There are many people who sincerely believe they've been abducted by space aliens too. The fact that they believe it doesn't make it true and doesn't make their testimony evidence.
I'm not saying either claim is false, i'm saying that there is no number of anecdotes you can gather that will count as scientific evidence.
that post was very informative. it sounds like the bbc's funding by the government isn't really germane to the download service. The rights and obligations involved in that funding seem exclusively to apply to broadcasting programs and don't consider subsequent, non-broadcast, distribution of the same content.
I'm confused. Both HD-DVD and BluRay include Microsoft's VC-1 codec as a manditory-to-implement codec. So any device capable of decoding either of the two high-definition DVD formats is required to include a Microsoft codec. Why is this any different?
Well, both formats require VC-1, MPEG-2, and H.264 video codecs to be implemented. VC-1, while developed by Microsoft, is a published standard from SMPTE. If you implement the published standard, movies from either physical media (that use VC-1 for video encoding) will play on your device.
This is different from using the Windows Media format because nobody else can implement it legally. No video player other than Windows Media Player can play them; and WMP is only available on Windows. This forces the BBC audience to use Windows and WMP if they want to partake of the content.
Even MP3 isn't an "open standard" - it's protected by a series of patents that are owned by various corporations (AT&T, Freunhoffer), so would the BBC be precluded from distributing its content via MP3s?
MP3 is a standard that requires licensing. However, it can be (and is) implemented by many media players and on many platforms. It isn't the same issue.
Hopefully, that helps clear up the confusion as to why the situation with the BBC isn't the same as the HD formats or MP3.
Based on your statements about the license fee, streaming via the internet is not a broadcast and that means that nobody is required to have a license to view the streamed content. The streaming service is still implemented and maintained with government funding. As such, and since it doesn't require a license fee, they should provide that service in a format that is accessible to all citizens of that government who wish to use it.
I'm not British, so i don't know exactly how the whole bbc/government relationship is set up. It is possible there are aspects of that relationship that would change my view, but based on your description and the article in the summary, that's the view i've developed.
Here in the Philippines the entire country is covered with all the latest little GSM acronyms. A country which you US types have a tendency to refer to as '3rd world' There might be the odd bit of corruption here (sarcasm), but it is most definitely a country with 1st world amenities and technology throughout.
The Philippines cover 115,124 sq mi and have a population of about 88,700,000 people. The U.S. covers 3,537,438 sq mi and has a population of about 301,139,947 people. Texas by itself covers 261,797 sq mi and has a population of about 23,507,783 people.
That gives the Pilippines a population density of about 770.47 people/sq mi, the U.S. a population density of about 85.13 people / sq mi, and Texas a population density of about 89.79 people / sq mi.
It isn't really a valid comparison to use the GSM penetration of a small country with a high population density as evidence that the geographic size of a country almost 31 times larger and with a much lower population density doesn't have an effect on the penetration of GSM there. It is vastly more expensive and complicated to roll out infrastructure for a nationwide service in the U.S. than in the Philippines in that respect.
That isn't to say that telephony companies in the U.S. don't artificially restrict new technologies to maximize their profits and minimize their costs. They do and they suck, but the size of the U.S. has a big impact on the costs they are trying to avoid by ignoring those technologies.
hile i might be willing to grant you that for individual trading firms, speed is more important than stability, you cannot make that argument for the whole stock exchange. when morgan stanley or some hedge fund loses connectivity, they stop making money for a few hours. no big deal really. if the NYSE goes down, it's a major economic catastrophe. stability and capacity are the most important things! obviously they need speed to keep up with the demands of the traders, but that just translates to high volume for the NYSE's servers.
Don't be silly. That would never happen.
I mean, who has ever heard of the stock market crashing?
that is a good point that i didn't make clear. I do not advocate laws to punish journalists for getting it wrong.
I wouldn't be opposed to a lawsuit by parties harmed by this kind of incompetent journalism, but I think the most effective way for the public at large to punish this behaviour is to stop using them as reliable sources of information.
If they had a source, and a valid reason to believe that source was credible, I don't see how they can be punished for that. I would hope they had more of a reason to believe it was credible than that it came from an "apple.com" e-mail address.
If you start punishing reporters for getting a story wrong based on a faulty source when a reasonable person would have accepted the source as credible, you will basically kill investigative journalism (as if it wasn't close enough to dead in this country as it is).
Where was the investigative part of this journalism?
One credible source is the basis for a story. Then the journalist does some actual investigating to corroborate and support the story. Then he publishes, usually after giving anyone involved the opportunity to contribute their position to the article.
In this case, the writer did nothing to corroborate the source. He didn't contact Apple for confirmation or denial. He didn't even check the Apple website to see if the press release the internal email claims was published today was actually published.
Punishing reporters for getting a story that completely wrong based on a faulty source they did nothing to verify would resurrect invetigative journalism, not kill it. The reason it is so close to dead is because people give this kind of shoddy work a free pass.
yeah. it ran ok for me in 512 megs when it first came out but it has long since passed that being enough ram. My wife's computer had 512 megs before i upgraded it and COV was unplayable. I dont think they ever updated the minimum and recommended requirements, even though they added new features that made those requirements unrealistic.
