Portal brought this game hater back to FPS. And oh man, the story makes it soooo much better! X-D The twisted humor made me laugh out loud and the game play itself was exhilarating. No shooting or killing; just jumping, flying and dropping things on machine-gun wielding drones.
I still sing the "Still Alive" song to myself at work.
"Now these points of data/make a beautiful line.
And we're out of beta/and releasing on time!"
I also have to wondeder what ASCAP and BMI will think of this. If this proposal results in a drop in radio play, then payments to songwriters (as opposed to song performers) will fall.
I wonder how many will switch the all news or all talk formats...
... doesn't know how to do multi-threaded programming effectively deserves to be on EI anyway. It is not that difficult.
I have a feeling you don't. Nor do most people who claim they know. I've had to debug multi-threaded code written by people who thought they knew. Multi-threading is something to be avoided in 90% of your code. Only certain core functions might benefit from multi-threading.
First rule: profile your code. You might be surprised to find the bulk of your run-time is in 20 lines of code.
Second rule: Change algorithms first. Bubble-sort can be done multi-threadedly, but switching to a single-threaded quicksort would still blow its doors off (and hey, QSort if eminently amenable to parallelization).
Third rule: Know your overhead. Multi-threaded communication and co-ordination is expensive. Make sure you understand the cost of your multi-threaded solutions vs. single-threaded.
Fourth rule: Mutexes are not a cure all. I heard a story about how Sony's clib for PS3 had mutexes on all the non-reentrant functions (read: ALL the string functions). Anyone dumb enough to call a str*() function on a PS3 froze out all the cores while the function ran. When possible, create code that doesn't require mutexes, and if it does require, keep it to a narrow scope.
Fifth rule: GUI-Worker-IO threads. For a lot of applications, you can get away with just having one thread responding to GUI events and passing heavy lifting to Worker threads which in turn can send some heavy I/O work to I/O threads that can set there waiting for data. It's a lot simpler to implement than threading everything. My experience is use some sort of message mailbox system (MessagePort for the Amiga fans out there) where each thread is waiting for messages on a mailbox to act on. There should be some good resources out there on how to design them. For everyone's sake, do NOT use a busy loop checking if your FIFO has a new message. Let the OS do the waiting which can then tell the scheduler to put your thread to sleep until the I/O or signal comes through.
Sixth rule: Learn about parallel algorithms. Writing algorithms for parallel processing is an old and venerated art. It's used in DSPs, video cards and supercomputers. Paper after paper has been written on creating very fast, parallel algorithms. Just learning about them will help you lean how to write in parallel. It's a very different way of thinking about solving problems, and kind of fun. I wish I had a Cell processor just to play with that kind of thing.
Seventh rule: Debugging is hell. Try to keep your code simple & easy when it multi-threads. The race conditions in true parallel systems can give you headaches and blurry vision trying to comprehend it. Do everything possible to make your debugging easier because multi-threading will fail.
But I doubt anyone remembers that. Two researchers were able to crack the SSL key of Netscape back in the 90s because Netscape was using plain-old rand just using the current system time as the seed.
Nope. Then they'd deny everything. The answer is obviously to allow industry to set up a self-regulating body to approve and deny patent applications. No need for the oversight.
I think you're close there. I say abandon government granted patents and return to contract law and NDA. If I invent something, and there's no paper trail showing the company ever revealed their technique/invention to me, nothing they can do. What about things that can be reverse engineered? That takes time & money; most times it's cheaper to license. Also reverse engineering becomes the "marginal land" against which licensing fees can be compared. You want to license your new CPU? Fine, charge less than it would cost me to reverse engineer and build up a factory to mass produce.
True, we would end up with some "victims". The small inventor who comes up with the pulse windshield wiper could get screwed, but then again, if you know of the idea, and an engineer can easily re-create it (it violates the non-obvious rule), then it shouldn't have been granted under the patent system in the first place. But no system is perfect and I think we should focus on harm reduction.
