It can't be overstated how important the immigration of a HUGE pool of talented engineers to the US from China, India, Canada, all over Europe, etc. has been to the growth and success of Silicon Valley. I'd estimate half the engineers I work with were not born in the United States. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons why someone would move from their home country to the Bay Area (reasons that oviously very widely based on the individial and the country). But let's face it, very few of those reasons will ever convince anyone to move to Siberia.
Fraud is narrowly defined as lying that results in personal gain, pretexting doesn't have to result in personal gain, hence is not equivalent.
Lying isn't (necessarily) illegal. Pretexting is. Not equivalent.
I think "pretexting" is a really stupid term, too, but it is in fact a legal term (ie. it's the term officially used by the FTC) that most succinctly describes the crime. You can gripe that it's a dumb word, but not that all of these terms mean the same thing.
Onboard will use CPU cycles whatever driver model is, whatever host OS is and even if they gave the entire driver in opensource. That is not a sound card even.
It's not "onboard audio" that's the problem, it's CHEAP onboard audio.
I'm still baffled as to why nVidia dropped real-time Dolby Digital encoding support that their original nForce chipset supported. No need for running a whole mess of cables to get multichannel surround like with Creative (assuming you don't fall for their trap and buy their crappy speakers just to get a single cable connection - but don't get me started there... Creative could EASILY do realtime DD/DTS with their vaunted DSP, but they prefer to keep things proprietary). The nForce studd was mostly done in hardware, too (probably almost the same chip as on the original XBox).
I guess it was just a cost licensing issue, they saved a couple bucks by passing the job off to the CPU. But come on, they can put 4 channel SATA2, RAID, a mess of USB2, fairly high performance *GPUs* in their mobo, but not audio hardware that they already had 6 years ago??
All the laws concerning it deal with copying and distribution. Nothing about obtaining it.
There is no point in getting into a semantic argument. Downloading digitial media is considered copying in US copyright law.
From the U.S. Copyright Office FAQ (which I would call the authority on US Copyright law over your guessing):
Is it legal to download works from peer-to-peer networks and if not, what is the penalty for doing so? Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution. Anyone found to have infringed a copyrighted work may be liable for statutory damages up to $30,000 for each work infringed and, if willful infringement is proven by the copyright owner, that amount may be increased up to $150,000 for each work infringed. In addition, an infringer of a work may also be liable for the attorney's fees incurred by the copyright owner to enforce his or her rights.
Maybe you were thinking of Canadian copyright law? There have been precedents in Canada that downloading is not illegal, just sharing.
I'm not arguing whether is SHOULD be legal, just correcting misinformation about the current US law.
If you had planted an IED in Washington after the Nazis successfully landed there in WW2 (in some alternate scenario), would you be a bad guy, with the wrong crowd?
Not even going into the absurdity of your commparison - if said IEDs routinely killed 10 times the number of your own civilian people as the "enemy" (and that being no accident, hence the distinction beween "war" and "terror") - then, absolutely, yes, that's a "real bad guy".
Downloading isn't a crime. It is distrbuting and copying that is a crime.
Not true. Downloading copyrighted content is most definitely illegal in many countries, including the US. The copyright holders just don't often prosecute downloaders, since the uploaders are much easier to catch.
But how many websites can simultaneously provide EVERYONE ON THE PLANET WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION with 10Mbps download speeds? The answer is none.
I'm sorry, but that statement is just silly.
I already did this little exercise a while back on/. but here's a summary: a ridiculously conservative assumption would be a few percent of the regular Internet users on the planet even using it at the same time. And even after that, there are MILLIONS of web sites sharing that load. And if that weren't enough, if the average web page plus graphics, etc is a couple hundred kilobytes (ugh, hopefully less but web sites are crappily inefficient these days) and if most people, once going to that page, tend to stay on it reading (or staying within the site with a lot of cached graphics, AJAX/DHTML, etc) for 95% of the time, then if every active user on the planet was on the same site, it would still probably be less than 10 Gb/second, which a company like Google (probably the only one who would even be within a few orders of magnitude of likelihood of getting this percentage of the population using their site at the same time) might actually be able to handle.
