After Sanderson took over the books have tremendously improved, almost back to the initial volumes.
I both agree and disagree. Sanderson certainly brought back the pacing from the early books, which is nice (since that means the series will finish). And he has a great respect for the series and is a good writer in his own right, so I really don't think there is anyone better they could have picked to finish it up.
On the other hand, Sanderson is not as good technically, lacks most of the subtlety, and tends to use lots of neologisms that just don't fit. It will be nice to finally get it finished (hell, I've been reading the series since circa 1993 or 1994), but it is a pity that Jordan didn't manage to finish off the series in his lifetime.
Oh, if anyone wants the Cliff-notes version rather than going back to read all 10,000 pages before the final book comes out, here is a fairly voluminous re-read that might actually have a chance to be completed before Memory comes out now that it has been pushed back.
Where I live (the Midwest), it's hard to take meteorologists seriously; the weather is just too damn unpredictable.
So really, I guess it all comes down to the specific situation; if the seismologists had data that, as experts, they should have known was indicating that a major event was forthcoming, but decided to withhold said data from the public (or outright lie about it), then they should be held liable. If they had no such data and were caught as unawares as the rest of the populace, then they should be exonerated.
It sounds like they are accused of a third possibility; there was no way to know whether a larger event was coming or not, but they reassured the public that there was nothing to worry about. Actually from reading the article, it sounds like the former Director of Public Safety is the one that said that; the guilt or innocence of the scientists depends (or should depend, at any rate) on whether that was their advice to him.
The former Caltrans seismologist has a point, but I'm not sure it really pertains to this case. Earthquake frequency analysis is a great tool for determining something like insurance rates, where you are trying to figure out how likely it is for an earthquake of x magnitude to occur in y period of time. From a public safety standpoint, the primary concern should be the maximum expected earthquake magnitude, because this is what you need to design your infrastructure to. Frequency analysis does come into play here, as it might not make economic sense to design to the largest earthquake ever recorded (or that there is evidence for), but it offers absolutely no guarantees - just because the largest expected quake is a 6.5, you just had a 6.5 three years ago so on average another shouldn't occur for another three thousand years, doesn't mean that another 6.5 won't occur next year.
The only reassurance the scientists should have offered is that the string of minor earthquakes did not necessarily mean a larger event was on the way, which I realize isn't very reassuring. They had absolutely no way of knowing whether something larger was coming, or whether the string of minor earthquakes was it. If they actually claimed otherwise, then they are guilty.
Apparently, in the distant past, TV announcers in the USA would use the phrase "Film at 11" to mean that the film that was normally on at 10pm, after the 9pm news, would be an hour later tonight, as momentous events required an extra hour of news coverage. Hence the non-sarcastic use of "Film at 11" to mean "That's big news" and the sarcastic use meaning "That is not really news at all."
Not quite. Until pretty recently, say 5-10 years ago, 11 o' clock was the standard later time slot for local news broadcasts (the earlier time slot was usually 5:00 or 5:30). So, during prime time viewing it was common to have brief updates on developing situations or big news events, with "Film at 11" meaning that there would be a full report on the late news broadcast. Many local news organizations have moved their late broadcast up to 10:00 in the last few years, so this isn't so common. It became a bit of a joke because the news organizations started to always advertise/hype something that would be on the 11:00 news regardless of whether anything interesting or significant was actually happening; the more ominous the teaser the less likely it was to be anything significant. They still do this, but the disparate schedules different broadcasters have adopted in order to compete with each other means that there is no single time slot that is so widely used - could be anywhere between 9:00 and 11:30. That said, in my area at least, two of the three local news organizations still broadcast their late news show at 11:00; I think the other one broadcasts at 10:00 but I so rarely watch the news on any channel I'm not really sure.
Faster than any Pre1990 Porsche? Yes, I guess so. That would be pretty impressive if it were 1990. Really, 4.4s is still very impressive, for any car. But...
There are a lot of Porsche 911 variants out there. A large fraction of the modern ones list sub 4.4s times.