Short Answer: Why is deflation bad? Ask the Japanese.
Long answer: Are you willing to take a cut in your pay? Would you be willing to stay with an employer who cuts your wages? Would you take a lower paying job even IF the price of your "basket of goods" was falling? For most people, the answer is no. Or in the words of a famous economist: "wages are sticky downwards". Deflation causes tremendous problems for employers because their employees and execs won't accept pay cuts.
Also: You bought a house for $500,000. You got a mortgage for $500,000. Your house is now worth $400,000 with no certainty when you'd recoup your loss. In situations like that, people simply abandon their house and let the bank foreclose on it. The property can no longer fetch $500,000 so the bank loses $100,000. A thousand other people do this. Very quickly, banks start to collapse (ala Japan) and the terror it generates in the populace causes them to take their money from the banks or simply not deposit them there making the problem worse (which can be partially blamed on fractional-reserve banking as mentioned in an earlier post in this thread). Without assets to lend, banks can't give out credit. Economy goes pear shaped.
Inflation, most economists now believe, is a necessary evil to fight wage stickiness. People are less likely to join the communist party or vote Democrat if they see their income remain flat but prices go up. But if you were to take away some of their income, even if prices were going down, you'd get a general revolt.
Bad mixing. I can't find the link right now, but many people have complained about how CDs are being produced by mixing things loud and the sound getting clipped. Add to that most consumer CD players completely process the CD signal to hell and gone then they play it through cheap-ass head phones so seriously, the consumer has already lost a lot of quality. Most listeners won't notice the difference because of their playback set-up.
Of course, some people are now going for the "super bitrate" MP3s ripped directly from CDs, but they are the rare ones.
Also, if the mass market really wanted higher audio quality, don't you think any of the CD successors would have taken off already?
This type of response is all too common - refuting statistics by anecdote. The article cites Dr Clark's work in which he uses various means to conclude that the richer had more surviving children than the poor. Saying "I'd need more proof of solid numbers" just isn't good enough - you need to either hit the source and refute Dr Clark's methods, or produce some contrary statistics from another source.
I couldn't find his paper, and it flies in the face of previous work done on demographic patterns of Western Europe. He is the one making extraordinary claims, and since he's the first, he's the one who needs to provide the numbers. If you know where I can get the paper on-line, please share it with us. I have ordered the book, and I hope he provides stronger reasoning there. But somehow I doubt it.
Sounds fishy to me. As established in many places and times, the poor compensate for infant mortality be fecundity and as things get a little better, they outnumber the rich. I'd need more proof of solid numbers that the absolute numbers of children born to poor is less than the number of children born to the not-poor.
The ideas taking hold, on the other hand, have been noticed before, but I agree with the old-fashioned historians who say religion was responsible for that. The power of the state to enforce religious values all the way from the top to the street created a new culture, even among the poor. The king or government's incentive? A less violent population is less likely to cause problems later. Encourage the idea of non-violence in the poor and turning the other cheek, and you can avoid usurpers rallying an army or peasant-lead revolts. Encourage the ideals of hard-work to get more value of the land you own. Saving money by using the church owned banks.
Eventually, society learns to depend on the state instead of family bonds for their security and to enforce contracts, and you start to see a modern world of high mobility and capital flow (you no longer HAD to marry the miller's daughter to get the miller to invest in your factory).
Are you suggesting that if a carrier came out with a lower price, people wouldn't flock to it because people are okay with the prices they pay to Cingular and Sprint? The problem isn't that people are buying what is currently offered, the problem is that there is no disruptive provider coming in to challenge the established market.
There are some, like Virgin Mobile, but the problem is the marketplace. Why is there a Microsoft monopoly? Because the vast majority of Americans want a single company to take care of them. Why is there no disruptive competitor offering fancy phones or free bells & whistles? Because the American public seem very, very indifferent to the idea. To them, it's the service, not the phone, that matters. Which is why they will gladly take a seemingly cheap or free phone in exchange for a 10 year contract that will ram them up the you-know-what.
