RIAA and MPAA member? Nope. Just an ordinary average grownup. You on the other hand show every sign of still being ten years old, emotionally at least.
Developing games for Vista/Xbox is considerably easier than any other platform in history.
Back in the day, I developed state-of-the-art games for the Nascom Computer in under a week. You would need a team of a hundred to do that on Vista/Xbox. Developing games gets harder with every new platform.
Of course the fact that the bar is steadily being raised in terms of graphics, physics, sounds, artwork, etc... has nothing to with development getting harder?
The DRM in Vista will simply obey the restrictions placed on the media by the supplier of that media, it won't magically add new DRM restrictions.
Instead of obeying the instructions of the OWNER of the media.
It does obey the instructions of the owner - what it does not do is obey the instructions of the custodian. It long past time for those who dislike DRM to grow the hell up and stop confusing physical possesion with ownership. It's not the same thing, and when it comes to IP - it hasn't ever been the same thing. You want to argue law and rights - then use the proper terminology and understand what it means, rather than reverting to the arguement of a five year old. ("I've got it, it's mine, Mine, MINE!")
China just need to put all the dollars they have accumulated in market and boom!!! it would affect US economy more than if they a war instead.
Of course, the effects on the Chinese economy will be pretty ugly too. Not to the rest of Asia, the EU, in fact - pretty much of the rest of the developed world.
Wrong. You are probably making the false assumption that the target is at the maximum range. A shell can easily have enough kinetic energy to correct for a 180 degree error in azimuth if the target is close enough.
Only in some fantasy world where the laws of physics have been repealed.
Hmm, I wonder if, instead of nuclear missiles, we could just have nuclear generation powered railguns that could lob comet-like projectiles, thereby have the same kind of initial devastating effect, but without all the problems of nuclear fallout and radiation.
the new year's 3 hour long episode of "Future Weapons" on Discovery Channel had a segment on GPS-guided artillery. They fired it at 16,000 Gs and it hit a target 25 miles away or so within 2 yards. And this was with the shell fired 40 degrees off course.
Sorry - not buying it. There's not an artillery shell in the world that can carry enough fuel (or has enough kinetic energy to use aerodynamically) to correct for a 40 degree error in azimuth.
Ten a day per launcher, yo. A cruise missile costs a million bucks plus. These projectiles will cost about a thousand dollars (projected, maybe it'll be $2000, still negligible in comparison.) With the amount of money you save not launching cruise missiles, you can afford to build more launchers.
The problem will be convincing Congress to come up with the money to build the ships to carry the launchers. Warships aren't cheap.
No, because when you shoot a projectile, you're putting it into a orbit that intersects the earth. You need some other impulse source to circularize the orbit.
Or, the rail gun could just be used as the first stage, second stage would be a solid chemical rocket which would take it the rest of the way and shape the orbit. The hard part then is getting the rocket engine, fuel, and nav-instruments to take the inital g-force of the rail-launch.
No - getting the hardware capable of surviving the G-forces is the easy part. The hard part is explaining to the beancounters why you are replacing a 50 million dollar first stage with a 10 billion (or most likely more) dollar accelerator - and not reducing your launch costs significantly because of vastly increased infrastructure maintenance and operations costs.
There's a reason why only the lunatic fringe of the alt.space community keeps insisting that an EM accelerator is the 'only way to go'.
Re:Speaking of statistics
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
Yeah, how can a conspiracy of this scale stay unnoticed, without someone leaking? You would need at the very least ONE programmer to make the actual change. How on earth can they keep something of that scale quiet?
Okay, okay, in all fairness, you need about five. The two brothers that are CEOs at Diebold and ES&S, Karl Rove, and two unwitting programmers that quite possibly make a requested change from their CEO without being told what it is really for.
If it were so simple - what happened in Nov 2006? Did someone revert to a pre-conspiracy build of the software? Or just *maybe* - there isn't a conspiracy, and American actually preferred Bush over Kerry (howsoever slightly).
Re:Examples of horrible MySpace design?
on
Inside MySpace.com
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· Score: 1
Wow -- 30 seconds into the page and the fan on my macbook cranked up to maximum and the only thing I had running was Firefox for mac when I went there.
I suspect the problem lies somewhere in your OS, hardware, or browser. The fan on my HP Pavilion didn't change at all.
