Yep, it'll be a terrific world when everyone is considered equal and no preference is given to anybody because your race, gender, and nationality (and hopefully financial background) doesn't dictate your future prospects.
But until that day, white males will continue to bitch about unfair prejudice and reverse racism even after starting at third base and thinking they hit a home run.
I'm definitely interested in it's gaming potential, since they just announced their amazon game studio (http://games.amazon.com/, but I am pretty underwhelmed with how they're managing the streaming service.
I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime and use both for streaming, and Amazon Prime is awful compared to Netflix. It's no wonder that they screwed up their set top box. There's no easy way that's immediately apparent to me on how to search for things that are available for free on Amazon streaming off their website. I've used their app built into Vizio TVs and that sucks too, as searching is again a pain in the ass. They don't even have a standalone app for Windows 8 like Netflix does - it all has to be done through the site which is hard to use. Overall, I love Amazon Prime for the shipping and I like having access to their streaming videos but I use it as little as possible if Netflix has the same show on their service.
Is this really a serious concern? He's already trying to be extradited, who cares if they want him on tax evasion? He's never going to have a trial to make it "legal whistleblowing" and will never be coming back to the US and is trying to get asylum in a country who won't extradite him to the US for espionage, let alone tax evasion.
This isn't about personal responsibility, it's about safety and security. The people who want to ban 3D printed guns (and guns in general) are the people who don't use or want to use guns and want to even the playing field for themselves by getting rid of guns altogether.
Where does the personal responsibility come in? I don't expect the people who are 3D printing guns are all doing it for personal safety and security. I imagine some of them want to print guns so they don't have legal traceable guns and want to go kill people with them and I don't want one of those people killed to be me.
Should we really wait for someone to go on a killing spree with a 3D printed gun or any gun for that matter until they "prove" they can't handle a level of personal responsibility? No, we should probably be proactive about it and limit the ways people can have access to dangerous weaponry.
Why do you find it insulting? When you're given a weapon without training or practice it SHOULD be assumed you're not going to be responsible with it. We require licenses to drive because cars are dangerous without proper instruction, as are guns and most things that we need licenses to operate.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Bloomberg wants everyone to become a plumber so he could lower his plumbing costs. That's the ticket.
My brother used to work for Bloomberg the financial company as a programmer and he was getting paid a shitload of money for it right out of school. If Bloomberg was speaking purely in his own self interest, he would be telling everybody to be a programmer so he could lower those costs.
Being a plumber is more secure than anything in IT. It's not a job that can be outsourced and it requires some training, so not anybody can do it right off the bat.
I work in a creative field (animation and film) and for me the smart phone inspires tons of creativity. Look at all of the amazing apps and games that creative people are doing in this new medium that wouldn't have happened if the developers weren't addicted to their smart phones.
People sitting alone in their living room and being bored doesn't inspire creativity. Creativity is inspired when people surround themselves with other creative ideas and people, and with smart phones, creative ideas and people are closer than ever, right at your fingertips..
Boring people will continue to be bored and uncreative, but creative people will find inspiration in everything, especially in new technologies like mobile devices.
Why does that matter? It means more US workers will have jobs, and foxconn will still have to pay US taxes for the work done here. Still a win all around.
I think the loss of several dozen additional children per year, across society, is far outweighed by the extraordinary benefit to the other 99.999%.
And what benefit is that? Apparently, I benefited from dozens of children being lost per year and I didn't even know about it! Thanks, lost children!
I'm sure their parents feel a little differently though and wish their kids had a GPS tracker on them.
Lots of my friends from the Mid-West and South have lots of stories like yours, about being in the woods, away from the rest of the world and being alone while camping or whatever. While that's all well and good, and you could go start a reality show where you survive the wilderness by snatching fish from the river using only your hands, most of society - me included - grew up or live most of their lives in larger urban areas where they need to depend on other people for their survival. There's nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, humans have created everything we have today because we work better in groups and naturally rely on each other.
The only reason I'd say would benefit people from having their technology taken away and left in the woods to fend for themselves is that they'll learn how linked they are to each other and won't take all of the hard work that people have put into creating the technology and a functional society for granted.
It built a real sense of self-control and the confidence to do things on my own.
I have self-control and confidence to do things on my own as well, and I didn't have to get lost in the woods to do so, but hey, different strokes...
I don't see a downside to GPS tracking your kids. We use GPS on our smart phones to find directions to places in our direct neighborhood. It's ubiquitous. The whole "Children need to find out how to get unlost by themselves" is complete luddite garbage. Children are entering a future where this kind of technology is intrinsically linked to their development. Keeping them inside of a tech-free bubble, just because the parents never grew up with the same technology around them ("And they turned out fine!") is just as bad as brainwashing them into religion at an early age, and yet it's something I often hear from my friends and co-workers who are in the technology industry. I also often see it here on Slashdot whenever someone poses a question on what technology they should introduce to their kids.
