They can't agree on merging one... so the obvious answer is just to drop one format. There is already very little incentive to buy this very expensive next generation format... failing to pick a univeral standard will probably just kill the whole thing.
Anyway, right now the high def dvds are looking a lot like lazerdisk, in the sense that it will be too expensive for anyone to buy it, and by the time it becomes cheap there will be a better standard out. There's just too much competition in the storage space for this dumbass strategy to work. Just because DVD was a success doesn't mean that the successor to DVD will be.
My bet is that what we will end up doing for hi def movies, is using the existing DVD media, but changing the format from mpeg-2, to something that compresses better like mpeg-4 or windows media. Extra processing power to do decompression may get a lot cheaper a lot faster than these lazers are.
You have to consider that at this point, PVRs already have the power to do streaming video decompression, and compression of video. It's not hard to imagine increasing the processing power there and adding additional functionality like a divx dvd player, and some basic video games (roms anyone?). You could probably do something equivalent with a modded first gen xbox.
DVDs were essentially high tech VCRs, which made sense at the time, but these days if people are going to spend more than $50 on some piece of electronics, they expect it to do a lot more than just play videos on their tv.
I can see them becoming a little bit more successful on the PCs and on consoles. PCs need a way to back up more and more massive data, and consoles need lots of space for more content. That's the primary reason that I'm pretty optimistic about the PS3. Video games are becoming enourmous in terms of space. These disks are on the order of 50 GB, which not that long ago was the size of an entire harddrive. Can game makers fill up all that space with artwork and video? Probably not yet, but I suspect we will start to see some extremely high resolution textures on the 2nd generation PS3 games. Maybe there's just not that much need to expand in that direction... but I suspect that game makers will find some interesting way to make use of the extra space. The main problem I see is lack of exclusive titles these days, game makers need to make their games generic so they can port them from system to system. Thus, the limitations of the xbox 360 will probably keep game makers from taking too much advantage of special things the PS3 can do that can't be ported.
if not what we need. Obviously a compromise of convenience over security. Kind of surprising that microsoft is doing this now, after having finally started taking security more seriously... SP2 actually seemed to be locked down pretty tight, in terms of the firewall being turned on, automatic updates on, probably some rate limiting stuff to slow down DDOS attacks (also seemed to slow down some p2p traffic, maybe that's just anecdotal though). I guess its sad, but kind of predictable, giving all the whining people did over SP2... I still know plenty of people that refuse to run it, just get the security patches and add them to SP1.
>Speed. Quite simply, a monolithic kernel like the one used in Linux or most of the other Open Source >Unix clones is inherently two to three times faster for integer calculations than the Mach microkernel >presently used in OS X 10.4. That's why the world hasn't embraced xServes, for example, because for >simple web or database service they are slower and serve fewer users.
What do monolithic kernels have to do with integer calculations? Sounds like Cringely doesn't know what a microkernel is... This sounds like a "new intel processors will make your internet faster" kind of argument.
Not really. It's stupid to dump the padding to disk, and it is stupid to not put things in network byte order, but not everything should be in plaintext... that's a tremendous waste of space and makes random file IO impossible in many cases since records aren't of uniform size.
It seems wildly inaccurate to call these guys environmentalists...
Don Young in particular is one of the guys trying to get us to drill in ANWR (alaska national wildlife reserve). He receives a lot of money from the oil industry, and in the past suggested that the world trade center attacks might have been carried out by "eco-terrorists"...
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1594/is _1_13/ai_82352618 >Young told a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News that responsibility could lie with groups other than >Islamic fundamentalists. "If you watched what happened in Genoa, in Italy, and even in Seattle, there's >some expertise in that field," said Young. "I'm not sure they're that dedicated, but ecoterrorists... >there's a strong possibility that could be one of the groups."
Its surprising how often oil industry figures and others are able to hijack environmentalist sentaments in this country...
The problematic part is at the end of part 2: "... forty-four seconds west. ID by rows." On April 19th, sculptor Sanborn contacted one of the Kryptos Group moderators to say, "No, that last part is wrong." He also indicated that there was a missing character on the sculpture, probably something that would have resulted in a plaintext "X" before that section. He said that he had thought that with the missing character, the section in question would have come out to be an unintelligible scramble. Instead, he was astounded to see that by sheer chance, the resulting random text had turned out to be apparently intelligible English, "ID BY ROWS", although that was not what was intended.
