Yes, you will have trouble installing this on the non-existent computers that have no way to connect to the Internet, even temporarily, but still are modern enough to meet the other system requirements. Yes, if the authentication servers crash, you may be forced to suffer without a video game for an hour or two (or rather, without this particular video game -- presumably you'll still be able to play others if you really, really can't just read a book or watch TV or something). A meteor might come out of the sky and destroy your computer. YOU NEVER KNOW! So many things may prevent you from getting your SC2 fix at the particular instant you want it most...
But all that wasn't my point of my original post. The point was that you can't go around saying you don't have restrictive DRM and then implement restrictive DRM, but just less so than someone else.
Apparently, you can. Furthermore, since "restrictive" can be a very relative term, you can do so with a straight face, in perfect accuracy, and be understood by most competent speakers of the English language, just like you can claim you don't like hot beverages but then drink a "cold" beer that's hundreds of degrees above absolute zero.
But the fact is the new Battle.net is one of the worst multiplayer platforms I have ever encountered.
Worst compared to... I have to ask, how many platforms have you been allowed to play before they were finished? Or were you actually comparing finished products with stuff still in development? You realize that's kinda stupid, right?
Please post your address, I'd like to come take all your stuff. You'll clearly be OK with that if I give you the vague impression that I'm "likely" to give it back to you someday.
Oh, come on. After that rant, you can't possibly be suggesting you believe individual people should be allowed to own stuff.
LAN SCHLAN... the statistics tracking, achievements, and similar multiplayer features require battle.net. They would have had to strip those features for the LAN version, so the exact opposite argument could be just as easily made. Rather than provide a stripped-down, feature-lite version for LAN play, they just decided to make sure everyone always has all the features available.
"If and only if they have a connection to the Internet", you say. Yup. And they assume everyone does. They're willing to lose the three potential customers that might not be true for in 2010. I know some people find that hard to believe, but those kids playing on your lawn all have Internet access. Saying "it excludes anyone who don't have Internet" stopped being a serious argument years ago...
(The Bible Defines Swearing as Taking the Name of the Lord your God in Vain.)
Taking the Lord's name in vain means swearing to God that something is true when you know it's not, or swearing to God that you'll do something and not doing it, or otherwise invoking God while swearing and oath, and then breaking the oath. There are a lot of misinformed Christians who are under the impression that it has something to do with using His name while uttering profanity, but that's merely because most Christians know diddly-squat about the Bible and what it actually says. The rule against taking the Lord's name in vain is basically ancient contract-law, and has never had anything to do with "swearing" in the sense of using profanity, only "swearing" in the sense of "swearing an oath".
Frozen CO2 as "ice" makes as much sense as frozen iron as "ice".
Actually, it makes as much sense as frozen water as "ice". Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply not as fluent in the English language as they could be. Someone who isn't as familiar with the language is likely to try to puzzle out nonexistent rules because they aren't familiar with the linguistic conventions that apply in the case at hand. But those who are familiar with how the language is used know that "ice" is a word that applies to certain cases of solids without regard to their chemical composition. Indeed, the word "ice" long predates the knowledge that water ice composed of H2O, or that dry ice is composed of CO2. To assert that "ice" means "solid H2O" shows vast ignorance of the historical usage of the word.
Depending on what you mean, this is either flat-out false, or true, but equally true of humans (who, like the machines in question, have pre-coded instructions, and any decision-making that occurs beyond that is occurring in accord with those instructions -- they think because they're programmed to).
Reprogramming a machine takes longer than a human can change his/her mind, based on the situation in real time.
As a generalization, this is also just plain false. It can be true of particular machines, but it's certainly not always the case.
But if the big bang had a slight antimatter bias, we would have called what we now call antimatter, matter, and vice versa. We'd still say the big bang would have a slight matter bias, because our planet, sun, etc, would be made of "ordinary" (common) matter -- to the eyes of our alternate selves.
Well, yes, precisely. The mystery isn't that the bias is for matter rather than antimatter; that's a given, given what you just said. The mystery is that they aren't produced in precisely equal quantities with no bias at all. Why is there a more common form and a less common form at all?
Steve Jobs seems to ignore everything that caused products to be successful: Price to performance.
... I'm not going to get an iPad because there are cheaper devices that do a -ton- more.
When Steve Jobs was first in charge of Apple, they made a lot of money selling computers for premium prices. They didn't generate huge market share, but they generated huge profits for Apple.