(0-60 times often have largeish error bars)
Hmm, a bunch of $120k+ 911 Turbos and a $300k RUF. I think maybe you are looking at the wrong cars for comparison. According to Porsche's own website, the 2012 911 Carrera does 0-60 in 4.6 seconds, MSRP of $82k. So the Model X would be both quicker to 60 and cheaper. Looks like you have to step up to the $96k Carrera S to beat the 4.4s 0-60 time.
Yes, but the masks used by protestors are very much based on the version drawn by Alan Moore (and which the movie intentionally used, being a cinematic version of Moore's work). Had they been directly drawn from the original source, they would have looked more different.
I'm aware of all this (as I'm sure most on Slashdot are); what I haven't been able to find is an image of what Guy Fawkes masks looked like before V for Vendetta. As stated in the article, when creating the look for V in the graphic novel they used an existing cardboard Guy Fawkes mask as a reference - anyone know what these "original" masks looked like (no doubt they changed significantly through the years even before David Lloyd and Alan Moore left their mark)?
Audiophiles are pretty much the dumbest group of people ever. No, you can't hear a difference between this $5000 speaker and this $150 speaker. No, these cables don't sound "warm".
There is a very significant difference between a $150 speaker and even a $500-$1,000 speaker. Not even approaching audiophile territory here, any random person you pick off the street who isn't deaf is going to be able to tell the difference. Stupid audiophile territory starts a little higher; once you get to around $5,000 plus or minus a couple thousand, yeah, you're into the realm of rapidly diminishing returns and you probably aren't going to hear any difference unless you really look for it.
Agree about the cables, though - that is just dumb.
All that said, I think the point Mr. Parsons was trying to make is that a lot of people will pour money into their speakers, cables, amps, turntables, etc. but totally ignore the room they are in. There's absolutely no point in my trying to put together an ultra-high-end system because I use it in a room that also has a refrigerator, often times AC or heater running, people walking around, noise coming in from the street, no attention to acoustics, etc. Basically, no matter how perfect the system is, the listening environment is sub-optimal. Unless you spend the money to install some acoustically perfect and isolated listening environment (basically, a recording studio), it makes absolutely no sense to spend tens of thousands of dollars chasing those last tenths of a percent of performance. And if you do install such a room, then I'd have to agree with one of the other commenters - at this point you are more interested in listening to your system than you are interested in listening to music.
When you consider supercavitating torpedoes that are approaching or surpassing the speed of sound in water (and have active homing)...
Interesting, I wasn't aware of any torpedoes moving at close to 3,500 mph (speed of sound in seawater is ~1560 m/s). Or did you mean the torpedoes exceed the speed of sound in air at sea level? Even that I find hard to believe, as everything I have seen indicates top speeds in the realm of 200-350 mph.
Great, got sidetracked thinking about detecting supersonic jets acoustically - if an F-22 is headed straight at you over the ocean flat out, assuming you have a sensitive enough microphone in the water, you should be able to hear it coming before it gets to you if you are more than ~22 miles away. So, uh, there's that.
The question everyone is probably asking themselves is "what countries is this censored in?".
More to the point, "How can we leverage the massive potential of the internet to improve communication and erode the power of regimes built on fear and ignorance when even the most trusted tech companies seem eager to roll over for every authoritarian whim promulgated by a developing market?"
You have a subscriber star. Your money is extremely trackable with the right subpoenas.
Additionally, even if you weren't a subscriber, the time and dates of your postings along with your user ID can be used as inputs to track you down (even with an anonymizer like Tor).
No, no, no... you think he/she uses their own money to pay for it? Like any privacy-conscious person, they threaten somebody else with physical harm in order to induce that person to pay for their pseudonymous account, which they then use in an attempt to influence political discourse.
Twenty? I'd say 5 to 10. Problem is that on an international scale there is very little that comes out of the US that isn't via Asia. Let em see.... Film and TV, Music..... And yeah not a hell of a lot more.
What it will boil down to is free trade agreements the more they become redundant the quicker the US will fall prey.
Software, films, and high speed pizza delivery.
Microcode and high-speed pizza delivery, I believe the quote is;)
Yes and no. The problem, as some European nations have recently discovered, is that it doesn't take a whole lot of uncertainty for interest rates to skyrocket. Right now we can issue debt and people will buy it at low interest rates because they trust that we will, in fact, be good for it. China has been buying a large amount of our debt because they have the money, and because they see it as a solid investment - not least because it helps prop up our economy which helps their economy immensely - so they effectively get the interest on the debt plus the positive effect that debt has on their economy.