City of Foozles is also extremely CPU bound, in my experience, that is not the case. I have found memory to be more important than cpu.
and from experiences in the CoV closed beta I strongly believe that their art team has carte blanche to implement stuff without optimization or consulting with the coding teams.
well, it was a beta.
It took them close to a year to clean up the mess that was Arachnos laboratory maps-- in every one, there was a 'sour spot' that would cause virtually any machine to hang for ten to thirty seconds, presumably as a combination of poorly optimized textures, LoD nightmares (much of those maps is semi-transparent, so occlusion culling has a markedly reduced effect than it does on other indoor maps)
I have never experienced any of these "sour spot" issues. I've been playing COV since it was released and COH since a couple of weeks after it was released.
I did have chugging issues in COV in Mercy Isle, but i upgraded my RAM to 2gigs and it's very smooth now. My wife found COV unplayable because of lag. I upgraded her to 2 gigs of ram, and it's smooth for her almost everywhere in COV and everywhere in COH. The only advantage i have over her is load times into zones (my processor is much beefier than hers).
and the geometry holes that are still there to this day.
yeah, they've had some problems in the past with holes in the geometry that players and mobs could fall through. Most of them have been closed, but there are some still around. Most of the time now, it's really just a problem because bad guys will jump out of the map during a kill all mission and you have to ask a gm to bring them back for you. It would be nice if all of the leaks would be fixed though.
New content like the Universities are particularly awful-- when I enter one on my machine, the poor thing chugs for a minute while the shaders visibly load in texture by texture, and repeat the process when I turn to survey the scene.
I have run all over the universities and done the inventions tutorial. I have had no issues like you describe. Maybe it is your video drivers? I used to have problems when I had an ATI card (3 years ago, when i started playing) because of a bug in the drivers. It caused lots of messed up graphical glitches that made the game unplayable in some places. I replaced that card with an NVidia card and have had no problems since.
Before the universities became active, there was a bug that would allow you to fly under the geometry in one of the city zones where there was one; CoX simulates indoor chambers in world zones by placing them under the accessible map, so by going under the geometry you could see the inside of a store, with NPCs standing around and PCs flitting about willy-nilly.
that was a fun bug. My favourite effect of the indoor areas being located outside the accessible map was how the tsoo sorcerers used to teleport away from fights and into stores. That was funny as long as you werent the guy jacking with his enhancements in the shop when the sorcerer showed up.
close, but i think you are leaving out one piece of this.
Microsoft doesnt want a chunk. they want it all. The way they are going to get it all is to get all media flowing through a microsoft product. They are trying to do this two ways. First is media formats. Second is devices. The end game is to push all media into a microsoft media format and use it to exclude everyone else from being able to provide media players without paying them. Then they can make royalties off of all content produced for the home and make royalties off of all devices produced to play that content. They can also undercut all other media center producers by coming to market with products that do not have to absorb these kinds of royalty costs.
I believe microsoft views the production and home use of media content as the new target monopoly to sustain their company in the future. The problem they are having is that they didnt have an effective way to leverage their existing monopolies to force their way into that market. That's where directx, gaming for windows, and the xbox comes in. It's the crowbar to leverage the windows monopoly into the console market. The console market gets them in the living room (something they have repeatedly tried and failed to do). Once in the living room, the console becomes the media center they've always wanted. Once they have the media center in the living room, they start working on locking up the media formats.
That is what their involvement in hddvd and the zune are about as well.
The reason microsoft is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year on all of this is because they know the existing monopolies are doomed. They know they need to use them to build a new monopoly before they die if they are going to survive as a company.
With all due respect, that sounds more like your hindsight bias talking. I can imagine how critical world powers at the time didn't have the same confidence you have in Egypt's willingness to adhere to those terms.
I dont really have a bias about it. It happened before i was born and i find it interesting historically, but i have nothing personally invested in the event. The reason i believe they had no intention to close it is because the whole purpose of nationalizing it was to generate revenue to fund the construction of the hydroelectric dam. Interfering with the traffic through it would have defeated the point of nationalizing it to begin with.
The fact that they later tried to block Israeli use of it, to me, speaks more to the long running conflicts between the two countries more than to a general agenda Egypt had with the suez canal. Also, that event happened over 10 years after the suez canal crisis. Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt who nationalized the canal, had been dead for a long time at that point.
Eqypt had no intention of closing off the suez canal. They wanted it for revenue and closing it off wouldn't have been constructive.
