwise we'll be stuck with 100,000 Jedis complaining about how there's too many Jedis in the game.
Of course, the Jedi is just pretty much like the mage class in most fantasy-based MMORPGs. I rarely play the mages, I like being the brute warrior type myself. And there are plenty of other people who don't play mages because they find elements of other professions more interesting. So hopefully this will be the same with the Jedi class. If you look at a game like Ultima Online, people play non-mages (or non-warriors or whatever) because EA has made it similarly rewarding to play other classes. As long as they can do that with SWG, they ought to be OK.
I dunno...it could be almost an entirely different game. If you figure that they'll probably release the original with all the planets and allow you to travel between them via spaceports (just no in-space sequences), then you still get most of the functionality in the initial package. But then beyond that you could create a game where the space travel part of the game becomes a primary activity, allowing you to play a smuggler, or rebel/imperial pilot, pirate, mercenary, etc.
You could almost work in an entirely new game like X-wing vs. Tie-Fighter, only opened up to allow more players simultaneously and allow for a wider variety of ships. Imagine, you've managed to get a ship to transport you from Tatooine to Coruscant. On the way you pass by a dogfight where a merchant cruiser is being attacked by a band of pirates. You could jump in on whichever side you favor and be the heroic rescuer. Or you could just keep going and not worry about it. Or perhaps you could save the merchant ship and then be offered a reward or future employment with the merchant company (perhaps only to be swayed in the future by a pirate gang).
Or perhaps you could make a career as a pirate-hunter, bounty hunter, or even repo man who specializes in hunting down starships. You could have an opportunity to take out PK's and other (even high-level) characters/NPC's without having to worry about him having twice the XP and mana points that you do, because it would all come down to your ability to actually dogfight in a sim-like environment. No worries about whether you've got enough skill points to take someone on.
You really could make an entire other game with a MMO space combat sim that integrates into SWG. That would be sweet!
Hey, I remember when Tie Fighter first came out they had Gouraud shaded starships and it was frickin' awesome. And I think that it probably looks a little better than having to texture all that background space, not to mention being considerably faster.
all of those were great games that did an excellent job of keeping the money rolling in while they were between movies, but now that he's back into the SW movie saga there are brand-names to be milked.
I'm kinda surprised that NASA is using a human to do this. I didn't read the article yet, so perhaps this is a waste. Aren't we, as humans, one of the more under-developed species when it comes to olafactory senses?
Most of us are, yes. But then that's the trick isn't it? You can't have a dog tell you that something stinks because dogs cannot talk. You could build a sniffer machine to test the smell, but then it ends up having a wider range of detectability than a human nose, and it still can't tell you if something smells really awful.
Nope, if you want to see if something smells bad to a human being, then you pretty much are best of (economically and effectively) using humans as testers.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a shotgun and a shovel. Use the shovel to dig up and cut the lines. Then use the shotgun to impress upon the phone company exactly how you feel about them digging up your yard to run their fiber when they come by to fix the break.
head != boobs
No, but if you give the producer a little head, you can still get the part even if you don't have boobs!
Um...yes, they do.
;-)
My ex-girlfriend's best friend and husband used to eat the stuff. They'd fry it and then eat it with maple syrup. I can't imagine what that tastes like. Truly frightening.
At any rate, when I was a child there was a similar product called "TREET" (or something similar). I think that it was made by Armour instead of Hormel, and may have been a competitor to SPAM. We used to eat it quite a lot when I was growing up, and I loved it. I don't think that you can find it in the stores anymore.
A couple years ago I was at the grocery and on a whim decided to try SPAM and see if it was actually any good. I knew that it was some kind of pork product, so I fried up a couple slices like you would a sausage patty and then made a sandwich of it (with lots of mustard, as you would with a sausage sandwich). It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing that I have memory of eating. After a few bites I actually threw the SPAM away and had a mustard sandwich.
But I'm hardly objective since I tend to dislike pork products anyway (with the exception of bacon and some sausages).
It wouldn't suprise me if this sort of thing is being investigated somewhere as a speculative new military tool.
Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid. But given the military's obsession with technological superiority, I doubt it...
I know that I'm going to regret saying this almost as soon as I save it, but I doubt that the US military is looking at making at anti-matter bomb. I mean, realistically speaking, we already have big enough bombs. We already have so much destructive power that we'll never have a need to use even half of it, even in a Really Big War. Building an anti-matter bomb just doesn't make sense, even if we do get more "bang for the buck" than we do with nukes.