Why is it that only women get these special programs?
Because the political, legal, and social default position in the US is that males (especially white males) are born with massive advantages - advantages so great as to not require assistance. That this stance is both sexist and racist seems to escape most people.
However, I would ask, why incite them to join? So what? There are many more women than men in law school and medical school. For years, it was the other way around. Incentive programs and scholarships helped tilt the balance. No reason to fire up programs now to incite men back into the fields.
Let me see if understand you right - there is a gender imblance in those fields, but because the minority is male there is no reason to fix the imbalance?
The parent post is insightful because the parent poster understands the issues. On the other hand, the individual replying to the the parent merely replied with his first kneejerk response without making any attempt to understand the parent. Had he done so, the fact that no comparison was made between MySpace and DRM was made would be blatantly obvious. The fact that the comparison involved contrasting the behavior of Slashdot posters would be equally obvious. But kneejerk reactions are much easier than thinking.
Every single time I see a MySpace "analysis" there's that snide, bloghorati uber-alles comment about "web standards" and "lack of design". Holy crap. I am no fan of MySpace, but at least I'm mature enough to realize that people (normal people) don't give a dead rat's ass about CSS, DOM, XHTML, microformats, "mashups" or any of that other stuff that the self-appointed standards nannies of teh interwebs have decided everyone should observe closely or face death.
I've been saying it for years - and I'll say it again: The proliferation of 'standards' by the ivory tower web community is about as important to the real world as the proliferation of celebrity news - and they both have the same purpose, to make the ivory tower academic and the celebrity starlet feel important. The IT community embraces many of those 'standards' because it makes them feel part of the 'in' crowd.
MySpace shouldn't have allowed their users to modify the pages so heavily. They shouldn't have allowed people to have music that plays when you visit the page. They shouldn't have made a system that can't talk to other stuff (like del.icio.us tags or RSS readers). They shouldn't have made it so freaking hard to use. (It takes three times as many clicks to do on something on MySpace than what it should take.)
It's fascinating to see such a comment modded up on Slashdot - which is normally the bastion of freedom and personal rights to do whatever the hell they want, when they want.
I write web apps for a living.
But here we see the truth - Slashdot who screams the loudest when $MEDIA_MEGACORP tramples on *their* (assumed) rights - bellows equally loudly when their own ox is gored.
I know what a good app looks like. I could write a better MySpace clone in the space of a weekend. However, nobody would use it. Why? Because it's not "MySpace."
It's no wonder they had so much trouble keeping the system up and running, because they're obviously not professionals.
WorldWind was available before Google Earth was born, but it was not marketed into news headlines.
[snippage much praise of WorldWind.]
And now - for the rest of the story; Google Earth actually works - almost never do you have to wait forever for it download and render your selected map. Google Earth has a simple and straightforward user interface, (especially when moving about the map - it *stays* centered under my cursor instead of drifting around). Etc... etc...
Google Earth didn't become the defacto standard because of marketing; but because it is plainly, and simple - better.
Gamasutra offers up yet another unique feature: an annotated contract for a big-budget game.
No - Gamasutra offers up a series of low quality scans of the pages of a contract for a big-budget game with some commentary offered after some of the pages. The result is product that is virtually unreadable. On top of that, what is offered is a translation (and a partial one at that), rather than an annotation.
Because the imperial system is insane. The units used are more handy for measuring or describing things in everyday life, but when it comes to doing actual calculations, you are lost. The metric system measures things in tens. The imperial system, however, uses twos, threes, fours, fives, eights, tens, twelves, fourteens and sixteens and more. How many cubic centimetres in a litre? 1000. How many cubic inches in a gallon? 231.
The real question isn't "how many x in a y", it is: who the [censored] cares anyhow?
Seriously - everytime the subject of metric conversion comes up, enthusiasts of the metric will pipe up with how it makes things 'easier'. But somehow, they never have an example that real people use day to day - but always some utterly irrelevant oddball 'conversion'. In everyday life folks measure things, using a ruler, measuring cup, or scale - you simply don't have to do oddball conversions. (At that point it doesn't *matter* what system you use - and it's pointless to spend effort converting to a system that doesn't gain you anything for all your effort.)