You and the rest of slashdot are people. These are corporations. They hire teams of people whose sole jobs are to limit the tax burden for the company. If other companies are creating tax havens with offshore shell companies and your accounting team isn't then they're not doing their job and should be fired and replaced with a better team. It's up to the government to close the loopholes on the tax code so that these games can't be played.
Digital won because it's cheaper and easier to manage. Footage goes directly from camera to the editing bay in the same day, as opposed to having to purchase hundreds of feet of film, go through a day or 2 of developing and then seeing your footage. It's just generally easier to produce. The footage, though, DOESN'T look as good, sorry. The most popular digital film camera - the RED - has horrible rolling shutter and noticeable compression issues as well as a way lower dynamic range. Sure, these problems are going to go away over time, but don't think that digital won because it LOOKS any better.
How is loser pays more fair? It still screws the little guy. If I have a legit case against a huge megacorporation and I decide to sue them and lose because they have the best lawyers money can buy, should I have to pay for their million dollar defense? Hell no. Whereas the big megacorporation will have zero problem paying out for my legal defense if I win. The corporations who have lots and lots of money always have the upper hand.
Here's the obligatory proportions post. How many people have been arrested for the housing market crash thus far? How much monetary damage did those people actually do in comparison to this guy?... yeah.
Yes, MySpace was a competitor but it was a much smaller market back then and Facebook did it better, so there wasn't too big of a barrier to switching. Now, if people switch completely, they have to take the hundreds of photos they've posted, and lose years of status updates, and wait for all their hundreds of friends to switch over as well - it's a big task just like reformatting your harddrive which is something that most people are also loathe to do even when it would end up being better for them.
Circles is a great concept, one that Facebook is already implementing in some fashion, and even if it's not better than Google's it's Good Enough For Now. Yes, it is too early to be saying G+ is a failed experiment and I didn't say that. I just said you can't compare the environment that Facebook thrived in back then to the environment that Google is facing today. It's a very different landscape and tossing out numbers of early adopters isn't a show of Google's success. I'm also an early adopter, and I still use G+ with Facebook, but I use Facebook a lot more.
Look, you can't really compare the timelines between Facebook and Google+. Facebook has been around for almost a decade, and when it came out it didn't have many competitors, the whole social networking concept was new and experimental. Now Facebook is the established brand in social networking - pretty much invented the market - and it's going to be incredibly difficult for Google to topple it, even if the numbers show it to be oh so much more successful in the short term than Facebook was when it started.
Where's the pitfall? The place was packed with customers and you're just pissed off because a place that was usually empty was not - and you're making assumptions about every single Groupon customer. I use Groupons all the time, and if I found a restaurant off of Groupon that I really liked I would definitely return again, and while I may be a minority in that regard, I think having 4 or 5 return customers out of 100 that stop in because of the Groupon ends up being a good deal. It doesn't sound like you're such a terrific customer since it seems a big reason for you even going there is because their business didn't have many customers and you wanted to avoid the people.
I've been saying this for awhile now. I only finish a handful of games a year and give up on many more. I actually finished RDR but feel it would have been a much better game if they took half of it out.
I, personally, can't wait until the average game length is 10 hours. I play games for the story and every game seems to have the problem of dragging the story with pointless side quests just to get the game over 20 hours long. I'd gladly pay a little less for half the game if that means the stories are tighter and more fulfilling.
I think if games are to get as mainstream as movies, they need to be shorter to take into account that adults only have so many hours of the day to watch/play your stuff. Playing a game these days is like reading an epic novel - you either need to plug away at it a few pages/minutes at a time for months, or you take a week off of life and grind though it like a full-time job. I'd like more options where I could finish a serious game (like RDR, not like Angry Birds) in the time it would take to watch a few movies.
At some point, you can't just lower your salary. Of course it's not better to remain unemployed than lower your salary but older people have to put their kids through college, have a mortgage, and other expenses that a 25 year old just doesn't have so they will always be more expensive.
The accuracy on this is pretty bad, as you can see from the comparison to the Vicon system, so this has very limited use in production, and it seems like it's trying to solve a non-existent problem. It doesn't get rid of the cumbersome suit from motion capture, so you can't really get capture data while performing in front of a camera, and there are already solutions on the market that allow you to create a motion capture setup outside using regular cameras and get motion capture data without any tracking markers. The only new thing this brings to the table is having a really wide range of capture, as the test with the person walking along the curved path shows, but the practical application for something like that is limited. Attaching cameras and trying to create tracks off of the movement of the background just seems a really backwards way of doing this kind of stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a perfect analogy for modern day indie game development, too. I guess things stay the same, the names just change.
Yep, it'll be a terrific world when everyone is considered equal and no preference is given to anybody because your race, gender, and nationality (and hopefully financial background) doesn't dictate your future prospects.