What might NOT be able to handle this are segments of the Internet backbone, peering points, ISP routers, proxies, or headends/COs, whatever.
Basically, (though most cable and DSL is closer to 3-6Mbps, not 10Mbps) you are mostly right about the current problem not being the last mile (as long as you aren't talking HD video...). But you are equally wrong that the problem is at the other end (ie web servers) either. What the article is saying (and has some truth, and plenty of FUD) is that it's the big cloud in the middle that we have to worry about.
They'll have no more excuse to be rude fucking assholes!
Just like you.
Autism is a serious neurodevelopmental disorder, not "smart people acting weird". Just because Hollywood somehow made it glamorous to be autistic, doesn't mean it's remotely accurate.
What you want is a strategy game, not a straight up RPG.
Hmm. I'd say that his post pretty much describes the traditional RPG, which of course comes from the pen-and-paper/tabletop, turn based games like D&D. Baldur's Gate/Baldur's Gate II (and others like X-Com, Fallout, Jagged Alliance, Ultima, etc) pretty much define what he is looking for. Most of those are > 5 years old (X-Com, is from what, '94??), predating any reasonable 3D graphics, let alone most of the recent hollow "3D RPGs" with more flash than gameplay.
Though I will give you that, with this redefinition of the RPG in recent years, they seem to have started calling new games that focus more on game design/mechanics, plot, and, yeah, strategy, a "strategy RPG". It's like like saying "a funny comedy"... (if they did their job right, that's the POINT). I guess I'm just bitter about that:)
For a "reasonably modern" RPG (ie 3 years old) you may not have tried that mostly meets your description (yet is fairly novel as well) try Freedom Force. Pretty decent RPG advancement and a really solid, interesting, and funny plot. No items, though, it's all about superpowers...
I agree with your post completely, though. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have played most/all of the following, but I think they pretty much define the category you are describing: Baldur's Gate I/II, Icewind Dale I/II, Planescape: Torment, Fallout I/II, Jagged Alliance I/II, X-Com (!), Ultima (!! - well at least 8;). I think KOTOR is the best example of a recent console RPG in the style of those old PC games... then again, I guess they have a PC port of it anyway.
You haven't really added much from your original post. Die shrink is an implementation detail, probably something you read that sounded "futuristic"... The real goals are performance, and (usually secondarily) power consumption. Doesn't really matter how they achieve those goals.
I agree with you on one point - I think as with your requirements, the goal for the average non-technical home consumer should be focused more on efficiency than multi-core 64 bit 4MB cache, etc. But not everyone spends 95% of their time browsing the web and typing in their casserole recipes. Try to run a parallel make on a large project and you immediately appreciate a processor with a high clock rate, multiple cores, and huge cache. I don't need to read sci fi to know what I need to do my REAL job.
The beta has been out for a year - much of the point of that being to give hardware manufacturers a chance to support it. Don't tell me 1000 other companies are able to develop drivers to support Vista on launch but not Apple.
Home users may want it for whatever reason
That reason being it's now installed on new PCs they buy.
a full-on class-action lawsuit after just three days of Vista on the store shelves
No, in fact that's totally untrue. RTFA next time - the/. was misleading (big surprise), but all it was is some guy who created a web site called NVidiaClassAction.org. Far from "full-on", he doesn't even seem to have representation or a real interest in suing, let alone filed a suit. It's a publicity stunt, though I agree he has a right to be pissed...
And Microsoft has never purposefully designed their OS to interfere with another competitors product.
Who cares? Does that mean Apple needs to sink to their level? The vast majority of iPod owners use it on Windows, so it really doesn't seem to be best for the customer (as Apple is always claiming to be their motivation) not to support Vista properly. I'm a bit disappointed by Apple's obvious attempt to make Vista look bad on release at the expense of their customers.
This can't be stoped. It's not like the first DeCSS that used stolen Xing keys and could only work for as long as the keys weren't revoked. This uses the keys specific for the DISC, which can't be changed anymore.