This has been great for the U.S., because we have been able to maintain low interest rates on our massive debt that keeps it affordable. As long as those interest rates are low, we are fine. However, if China ever decided that they were no longer interested in buying our debt, the interest rates would likely need to be increased to attract investment from other parties. Even relatively small increases in the interest rate result in major increases in our cost of borrowing, which increases the likelihood of default (all else being equal). This is what bit Greece and others - they were okay as long as interest rates stayed low; as soon as rates started to increase because there was some doubt about their future ability to pay it back, that once-affordable debt load quickly became unaffordable. Which, of course, made investors more wary of buying their debt, leading to further increases in interest rates, and so on. The same thing could happen with the U.S. debt, and it could happen very quickly.
Ironically, perhaps the best protection against China abandoning our debt and wreaking havoc with our economy is to ensure that we continue being their major export market. This relationship makes the effective interest rate they receive on our debt higher - basically, with our trade balance they are guaranteed to get a good portion of the economic activity generated by the debt they are buying from us. Large-scale investment from, say, Russia, would not see that extra benefit so buying our debt (as opposed to the debt of a significant trade partner, assuming Russia was in the position to buy anyone's debt) isn't as attractive to them. So, China is willing to buy our debt at a lower interest rate than some other investors might, which helps to keep our debt affordable, which allows us to buy more from China. Not to say that this relationship can go on forever, but a lot of the noise about immediately trying to cut our trade with China could easily backfire and make our current debt-load crippling.
Before the Department of Homeland Security took over the United States it was unconstitutional to arrest a member of Congress while Congress is in session.
Don't know whether that's accurate, but in any case he wasn't arrested so it doesn't really apply. From TFA, he was briefly detained (not detained at all according to the TSA) and missed his flight, then booked a different flight and passed through security without an issue.
Of course, if he wasn't a senator he probably would have been arrested for refusing to complete the security process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Bus_Boycott was the direct effect of Parks' protest and caused major finacial loses for the transportation system. Now, tell me how it is different from DDOSing the living shit out of **AA and friends?
Ah yes, organizing a boycott against a service versus forcibly preventing others from using said service. Clearly these are one and the same.
The People expressed their opinion about SOPA/PIPA. The Government responds with a resounding, "We don't give a shit."
This has nothing to do with SOPA, beyond showing that the government doesn't need it in order to take down (alleged) pirates in other countries. If anything this is the government throwing a bone to the (pissed off) media industry, saying look - we can get these guys without crippling the internet.
Huh? What judge? With SOPA & PIPA, there's no due process to follow or judge to convince; the bully companies get to play judge, jury and executioner themselves!
Umm, no.
SOPA requires a Court Order to do anything. Read the Bill.
And yes, you have to convince a Judge to get a Court Order.
Of course, that hasn't always been a very high bar to pass.
It's official: oenology has veered off into gimmicky homeopathy.
Enology has always been gimmicky homeopathy; it's only fairly recently (last 40-50 years out of a history >2000 years long) that it has been anything but gimmicky homeopathy.
That said, It would be nice if they mentioned what kind of meteorite it is. I mean, I can see a nice iron-nickel meteorite bringing out the grapes' natural terroir of the clean, arid Chilean hills where they grow in the shadow (??) of the great Atacama desert. The complex and subtle mineral flavors imbued by a chondritic meteorite would obviously clash with the natural simplicity of the South American wine, and would be more appropriate for something grown in Napa or Bordeaux (no critique is complete without some form of inter-continental snobbery).
Personally I'd grind up the meteorite and scatter it across the field so I could make up some even better BS about the alien notes introduced by the extra-terrestrial terroir (I like terroir) of the meteorite-imbued (imbue is good, too) soil. I could also produce way more meteorite wine that way than how they are doing it. Amateurs.
They share the glory of launching humans into space with China at the moment. On the other hand, Russians don't have a good track record of creating a brand new design for a while. Kliper is dead, their shuttle did one flight and they haven't managed to design a single human-rated spacecraft since Soyuz and that was in 1960s. Sad fact: Both Russia and Western countries have stagnated.