Those phones overseas are expensive -- way more than what the American public will pay for. Someone above mentioned a $600 phone he bought from Australia. Tell that to your average New York cell junky and they'll spit-take. I read an article saying cellphone makers are annoyed by the public's sticker shock and refusal to outright buy their phones. As long as the people behave like that, the American cell phone market will suck. Thank goodness we have Asia to drive the market forward and trickle down the innovation to North America.;-)
You know. It reminds me of the days before 3rd party phones were legal. Yes, kids, there was a time you could not buy a phone at Wal-Mart and simply plug it into your wall. You had to go to the phone company to buy a different phone because 3rd party phones were prohibited by your contract with the Phone Company. In an even earlier period, you couldn't even buy a phone. It was always a rental from the phone company.
That's the scenario patent advocates love to trot out, but try offering concrete examples and statistics, not hypotheticals. (Such as how patents allowed James Watt to retard the progress of the steam engine for decades, perhaps?)
I'm glad someone brought that up. When the patent expired, the efficiency of the steam engine shot up (see parent's link). And without patents, people still innovate because they need to make a buck. They just find other ways to get more value out of their invention. One way is old fashioned "trade secrets". As your product hits the market, the secret will eventually be reverse engineered but you have time to make your cash. More importantly, you have the time to produce something better than the other guys who have to play catch-up.
Are you fucking retarted? Fucking Marx swilling liberal commie socialist pinko useful idiot bastard. It's government intervention that is causing this whole problem.
And do you know what the queers are doing to the soil too? That's what you sound link to me.
What you missed here, actually, is that they can only do it if the State gives them such power.
Very close! When ever I've heard of some law that screws the consumer over, in the guise of "good market intervention", it seems like there's private business behind it. E.g., DMCA, local anti-gas price war statutes.
But even with contract law, we can get screwed, and as history has shown us, the private sector has no problem ganging together to ensure we can't negotiate our way out of restrictive contract laws. E.g., software EULA. The only reason they don't seriously harm us is the State did protect us from some of the aspects of the EULA (but not all!)
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need the State to protect us from the marketplace, but since it is not ideal, maybe government regulation should limit itself to preventing bad contract conditions and nothing else?
But good point about pointing out the State aiding and abetting them.
The only way this works is if the auctioners are able to purchase product for less than the minimum prices from an authorized dealer. If authorized dealers are sellling product at below their contracted minimum prices these dealers are who the manufacturers should be going after, not the auctioners.
That's precisely the problem. The make-up case was the woman buying them at a flea market (probably from a salon owner selling overstock) and then selling them on eBay. The autoparts case was the man buying from a wholesaler (legitimately), but the man never signed the official licensed retailer contract with the company, so he could sell at less than the MSRP.
This just confirms something to me that certain classes of laissez-faire types keep missing: the private sector can just be as bad as the government for the market. The only thing keeping them in check is ironically government regulation of the market.
But at the same time I feel like it's a waste of money compared to better causes, like I dont know, FEEDING or MEDICINE for kids. Granted I grew up poor, and I wish I had a laptop when I was in high school and younger would have been able to kick start my career even earlier. But even then if it came to me having a free laptop, or seeing the kid down the street who eats government peanut butter on bread (no jelly) every day and no medical insurance. I'd gladly give it up to feed him/her for a while.
I've grown up and don't flame people like this anymore. Because I realise jshriver is without a clue about the developing world. These arguments comes from ignorance about what life in the developing world is like. For starters, giving them aid may make you feel good, but it doesn't help the recipients stand on their own two feet which is what they really want to do. Are you aware sub-saharan Africa is the world's fastest growing cell phone market? 82 million subscribers and climbing.