At the time, Egypt was trying to build a big hydroelectric dam and needed money. The U.S. and Britain were going to foot most of the bill, but Egypt started getting cozy with the Soviet Union. The U.S. said if they wanted to be buddies with the Soviets, the U.S. wasnt going to fund the dam. Britain agreed and pulled their funding also. Egypt nationalized the suez canal to get the money to build the dam. Britain and France got together and got Israel to invade Egypt. Britain and France then showed up and occupied the canal to "protect" it and enforce peace in the area (mostly by attacking Egypt). The U.S. told Israel to cut it out and they backed off. Nasser sank a bunch of ships and blocked off the canal. Britain's economy tanked due to oil shortages caused by the suez being blocked. The Canadian delegate to the U.N. introduced a resolution to create an official peace keeping force for the U.N. This force then took control of the suez canal and sent Britain and France home. Britian gave up willingly since their economy was fubar and they recognised the plan was a pretty big mistake. France went begrudgingly.
Also, the UN had already acknowledged that Egypt had the right to nationalize the canal zone as long as shipping remained unaffected. Later (much after this incident) Egypt did try to close the canal to Israeli traffic.
The UN of those days was not by any means the amorphous UN we know now. That was prior to the foundation of the league of unaligned states, prior to most members of the Warsaw block being members and it was very clearly pushing one sole line. The line of US, UK, France and a few others. The UN of those days authorised and deployed forces actively engaged in several local conflicts, most notably Korea. The US hates referring to them this way nowdays, but the South in the conflict was known as the "UN Forces" (just read any newspaper of the day). So UN siding with someone prior to mid-1960es cannot be used to signify neither moral superiority nor the world opinion for that matter. All it says that this was US and UK opinion of the day.
prior to the suez canal incident, there was no charter in the United Nations that allowed them to field peacekeeping forces. that ability was proposed by the Canadian delegate and passed to allow the U.N. to create a force that could deal with the suez canal crisis. The U.N. also immediately opposed and condemned the action against Egypt. It had previously acknowledged that Egypt had the right to nationalize the canal zone as long as shipping was not interfered with. The U.S. and Soviet Union also condemned the action against Egypt.
It's not a matter of whether pretending to be a Power Ranger leads to increased acts of violence. The issue is that this kind of role-playing helps form the basis of the child's values. If you disagree, ask yourself if you'd want your kids playing Slaveowners and Abolitionists instead of Cowboys and Indians.
depending on the context of how they are playing the game, i wouldnt mind them playing Slaveowners and Abolitionists. It has the opportunity for them to understand why slavery and racism are bad things.
By that token, what values are they learning from Power Rangers and Cowboys and Indians? That problems should be solved with violence and people who arent white are out to scalp them? (this is a bit inflammatory, i know, but i really am curious why you think Slaveowners and Abolitionists wouldn't teach them anything and the other two would teach them something good.)
The point of this type of play is to reinforce societies values. Children want to be the Hero so they emulate the qualities of the Hero.
Someone has to be the villain, or there isnt a game to play. The villain is also played by a child.
In many modern video games the protagonist is an Anti-Hero. GTA is a perfect example. I won't buy it for my kids because I don't think that a game that rewards players for theft, blackmail, racketeering, murder and selling drugs is appropriate.
Great. You are being a parent. I commend you on that.
Now I recognize that the current rating system places far more emphasis on sex and violence than the actual subject matter, but fortunately most developers that think anti-social behavior is cool also think graphic violence is cool. This means that most of the games I would object to get rated as Mature. There are some that get rated as Mature that I don't object to, but then I can buy them for my kids if I choose to do so.
That's pretty much what i advocated that parents should be doing.
The line that gets parroted a lot is that it's the parent's responsibility to keep their kids from buying these games. That's a bunch of crap. It's not unreasonable for a 13 year old to spend a Saturday afternoon with his friends playing stickball in the abandoned lot or watching a matinee at the cinema. You know what else isn't unreasonable? It isn't unreasonable to expect salespeople not to sell an M rated game to a bunch of kids that decided to pool their money and buy Grand Theft Auto 27 instead of going to the theatre.
I guess you missed the part where i said stores should enforce the industry promoted rating system, just like the movie industry does.
I find the idea that allowing children to play amongst themselves for a few hours without parents hovering over their every move or sending them to convenience store for some milk is somehow shirking parental responsibilities to be ludicrous.
It's also a non-sequitor since i never promoted that idea.
Part of rearing a child is teaching them independence. That requires doing things on their own without a parent present. It is the responsibility of other adults to step in and moderate unsafe behavior when children are out of the immediate supervision of their parents.
I disagree with this. I have no responsibility to moderate the behaviour of anyone else. I do have a responsibility to inform the proper authorities about illegal behaviour, but that isn't really what we're talking about here.
Independence also requires kids to be able to make their own mistakes and be exposed to ideas that you dont necessarily approve of. It isnt the rest of the world's responsibility to protect your kid from that either.
The first thing the kid is going to do to assert his independence is start doing things you don't approve of (usually for the sole reason that you disapprove of it). It's a phase kids go through.
We shouldn't need a law to make it clear that it might be a bad idea to sell a product that is clearly marked "Mature 17+" to
Anyone who has watched kids get fired up by watching Power Rangers and run around kicking shit knows that media has an effect on children.