When Steve Jobs was forced out and they replaced him with a soda-pop seller, Apple slashed prices and produced greater volumes. At one point, they were the world's #1 PC maker, outselling #2 Compaq and others at the time. And the company bled money as it lost, in the final year before Jobs returned, over a billion dollars. A BILLION dollars, lost!
Then Steve Jobs returned, he immediately said "cut that shit out", deep-sixed the clone market, and returned Apple to making high-priced niche machines instead of chasing market share with cheap prices. The first quarter after he returned, after losing over a billion dollars the previous year, Apple turned a profit instead of a loss. It's remained profitable ever since.
Steve Jobs is not ignoring what made Apple successful. He's doing precisely what has always made Apple successful, and ignoring the advice of people who've continuously insisted lower price and more features were more important than a premium cost device designed to do a few things well.
You can argue whether the philosophy is right or not, but it's not ignoring what made Apple successful, it's precisely the strategy and the only strategy that has ever turned massive profits for Apple. You can always buy products that have more features and cost less. Most people who buy from Apple would rather have the more expensive product that does the things it does well, rather than a bunch of other stuff they don't really need, even if it's cheap.
steve gets a little market share and it goes to his head.
here in the real world, he hasn't hardly made a dent in personal computing. I'd admit he has cornered the wanky new toy gadget market, that's about it.
Your comment is strangely reminiscent of Microsoft's attitude towards Netscape circa 1994. "They've cornered the wanky new Internet market, but that's about it."
I don't mean to be a skeptic, but I guess I fall into the camp that doesn't understand this. It seems that the control shaft is just used to undo the motion of the main input shaft.
Sort-of/not-really. You can think of what the control shaft does as changing the size of the gear being driven by the main shaft dynamically. Imagine the main shaft is driving the output shaft using a gear with 30 teeth. Now start moving the control shaft, and the main shaft has to move around 40 teeth to achieve a full rotation of the output shaft instead of just 30 teeth. You've "virtually" turned the smaller gear into a larger one by actually requiring an extra quarter turn around output gear, changing its effective size. The situation of this system with the control shaft orbiting backwards at that rate should be the same as a simpler system using the larger, 40 toothed gear directly connected to the main shaft. In theory, the same amount of power should be required, excluding the theoretically tiny amount of power required to orbit the planetary gear. In practice, I'm not sure that that power requirement remains tiny under load, but that's the theory, anyhow.
For instance, to go in reverse, the control shaft has to be going faster than the input shaft and would then be doing all the work.
No, the work is still being done by the main shaft, the only thing the control is doing is reversing the output gear by spinning faster than the main one. It's still the power being supplied to the main gear that's driving the movement of the output gear, and all the control shaft needs is power to keep it ahead of the main gear in terms of speed, it shouldn't need the power to push the output unless for some reason the main shaft is no longer contributing power. All it needs is the power to rotate it's little planet around at speed. As long as it can do that, the power coming from the main engine will push the output shaft around at the desired rate, including in reverse.
Furthermore it doesn't even solve the CVT part of it because the control shaft needs to be able to move through the same large range of speeds that the output does. If you had a control shaft that could do all this, why not just hook it up to the output?
Because the little electric motor running the control shaft doesn't have the power to turn the output, it just has enough to rotate its little planet around. At least in theory. In practice, I'd want to see how well this works with significant power and real loads. Again, count me as skeptical that those power requirements for the control shaft's engine remain tiny under load.
Also, did you just propose there forcing all assets into one legislated monopoly?...
Yes, he did. My apologies, Darkness404, for mistaking you for a right-wingnut in my previous post. I didn't realize your criticism of Obama was in fact coming from the extreme far left. I thought you were complaining about too much government, not that we're far short of the goal of centralized control that you Soviets prefer.
"...But the loan money is only a fraction of the cash that the federal government gave to GM over the past 12 months to stop it from going out of business. Overall, GM received $50 billion in federal help, with the government receiving $2 billion in preferred stock and 61% of the company's privately held common shares in return for the rest of the money..."
And do you consider money you pay to your investment plans or stock funds handouts to the companies you're giving money to? You're probably receiving nothing but common shares, not even any preferred stock at all.
...but can't trust it to run an organization without government support and can't trust it to run health care which businesses have had a proven track record of doing better than governments.
I'm sure the news didn't reach you in the right-wing fantasy land you live in, but the Obama health-care plan is entirely based on private-run health care, and was from day one. It ultimately amounts to a huge mandate to generate millions of new customers for private health-care companies, without even a public option. For the most part, it's Republican Mitt Romney's health care plan applied nationwide.