Africa has mostly moved beyond the image of the starving, shivering child. There are a few areas like that, but <Lewis Black mode> f--k me, there's a @#$!-damned war going on there!</Lewis Black mode> Mostly, the developing world would like to start their own businesses, grow their own food and keep the money they make away from corrupt dictators. But well-meaning people keep interfering with their plans to do this, including ironically the World Bank and IMF (but I digress).
You want to help that child in Africa get a better home and school? Camapaign to end American subsidies for farming. That will do more to help them than giving them your crumbs from the table.
Indian nations are a farcical anachronism who have greatly outlived their usefulness. The US and CA govs should just stop recognizing them. It's time to move out of the stone age people.
We (or our parents) had a choice of coming to North America. The Indian nations were here, recognized by the crown (Queen Vicky, lor bless her!) as sovereign nations within the British Empire and their land claims recognized. Then some trumped up judge in London decided to write law from the bench (a.k.a. "activist judge") that said that aboriginals had no claim to their land. In direct violation of treaties and the ruling of the privy council. The government of the day said "What harm could come?" Well, as New Zealand and Canada learned, acting on an invalid judgement is a legal time bomb and as a result, modern Supreme Courts in NZ and Canada have said "That ruling should have never happened -- the land claims and treaties are in tact".
This case isn't about what you think it. A bunch of commissions over the years pointed out the bloody obvious: life on the reserves suck because they were systematically neglected and restricted by the Indian Act on how they could earn a living and still be allowed to live on their land (Part of the goal was to erase the identities and land claims of the original Indian nations and "Westernize" them). So a couple years ago, the Feds and provincial ministers got together with the native bands to figure out how to change things so the native Indians can become self-sufficient and agreed to the Kelowna agreement.
An agreement the current Conservative government unilaterally decided to break. This little stunt is probably going to be the first of many public actions. As some have said, it's going to be a long, hot summer in Canada this year...
(Note, I am not a Native Indian, but a real honest-to-goodness Indian (half actually), but I grew up with native Indians and have great sympathy for them. I also live in Canada and pay taxes so I'm not some unemployed, liberal hippie who won't have to pay for the settlements.
Well, that's over simplifying, but in this case yes. Specifically, how many times have we read on/. of a major telco getting the FCC to make one or other competitor illegal. Fine, allow the big telcos to keep out other DSL providers from their CO's, but don't let the Telco's declare other providers illegal if they cut a deal with a municipality to lay fibre on a public right of way (can't find the/. article now).
When these Telco's insist on using the FCC for their competitive advantage, they lose the moral right to claim they are a "free market".
Most interviews I read with insiders (on and off the record) said that no one consciously copied Kimba, but some of the animators quickly realised they were and began making jokes about it in the office. The better question is "Was there corporate mal intent?" I haven't ready any indication there was, and that the animators and writers may have consciously or unconsciously borrowed from Simba putting Disney in an awkward situation.
So Nintendo is good at making really fun and well-polished games....and they make a big profit....they increase the amount of people who might call themselves a 'gamer'....this is a bad thing?
Nope. I'm one of them. I hate consoles and the vast majority of games on the market. I dislike FPS's and most modern RPGs (as noted by my earlier dismissal of Oblivion). The DS is the first game console I've owned since I was 12 and had an Atari 2600. Nintendo's DS has games I'm interested in that aren't going to interest the usual gamer. E.g., Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, Advanced Wars, Brain Age. Us "niche" market gamers were literally ignored and marginalised by the big publishers. Nintendo seems to notice us and caters to us and the fact we're flocking to Nintendo... scares you?
I think the whole argument is flawed because it says to me "Nintendo makes great games, they sell well, are fun, and get new people to play them. This is a bad thing because third party developers can't sell their crappy games, and have to spend more time and resources to compete by making decent games."
Maybe the fact that Nintendo makes some good stuff shows that a lot of games/developers suck? I don't know, perhaps it is the phenomena of "wrecking the curve".