Well what do you expect? WWII ended 66 years ago; all of their Germans must be dead by now, so there's no one around to design new stuff.
What's the negative aspect of the auction house? From what I see there's one auction house that uses in-game gold and another that uses real currency, and as far as I can tell neither of them are required for a player to use.
Well, for one, it gives them an incentive to design the game and item drops to maximize trading at the (real money) auction house rather than making it the most fun. Not that they will likely do that from the outset, but the promise of getting a portion of all trade at the auction house can't help but be a driver as they tweak item drop rates - once they have that ability, at some point a manager is going to point out that they could extract $x from the community by just doing this or that minor tweak. Activision won't be able to help themselves, even if Blizzard resisted initially.
There are other arguments, but to me that is the main one. It gives them an incentive to tweak the game to drive profits rather than just make the best game they can.
I hear D&D 12 is basically just tweaks to the roster, er, monster manual and fixing some bugs; but D&D 13 is supposed to be built on a whole new engine! Supposedly they're finally introducing 7-sided dice, which the community has been trying to get for ages.
If only there was a way WotC could prohibit the use of old versions; sadly, no central server is required to get together and play with other people, so they can't turn it off and force you to upgrade every other year.
(Hmm, the premise of my sarcasm might be off - I'm not sure how much crossover there is between pen-and-paper RPGers and players of EA Sports titles; hopefully the general dislike for EA will help pull this off...)
Slashdot Mirror
I better go pay my $699 per CPU fee, because clearly Zombie SCO cannot be stopped.
After Sanderson took over the books have tremendously improved, almost back to the initial volumes.
I both agree and disagree. Sanderson certainly brought back the pacing from the early books, which is nice (since that means the series will finish). And he has a great respect for the series and is a good writer in his own right, so I really don't think there is anyone better they could have picked to finish it up.
On the other hand, Sanderson is not as good technically, lacks most of the subtlety, and tends to use lots of neologisms that just don't fit. It will be nice to finally get it finished (hell, I've been reading the series since circa 1993 or 1994), but it is a pity that Jordan didn't manage to finish off the series in his lifetime.
Oh, if anyone wants the Cliff-notes version rather than going back to read all 10,000 pages before the final book comes out, here is a fairly voluminous re-read that might actually have a chance to be completed before Memory comes out now that it has been pushed back.
Where I live (the Midwest), it's hard to take meteorologists seriously; the weather is just too damn unpredictable.
So really, I guess it all comes down to the specific situation; if the seismologists had data that, as experts, they should have known was indicating that a major event was forthcoming, but decided to withhold said data from the public (or outright lie about it), then they should be held liable. If they had no such data and were caught as unawares as the rest of the populace, then they should be exonerated.
It sounds like they are accused of a third possibility; there was no way to know whether a larger event was coming or not, but they reassured the public that there was nothing to worry about. Actually from reading the article, it sounds like the former Director of Public Safety is the one that said that; the guilt or innocence of the scientists depends (or should depend, at any rate) on whether that was their advice to him.
The former Caltrans seismologist has a point, but I'm not sure it really pertains to this case. Earthquake frequency analysis is a great tool for determining something like insurance rates, where you are trying to figure out how likely it is for an earthquake of x magnitude to occur in y period of time. From a public safety standpoint, the primary concern should be the maximum expected earthquake magnitude, because this is what you need to design your infrastructure to. Frequency analysis does come into play here, as it might not make economic sense to design to the largest earthquake ever recorded (or that there is evidence for), but it offers absolutely no guarantees - just because the largest expected quake is a 6.5, you just had a 6.5 three years ago so on average another shouldn't occur for another three thousand years, doesn't mean that another 6.5 won't occur next year.
The only reassurance the scientists should have offered is that the string of minor earthquakes did not necessarily mean a larger event was on the way, which I realize isn't very reassuring. They had absolutely no way of knowing whether something larger was coming, or whether the string of minor earthquakes was it. If they actually claimed otherwise, then they are guilty.