What the military needs is smart weapons. You know the old quote, "Work smarter, not harder." Sure, you could build a single bomb that is capable of levelling a city the size of NYC, Rome, or London. But why? What are the odds that you'll ever need to destroy something that big during combat? The threats to world peace are no longer (for the most part) nations of mindless fanatics. They are individual groups of up to a couple hundred individuals. The weapons that make the most sense are not the ones that indiscriminantly kill hundreds of thousands of people, but the ones that allow you to target a specific building or vehicle in a city filled with hundreds of thousands people.
Unless, of course, Dubby decides that he needs a way around all those "nook-yoo-ler" weapons treaties (but he's already proven his willingness to break them, so I doubt that's even an issue).
If you're not paranoid yet, then you're obviously not paying attention.
Anyone else surprised by the size of the AOL install? I have never used AOL, so maybe it has a lot of nifty features, but that seems incredibly large. I still remember when AOL was distributed on floppy disks.
Yes, but that was in the Windows 3.1 days. And even then it would download additional artwork and other "features" when necessary. I recall back in the days there being several areas of AOL that would take 30 minutes or more to access for the first time because it had to download all the information for that area. In today's world of big hard disks and CD-ROM distributions, it makes sense to distribute as much of the data as possible on media instead of downloading it, especially when you remember that the overwhelming majority of AOL users are still using dial-up access instead of broadband.
Besides, IE5.5 by itself is a 20-30 MB download (depending on options installed). How big do you think that un-compresses to?
It's gone now...nuttin' left but a 404 page.
Don't you guys remember Reagan's big pre-satellite feed faux pas? He was getting ready to make a statement from the oval office, and before the satellite feed was supposed to have come on he said (laughing and abviously joking), "My fellow Americans. I have declared war on Russia. The bombing starts in 10 minutes."
Someone was watching the live feed and taped it, it's been making the rounds on "presidential blooper" tapes for years.
It costs from $30,000 to $100,000 to produce a single print of a movie onto film. Just think about how much you'd pay for enough 35mm film to shoot 24 frames per second for several hours continuously.
Talk about total nonsense! By your reasoning an opening weekend run of 2000 theatres (not uncommon for modern movie releases) would cost $60,000,000 to $200,000,000 just to make the prints! How pig-brained could you possibly be?
Count up all the rolls of 35mm film it would take? Dude, the reason that a 24 exposure roll of 35mm film costs $4 isn't because the celluloid is expensive, it's because the packaging is expensive. It's a pain in the ass to cut huge reels of celluloid into 24-36 frame strips and then package them in a little canister with gears and then box that up and market it and sell it. If you're buying the stuff by the reel, it's much much much much cheaper.
No wonder you posted AC...geez...
OK everybody...turn on your sarcasm detectors and read ergo98's post again. I can't believe that nobody who has replied to it has realized that it was obviously meant as a joke!!!
CodeFreeDVD.com sell DVD players which have been modified to play DVDs from all regions, Region 1 thru Region 6.
So then my choice is to either a) buy a DVD player for $799 USD, or b) get someone to break the illegal stranglehold that the big movie distrubutors have on distribution and then buy one of the $199 USD DVD players. Sounds like I'm fucked either way. Long live VHS!
"Regional codes are entirely optional for the maker of a disc. Discs without region locks will play on any player in any country."
Sure they are. In theory yes, but in practice you won't find anybody producing region-free DVDs. Just because it's theoretically possible doesn't make it so, and Hollywood still holds the keys to DVD and region coding.
It's most likely to mean legal zone modified players, however that would be in direct opposition to the new digital copyright circumvention laws.
Isn't that exactly what we want? Don't we need governments to say that the new digital copyright circumvention laws are overbroad and protect monopoly interests while degrading the legal rights of the consumers? I can't think of anything more perfect.
The movie industry is different because the movies aren't launched at theatres in other countries than US until it has finished playing in the US (due to the high production cost of the film rolls, and the translation/dubbing/texting involved). So, if they didn't have the zones, people could buy the DVDs before the movie had been shown at the theatres and so they would loose a lot of money on that.
What you meant to say was that they are able to milk less money from it than they would otherwise. Let's see here...buy a movie on DVD for $35 or pay $7 to go see it in a theatre. Tell me, where are they making the money now?
And it's not that expensive to make another copy of the film. Even if it cost $1,000,000 (pulling a ludicrously large number out of my ass)to make enough copies to cover all first-run theatres in Australia, it's still a small price to pay compared to the potential of picking up another $10,000,000 in ticket sales.
The bottom line is that the big studios and their puppets the MPAA don't want to compete with other smaller studios, so they have constructed a system to block everyone else out. They have no incentive to release in multiple countries simultaneously if "the system" allows them to milk each individually as they go.
My guess is that the courts will (assuming they rule in favor of the GPL) tell SloMedia that they either have to remove the code immediately or bring themselves into compliance with the license. I seriously doubt they will attempt to force SloMedia to open up their own source regardless of what they do to remedy the problem.