But they can minimize the damage. They can revoke the PC HD-DVD player, and then republish the movies with a new title key. That way the only compromised content is the few thousand HD-DVDs that have been sold for those titles so far.
If they really want to stop this in the future, they just revoke all PC HD-DVD players that don't use some sort of hardware security (like, say a PCMCIA add-on card for your laptop, HW support in your video card, etc) to do the key management and decryption. You might think that would slow down the adoption of HD-DVD (not being able to play it on a PC) but I think a lack of studio content has slowed adoption a lot more than lack of players - tighter security might give the studios more confidence to start publishing more movies...
Now the article is pretty badly written, but the news in it seems perfectly plausible; the same researcher was after all, one of the authors of the peer-reviewed attack in a European journal that discovered ways of constructing collisions in MD5, and has appeared at a crypto conference with collisions on the MD4 scheme. Why don't you think she's able to crack SHA-1? Because she's Chinese? Because she's in a country with communists in it? Because some anti-communists wrote a newspaper article about her? Because SHA-1 is sooper-seekrit NSA stuff that is uncrackable?
While I think the post you replied to was pretty stupid, technically he is correct - he said the ARTICLE was propaganda, not that the researcher was incompetent. Basically, the article was an almost entirely content-free celebration of the accomplishments of a Chinese scientist. I don't think anyone is arguing that the accomplishement isn't admirable and newsworthy, just that it happened TWO YEARS AGO and has already been covered on/. back then with actual TECHNICAL DISCUSSIONS. Posting an English translation of a propaganda piece on very old news is in fact pointless. But that's the level of competence we have come to know and love from the/. editors.
The first few paragraphs were so poorly written and full of unfounded opinions (even the EDITOR had to step in three times to comment on it!) that I couldn't even get to the potentially interesting parts... since I knew I wouldn't be able to trust anything else after that point.
An example: perhaps cat-ownership is correllated with femaleness, and femaleness is correllated with superior performance in writing technical documentation. An automated test-generator would unwittingly evolve to ask applicants about cat-ownership, in order to unwittingly select superior female candidates.
Funny you should use that example, as a TV news story I saw on this topic yesterday mentioned that "Do you have a dog?" was actually one of the questions.
Though a bit scarily, FTA...
"We wanted to cast a very wide net," Mr. Bock said. "It is not unusual to walk the halls here and bump into dogs. Maybe people who own dogs have some personality trait that is useful."
Or maybe Google doesn't have a higher percentage of dog owners than most companies, but a more tolerant "bring you dog to work" policy?? This sounds like with proper study of the correlations between traits and employees it could be illegal, and without study it could be just plain misleading...
I would think when it's obvious they wouldn't need to ask, but I guess to be safe they can't take any chances on accidentally guessing someones age wrong.
Yeah, it's hard to fault them for asking EVERYONE for ID... my friend's little brother was working in a convenience store when he was in high school, and was fined (I think $250 - which is almost FORTY HOURS of GROSS income to a kid making $7 an hour - ie blew away 2-3 weeks of his part time job) for selling alcohol to a minor. The minor happened to be a 20 year old undercover cop with a full beard who "looked in his mid 30s". When you know the police are out there trying to entrap 18 year old convenience store employees it's a good idea to ask no matter what the customer looks like.
But even with that, I want to know how accurate is the test these days? It is great that they did not have any positive in what was suppose to be negative cattle. But will they get a good positive in an infected animal?
I think you misunderstood the study...
Prions are proteins produced in all cattle (and all mammals?) The problem comes in when the tertiary structure of the prion changes, leading to the diseases you mention. The study was actually to stop production of normal prions in cows, so that they would of course be unable to change structure to the dangerous form. Their test was whether the cattle expressed prions at ALL, not whether they found abnormal prions.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen anyone touch on this one:
Free and open immigration?
It can't be overstated how important the immigration of a HUGE pool of talented engineers to the US from China, India, Canada, all over Europe, etc. has been to the growth and success of Silicon Valley. I'd estimate half the engineers I work with were not born in the United States. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons why someone would move from their home country to the Bay Area (reasons that oviously very widely based on the individial and the country). But let's face it, very few of those reasons will ever convince anyone to move to Siberia.