Ebert began by explaining why he felt a movie (particularly the girls gone wild kind) was not an experience equivalent to that of reading a great novel like, say, 'The Great Gatsby,' because movies don't delve very deeply into what it means to be human.
ah, I see. So with unrefined rapeseed oil, we can skip the step of moving to a hydrogen based economy, and move directly to a "rape" based economy. Where "rape" is the fancy new term for "unrefined rapeseed oil". I'm sure that "rape" will make all of our lives much better.
I really don't see why people should buy a computer or console just for this kind of trivial functionality that could be wrapped into existing devices...
All of this "media center" crap will probably eventually be included either 1. as part of the tv 2. (more likely) as part of the PVR device your cable company will be renting you
If you think about it, its pretty stupid that right now you have to buy a 400-500 dollar device (computer or xbox360...or modded *original* xbox, although that's cheaper) to get access to mp3, avi, and jpeg files on your tv...
I wouldn't get too caught up in learning every dinky scripting language out there.. if you want to invest time learning a new language learn a primary language.. maybe a cool one like Haskel or Ocaml.
The ultimate "scripting" language is of course.. bash... or zsh. As long as you don't need to do too much math, you can do fairly complicated things in bash and do it *fast* by virtue of the fact that everything you do just launches a native binary, usually written in c, that's specialized for performing whatever task you are doing. Shell scripts also make it easy to do some parallelism via pipes.
Also, just launching the environment for a lot of other interpreted languages (java esp) takes longer than many bash scripts run.
Of course bash is oriented towards handling text files and has lots of limitations outside of that field (basic math operations require launching bc and storing results as strings in environment variables) but if you primarily do text manipulation, you can probably do it pretty darn fast and easy with bash.
Generally architecture changes, compiler version changes, break code on large projects. Over a million lines of code, any tiny little difference in the platform that the original developers didn't think to account for will come up *somewhere*. A good example of this is if you are dumping data structures to disk or network and write a size_t variable. Suddenly, you can no longer communicate between 32 bit and 64 bit versions of your software.
As a general rule, "just a recompile" *never happens* for any architecture and compiler change on a project above a certain size. Compiler writers break compatibility with some little ol' thing they don't think anyone is using, but which everyone is actually using in *every* version, fail to implement uncommon or difficult language features, add non standard features that other compilers don't support. Then application developers do things like not swapping to network byte order and using architecture dependent data types (size_t as in the example). Between different unices, header file contents will change.
The fixes are often not that hard (usually trivial) to do between say versions of the same compiler, or endian switches... but they are still there and annoy the hell out off people trying to compile old open source software on a new platform, like say macosx was a few years ago and x86 64 is now. There's always growing pains.
I seriously doubt that WINE supports the speech API. Last I heard only the most commonly used elements of win32 were supported. Maybe someone more familiar with WINE would care to comment.
I've always heard that windows support for multiple processors was pretty limited. Is this still the case? Is limited multi proc support for windows encouraging the development of this technology? Does load balancing of processes or threads across processors happen automatically?
I keep hearing that people get dual proc or dual core machines like the apple core duos, but that one proc or core lies dead under windows. Is this actually the case? Is this just a driver problem specific to a few machines? Do you need windows server 2003 or something?
The way I see it is that there are currently just too many patentables in computer software. Some reform is needed, such as not allowing companies to patent "operation X, which is old, *applied to* market Y which is new" type patents, which are the real stupid ones. However, the majority of annoying patents like this will go away, because such a mass of prior art will exist, that you can be pretty much guaranteed that someone will have done something like it before unless it is truly inventive. That's not to say that bad patents won't be granted, but it will become pretty easy to get lawsuits like this dismissed with a little research.
Does anyone else see this optimistic view of the future? Am I just naive?