The kids also know they are playing make-believe. If you stopped the kid and asked him what he was doing, he knows it isnt real and he knows the Power Rangers arent real. The kid is having fun pretending. That doesnt tell us anything about long term effects of watching power rangers on real life incidents of violence. It is really no different than when kids used to play cowboys and indians. That didn't lead to mass shootings by children.
Finally, I think most of us accept that a video game (or other virtual reality experience) is valid training for real-life events.
Sure. Video games can be, and have been, used to train leadership skills, tactics, pattern recognition, etc. video games do not teach you how to shoot a weapon because the interface you use for the game has to relationship to firing an actual weapon. You can maybe learn academic information through simulation of causes and effects (like firing a mortar in a simulation), but you aren't going to get better at firing a gun without experience firing an actual gun.
The 9/11 highjackers, for example, learned to fly through the use of a simulator. So referring to Grand Theft Auto as a thug-life simulator is not as unreasonable as a lot of us make it out to be.
The 9/11 hijackers learned to fly at a flight schools in the U.S. Some of them trained on flight simulators in flight schools. That isnt the same thing as playing microsoft's flight simulator. (though, to be honest, i found microsoft's flight simulator boring enough that i started crashing my plane into buildings)
Calling Grand Theft Auto a thug life simulator is as reasonable as calling the Rainbow Six series anti-terrorist training simulators. (which, personally, i find absurd)
So, by that line of reasoning, I entirely support the restriction of sales of violent games, movies, music, or what have you to persons over the age of 18.
Considering that i disagree with that line of reasoning, you probably won't be surprised to hear that i do not support the restriction of sales of violent games for those reasons.
Why? Because parents are [ostensibly] responsible for what children do. Note that I do NOT support EVER treating a minor as an adult. You can't give someone responsibilities without rights. Respect works both ways, but fear only works in one.
Yes, parents should be responsible for their children. And for that reason i support voluntary enforcement of the rating system that exists, just like the system used for movies. It isnt that i think the material is harmful to the child, it's that the parent has a right to restrict the child's access to material the parent thinks the child isnt ready for, or disapproves of. That's the responsibility of the parent and i'm ok with a voluntary rating system that requires the parent to approve the child's purchase of the material. If the parent doesn't do that job, or the child finds an alternate way to get it (getting an adult friend to buy it for him or something), that's the parent's problem to deal with and has nothing to do with the stores or the content producers.
With respect to your issue of never treating a minor as an adult...even as kids, they have inalienable rights. They also do have some responsibilities inherent in those inalienable rights. I dont think being a kid mitigates your responsibility to respect other peoples' right to live, for example.
I agree that it is the parents' responsibility, but we shouldn't be passing laws to do it for them, even if they aren't doing it. Maybe, instead, we should pass laws requiring the parents' to be involved in raising their kids. (note, i'm not seriously suggesting that. a law like that would be even more ridiculously abused than our current child protective care laws)
i meant that the scientists are probably using the kelvin scale for notation. i didn't intend to imply the units were different sizes. i'm posting from the web browser in a ps3. typing with a controller is very distracting. i'll go upstairs and use a keyboard from now on.
The only game i liked on the Wii was tennis. Bowling was ok, but i am not that into bowling (virtual or otherwise). Boxing was terrible. (didn't try golf, but it looked ok).
Ultimately, i really enjoy playing wii tennis and do so about once a month at lan parties at a friend's house. Other than that, i accept that i am not the target audience for the console. that doesn't make me crazy.
Meanwhile, on the subject of motion controllers:
wii tennis is a good example of excellent use of motion control.
I do have a ps3 and find the use of motion control in flOw and blast factor to be good examples as well.
I dont think it needs to be in every game (thank god they didnt try to use it in Virtua Fighter 5), but it can be great when used responibly. (I'd like to play an air combat type game using the motion control interface to steer. i would like the option to invert the y axis also. that's my one issue with flOw)
I think it is indicitive of Microsoft's attitude as a company that they are waiting for someone else to prove the value of new ideas and then follow.
It appears his PH.D is from Queen Mary's College. According to wikipedia, Queen Mary's College has an international reputation as a research college and is not a bad pedigree for sciences.
I never considered going to a university abroad, so my information about the quality of the school is from wikipedia. It may or may not be accurate. I'm sure someone else can confirm or deny the quality of the school.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many people who sincerely believe they've been abducted by space aliens too.
The fact that they believe it doesn't make it true and doesn't make their testimony evidence.
I'm not saying either claim is false, i'm saying that there is no number of anecdotes you can gather that will count as scientific evidence.
You are incorrect. This is his actual entry on the florida bar member search page :
8 98F95585256A830051348B?OpenDocument
http://www.floridabar.org/names.nsf/All/07D079003
as you can see, he is still eligible to practice law in florida.
(if he weren't, there would be no need to give him a 90 day suspension)
that post was very informative. it sounds like the bbc's funding by the government isn't really germane to the download service. The rights and obligations involved in that funding seem exclusively to apply to broadcasting programs and don't consider subsequent, non-broadcast, distribution of the same content.