Actually, Arizona is basically becoming the customer support and QA departments for Silicon Valley's tech companies.
Fraud is narrowly defined as lying that results in personal gain, pretexting doesn't have to result in personal gain, hence is not equivalent.
Lying isn't (necessarily) illegal. Pretexting is. Not equivalent.
I think "pretexting" is a really stupid term, too, but it is in fact a legal term (ie. it's the term officially used by the FTC) that most succinctly describes the crime. You can gripe that it's a dumb word, but not that all of these terms mean the same thing.
Onboard will use CPU cycles whatever driver model is, whatever host OS is and even if they gave the entire driver in opensource. That is not a sound card even.
It's not "onboard audio" that's the problem, it's CHEAP onboard audio.
I'm still baffled as to why nVidia dropped real-time Dolby Digital encoding support that their original nForce chipset supported. No need for running a whole mess of cables to get multichannel surround like with Creative (assuming you don't fall for their trap and buy their crappy speakers just to get a single cable connection - but don't get me started there... Creative could EASILY do realtime DD/DTS with their vaunted DSP, but they prefer to keep things proprietary). The nForce studd was mostly done in hardware, too (probably almost the same chip as on the original XBox).
I guess it was just a cost licensing issue, they saved a couple bucks by passing the job off to the CPU. But come on, they can put 4 channel SATA2, RAID, a mess of USB2, fairly high performance *GPUs* in their mobo, but not audio hardware that they already had 6 years ago??
All the laws concerning it deal with copying and distribution. Nothing about obtaining it.
There is no point in getting into a semantic argument. Downloading digitial media is considered copying in US copyright law.
From the U.S. Copyright Office FAQ (which I would call the authority on US Copyright law over your guessing):
Is it legal to download works from peer-to-peer networks and if not, what is the penalty for doing so?
Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution. Anyone found to have infringed a copyrighted work may be liable for statutory damages up to $30,000 for each work infringed and, if willful infringement is proven by the copyright owner, that amount may be increased up to $150,000 for each work infringed. In addition, an infringer of a work may also be liable for the attorney's fees incurred by the copyright owner to enforce his or her rights.
Maybe you were thinking of Canadian copyright law? There have been precedents in Canada that downloading is not illegal, just sharing.
I'm not arguing whether is SHOULD be legal, just correcting misinformation about the current US law.
If you had planted an IED in Washington after the Nazis successfully landed there in WW2 (in some alternate scenario), would you be a bad guy, with the wrong crowd?
Not even going into the absurdity of your commparison - if said IEDs routinely killed 10 times the number of your own civilian people as the "enemy" (and that being no accident, hence the distinction beween "war" and "terror") - then, absolutely, yes, that's a "real bad guy".
Downloading isn't a crime. It is distrbuting and copying that is a crime.
Not true. Downloading copyrighted content is most definitely illegal in many countries, including the US. The copyright holders just don't often prosecute downloaders, since the uploaders are much easier to catch.
Just conducting a little more "research"...
o n.gif
http://www.lessonsforhope.org/images/cartoon_lars
I wish I had mod points... though knowing /. it would just get modded back down so that people ccould keep bashing Sony for another few hours.
...will be the "Yamamoto Cannon".
(damn, why couldn't he have been Dr. Yamato)
But how many websites can simultaneously provide EVERYONE ON THE PLANET WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION with 10Mbps download speeds? The answer is none.
/. but here's a summary: a ridiculously conservative assumption would be a few percent of the regular Internet users on the planet even using it at the same time. And even after that, there are MILLIONS of web sites sharing that load. And if that weren't enough, if the average web page plus graphics, etc is a couple hundred kilobytes (ugh, hopefully less but web sites are crappily inefficient these days) and if most people, once going to that page, tend to stay on it reading (or staying within the site with a lot of cached graphics, AJAX/DHTML, etc) for 95% of the time, then if every active user on the planet was on the same site, it would still probably be less than 10 Gb/second, which a company like Google (probably the only one who would even be within a few orders of magnitude of likelihood of getting this percentage of the population using their site at the same time) might actually be able to handle.