Apparently, in the distant past, TV announcers in the USA would use the phrase "Film at 11" to mean that the film that was normally on at 10pm, after the 9pm news, would be an hour later tonight, as momentous events required an extra hour of news coverage. Hence the non-sarcastic use of "Film at 11" to mean "That's big news" and the sarcastic use meaning "That is not really news at all."
Not quite. Until pretty recently, say 5-10 years ago, 11 o' clock was the standard later time slot for local news broadcasts (the earlier time slot was usually 5:00 or 5:30). So, during prime time viewing it was common to have brief updates on developing situations or big news events, with "Film at 11" meaning that there would be a full report on the late news broadcast. Many local news organizations have moved their late broadcast up to 10:00 in the last few years, so this isn't so common. It became a bit of a joke because the news organizations started to always advertise/hype something that would be on the 11:00 news regardless of whether anything interesting or significant was actually happening; the more ominous the teaser the less likely it was to be anything significant. They still do this, but the disparate schedules different broadcasters have adopted in order to compete with each other means that there is no single time slot that is so widely used - could be anywhere between 9:00 and 11:30. That said, in my area at least, two of the three local news organizations still broadcast their late news show at 11:00; I think the other one broadcasts at 10:00 but I so rarely watch the news on any channel I'm not really sure.
Faster that which porsche 911?
http://www.zeroto60times.com/Porsche-0-60-mph-Times.html
Faster than any Pre1990 Porsche? Yes, I guess so. That would be pretty impressive if it were 1990. Really, 4.4s is still very impressive, for any car. But...
1993 Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6 0-60 mph 4.3 Quarter mile 12.5
1995 Porsche 911 Turbo 0-60 mph 3.8 Quarter mile 12.3
1997 Porsche 911 Turbo 0-60 mph 3.6 Quarter mile 12.1
1997 Porsche RUF CTR-2 0-60 mph 3.4 Quarter mile11.2
2011 Porsche 911 Turbo S 0-60 mph 2.9 Quarter Mile 10.6
There are a lot of Porsche 911 variants out there. A large fraction of the modern ones list sub 4.4s times.
(0-60 times often have largeish error bars)
Hmm, a bunch of $120k+ 911 Turbos and a $300k RUF. I think maybe you are looking at the wrong cars for comparison. According to Porsche's own website, the 2012 911 Carrera does 0-60 in 4.6 seconds, MSRP of $82k. So the Model X would be both quicker to 60 and cheaper. Looks like you have to step up to the $96k Carrera S to beat the 4.4s 0-60 time.
people who say the mask is based on that book or V for V movie are funny, the mask is this guy (pun intended):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_fawkes
Yes, but the masks used by protestors are very much based on the version drawn by Alan Moore (and which the movie intentionally used, being a cinematic version of Moore's work). Had they been directly drawn from the original source, they would have looked more different.
I'm aware of all this (as I'm sure most on Slashdot are); what I haven't been able to find is an image of what Guy Fawkes masks looked like before V for Vendetta. As stated in the article, when creating the look for V in the graphic novel they used an existing cardboard Guy Fawkes mask as a reference - anyone know what these "original" masks looked like (no doubt they changed significantly through the years even before David Lloyd and Alan Moore left their mark)?
Audiophiles are pretty much the dumbest group of people ever.
No, you can't hear a difference between this $5000 speaker and this $150 speaker.
No, these cables don't sound "warm".
There is a very significant difference between a $150 speaker and even a $500-$1,000 speaker. Not even approaching audiophile territory here, any random person you pick off the street who isn't deaf is going to be able to tell the difference. Stupid audiophile territory starts a little higher; once you get to around $5,000 plus or minus a couple thousand, yeah, you're into the realm of rapidly diminishing returns and you probably aren't going to hear any difference unless you really look for it.
Agree about the cables, though - that is just dumb.
All that said, I think the point Mr. Parsons was trying to make is that a lot of people will pour money into their speakers, cables, amps, turntables, etc. but totally ignore the room they are in. There's absolutely no point in my trying to put together an ultra-high-end system because I use it in a room that also has a refrigerator, often times AC or heater running, people walking around, noise coming in from the street, no attention to acoustics, etc. Basically, no matter how perfect the system is, the listening environment is sub-optimal. Unless you spend the money to install some acoustically perfect and isolated listening environment (basically, a recording studio), it makes absolutely no sense to spend tens of thousands of dollars chasing those last tenths of a percent of performance. And if you do install such a room, then I'd have to agree with one of the other commenters - at this point you are more interested in listening to your system than you are interested in listening to music.