I'm confused. Both HD-DVD and BluRay include Microsoft's VC-1 codec as a manditory-to-implement codec. So any device capable of decoding either of the two high-definition DVD formats is required to include a Microsoft codec. Why is this any different?
Well, both formats require VC-1, MPEG-2, and H.264 video codecs to be implemented. VC-1, while developed by Microsoft, is a published standard from SMPTE. If you implement the published standard, movies from either physical media (that use VC-1 for video encoding) will play on your device.
This is different from using the Windows Media format because nobody else can implement it legally. No video player other than Windows Media Player can play them; and WMP is only available on Windows. This forces the BBC audience to use Windows and WMP if they want to partake of the content.
Even MP3 isn't an "open standard" - it's protected by a series of patents that are owned by various corporations (AT&T, Freunhoffer), so would the BBC be precluded from distributing its content via MP3s?
MP3 is a standard that requires licensing. However, it can be (and is) implemented by many media players and on many platforms. It isn't the same issue.
Hopefully, that helps clear up the confusion as to why the situation with the BBC isn't the same as the HD formats or MP3.
I disagree with your conclusion.
Based on your statements about the license fee, streaming via the internet is not a broadcast and that means that nobody is required to have a license to view the streamed content. The streaming service is still implemented and maintained with government funding. As such, and since it doesn't require a license fee, they should provide that service in a format that is accessible to all citizens of that government who wish to use it.
I'm not British, so i don't know exactly how the whole bbc/government relationship is set up. It is possible there are aspects of that relationship that would change my view, but based on your description and the article in the summary, that's the view i've developed.
Here in the Philippines the entire country is covered with all the latest little GSM acronyms. A country which you US types have a tendency to refer to as '3rd world' There might be the odd bit of corruption here (sarcasm), but it is most definitely a country with 1st world amenities and technology throughout.
/sq mi,
The Philippines cover 115,124 sq mi and have a population of about 88,700,000 people.
The U.S. covers 3,537,438 sq mi and has a population of about 301,139,947 people.
Texas by itself covers 261,797 sq mi and has a population of about 23,507,783 people.
That gives the Pilippines a population density of about 770.47 people
the U.S. a population density of about 85.13 people / sq mi,
and Texas a population density of about 89.79 people / sq mi.
It isn't really a valid comparison to use the GSM penetration of a small country with a high population density as evidence that the geographic size of a country almost 31 times larger and with a much lower population density doesn't have an effect on the penetration of GSM there.
It is vastly more expensive and complicated to roll out infrastructure for a nationwide service in the U.S. than in the Philippines in that respect.
That isn't to say that telephony companies in the U.S. don't artificially restrict new technologies to maximize their profits and minimize their costs. They do and they suck, but the size of the U.S. has a big impact on the costs they are trying to avoid by ignoring those technologies.
actually, i was joking. it was intended as an implicit reference to the stock market crash of 1929.
hile i might be willing to grant you that for individual trading firms, speed is more important than stability, you cannot make that argument for the whole stock exchange. when morgan stanley or some hedge fund loses connectivity, they stop making money for a few hours. no big deal really. if the NYSE goes down, it's a major economic catastrophe. stability and capacity are the most important things! obviously they need speed to keep up with the demands of the traders, but that just translates to high volume for the NYSE's servers.
Don't be silly. That would never happen.
I mean, who has ever heard of the stock market crashing?
that is a good point that i didn't make clear. I do not advocate laws to punish journalists for getting it wrong.
I wouldn't be opposed to a lawsuit by parties harmed by this kind of incompetent journalism, but I think the most effective way for the public at large to punish this behaviour is to stop using them as reliable sources of information.
If they had a source, and a valid reason to believe that source was credible, I don't see how they can be punished for that. I would hope they had more of a reason to believe it was credible than that it came from an "apple.com" e-mail address.
If you start punishing reporters for getting a story wrong based on a faulty source when a reasonable person would have accepted the source as credible, you will basically kill investigative journalism (as if it wasn't close enough to dead in this country as it is).
Where was the investigative part of this journalism?
One credible source is the basis for a story. Then the journalist does some actual investigating to corroborate and support the story. Then he publishes, usually after giving anyone involved the opportunity to contribute their position to the article.
In this case, the writer did nothing to corroborate the source. He didn't contact Apple for confirmation or denial. He didn't even check the Apple website to see if the press release the internal email claims was published today was actually published.
Punishing reporters for getting a story that completely wrong based on a faulty source they did nothing to verify would resurrect invetigative journalism, not kill it. The reason it is so close to dead is because people give this kind of shoddy work a free pass.
yeah. it ran ok for me in 512 megs when it first came out but it has long since passed that being enough ram. My wife's computer had 512 megs before i upgraded it and COV was unplayable. I dont think they ever updated the minimum and recommended requirements, even though they added new features that made those requirements unrealistic.