This is the heart of the matter. I now cruise EB ever week keeping an eye out for interesting games, as well as visiting the game sites to keep an eye on previews. The majority of games I like were released by Nintendo. There are two exceptions (Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk), but all the 3rd party games I've seen have been ports of older titles that I never cared for anyway or "fast cash in" games on movie licenses. I mean really. On Game Rankings.com, I'm hard pressed to find a DS movie-tie-in game break 80%. The Wii and DS caters to a different crowd. You want my money, cater to me. I'll give you a hint: my favorite games are strong story-based like Infocom, Ultima IV, V and Dreamfall. I don't like thumb-twitcher games. I dislike FPS's. I do like strategy games, like Advanced Wars or Company of Heroes (which isn't on the DS obviously, but it is on my PC). I do like other games as well like the old Time Pilot arcade game. I don't see MS or Sony tripping over themselves to cater to me and my kind so Nintedo gets my dollars. THAT'S what's happening, folks.
Slashdot Mirror
Portal brought this game hater back to FPS. And oh man, the story makes it soooo much better! X-D The twisted humor made me laugh out loud and the game play itself was exhilarating. No shooting or killing; just jumping, flying and dropping things on machine-gun wielding drones.
I still sing the "Still Alive" song to myself at work.
"Now these points of data/make a beautiful line.
And we're out of beta/and releasing on time!"
We do what we must because we can!
I wonder how many will switch the all news or all talk formats...
I have a feeling you don't. Nor do most people who claim they know. I've had to debug multi-threaded code written by people who thought they knew. Multi-threading is something to be avoided in 90% of your code. Only certain core functions might benefit from multi-threading.
First rule: profile your code. You might be surprised to find the bulk of your run-time is in 20 lines of code.
Second rule: Change algorithms first. Bubble-sort can be done multi-threadedly, but switching to a single-threaded quicksort would still blow its doors off (and hey, QSort if eminently amenable to parallelization).
Third rule: Know your overhead. Multi-threaded communication and co-ordination is expensive. Make sure you understand the cost of your multi-threaded solutions vs. single-threaded.
Fourth rule: Mutexes are not a cure all. I heard a story about how Sony's clib for PS3 had mutexes on all the non-reentrant functions (read: ALL the string functions). Anyone dumb enough to call a str*() function on a PS3 froze out all the cores while the function ran. When possible, create code that doesn't require mutexes, and if it does require, keep it to a narrow scope.
Fifth rule: GUI-Worker-IO threads. For a lot of applications, you can get away with just having one thread responding to GUI events and passing heavy lifting to Worker threads which in turn can send some heavy I/O work to I/O threads that can set there waiting for data. It's a lot simpler to implement than threading everything. My experience is use some sort of message mailbox system (MessagePort for the Amiga fans out there) where each thread is waiting for messages on a mailbox to act on. There should be some good resources out there on how to design them. For everyone's sake, do NOT use a busy loop checking if your FIFO has a new message. Let the OS do the waiting which can then tell the scheduler to put your thread to sleep until the I/O or signal comes through.
Sixth rule: Learn about parallel algorithms. Writing algorithms for parallel processing is an old and venerated art. It's used in DSPs, video cards and supercomputers. Paper after paper has been written on creating very fast, parallel algorithms. Just learning about them will help you lean how to write in parallel. It's a very different way of thinking about solving problems, and kind of fun. I wish I had a Cell processor just to play with that kind of thing.
Seventh rule: Debugging is hell. Try to keep your code simple & easy when it multi-threads. The race conditions in true parallel systems can give you headaches and blurry vision trying to comprehend it. Do everything possible to make your debugging easier because multi-threading will fail.
Any intentions of implementing any of C.J. Date's Third Manifesto proposals for implementing the new generation of relational databases? If not, why?