I expected this to be about programming languages. I've known a lot of fat, broke, chain-smoking COBOL programmers.
I prefer to call them COBOL Developers, for reasons that should be obvious.
When you consider supercavitating torpedoes that are approaching or surpassing the speed of sound in water (and have active homing)...
Interesting, I wasn't aware of any torpedoes moving at close to 3,500 mph (speed of sound in seawater is ~1560 m/s). Or did you mean the torpedoes exceed the speed of sound in air at sea level? Even that I find hard to believe, as everything I have seen indicates top speeds in the realm of 200-350 mph.
Great, got sidetracked thinking about detecting supersonic jets acoustically - if an F-22 is headed straight at you over the ocean flat out, assuming you have a sensitive enough microphone in the water, you should be able to hear it coming before it gets to you if you are more than ~22 miles away. So, uh, there's that.
The question everyone is probably asking themselves is "what countries is this censored in?".
More to the point, "How can we leverage the massive potential of the internet to improve communication and erode the power of regimes built on fear and ignorance when even the most trusted tech companies seem eager to roll over for every authoritarian whim promulgated by a developing market?"
You have a subscriber star. Your money is extremely trackable with the right subpoenas.
Additionally, even if you weren't a subscriber, the time and dates of your postings along with your user ID can be used as inputs to track you down (even with an anonymizer like Tor).
No, no, no... you think he/she uses their own money to pay for it? Like any privacy-conscious person, they threaten somebody else with physical harm in order to induce that person to pay for their pseudonymous account, which they then use in an attempt to influence political discourse.
Robotech Defense Force
So you think they're running their website on MAC IIs?
Twenty? I'd say 5 to 10. Problem is that on an international scale there is very little that comes out of the US that isn't via Asia. Let em see .... Film and TV, Music ..... And yeah not a hell of a lot more.
What it will boil down to is free trade agreements the more they become redundant the quicker the US will fall prey.
Software, films, and high speed pizza delivery.
Microcode and high-speed pizza delivery, I believe the quote is ;)
Yes and no. The problem, as some European nations have recently discovered, is that it doesn't take a whole lot of uncertainty for interest rates to skyrocket. Right now we can issue debt and people will buy it at low interest rates because they trust that we will, in fact, be good for it. China has been buying a large amount of our debt because they have the money, and because they see it as a solid investment - not least because it helps prop up our economy which helps their economy immensely - so they effectively get the interest on the debt plus the positive effect that debt has on their economy.
This has been great for the U.S., because we have been able to maintain low interest rates on our massive debt that keeps it affordable. As long as those interest rates are low, we are fine. However, if China ever decided that they were no longer interested in buying our debt, the interest rates would likely need to be increased to attract investment from other parties. Even relatively small increases in the interest rate result in major increases in our cost of borrowing, which increases the likelihood of default (all else being equal). This is what bit Greece and others - they were okay as long as interest rates stayed low; as soon as rates started to increase because there was some doubt about their future ability to pay it back, that once-affordable debt load quickly became unaffordable. Which, of course, made investors more wary of buying their debt, leading to further increases in interest rates, and so on. The same thing could happen with the U.S. debt, and it could happen very quickly.
Ironically, perhaps the best protection against China abandoning our debt and wreaking havoc with our economy is to ensure that we continue being their major export market. This relationship makes the effective interest rate they receive on our debt higher - basically, with our trade balance they are guaranteed to get a good portion of the economic activity generated by the debt they are buying from us. Large-scale investment from, say, Russia, would not see that extra benefit so buying our debt (as opposed to the debt of a significant trade partner, assuming Russia was in the position to buy anyone's debt) isn't as attractive to them. So, China is willing to buy our debt at a lower interest rate than some other investors might, which helps to keep our debt affordable, which allows us to buy more from China. Not to say that this relationship can go on forever, but a lot of the noise about immediately trying to cut our trade with China could easily backfire and make our current debt-load crippling.
Before the Department of Homeland Security took over the United States it was unconstitutional to arrest a member of Congress while Congress is in session.