City of Foozles is also extremely CPU bound,
in my experience, that is not the case. I have found memory to be more important than cpu.
and from experiences in the CoV closed beta I strongly believe that their art team has carte blanche to implement stuff without optimization or consulting with the coding teams.
well, it was a beta.
It took them close to a year to clean up the mess that was Arachnos laboratory maps-- in every one, there was a 'sour spot' that would cause virtually any machine to hang for ten to thirty seconds, presumably as a combination of poorly optimized textures, LoD nightmares (much of those maps is semi-transparent, so occlusion culling has a markedly reduced effect than it does on other indoor maps)
I have never experienced any of these "sour spot" issues. I've been playing COV since it was released and COH since a couple of weeks after it was released.
I did have chugging issues in COV in Mercy Isle, but i upgraded my RAM to 2gigs and it's very smooth now. My wife found COV unplayable because of lag. I upgraded her to 2 gigs of ram, and it's smooth for her almost everywhere in COV and everywhere in COH. The only advantage i have over her is load times into zones (my processor is much beefier than hers).
and the geometry holes that are still there to this day.
yeah, they've had some problems in the past with holes in the geometry that players and mobs could fall through. Most of them have been closed, but there are some still around. Most of the time now, it's really just a problem because bad guys will jump out of the map during a kill all mission and you have to ask a gm to bring them back for you. It would be nice if all of the leaks would be fixed though.
New content like the Universities are particularly awful-- when I enter one on my machine, the poor thing chugs for a minute while the shaders visibly load in texture by texture, and repeat the process when I turn to survey the scene.
I have run all over the universities and done the inventions tutorial. I have had no issues like you describe. Maybe it is your video drivers? I used to have problems when I had an ATI card (3 years ago, when i started playing) because of a bug in the drivers. It caused lots of messed up graphical glitches that made the game unplayable in some places. I replaced that card with an NVidia card and have had no problems since.
Before the universities became active, there was a bug that would allow you to fly under the geometry in one of the city zones where there was one; CoX simulates indoor chambers in world zones by placing them under the accessible map, so by going under the geometry you could see the inside of a store, with NPCs standing around and PCs flitting about willy-nilly.
that was a fun bug. My favourite effect of the indoor areas being located outside the accessible map was how the tsoo sorcerers used to teleport away from fights and into stores. That was funny as long as you werent the guy jacking with his enhancements in the shop when the sorcerer showed up.
I took his meaning to be that the 150,000 number is an overstatement of the number of layoffs they can realistically have.
close, but i think you are leaving out one piece of this.
Microsoft doesnt want a chunk. they want it all. The way they are going to get it all is to get all media flowing through a microsoft product. They are trying to do this two ways. First is media formats. Second is devices. The end game is to push all media into a microsoft media format and use it to exclude everyone else from being able to provide media players without paying them. Then they can make royalties off of all content produced for the home and make royalties off of all devices produced to play that content. They can also undercut all other media center producers by coming to market with products that do not have to absorb these kinds of royalty costs.
I believe microsoft views the production and home use of media content as the new target monopoly to sustain their company in the future. The problem they are having is that they didnt have an effective way to leverage their existing monopolies to force their way into that market. That's where directx, gaming for windows, and the xbox comes in. It's the crowbar to leverage the windows monopoly into the console market. The console market gets them in the living room (something they have repeatedly tried and failed to do). Once in the living room, the console becomes the media center they've always wanted. Once they have the media center in the living room, they start working on locking up the media formats.
That is what their involvement in hddvd and the zune are about as well.
The reason microsoft is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year on all of this is because they know the existing monopolies are doomed. They know they need to use them to build a new monopoly before they die if they are going to survive as a company.
With all due respect, that sounds more like your hindsight bias talking. I can imagine how critical world powers at the time didn't have the same confidence you have in Egypt's willingness to adhere to those terms.
I dont really have a bias about it. It happened before i was born and i find it interesting historically, but i have nothing personally invested in the event. The reason i believe they had no intention to close it is because the whole purpose of nationalizing it was to generate revenue to fund the construction of the hydroelectric dam. Interfering with the traffic through it would have defeated the point of nationalizing it to begin with.
The fact that they later tried to block Israeli use of it, to me, speaks more to the long running conflicts between the two countries more than to a general agenda Egypt had with the suez canal. Also, that event happened over 10 years after the suez canal crisis. Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt who nationalized the canal, had been dead for a long time at that point.
Eqypt had no intention of closing off the suez canal. They wanted it for revenue and closing it off wouldn't have been constructive.