Dunno. Seems to me that if they cannot guarantee that they can remove from circulation all of the copies of the software/distribution that have GPL'd code in it, then they would need to release the code to those versions. But then I'm not a lawyer or a judge, and it would be an obvious blow to Vidomi's business to have to release the source to their product. Then again, maybe it's not their source anyways...
I'd say the russians have plenty of room for their space program in Siberia. So why lug all their heavy rockets and stuff over to australian Islands? I'd say the aussies got invited in for the money. Either that, or the russian kosmonauts have to thaw ...
Ever try to launch a rocket in freezing weather? If I'm not mistaken the cold weather was one of the key factors in causing the o-ring on the Challenger's booster rocket to fail. We all know how that ended.
I'm sorry I've heard abotu this and heard ppl trying to market teh idea, but if parents arent' even watchign their kids at home, why woudl they watch them at school. my sister, my mom, my gf mom, well there are many teachers inmy family and the biggest complaints are parents who are non existent when it comes to monitoring their childs behavior. be on purpose or not, if there isn't time to do this and spend time with kids whats th epoint now all you will have is kids that are carefully watched by some online snoopy parent but rarely gets the physical interaction they need. and I'm not even going to talk about the perverts who will tap into this to watch kids.
So to paraphrase your incredibly relevant point, you are basically saying that the people who are likely to make use of this system are going to be the ones who need it the least because their children aren't problem students? I'd buy that.
Look at the example they gave:
Some kid is eating too much junk food at school and not healthy lunches. Parents get the notion from being involved in their son's life that he's not eating healthy lunches. Parents look it up online and see that he's eating crap at school. Parents call the school, get the kid banned from being served junk-food lunches. Hooray!!! The system works.
Meanwhile Chris Columbine is an angry and neglected young man. He has a habit of writing dark stories and drawing pictures about murder. He is bullied and picked on by other students and feels rejected. He quietly plots revenge on the students who tormented him, and his disinterested parents never notice and fail to care what he's up to. Since they don't even take the time to talk to him and find out what's going on in his life, they certainly don't log onto the school's web site to see if there might be problems at school. One day Chris comes in with a backpack full of handguns and starts shooting students. Boo! The system failed. No, wait a minute. The system didn't fail, the parents failed. The system just doesn't offer any way to make those bad parents any better at being parents.
As a Taxpayer I think the schools should put up all the data as a whole, sans the identify of the students. Then I as a taxpayer can hold the school board more accountable.
As a taxpayer I don't want my tax money lining the pockets of some clever programmer who wrote some spyware and marketed and sold it to gullible schools and parents in the name of "good parenting." Good parents won't need this software. The article quoted a pricetag of some $20 million dollars for this program. I'd rather they spent the money on some teachers that actually care about helping students learn or on creating tougher educational standards. As a taxpayer, I don't want to see my money wasted, and we should hold school boards and state legislatures responsible for this kind of horseshit.
I could call the school tie up some mid level educrat every day and find out all this information.
If you would/are doing that, then you have far worse problems than figuring out what little Johnnie is doing.
. If I want to use technology to know where my children are then that is my perogative.
You cannot find a technological solution to a social problem. If your kids are misbehaving, they will still continue to misbehave. If your kids are star students, they will still continue to behave as star students. Monitoring will make no difference because the absence of monitoring is not the cause of the problems.
Good parents know that. Good parents have raised their children to the point that when they are in high school they don't need constant monitoring. Good parents have open, communicative relationships with their children and will know (without having to log into a web site) how their children are doing in school.
This is not a privacy issue, as children have no right to expect privacy from their parents.
Well...it's not a privacy issue until someone hacks the web server and makes the private information available to anyone who wants it. Or maybe the smart nerdy kids that always gets bullied decides that he wants to get a little revenge on the bullies. Maybe he hacks the server and posts the bullies information for all the students to see. Or maybe he just changes some of the information to make the bully look worse than he really is, with nobody (but the bully) being the wiser. There are certainly some interesting prospects for abuse here. Especially considering that many script kiddies are high school students...
Positional trackers are a little strong IMHO. But I like the webcam idea not so I can check on my kid's care givers, but because I simply miss the little bugger and like the idea of seeing what he is up to
Well, I miss my girlfriend and my pet dog while I'm not with them, but I'd be fired if I had a webcam open on my computer all day that showed me what they were doing while I was at work. Now, I know this is going to come off as a troll, but I don't intend it to. And it isn't directed specifically at i8msft. But here are my thoughts on this:
Oh boy, another way parents can waste time at/get out of doing work while all of the single people have to pick up the slack for them. And yes, that sounds nasty, but it's true.