I'm sorry, but that statement is just silly.
I already did this little exercise a while back on
What might NOT be able to handle this are segments of the Internet backbone, peering points, ISP routers, proxies, or headends/COs, whatever.
Basically, (though most cable and DSL is closer to 3-6Mbps, not 10Mbps) you are mostly right about the current problem not being the last mile (as long as you aren't talking HD video...). But you are equally wrong that the problem is at the other end (ie web servers) either. What the article is saying (and has some truth, and plenty of FUD) is that it's the big cloud in the middle that we have to worry about.
They'll have no more excuse to be rude fucking assholes!
Just like you.
Autism is a serious neurodevelopmental disorder, not "smart people acting weird". Just because Hollywood somehow made it glamorous to be autistic, doesn't mean it's remotely accurate.
What you want is a strategy game, not a straight up RPG.
:)
Hmm. I'd say that his post pretty much describes the traditional RPG, which of course comes from the pen-and-paper/tabletop, turn based games like D&D. Baldur's Gate/Baldur's Gate II (and others like X-Com, Fallout, Jagged Alliance, Ultima, etc) pretty much define what he is looking for. Most of those are > 5 years old (X-Com, is from what, '94??), predating any reasonable 3D graphics, let alone most of the recent hollow "3D RPGs" with more flash than gameplay.
Though I will give you that, with this redefinition of the RPG in recent years, they seem to have started calling new games that focus more on game design/mechanics, plot, and, yeah, strategy, a "strategy RPG". It's like like saying "a funny comedy"... (if they did their job right, that's the POINT). I guess I'm just bitter about that
For a "reasonably modern" RPG (ie 3 years old) you may not have tried that mostly meets your description (yet is fairly novel as well) try Freedom Force. Pretty decent RPG advancement and a really solid, interesting, and funny plot. No items, though, it's all about superpowers...
;). I think KOTOR is the best example of a recent console RPG in the style of those old PC games... then again, I guess they have a PC port of it anyway.
I agree with your post completely, though. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have played most/all of the following, but I think they pretty much define the category you are describing: Baldur's Gate I/II, Icewind Dale I/II, Planescape: Torment, Fallout I/II, Jagged Alliance I/II, X-Com (!), Ultima (!! - well at least 8
It depends, is your name Moose?
You haven't really added much from your original post. Die shrink is an implementation detail, probably something you read that sounded "futuristic"... The real goals are performance, and (usually secondarily) power consumption. Doesn't really matter how they achieve those goals.
I agree with you on one point - I think as with your requirements, the goal for the average non-technical home consumer should be focused more on efficiency than multi-core 64 bit 4MB cache, etc. But not everyone spends 95% of their time browsing the web and typing in their casserole recipes. Try to run a parallel make on a large project and you immediately appreciate a processor with a high clock rate, multiple cores, and huge cache. I don't need to read sci fi to know what I need to do my REAL job.
What, you mean like nvidia?
Touche! Oh wait, I ALREADY commented on that at the end of the post you replied to. So your point is about as effective as...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHFphYifXKo
Um, why should the iPod support Vista?
/. was misleading (big surprise), but all it was is some guy who created a web site called NVidiaClassAction.org. Far from "full-on", he doesn't even seem to have representation or a real interest in suing, let alone filed a suit. It's a publicity stunt, though I agree he has a right to be pissed...
I already explained that.
It has only been out for 3 days
The beta has been out for a year - much of the point of that being to give hardware manufacturers a chance to support it. Don't tell me 1000 other companies are able to develop drivers to support Vista on launch but not Apple.
Home users may want it for whatever reason
That reason being it's now installed on new PCs they buy.
a full-on class-action lawsuit after just three days of Vista on the store shelves
No, in fact that's totally untrue. RTFA next time - the
And Microsoft has never purposefully designed their OS to interfere with another competitors product.
Who cares? Does that mean Apple needs to sink to their level? The vast majority of iPod owners use it on Windows, so it really doesn't seem to be best for the customer (as Apple is always claiming to be their motivation) not to support Vista properly. I'm a bit disappointed by Apple's obvious attempt to make Vista look bad on release at the expense of their customers.