At the time, Egypt was trying to build a big hydroelectric dam and needed money. The U.S. and Britain were going to foot most of the bill, but Egypt started getting cozy with the Soviet Union. The U.S. said if they wanted to be buddies with the Soviets, the U.S. wasnt going to fund the dam. Britain agreed and pulled their funding also. Egypt nationalized the suez canal to get the money to build the dam. Britain and France got together and got Israel to invade Egypt. Britain and France then showed up and occupied the canal to "protect" it and enforce peace in the area (mostly by attacking Egypt). The U.S. told Israel to cut it out and they backed off. Nasser sank a bunch of ships and blocked off the canal. Britain's economy tanked due to oil shortages caused by the suez being blocked. The Canadian delegate to the U.N. introduced a resolution to create an official peace keeping force for the U.N. This force then took control of the suez canal and sent Britain and France home. Britian gave up willingly since their economy was fubar and they recognised the plan was a pretty big mistake. France went begrudgingly.
Also, the UN had already acknowledged that Egypt had the right to nationalize the canal zone as long as shipping remained unaffected. Later (much after this incident) Egypt did try to close the canal to Israeli traffic.
The UN of those days was not by any means the amorphous UN we know now. That was prior to the foundation of the league of unaligned states, prior to most members of the Warsaw block being members and it was very clearly pushing one sole line. The line of US, UK, France and a few others. The UN of those days authorised and deployed forces actively engaged in several local conflicts, most notably Korea. The US hates referring to them this way nowdays, but the South in the conflict was known as the "UN Forces" (just read any newspaper of the day). So UN siding with someone prior to mid-1960es cannot be used to signify neither moral superiority nor the world opinion for that matter. All it says that this was US and UK opinion of the day.
prior to the suez canal incident, there was no charter in the United Nations that allowed them to field peacekeeping forces. that ability was proposed by the Canadian delegate and passed to allow the U.N. to create a force that could deal with the suez canal crisis. The U.N. also immediately opposed and condemned the action against Egypt. It had previously acknowledged that Egypt had the right to nationalize the canal zone as long as shipping was not interfered with.
The U.S. and Soviet Union also condemned the action against Egypt.
It's not a matter of whether pretending to be a Power Ranger leads to increased acts of violence. The issue is that this kind of role-playing helps form the basis of the child's values. If you disagree, ask yourself if you'd want your kids playing Slaveowners and Abolitionists instead of Cowboys and Indians.
depending on the context of how they are playing the game, i wouldnt mind them playing Slaveowners and Abolitionists. It has the opportunity for them to understand why slavery and racism are bad things.
By that token, what values are they learning from Power Rangers and Cowboys and Indians? That problems should be solved with violence and people who arent white are out to scalp them? (this is a bit inflammatory, i know, but i really am curious why you think Slaveowners and Abolitionists wouldn't teach them anything and the other two would teach them something good.)
The point of this type of play is to reinforce societies values. Children want to be the Hero so they emulate the qualities of the Hero.
Someone has to be the villain, or there isnt a game to play. The villain is also played by a child.
In many modern video games the protagonist is an Anti-Hero. GTA is a perfect example. I won't buy it for my kids because I don't think that a game that rewards players for theft, blackmail, racketeering, murder and selling drugs is appropriate.
Great. You are being a parent. I commend you on that.
Now I recognize that the current rating system places far more emphasis on sex and violence than the actual subject matter, but fortunately most developers that think anti-social behavior is cool also think graphic violence is cool. This means that most of the games I would object to get rated as Mature. There are some that get rated as Mature that I don't object to, but then I can buy them for my kids if I choose to do so.
That's pretty much what i advocated that parents should be doing.
The line that gets parroted a lot is that it's the parent's responsibility to keep their kids from buying these games. That's a bunch of crap. It's not unreasonable for a 13 year old to spend a Saturday afternoon with his friends playing stickball in the abandoned lot or watching a matinee at the cinema. You know what else isn't unreasonable? It isn't unreasonable to expect salespeople not to sell an M rated game to a bunch of kids that decided to pool their money and buy Grand Theft Auto 27 instead of going to the theatre.
I guess you missed the part where i said stores should enforce the industry promoted rating system, just like the movie industry does.
I find the idea that allowing children to play amongst themselves for a few hours without parents hovering over their every move or sending them to convenience store for some milk is somehow shirking parental responsibilities to be ludicrous.
It's also a non-sequitor since i never promoted that idea.
Part of rearing a child is teaching them independence. That requires doing things on their own without a parent present. It is the responsibility of other adults to step in and moderate unsafe behavior when children are out of the immediate supervision of their parents.
I disagree with this. I have no responsibility to moderate the behaviour of anyone else. I do have a responsibility to inform the proper authorities about illegal behaviour, but that isn't really what we're talking about here.
Independence also requires kids to be able to make their own mistakes and be exposed to ideas that you dont necessarily approve of. It isnt the rest of the world's responsibility to protect your kid from that either.
The first thing the kid is going to do to assert his independence is start doing things you don't approve of (usually for the sole reason that you disapprove of it). It's a phase kids go through.
We shouldn't need a law to make it clear that it might be a bad idea to sell a product that is clearly marked "Mature 17+" to
I've played a little bit of R6:Vegas. I've also played Rogue Spear and Raven Shield.
I guess i'm qualified as an anti-terrorist expert.