Of course - this being Slashdot, somebody will reply "but I convert [oddball measurement x] to [oddball measurement y] daily!". To that someone I will reply in advance: You are one in a million bub. If you do it daily, you already know the conversion and gain little by converting to metric and there is no need to put the rest of us through the pain.
The other thing that bothers me is that almost invariably someone will, thinking it makes him look smart, bring up rods and furlongs. It doesn't make you look smart - it makes you look like a boob. Nobody uses those measurements casually in daily life. (Surveyors do when doing land surveys - but their tools and systems are well adapted to doing so. Once again, changing over gains nothing.)
If the kids grow up learning metric terms, they'll see the benefits of simplicity, easier unit conversion, and so on.
Everybody in the United States under the age of forty grew up learning metric terms.
Nope. Virtually nobody in the US has grown up learning metric terms, not in any useful sense of the term 'learning' anyhow. They get a unit in school, pass the test and move on.
Seriously, it's two thousand goddamn seven, the "What is this X the article speaks of?" thing is OVER. You're on the fucking Internet, go to Google or Wikipedia and do five seconds of research.
You'd have a point if TFA hadn't specifically cited 'X' as "one of the hottest names in American music these days". Asking the question "What is this X" is merely a way of pointing out that "maybe X isn't so hot - because X sure as heck isn't widely known".
That being said - it's interesting that the TFA cites the fame of the individual being ripped off, as if that somehow matters. Such is the penetration of the culture of celebrity into our collective subconscious.
It very much looks like liquid metal balls bouncing on the floor, these are produced very often when using an electric arc welder.
That was my thought too - all the 'balls' dropped straight to the ground and skittled along it. Behavior perfectly consistent with sparks such as those produced by a welder - and not at all consistent with that of ball lightning which is almost always described as 'floating'.
In fact, I Am A Physicist and I can tell you that what we don't know is exactly how much and how fast the temperature will rise, how the climate change will vary from place to place and how exactly all this will affect our world.
Who cares if you are a physicist or not? Physics isn't under discussion - climatology is. You should have added a disclaimer to your post as well: "I am not a climatologist, but I will toss in my qualifications in an utterly unrelated field so as to make myself look smart and to add undeserved weight to my statements".
I own An Inconvenient Truth (the movie not the book). And I would like to say that although some people still consider the effects that are predicted by that movie to be "a theory," they are hard to disprove.
Of course, the effects predicted by that movie are pretty hard to prove too.
I don't want to think up possibilities because I happen to agree heavily with that correlation.
I have tried to keep an open mind about this issue for both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
RIAA and MPAA member? Nope. Just an ordinary average grownup. You on the other hand show every sign of still being ten years old, emotionally at least.
Of course the fact that the bar is steadily being raised in terms of graphics, physics, sounds, artwork, etc... has nothing to with development getting harder?
It does obey the instructions of the owner - what it does not do is obey the instructions of the custodian. It long past time for those who dislike DRM to grow the hell up and stop confusing physical possesion with ownership. It's not the same thing, and when it comes to IP - it hasn't ever been the same thing. You want to argue law and rights - then use the proper terminology and understand what it means, rather than reverting to the arguement of a five year old. ("I've got it, it's mine, Mine, MINE!")
Of course, the effects on the Chinese economy will be pretty ugly too. Not to the rest of Asia, the EU, in fact - pretty much of the rest of the developed world.
Only in some fantasy world where the laws of physics have been repealed.
No.
Sorry - not buying it. There's not an artillery shell in the world that can carry enough fuel (or has enough kinetic energy to use aerodynamically) to correct for a 40 degree error in azimuth.
The problem will be convincing Congress to come up with the money to build the ships to carry the launchers. Warships aren't cheap.
No - getting the hardware capable of surviving the G-forces is the easy part. The hard part is explaining to the beancounters why you are replacing a 50 million dollar first stage with a 10 billion (or most likely more) dollar accelerator - and not reducing your launch costs significantly because of vastly increased infrastructure maintenance and operations costs.
There's a reason why only the lunatic fringe of the alt.space community keeps insisting that an EM accelerator is the 'only way to go'.
If it were so simple - what happened in Nov 2006? Did someone revert to a pre-conspiracy build of the software? Or just *maybe* - there isn't a conspiracy, and American actually preferred Bush over Kerry (howsoever slightly).
I suspect the problem lies somewhere in your OS, hardware, or browser. The fan on my HP Pavilion didn't change at all.