Why is it that we can give tons of money to failing businesses that are going to fail eventually but can't give money to improve national defense and research (and yes, supremacy in space allows for supremacy in war as many of the technologies go hand in hand)?
Um, we do. Get out of fantasy-land and read a real newspaper once in a while.
To me, it's like a successful national effort to paint the mona lisa, where once you finish the painting you simply burn it. All the work is wasted and we're left with nothing but memories.
Alas, shuttles are not pieces of art. If we'd built it and never flown it, just hung it on the wall for a quarter century, it'd be nearly as good as new today. OTOH, if you used the Mona Lisa for a dinner tray for a quarter of a century, it probably wouldn't be worth keeping afterward. Things that are built for using are not meant to last forever.
You are not the center of the universe. "News" does not mean "events that *I* am interested in reading about." There are other people in the world who are interested in other things. The hallmark of a good news site is that it contains many articles you don't care to read. Someone else will. A great news site is like a buffet. If you're smart, you look it over and take the stuff you like. If you're a complete and utter fucking moron, you take a heaping pile of beans because it's there, then complain to management that beans shouldn't be on the buffet because you hate them, rather than simply skipping them because you don't any of that, but not resenting the fact that other people are allowed to eat them if they like them even though you don't.
The accretion disk could account for the X-rays. The reason they were looking for X-rays in the first place was to spot normal black holes.
Right... and accretion disks are created from the material falling into the black hole. If the black hole is heading into intergalactic space and NOT "dragging a fair amount of material with it", where is that material coming from?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you will have trouble installing this on the non-existent computers that have no way to connect to the Internet, even temporarily, but still are modern enough to meet the other system requirements. Yes, if the authentication servers crash, you may be forced to suffer without a video game for an hour or two (or rather, without this particular video game -- presumably you'll still be able to play others if you really, really can't just read a book or watch TV or something). A meteor might come out of the sky and destroy your computer. YOU NEVER KNOW! So many things may prevent you from getting your SC2 fix at the particular instant you want it most...
But all that wasn't my point of my original post. The point was that you can't go around saying you don't have restrictive DRM and then implement restrictive DRM, but just less so than someone else.
Apparently, you can. Furthermore, since "restrictive" can be a very relative term, you can do so with a straight face, in perfect accuracy, and be understood by most competent speakers of the English language, just like you can claim you don't like hot beverages but then drink a "cold" beer that's hundreds of degrees above absolute zero.
But the fact is the new Battle.net is one of the worst multiplayer platforms I have ever encountered.
Worst compared to... I have to ask, how many platforms have you been allowed to play before they were finished? Or were you actually comparing finished products with stuff still in development? You realize that's kinda stupid, right?
Please post your address, I'd like to come take all your stuff. You'll clearly be OK with that if I give you the vague impression that I'm "likely" to give it back to you someday.
Oh, come on. After that rant, you can't possibly be suggesting you believe individual people should be allowed to own stuff.
... You are not, since 1.15, required to have a CD in your CD drive to play Starcraft or Broodwars.
The current Diablo and Diablo II patches also remove the CD requirement.
LAN SCHLAN... the statistics tracking, achievements, and similar multiplayer features require battle.net. They would have had to strip those features for the LAN version, so the exact opposite argument could be just as easily made. Rather than provide a stripped-down, feature-lite version for LAN play, they just decided to make sure everyone always has all the features available.
"If and only if they have a connection to the Internet", you say. Yup. And they assume everyone does. They're willing to lose the three potential customers that might not be true for in 2010. I know some people find that hard to believe, but those kids playing on your lawn all have Internet access. Saying "it excludes anyone who don't have Internet" stopped being a serious argument years ago...
(The Bible Defines Swearing as Taking the Name of the Lord your God in Vain.)
Taking the Lord's name in vain means swearing to God that something is true when you know it's not, or swearing to God that you'll do something and not doing it, or otherwise invoking God while swearing and oath, and then breaking the oath. There are a lot of misinformed Christians who are under the impression that it has something to do with using His name while uttering profanity, but that's merely because most Christians know diddly-squat about the Bible and what it actually says. The rule against taking the Lord's name in vain is basically ancient contract-law, and has never had anything to do with "swearing" in the sense of using profanity, only "swearing" in the sense of "swearing an oath".