But I doubt anyone remembers that. Two researchers were able to crack the SSL key of Netscape back in the 90s because Netscape was using plain-old rand just using the current system time as the seed.
I think you're close there. I say abandon government granted patents and return to contract law and NDA. If I invent something, and there's no paper trail showing the company ever revealed their technique/invention to me, nothing they can do. What about things that can be reverse engineered? That takes time & money; most times it's cheaper to license. Also reverse engineering becomes the "marginal land" against which licensing fees can be compared. You want to license your new CPU? Fine, charge less than it would cost me to reverse engineer and build up a factory to mass produce.
True, we would end up with some "victims". The small inventor who comes up with the pulse windshield wiper could get screwed, but then again, if you know of the idea, and an engineer can easily re-create it (it violates the non-obvious rule), then it shouldn't have been granted under the patent system in the first place. But no system is perfect and I think we should focus on harm reduction.
I don't feel so bad about UID now. ;-)
Short Answer: Why is deflation bad? Ask the Japanese.
Long answer:
Are you willing to take a cut in your pay? Would you be willing to stay with an employer who cuts your wages? Would you take a lower paying job even IF the price of your "basket of goods" was falling? For most people, the answer is no. Or in the words of a famous economist: "wages are sticky downwards". Deflation causes tremendous problems for employers because their employees and execs won't accept pay cuts.
Also: You bought a house for $500,000. You got a mortgage for $500,000. Your house is now worth $400,000 with no certainty when you'd recoup your loss. In situations like that, people simply abandon their house and let the bank foreclose on it. The property can no longer fetch $500,000 so the bank loses $100,000. A thousand other people do this. Very quickly, banks start to collapse (ala Japan) and the terror it generates in the populace causes them to take their money from the banks or simply not deposit them there making the problem worse (which can be partially blamed on fractional-reserve banking as mentioned in an earlier post in this thread). Without assets to lend, banks can't give out credit. Economy goes pear shaped.
Inflation, most economists now believe, is a necessary evil to fight wage stickiness. People are less likely to join the communist party or vote Democrat if they see their income remain flat but prices go up. But if you were to take away some of their income, even if prices were going down, you'd get a general revolt.
You worked for Commodore!?
Bad mixing. I can't find the link right now, but many people have complained about how CDs are being produced by mixing things loud and the sound getting clipped. Add to that most consumer CD players completely process the CD signal to hell and gone then they play it through cheap-ass head phones so seriously, the consumer has already lost a lot of quality. Most listeners won't notice the difference because of their playback set-up.
Of course, some people are now going for the "super bitrate" MP3s ripped directly from CDs, but they are the rare ones.
Also, if the mass market really wanted higher audio quality, don't you think any of the CD successors would have taken off already?
I couldn't find his paper, and it flies in the face of previous work done on demographic patterns of Western Europe. He is the one making extraordinary claims, and since he's the first, he's the one who needs to provide the numbers. If you know where I can get the paper on-line, please share it with us. I have ordered the book, and I hope he provides stronger reasoning there. But somehow I doubt it.
Sounds fishy to me. As established in many places and times, the poor compensate for infant mortality be fecundity and as things get a little better, they outnumber the rich. I'd need more proof of solid numbers that the absolute numbers of children born to poor is less than the number of children born to the not-poor.
The ideas taking hold, on the other hand, have been noticed before, but I agree with the old-fashioned historians who say religion was responsible for that. The power of the state to enforce religious values all the way from the top to the street created a new culture, even among the poor. The king or government's incentive? A less violent population is less likely to cause problems later. Encourage the idea of non-violence in the poor and turning the other cheek, and you can avoid usurpers rallying an army or peasant-lead revolts. Encourage the ideals of hard-work to get more value of the land you own. Saving money by using the church owned banks.
Eventually, society learns to depend on the state instead of family bonds for their security and to enforce contracts, and you start to see a modern world of high mobility and capital flow (you no longer HAD to marry the miller's daughter to get the miller to invest in your factory).