But until that day, white males will continue to bitch about unfair prejudice and reverse racism even after starting at third base and thinking they hit a home run.
So you're saying we should name a deli after him?
I'm definitely interested in it's gaming potential, since they just announced their amazon game studio (http://games.amazon.com/, but I am pretty underwhelmed with how they're managing the streaming service.
I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime and use both for streaming, and Amazon Prime is awful compared to Netflix. It's no wonder that they screwed up their set top box. There's no easy way that's immediately apparent to me on how to search for things that are available for free on Amazon streaming off their website. I've used their app built into Vizio TVs and that sucks too, as searching is again a pain in the ass. They don't even have a standalone app for Windows 8 like Netflix does - it all has to be done through the site which is hard to use. Overall, I love Amazon Prime for the shipping and I like having access to their streaming videos but I use it as little as possible if Netflix has the same show on their service.
Is this really a serious concern? He's already trying to be extradited, who cares if they want him on tax evasion? He's never going to have a trial to make it "legal whistleblowing" and will never be coming back to the US and is trying to get asylum in a country who won't extradite him to the US for espionage, let alone tax evasion.
This isn't about personal responsibility, it's about safety and security. The people who want to ban 3D printed guns (and guns in general) are the people who don't use or want to use guns and want to even the playing field for themselves by getting rid of guns altogether.
Where does the personal responsibility come in? I don't expect the people who are 3D printing guns are all doing it for personal safety and security. I imagine some of them want to print guns so they don't have legal traceable guns and want to go kill people with them and I don't want one of those people killed to be me.
Should we really wait for someone to go on a killing spree with a 3D printed gun or any gun for that matter until they "prove" they can't handle a level of personal responsibility? No, we should probably be proactive about it and limit the ways people can have access to dangerous weaponry.
Why do you find it insulting? When you're given a weapon without training or practice it SHOULD be assumed you're not going to be responsible with it. We require licenses to drive because cars are dangerous without proper instruction, as are guns and most things that we need licenses to operate.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Bloomberg wants everyone to become a plumber so he could lower his plumbing costs. That's the ticket.
My brother used to work for Bloomberg the financial company as a programmer and he was getting paid a shitload of money for it right out of school. If Bloomberg was speaking purely in his own self interest, he would be telling everybody to be a programmer so he could lower those costs.
Being a plumber is more secure than anything in IT. It's not a job that can be outsourced and it requires some training, so not anybody can do it right off the bat.
I work in a creative field (animation and film) and for me the smart phone inspires tons of creativity. Look at all of the amazing apps and games that creative people are doing in this new medium that wouldn't have happened if the developers weren't addicted to their smart phones.
People sitting alone in their living room and being bored doesn't inspire creativity. Creativity is inspired when people surround themselves with other creative ideas and people, and with smart phones, creative ideas and people are closer than ever, right at your fingertips..
Boring people will continue to be bored and uncreative, but creative people will find inspiration in everything, especially in new technologies like mobile devices.
Why does that matter? It means more US workers will have jobs, and foxconn will still have to pay US taxes for the work done here. Still a win all around.
They could just bottle it up and sell it as homeopathic medicine.
I think the loss of several dozen additional children per year, across society, is far outweighed by the extraordinary benefit to the other 99.999%.
And what benefit is that? Apparently, I benefited from dozens of children being lost per year and I didn't even know about it! Thanks, lost children!
I'm sure their parents feel a little differently though and wish their kids had a GPS tracker on them.
Lots of my friends from the Mid-West and South have lots of stories like yours, about being in the woods, away from the rest of the world and being alone while camping or whatever. While that's all well and good, and you could go start a reality show where you survive the wilderness by snatching fish from the river using only your hands, most of society - me included - grew up or live most of their lives in larger urban areas where they need to depend on other people for their survival. There's nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, humans have created everything we have today because we work better in groups and naturally rely on each other.
The only reason I'd say would benefit people from having their technology taken away and left in the woods to fend for themselves is that they'll learn how linked they are to each other and won't take all of the hard work that people have put into creating the technology and a functional society for granted.
It built a real sense of self-control and the confidence to do things on my own.
I have self-control and confidence to do things on my own as well, and I didn't have to get lost in the woods to do so, but hey, different strokes...
I don't see a downside to GPS tracking your kids. We use GPS on our smart phones to find directions to places in our direct neighborhood. It's ubiquitous. The whole "Children need to find out how to get unlost by themselves" is complete luddite garbage. Children are entering a future where this kind of technology is intrinsically linked to their development. Keeping them inside of a tech-free bubble, just because the parents never grew up with the same technology around them ("And they turned out fine!") is just as bad as brainwashing them into religion at an early age, and yet it's something I often hear from my friends and co-workers who are in the technology industry. I also often see it here on Slashdot whenever someone poses a question on what technology they should introduce to their kids.