Frozen CO2 as "ice" makes as much sense as frozen iron as "ice".
Actually, it makes as much sense as frozen water as "ice". Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply not as fluent in the English language as they could be. Someone who isn't as familiar with the language is likely to try to puzzle out nonexistent rules because they aren't familiar with the linguistic conventions that apply in the case at hand. But those who are familiar with how the language is used know that "ice" is a word that applies to certain cases of solids without regard to their chemical composition. Indeed, the word "ice" long predates the knowledge that water ice composed of H2O, or that dry ice is composed of CO2. To assert that "ice" means "solid H2O" shows vast ignorance of the historical usage of the word.
Humans think (not very well), but they think.
Largely true...
Machines only act on a specific set of commands.
Depending on what you mean, this is either flat-out false, or true, but equally true of humans (who, like the machines in question, have pre-coded instructions, and any decision-making that occurs beyond that is occurring in accord with those instructions -- they think because they're programmed to).
Reprogramming a machine takes longer than a human can change his/her mind, based on the situation in real time.
As a generalization, this is also just plain false. It can be true of particular machines, but it's certainly not always the case.
But if the big bang had a slight antimatter bias, we would have called what we now call antimatter, matter, and vice versa. We'd still say the big bang would have a slight matter bias, because our planet, sun, etc, would be made of "ordinary" (common) matter -- to the eyes of our alternate selves.
Well, yes, precisely. The mystery isn't that the bias is for matter rather than antimatter; that's a given, given what you just said. The mystery is that they aren't produced in precisely equal quantities with no bias at all. Why is there a more common form and a less common form at all?
Steve Jobs seems to ignore everything that caused products to be successful: Price to performance.
... I'm not going to get an iPad because there are cheaper devices that do a -ton- more.
When Steve Jobs was first in charge of Apple, they made a lot of money selling computers for premium prices. They didn't generate huge market share, but they generated huge profits for Apple.
When Steve Jobs was forced out and they replaced him with a soda-pop seller, Apple slashed prices and produced greater volumes. At one point, they were the world's #1 PC maker, outselling #2 Compaq and others at the time. And the company bled money as it lost, in the final year before Jobs returned, over a billion dollars. A BILLION dollars, lost!
Then Steve Jobs returned, he immediately said "cut that shit out", deep-sixed the clone market, and returned Apple to making high-priced niche machines instead of chasing market share with cheap prices. The first quarter after he returned, after losing over a billion dollars the previous year, Apple turned a profit instead of a loss. It's remained profitable ever since.
Steve Jobs is not ignoring what made Apple successful. He's doing precisely what has always made Apple successful, and ignoring the advice of people who've continuously insisted lower price and more features were more important than a premium cost device designed to do a few things well.
You can argue whether the philosophy is right or not, but it's not ignoring what made Apple successful, it's precisely the strategy and the only strategy that has ever turned massive profits for Apple. You can always buy products that have more features and cost less. Most people who buy from Apple would rather have the more expensive product that does the things it does well, rather than a bunch of other stuff they don't really need, even if it's cheap.
steve gets a little market share and it goes to his head.
here in the real world, he hasn't hardly made a dent in personal computing. I'd admit he has cornered the wanky new toy gadget market, that's about it.
Your comment is strangely reminiscent of Microsoft's attitude towards Netscape circa 1994. "They've cornered the wanky new Internet market, but that's about it."
Lukcily, people are too stupid and lazy to learn things like Chemistry, Physics and Maths in the UK these days.
Yeah, it's less work in the US where you just need to learn math instead of maths. ;)
I don't mean to be a skeptic, but I guess I fall into the camp that doesn't understand this. It seems that the control shaft is just used to undo the motion of the main input shaft.
Sort-of/not-really. You can think of what the control shaft does as changing the size of the gear being driven by the main shaft dynamically. Imagine the main shaft is driving the output shaft using a gear with 30 teeth. Now start moving the control shaft, and the main shaft has to move around 40 teeth to achieve a full rotation of the output shaft instead of just 30 teeth. You've "virtually" turned the smaller gear into a larger one by actually requiring an extra quarter turn around output gear, changing its effective size. The situation of this system with the control shaft orbiting backwards at that rate should be the same as a simpler system using the larger, 40 toothed gear directly connected to the main shaft. In theory, the same amount of power should be required, excluding the theoretically tiny amount of power required to orbit the planetary gear. In practice, I'm not sure that that power requirement remains tiny under load, but that's the theory, anyhow.