Don't know whether that's accurate, but in any case he wasn't arrested so it doesn't really apply. From TFA, he was briefly detained (not detained at all according to the TSA) and missed his flight, then booked a different flight and passed through security without an issue.
Of course, if he wasn't a senator he probably would have been arrested for refusing to complete the security process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Bus_Boycott was the direct effect of Parks' protest and caused major finacial loses for the transportation system. Now, tell me how it is different from DDOSing the living shit out of **AA and friends?
Ah yes, organizing a boycott against a service versus forcibly preventing others from using said service. Clearly these are one and the same.
The People expressed their opinion about SOPA/PIPA. The Government responds with a resounding, "We don't give a shit."
This has nothing to do with SOPA, beyond showing that the government doesn't need it in order to take down (alleged) pirates in other countries. If anything this is the government throwing a bone to the (pissed off) media industry, saying look - we can get these guys without crippling the internet.
All those slebs supporting Mega* sites look like thugs.
No kidding. Anything endorsed by Kim Kardashian and Kanye West has to be criminally stupid.
Umm, no.
SOPA requires a Court Order to do anything. Read the Bill.
And yes, you have to convince a Judge to get a Court Order.
Of course, that hasn't always been a very high bar to pass.
It's official: oenology has veered off into gimmicky homeopathy.
Enology has always been gimmicky homeopathy; it's only fairly recently (last 40-50 years out of a history >2000 years long) that it has been anything but gimmicky homeopathy.
That said, It would be nice if they mentioned what kind of meteorite it is. I mean, I can see a nice iron-nickel meteorite bringing out the grapes' natural terroir of the clean, arid Chilean hills where they grow in the shadow (??) of the great Atacama desert. The complex and subtle mineral flavors imbued by a chondritic meteorite would obviously clash with the natural simplicity of the South American wine, and would be more appropriate for something grown in Napa or Bordeaux (no critique is complete without some form of inter-continental snobbery).
Personally I'd grind up the meteorite and scatter it across the field so I could make up some even better BS about the alien notes introduced by the extra-terrestrial terroir (I like terroir) of the meteorite-imbued (imbue is good, too) soil. I could also produce way more meteorite wine that way than how they are doing it. Amateurs.
Now they just have to work on that random access time of 300000 milliseconds.
Should be easy, right?
They share the glory of launching humans into space with China at the moment. On the other hand, Russians don't have a good track record of creating a brand new design for a while. Kliper is dead, their shuttle did one flight and they haven't managed to design a single human-rated spacecraft since Soyuz and that was in 1960s. Sad fact: Both Russia and Western countries have stagnated.
Well what do you expect? WWII ended 66 years ago; all of their Germans must be dead by now, so there's no one around to design new stuff.
What's the negative aspect of the auction house? From what I see there's one auction house that uses in-game gold and another that uses real currency, and as far as I can tell neither of them are required for a player to use.
Well, for one, it gives them an incentive to design the game and item drops to maximize trading at the (real money) auction house rather than making it the most fun. Not that they will likely do that from the outset, but the promise of getting a portion of all trade at the auction house can't help but be a driver as they tweak item drop rates - once they have that ability, at some point a manager is going to point out that they could extract $x from the community by just doing this or that minor tweak. Activision won't be able to help themselves, even if Blizzard resisted initially.
There are other arguments, but to me that is the main one. It gives them an incentive to tweak the game to drive profits rather than just make the best game they can.
It's probably a bunch of guys sitting around, trying to "one up" each other on who can get the most outrageous patent.
I sense a new drinking game!
Sorry, that was the second patent they filed.
I hear D&D 12 is basically just tweaks to the roster, er, monster manual and fixing some bugs; but D&D 13 is supposed to be built on a whole new engine! Supposedly they're finally introducing 7-sided dice, which the community has been trying to get for ages.
If only there was a way WotC could prohibit the use of old versions; sadly, no central server is required to get together and play with other people, so they can't turn it off and force you to upgrade every other year.
(Hmm, the premise of my sarcasm might be off - I'm not sure how much crossover there is between pen-and-paper RPGers and players of EA Sports titles; hopefully the general dislike for EA will help pull this off...)