Because the political, legal, and social default position in the US is that males (especially white males) are born with massive advantages - advantages so great as to not require assistance. That this stance is both sexist and racist seems to escape most people.
Let me see if understand you right - there is a gender imblance in those fields, but because the minority is male there is no reason to fix the imbalance?
The parent post is insightful because the parent poster understands the issues. On the other hand, the individual replying to the the parent merely replied with his first kneejerk response without making any attempt to understand the parent. Had he done so, the fact that no comparison was made between MySpace and DRM was made would be blatantly obvious. The fact that the comparison involved contrasting the behavior of Slashdot posters would be equally obvious. But kneejerk reactions are much easier than thinking.
I've been saying it for years - and I'll say it again: The proliferation of 'standards' by the ivory tower web community is about as important to the real world as the proliferation of celebrity news - and they both have the same purpose, to make the ivory tower academic and the celebrity starlet feel important. The IT community embraces many of those 'standards' because it makes them feel part of the 'in' crowd.
It's fascinating to see such a comment modded up on Slashdot - which is normally the bastion of freedom and personal rights to do whatever the hell they want, when they want.
But here we see the truth - Slashdot who screams the loudest when $MEDIA_MEGACORP tramples on *their* (assumed) rights - bellows equally loudly when their own ox is gored.
The term you are looking for is sour grapes.
[snippage much praise of WorldWind.]
And now - for the rest of the story; Google Earth actually works - almost never do you have to wait forever for it download and render your selected map. Google Earth has a simple and straightforward user interface, (especially when moving about the map - it *stays* centered under my cursor instead of drifting around). Etc... etc...
Google Earth didn't become the defacto standard because of marketing; but because it is plainly, and simple - better.
No - Gamasutra offers up a series of low quality scans of the pages of a contract for a big-budget game with some commentary offered after some of the pages. The result is product that is virtually unreadable. On top of that, what is offered is a translation (and a partial one at that), rather than an annotation.
The real question isn't "how many x in a y", it is: who the [censored] cares anyhow?
Seriously - everytime the subject of metric conversion comes up, enthusiasts of the metric will pipe up with how it makes things 'easier'. But somehow, they never have an example that real people use day to day - but always some utterly irrelevant oddball 'conversion'. In everyday life folks measure things, using a ruler, measuring cup, or scale - you simply don't have to do oddball conversions. (At that point it doesn't *matter* what system you use - and it's pointless to spend effort converting to a system that doesn't gain you anything for all your effort.)
Of course - this being Slashdot, somebody will reply "but I convert [oddball measurement x] to [oddball measurement y] daily!". To that someone I will reply in advance: You are one in a million bub. If you do it daily, you already know the conversion and gain little by converting to metric and there is no need to put the rest of us through the pain.
The other thing that bothers me is that almost invariably someone will, thinking it makes him look smart, bring up rods and furlongs. It doesn't make you look smart - it makes you look like a boob. Nobody uses those measurements casually in daily life. (Surveyors do when doing land surveys - but their tools and systems are well adapted to doing so. Once again, changing over gains nothing.)
Nope. Virtually nobody in the US has grown up learning metric terms, not in any useful sense of the term 'learning' anyhow. They get a unit in school, pass the test and move on.
You'd have a point if TFA hadn't specifically cited 'X' as "one of the hottest names in American music these days". Asking the question "What is this X" is merely a way of pointing out that "maybe X isn't so hot - because X sure as heck isn't widely known".
That being said - it's interesting that the TFA cites the fame of the individual being ripped off, as if that somehow matters. Such is the penetration of the culture of celebrity into our collective subconscious.
That was my thought too - all the 'balls' dropped straight to the ground and skittled along it. Behavior perfectly consistent with sparks such as those produced by a welder - and not at all consistent with that of ball lightning which is almost always described as 'floating'.
But you couldn't be bothered to mention your training could you? This indicates either laziness, ignorance, or arrogance. Which is it?
Who cares if you are a physicist or not? Physics isn't under discussion - climatology is. You should have added a disclaimer to your post as well: "I am not a climatologist, but I will toss in my qualifications in an utterly unrelated field so as to make myself look smart and to add undeserved weight to my statements".
Of course, the effects predicted by that movie are pretty hard to prove too.
These two statements are mutally incompatible.