For instance, to go in reverse, the control shaft has to be going faster than the input shaft and would then be doing all the work.
No, the work is still being done by the main shaft, the only thing the control is doing is reversing the output gear by spinning faster than the main one. It's still the power being supplied to the main gear that's driving the movement of the output gear, and all the control shaft needs is power to keep it ahead of the main gear in terms of speed, it shouldn't need the power to push the output unless for some reason the main shaft is no longer contributing power. All it needs is the power to rotate it's little planet around at speed. As long as it can do that, the power coming from the main engine will push the output shaft around at the desired rate, including in reverse.
Furthermore it doesn't even solve the CVT part of it because the control shaft needs to be able to move through the same large range of speeds that the output does. If you had a control shaft that could do all this, why not just hook it up to the output?
Because the little electric motor running the control shaft doesn't have the power to turn the output, it just has enough to rotate its little planet around. At least in theory. In practice, I'd want to see how well this works with significant power and real loads. Again, count me as skeptical that those power requirements for the control shaft's engine remain tiny under load.
...there should be no wear at all when changing gear...
o.O
In the real world, what you describe is physically impossible.
Why does Britain have its own filesystem, and why does the Ubuntu Market (which I assume is a free market) want to use it?
I don't know, but as long as this Maverick doesn't ship together with Harebrained Hockeymom, it might do okay...
Also, did you just propose there forcing all assets into one legislated monopoly?...
Yes, he did. My apologies, Darkness404, for mistaking you for a right-wingnut in my previous post. I didn't realize your criticism of Obama was in fact coming from the extreme far left. I thought you were complaining about too much government, not that we're far short of the goal of centralized control that you Soviets prefer.
"...But the loan money is only a fraction of the cash that the federal government gave to GM over the past 12 months to stop it from going out of business. Overall, GM received $50 billion in federal help, with the government receiving $2 billion in preferred stock and 61% of the company's privately held common shares in return for the rest of the money..."
And do you consider money you pay to your investment plans or stock funds handouts to the companies you're giving money to? You're probably receiving nothing but common shares, not even any preferred stock at all.
...but can't trust it to run an organization without government support and can't trust it to run health care which businesses have had a proven track record of doing better than governments.
I'm sure the news didn't reach you in the right-wing fantasy land you live in, but the Obama health-care plan is entirely based on private-run health care, and was from day one. It ultimately amounts to a huge mandate to generate millions of new customers for private health-care companies, without even a public option. For the most part, it's Republican Mitt Romney's health care plan applied nationwide.
Why is it that we can give tons of money to failing businesses that are going to fail eventually but can't give money to improve national defense and research (and yes, supremacy in space allows for supremacy in war as many of the technologies go hand in hand)?
Um, we do. Get out of fantasy-land and read a real newspaper once in a while.
To me, it's like a successful national effort to paint the mona lisa, where once you finish the painting you simply burn it. All the work is wasted and we're left with nothing but memories.
Alas, shuttles are not pieces of art. If we'd built it and never flown it, just hung it on the wall for a quarter century, it'd be nearly as good as new today. OTOH, if you used the Mona Lisa for a dinner tray for a quarter of a century, it probably wouldn't be worth keeping afterward. Things that are built for using are not meant to last forever.
You are not the center of the universe. "News" does not mean "events that *I* am interested in reading about." There are other people in the world who are interested in other things. The hallmark of a good news site is that it contains many articles you don't care to read. Someone else will. A great news site is like a buffet. If you're smart, you look it over and take the stuff you like. If you're a complete and utter fucking moron, you take a heaping pile of beans because it's there, then complain to management that beans shouldn't be on the buffet because you hate them, rather than simply skipping them because you don't any of that, but not resenting the fact that other people are allowed to eat them if they like them even though you don't.
The accretion disk could account for the X-rays. The reason they were looking for X-rays in the first place was to spot normal black holes.
Right... and accretion disks are created from the material falling into the black hole. If the black hole is heading into intergalactic space and NOT "dragging a fair amount of material with it", where is that material coming from?
7/10 -- pretty good, but you could use a bit more tinfoil.
This is your brain on lightning. Get the picture?
Probably more or less the same things that happen (or not) on December 20th and 22nd, 2012.
So, what, the same thing happens in your life every day of the week? How boring is that?
Oh, wait...
Bah. Wake me up when I can turn to Mr. Data and have the display come up a few button presses after the scan.