There's also an elephant in the room: The Apache config file.
YOU feel awkward!? I felt awkward thinking how superior I was that most other people WOULDN't!
There are some, like Virgin Mobile, but the problem is the marketplace. Why is there a Microsoft monopoly? Because the vast majority of Americans want a single company to take care of them. Why is there no disruptive competitor offering fancy phones or free bells & whistles? Because the American public seem very, very indifferent to the idea. To them, it's the service, not the phone, that matters. Which is why they will gladly take a seemingly cheap or free phone in exchange for a 10 year contract that will ram them up the you-know-what.
Those phones overseas are expensive -- way more than what the American public will pay for. Someone above mentioned a $600 phone he bought from Australia. Tell that to your average New York cell junky and they'll spit-take. I read an article saying cellphone makers are annoyed by the public's sticker shock and refusal to outright buy their phones. As long as the people behave like that, the American cell phone market will suck. Thank goodness we have Asia to drive the market forward and trickle down the innovation to North America. ;-)
You know. It reminds me of the days before 3rd party phones were legal. Yes, kids, there was a time you could not buy a phone at Wal-Mart and simply plug it into your wall. You had to go to the phone company to buy a different phone because 3rd party phones were prohibited by your contract with the Phone Company. In an even earlier period, you couldn't even buy a phone. It was always a rental from the phone company.
I'm glad someone brought that up. When the patent expired, the efficiency of the steam engine shot up (see parent's link). And without patents, people still innovate because they need to make a buck. They just find other ways to get more value out of their invention. One way is old fashioned "trade secrets". As your product hits the market, the secret will eventually be reverse engineered but you have time to make your cash. More importantly, you have the time to produce something better than the other guys who have to play catch-up.
And do you know what the queers are doing to the soil too? That's what you sound link to me.
Very close! When ever I've heard of some law that screws the consumer over, in the guise of "good market intervention", it seems like there's private business behind it. E.g., DMCA, local anti-gas price war statutes.
But even with contract law, we can get screwed, and as history has shown us, the private sector has no problem ganging together to ensure we can't negotiate our way out of restrictive contract laws. E.g., software EULA. The only reason they don't seriously harm us is the State did protect us from some of the aspects of the EULA (but not all!)
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need the State to protect us from the marketplace, but since it is not ideal, maybe government regulation should limit itself to preventing bad contract conditions and nothing else?
But good point about pointing out the State aiding and abetting them.
That's precisely the problem. The make-up case was the woman buying them at a flea market (probably from a salon owner selling overstock) and then selling them on eBay. The autoparts case was the man buying from a wholesaler (legitimately), but the man never signed the official licensed retailer contract with the company, so he could sell at less than the MSRP.
This just confirms something to me that certain classes of laissez-faire types keep missing: the private sector can just be as bad as the government for the market. The only thing keeping them in check is ironically government regulation of the market.
I've grown up and don't flame people like this anymore. Because I realise jshriver is without a clue about the developing world. These arguments comes from ignorance about what life in the developing world is like. For starters, giving them aid may make you feel good, but it doesn't help the recipients stand on their own two feet which is what they really want to do. Are you aware sub-saharan Africa is the world's fastest growing cell phone market? 82 million subscribers and climbing.
Africa has mostly moved beyond the image of the starving, shivering child. There are a few areas like that, but <Lewis Black mode> f--k me, there's a @#$!-damned war going on there!</Lewis Black mode> Mostly, the developing world would like to start their own businesses, grow their own food and keep the money they make away from corrupt dictators. But well-meaning people keep interfering with their plans to do this, including ironically the World Bank and IMF (but I digress).
You want to help that child in Africa get a better home and school? Camapaign to end American subsidies for farming. That will do more to help them than giving them your crumbs from the table.