This can't be stoped. It's not like the first DeCSS that used stolen Xing keys and could only work for as long as the keys weren't revoked.
This uses the keys specific for the DISC, which can't be changed anymore.
But they can minimize the damage. They can revoke the PC HD-DVD player, and then republish the movies with a new title key. That way the only compromised content is the few thousand HD-DVDs that have been sold for those titles so far.
If they really want to stop this in the future, they just revoke all PC HD-DVD players that don't use some sort of hardware security (like, say a PCMCIA add-on card for your laptop, HW support in your video card, etc) to do the key management and decryption. You might think that would slow down the adoption of HD-DVD (not being able to play it on a PC) but I think a lack of studio content has slowed adoption a lot more than lack of players - tighter security might give the studios more confidence to start publishing more movies...
Now the article is pretty badly written, but the news in it seems perfectly plausible; the same researcher was after all, one of the authors of the peer-reviewed attack in a European journal that discovered ways of constructing collisions in MD5, and has appeared at a crypto conference with collisions on the MD4 scheme. Why don't you think she's able to crack SHA-1? Because she's Chinese? Because she's in a country with communists in it? Because some anti-communists wrote a newspaper article about her? Because SHA-1 is sooper-seekrit NSA stuff that is uncrackable?
/. back then with actual TECHNICAL DISCUSSIONS. Posting an English translation of a propaganda piece on very old news is in fact pointless. But that's the level of competence we have come to know and love from the /. editors.
While I think the post you replied to was pretty stupid, technically he is correct - he said the ARTICLE was propaganda, not that the researcher was incompetent. Basically, the article was an almost entirely content-free celebration of the accomplishments of a Chinese scientist. I don't think anyone is arguing that the accomplishement isn't admirable and newsworthy, just that it happened TWO YEARS AGO and has already been covered on
The first few paragraphs were so poorly written and full of unfounded opinions (even the EDITOR had to step in three times to comment on it!) that I couldn't even get to the potentially interesting parts... since I knew I wouldn't be able to trust anything else after that point.
An example: perhaps cat-ownership is correllated with femaleness, and femaleness is correllated with superior performance in writing technical documentation. An automated test-generator would unwittingly evolve to ask applicants about cat-ownership, in order to unwittingly select superior female candidates.
Funny you should use that example, as a TV news story I saw on this topic yesterday mentioned that "Do you have a dog?" was actually one of the questions.
Though a bit scarily, FTA...
"We wanted to cast a very wide net," Mr. Bock said. "It is not unusual to walk the halls here and bump into dogs. Maybe people who own dogs have some personality trait that is useful."
Or maybe Google doesn't have a higher percentage of dog owners than most companies, but a more tolerant "bring you dog to work" policy?? This sounds like with proper study of the correlations between traits and employees it could be illegal, and without study it could be just plain misleading...
I would think when it's obvious they wouldn't need to ask, but I guess to be safe they can't take any chances on accidentally guessing someones age wrong.
Yeah, it's hard to fault them for asking EVERYONE for ID... my friend's little brother was working in a convenience store when he was in high school, and was fined (I think $250 - which is almost FORTY HOURS of GROSS income to a kid making $7 an hour - ie blew away 2-3 weeks of his part time job) for selling alcohol to a minor. The minor happened to be a 20 year old undercover cop with a full beard who "looked in his mid 30s". When you know the police are out there trying to entrap 18 year old convenience store employees it's a good idea to ask no matter what the customer looks like.
But even with that, I want to know how accurate is the test these days? It is great that they did not have any positive in what was suppose to be negative cattle. But will they get a good positive in an infected animal?
I think you misunderstood the study...
Prions are proteins produced in all cattle (and all mammals?) The problem comes in when the tertiary structure of the prion changes, leading to the diseases you mention. The study was actually to stop production of normal prions in cows, so that they would of course be unable to change structure to the dangerous form. Their test was whether the cattle expressed prions at ALL, not whether they found abnormal prions.