It sucks so much, you put 180+ hours into it... makes sense.
You and the rest of slashdot are people. These are corporations. They hire teams of people whose sole jobs are to limit the tax burden for the company. If other companies are creating tax havens with offshore shell companies and your accounting team isn't then they're not doing their job and should be fired and replaced with a better team. It's up to the government to close the loopholes on the tax code so that these games can't be played.
Digital won because it's cheaper and easier to manage. Footage goes directly from camera to the editing bay in the same day, as opposed to having to purchase hundreds of feet of film, go through a day or 2 of developing and then seeing your footage. It's just generally easier to produce. The footage, though, DOESN'T look as good, sorry. The most popular digital film camera - the RED - has horrible rolling shutter and noticeable compression issues as well as a way lower dynamic range. Sure, these problems are going to go away over time, but don't think that digital won because it LOOKS any better.
How is loser pays more fair? It still screws the little guy. If I have a legit case against a huge megacorporation and I decide to sue them and lose because they have the best lawyers money can buy, should I have to pay for their million dollar defense? Hell no. Whereas the big megacorporation will have zero problem paying out for my legal defense if I win. The corporations who have lots and lots of money always have the upper hand.
Here's the obligatory proportions post. How many people have been arrested for the housing market crash thus far? How much monetary damage did those people actually do in comparison to this guy?... yeah.
I'd almost rather see that than have them cut to the dude's face as they usually do.
How does
it didn't have many competitors
translate to
No competitors?
Yes, MySpace was a competitor but it was a much smaller market back then and Facebook did it better, so there wasn't too big of a barrier to switching. Now, if people switch completely, they have to take the hundreds of photos they've posted, and lose years of status updates, and wait for all their hundreds of friends to switch over as well - it's a big task just like reformatting your harddrive which is something that most people are also loathe to do even when it would end up being better for them.
Circles is a great concept, one that Facebook is already implementing in some fashion, and even if it's not better than Google's it's Good Enough For Now. Yes, it is too early to be saying G+ is a failed experiment and I didn't say that. I just said you can't compare the environment that Facebook thrived in back then to the environment that Google is facing today. It's a very different landscape and tossing out numbers of early adopters isn't a show of Google's success. I'm also an early adopter, and I still use G+ with Facebook, but I use Facebook a lot more.
Look, you can't really compare the timelines between Facebook and Google+. Facebook has been around for almost a decade, and when it came out it didn't have many competitors, the whole social networking concept was new and experimental. Now Facebook is the established brand in social networking - pretty much invented the market - and it's going to be incredibly difficult for Google to topple it, even if the numbers show it to be oh so much more successful in the short term than Facebook was when it started.
Where's the pitfall? The place was packed with customers and you're just pissed off because a place that was usually empty was not - and you're making assumptions about every single Groupon customer. I use Groupons all the time, and if I found a restaurant off of Groupon that I really liked I would definitely return again, and while I may be a minority in that regard, I think having 4 or 5 return customers out of 100 that stop in because of the Groupon ends up being a good deal. It doesn't sound like you're such a terrific customer since it seems a big reason for you even going there is because their business didn't have many customers and you wanted to avoid the people.
I've been saying this for awhile now. I only finish a handful of games a year and give up on many more. I actually finished RDR but feel it would have been a much better game if they took half of it out.
I, personally, can't wait until the average game length is 10 hours. I play games for the story and every game seems to have the problem of dragging the story with pointless side quests just to get the game over 20 hours long. I'd gladly pay a little less for half the game if that means the stories are tighter and more fulfilling.
I think if games are to get as mainstream as movies, they need to be shorter to take into account that adults only have so many hours of the day to watch/play your stuff. Playing a game these days is like reading an epic novel - you either need to plug away at it a few pages/minutes at a time for months, or you take a week off of life and grind though it like a full-time job. I'd like more options where I could finish a serious game (like RDR, not like Angry Birds) in the time it would take to watch a few movies.
At some point, you can't just lower your salary. Of course it's not better to remain unemployed than lower your salary but older people have to put their kids through college, have a mortgage, and other expenses that a 25 year old just doesn't have so they will always be more expensive.
The accuracy on this is pretty bad, as you can see from the comparison to the Vicon system, so this has very limited use in production, and it seems like it's trying to solve a non-existent problem. It doesn't get rid of the cumbersome suit from motion capture, so you can't really get capture data while performing in front of a camera, and there are already solutions on the market that allow you to create a motion capture setup outside using regular cameras and get motion capture data without any tracking markers. The only new thing this brings to the table is having a really wide range of capture, as the test with the person walking along the curved path shows, but the practical application for something like that is limited. Attaching cameras and trying to create tracks off of the movement of the background just seems a really backwards way of doing this kind of stuff.