According to the 2000 US Census, the households in this country are split almost equally (something like 48%/52%) between families and single adults. Single adults make up a huge portion of the workforce, yet we get nothing resembling the liberties (at work) that parents get. Little Johnny has a softball game this afternoon and your development team is scheduled to work 14-hour days this week to make RTM? Sure, take off anyways. What? Little Susie is sick at school? Sure, go pick her up and take her home. The kids are at home today and Bobby won't stop picking on Stevie? Sure, take a 15-minute break from work to play referee over the phone. No problem. Oh, you want to monitor your child at daycare/school over the Internet, even though the company has a strict policy of using the Internet for business purposes only? Sure, we can overlook that.
But god forbid a single non-parent should want to take a second to review the sports scores from last night or check his stock portfolio online, or even read Slashdot. I'm sorry, did you say that you need to take a long lunch today so that you could renew your driver's license? Well, we really can't afford for you to take any extra time off, we're just too busy.
Fucking parents...all you have to do is get knocked up and your governmentally proctected rights in the workplace double instantly. Meanwhile, the more productive and less expensive to employ single non-parents get shafted so that you can dick around with trying to remote-raise your children. I mean honestly, if you really want to be a parent bad enough to have kids, then quit your job and stay at home with them and be a parent. Don't try to hold down a job too. It's people who try to be part-time parents that end up raising "Columbine Killers."
Anyway, to make this post relevant: I do monitor and control use of our proxy server at work, and I will be blocking sites like these as I discover that they are being used. After all, our Internet connection is for business purposes only.
Let's face it, a lot of people are bound to say "f* this. If I can't be a jedi, what's the point in playing it?"
This is true. Game developers always have to delicately balance fairness, gameplay balance, and player interests. Hopefully they will design a lot of other equally interesting professions. Otherwise we'll be stuck with 100,000 Jedis complaining about how there's too many Jedis in the game.
Of course, the Jedi is just pretty much like the mage class in most fantasy-based MMORPGs. I rarely play the mages, I like being the brute warrior type myself. And there are plenty of other people who don't play mages because they find elements of other professions more interesting. So hopefully this will be the same with the Jedi class. If you look at a game like Ultima Online, people play non-mages (or non-warriors or whatever) because EA has made it similarly rewarding to play other classes. As long as they can do that with SWG, they ought to be OK.
I dunno...it could be almost an entirely different game. If you figure that they'll probably release the original with all the planets and allow you to travel between them via spaceports (just no in-space sequences), then you still get most of the functionality in the initial package. But then beyond that you could create a game where the space travel part of the game becomes a primary activity, allowing you to play a smuggler, or rebel/imperial pilot, pirate, mercenary, etc.
You could almost work in an entirely new game like X-wing vs. Tie-Fighter, only opened up to allow more players simultaneously and allow for a wider variety of ships. Imagine, you've managed to get a ship to transport you from Tatooine to Coruscant. On the way you pass by a dogfight where a merchant cruiser is being attacked by a band of pirates. You could jump in on whichever side you favor and be the heroic rescuer. Or you could just keep going and not worry about it. Or perhaps you could save the merchant ship and then be offered a reward or future employment with the merchant company (perhaps only to be swayed in the future by a pirate gang).
Or perhaps you could make a career as a pirate-hunter, bounty hunter, or even repo man who specializes in hunting down starships. You could have an opportunity to take out PK's and other (even high-level) characters/NPC's without having to worry about him having twice the XP and mana points that you do, because it would all come down to your ability to actually dogfight in a sim-like environment. No worries about whether you've got enough skill points to take someone on.
You really could make an entire other game with a MMO space combat sim that integrates into SWG. That would be sweet!
nice gouraud shaded sand back there!
Hey, I remember when Tie Fighter first came out they had Gouraud shaded starships and it was frickin' awesome. And I think that it probably looks a little better than having to texture all that background space, not to mention being considerably faster.
But then again, I'm not a 3D artist/programmer.
all of those were great games that did an excellent job of keeping the money rolling in while they were between movies, but now that he's back into the SW movie saga there are brand-names to be milked.
I'm kinda surprised that NASA is using a human to do this. I didn't read the article yet, so perhaps this is a waste. Aren't we, as humans, one of the more under-developed species when it comes to olafactory senses?
Most of us are, yes. But then that's the trick isn't it? You can't have a dog tell you that something stinks because dogs cannot talk. You could build a sniffer machine to test the smell, but then it ends up having a wider range of detectability than a human nose, and it still can't tell you if something smells really awful.
Nope, if you want to see if something smells bad to a human being, then you pretty much are best of (economically and effectively) using humans as testers.