We (or our parents) had a choice of coming to North America. The Indian nations were here, recognized by the crown (Queen Vicky, lor bless her!) as sovereign nations within the British Empire and their land claims recognized. Then some trumped up judge in London decided to write law from the bench (a.k.a. "activist judge") that said that aboriginals had no claim to their land. In direct violation of treaties and the ruling of the privy council. The government of the day said "What harm could come?" Well, as New Zealand and Canada learned, acting on an invalid judgement is a legal time bomb and as a result, modern Supreme Courts in NZ and Canada have said "That ruling should have never happened -- the land claims and treaties are in tact".
This case isn't about what you think it. A bunch of commissions over the years pointed out the bloody obvious: life on the reserves suck because they were systematically neglected and restricted by the Indian Act on how they could earn a living and still be allowed to live on their land (Part of the goal was to erase the identities and land claims of the original Indian nations and "Westernize" them). So a couple years ago, the Feds and provincial ministers got together with the native bands to figure out how to change things so the native Indians can become self-sufficient and agreed to the Kelowna agreement.
An agreement the current Conservative government unilaterally decided to break. This little stunt is probably going to be the first of many public actions. As some have said, it's going to be a long, hot summer in Canada this year...
(Note, I am not a Native Indian, but a real honest-to-goodness Indian (half actually), but I grew up with native Indians and have great sympathy for them. I also live in Canada and pay taxes so I'm not some unemployed, liberal hippie who won't have to pay for the settlements.
Well, that's over simplifying, but in this case yes. Specifically, how many times have we read on /. of a major telco getting the FCC to make one or other competitor illegal. Fine, allow the big telcos to keep out other DSL providers from their CO's, but don't let the Telco's declare other providers illegal if they cut a deal with a municipality to lay fibre on a public right of way (can't find the /. article now).
When these Telco's insist on using the FCC for their competitive advantage, they lose the moral right to claim they are a "free market".
Unionized workers are only 12% of the American workforce. In fact, most of them are government. For the private sector, it's 7.4%.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
Most interviews I read with insiders (on and off the record) said that no one consciously copied Kimba, but some of the animators quickly realised they were and began making jokes about it in the office. The better question is "Was there corporate mal intent?" I haven't ready any indication there was, and that the animators and writers may have consciously or unconsciously borrowed from Simba putting Disney in an awkward situation.
Straight Dope has the best answer to this (they talked to the animators no longer working for Disney):
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a991224.html
Nope. I'm one of them. I hate consoles and the vast majority of games on the market. I dislike FPS's and most modern RPGs (as noted by my earlier dismissal of Oblivion). The DS is the first game console I've owned since I was 12 and had an Atari 2600. Nintendo's DS has games I'm interested in that aren't going to interest the usual gamer. E.g., Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, Advanced Wars, Brain Age. Us "niche" market gamers were literally ignored and marginalised by the big publishers. Nintendo seems to notice us and caters to us and the fact we're flocking to Nintendo ... scares you?
This is the heart of the matter. I now cruise EB ever week keeping an eye out for interesting games, as well as visiting the game sites to keep an eye on previews. The majority of games I like were released by Nintendo. There are two exceptions (Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk), but all the 3rd party games I've seen have been ports of older titles that I never cared for anyway or "fast cash in" games on movie licenses. I mean really. On Game Rankings.com, I'm hard pressed to find a DS movie-tie-in game break 80%. The Wii and DS caters to a different crowd. You want my money, cater to me. I'll give you a hint: my favorite games are strong story-based like Infocom, Ultima IV, V and Dreamfall. I don't like thumb-twitcher games. I dislike FPS's. I do like strategy games, like Advanced Wars or Company of Heroes (which isn't on the DS obviously, but it is on my PC). I do like other games as well like the old Time Pilot arcade game. I don't see MS or Sony tripping over themselves to cater to me and my kind so Nintedo gets my dollars. THAT'S what's happening, folks.