Anyone who has watched kids get fired up by watching Power Rangers and run around kicking shit knows that media has an effect on children.
The kids also know they are playing make-believe. If you stopped the kid and asked him what he was doing, he knows it isnt real and he knows the Power Rangers arent real.
The kid is having fun pretending. That doesnt tell us anything about long term effects of watching power rangers on real life incidents of violence.
It is really no different than when kids used to play cowboys and indians. That didn't lead to mass shootings by children.
Finally, I think most of us accept that a video game (or other virtual reality experience) is valid training for real-life events.
Sure. Video games can be, and have been, used to train leadership skills, tactics, pattern recognition, etc. video games do not teach you how to shoot a weapon because the interface you use for the game has to relationship to firing an actual weapon. You can maybe learn academic information through simulation of causes and effects (like firing a mortar in a simulation), but you aren't going to get better at firing a gun without experience firing an actual gun.
The 9/11 highjackers, for example, learned to fly through the use of a simulator. So referring to Grand Theft Auto as a thug-life simulator is not as unreasonable as a lot of us make it out to be.
The 9/11 hijackers learned to fly at a flight schools in the U.S. Some of them trained on flight simulators in flight schools. That isnt the same thing as playing microsoft's flight simulator. (though, to be honest, i found microsoft's flight simulator boring enough that i started crashing my plane into buildings)
Calling Grand Theft Auto a thug life simulator is as reasonable as calling the Rainbow Six series anti-terrorist training simulators. (which, personally, i find absurd)
So, by that line of reasoning, I entirely support the restriction of sales of violent games, movies, music, or what have you to persons over the age of 18.
Considering that i disagree with that line of reasoning, you probably won't be surprised to hear that i do not support the restriction of sales of violent games for those reasons.
Why? Because parents are [ostensibly] responsible for what children do. Note that I do NOT support EVER treating a minor as an adult. You can't give someone responsibilities without rights. Respect works both ways, but fear only works in one.
Yes, parents should be responsible for their children. And for that reason i support voluntary enforcement of the rating system that exists, just like the system used for movies. It isnt that i think the material is harmful to the child, it's that the parent has a right to restrict the child's access to material the parent thinks the child isnt ready for, or disapproves of. That's the responsibility of the parent and i'm ok with a voluntary rating system that requires the parent to approve the child's purchase of the material. If the parent doesn't do that job, or the child finds an alternate way to get it (getting an adult friend to buy it for him or something), that's the parent's problem to deal with and has nothing to do with the stores or the content producers.
With respect to your issue of never treating a minor as an adult...even as kids, they have inalienable rights. They also do have some responsibilities inherent in those inalienable rights. I dont think being a kid mitigates your responsibility to respect other peoples' right to live, for example.
I agree that it is the parents' responsibility, but we shouldn't be passing laws to do it for them, even if they aren't doing it. Maybe, instead, we should pass laws requiring the parents' to be involved in raising their kids. (note, i'm not seriously suggesting that. a law like that would be even more ridiculously abused than our current child protective care laws)
true
i meant that the scientists are probably using the kelvin scale for notation. i didn't intend to imply the units were different sizes.
i'm posting from the web browser in a ps3. typing with a controller is very distracting.
i'll go upstairs and use a keyboard from now on.
absolute zero is zero degrees kelvin. the article notes that that is -273 degrees celcius.
(which i guess is why the gp assumed celcius)
i expect the scientists are measuring it in kelvin
The summary is incomplete. It tells us this :
But don't go looking for little green men. You might remember HD209458b as a 'hot Jupiter' that boils under the glow of its very nearby star."
but neglects to answer the very important question this raises :
Given what we remember about HD209458b, what colour little men should we look for?
My initial guess was red, but there's no guarantee HD209458b-ians can even get sunburned.
I've played Warioware and Rayman. I hated them.
The only game i liked on the Wii was tennis. Bowling was ok, but i am not that into bowling (virtual or otherwise).
Boxing was terrible. (didn't try golf, but it looked ok).
Ultimately, i really enjoy playing wii tennis and do so about once a month at lan parties at a friend's house.
Other than that, i accept that i am not the target audience for the console.
that doesn't make me crazy.
Meanwhile, on the subject of motion controllers:
wii tennis is a good example of excellent use of motion control.
I do have a ps3 and find the use of motion control in flOw and blast factor to be good examples as well.
I dont think it needs to be in every game (thank god they didnt try to use it in Virtua Fighter 5), but it can be great when used responibly. (I'd like to play an air combat type game using the motion control interface to steer. i would like the option to invert the y axis also. that's my one issue with flOw)
I think it is indicitive of Microsoft's attitude as a company that they are waiting for someone else to prove the value of new ideas and then follow.
It appears his PH.D is from Queen Mary's College. According to wikipedia, Queen Mary's College has an international reputation as a research college and is not a bad pedigree for sciences.
I never considered going to a university abroad, so my information about the quality of the school is from wikipedia. It may or may not be accurate. I'm sure someone else can confirm or deny the quality of the school.