Look at the Avernum games that they are releasing now. They are just remakes of the old exile games they made. That would be *great* if the remake was an appreciable improvement on the original. Exile I, II, and III were great games, especially for mac users, since there were so few other rpgs for the mac at the time. If you haven't played them before, check out Exile III/Avernum III. Exile III was kind of a cross between elder scrolls and a tactical RPG. However, the only real improvement between the exile series and the avernum series is that they switched from low res grid graphics... to low res isometric graphics... They also keep reusing art between games, and I often recognize "stock" sounds from exile in other games. Although to their credit, I fondly associate those stock sounds the most with exile.
I played the Nethergate demo back in the day, and it was actually pretty cool. All of their stories have cool plots, and their gameplay mechanic *is* actually pretty enjoyable, even if it hasn't changed in over a decade... What they really need is to get out of their rut, get some outside investment, hire a few full time fantasy artists, and maybe another programmer, and put together a game that has the great stories, combat, and quests of the previous ones, but also has nice looking *graphics* to appeal to a wider audience... maybe even get it sold at retail.
Being an indy developer shouldn't mean that you have no budget whatsoever for your product... no company should be run like that. It's impossible to compete.
The only reason nethergate failed, is that spiderweb has locked itself into the "retro rpg" niche market. The "hisorical retro rpg" is a niche within a niche. Also, it would be nice if they kept supporting the project... you can no longer run it on the latest (intel) macs, which kind of hampers it from becoming some future "cult classic."
I fondly look forward to the day when spiderweb either gets outside investment, or Vogel goes to work for a larger company as a game designer. However, that doesn't seem likely, as they seem pretty committed to doing extremely low budget games...
As many have pointed out, while Moore may once have been with greenpeace, he is no longer any sort of environmentalist. Currently he's working for the timber lobby among others and using his former title as founder of greenpeace to dupe people into thinking that he represents the environmentalist movement. A quick search for "Patrick Moore timber" on google will give you the real story.
That said, I personally agree that nuclear power is the best option in most places in the world. It is certainly *not* the perfect option, but the technology has slowly but steadily improved over time, whereas the alternative, fossil fuels, have become more expensive and not a whole lot cleaner.
Solar power has also improved greatly in efficiency over the years, but solar power is only viable in certain places. The same could be said of wind, geo thermal, and hydro power. They are great options where available... but nuclear power represents the only general purpose replacement for hydrocarbons.
My state, Washington, is run almost entirely on hydro power, which provides us with cheap and reliable power. However, even with the large number of damable rivers, there's still excess need for power, which is split pretty evenly between coal and nuclear power. The thing is, that while nuclear is more environmentally friendly, and doesn't rise in cost with increasing fossil fuel prices, it still comes with its own problems. Additionally, cleaning up the hanford nuclear site has been a nightmare, especially for the people downwind... and the federal government has been remarkably slow to clean up the mess they made. This has done a lot to sour public perception of nuclear technology.
If you are interested in nuclear power, hanford is important to consider. The site was of course used for developing weapons (enriching uranium specifically I believe...), but there's a lot to be learned from the cleanup effort... specifically, that it goes very slowly, and that the federal government pinches every dime they can in the effort. I think that the estimated end of the cleanup is sometime in 2030, not counting further delays... Considering that other messes are likely to happen with widespread enough nuclear power, no matter how careful we are, the slowness of federal cleanup efforts could really become a problem.
Administering a nation of 300 million people is not a job for morons, although some morons have got it anyway. Historically, we've had some extremely bright people running the country.
From wikipedia: In addition to his political career, Jefferson was also an agriculturalist, horticulturist, architect, etymologist, archaeologist, mathematician, cryptographer, surveyor, paleontologist, author, lawyer, inventor, violinist, and the founder of the University of Virginia.
Jefferson wasn't alone either.
There was a period of time when smart people pretty much took over the world, called the Enlightenment. You really don't know anything meaningful about American history unless you know what and why the Enlightenment was... which is sad, because few do. The very existence of our country and modern ideas about democracy are owed to the intellectual revolution of those days.
In recent years, we've had Bill Clinton, who was a rhode scholar. Anyone know who was the smartest president of the 20th century?
There have been a number of design decisions that palm and other PDA manufacturers, and cell phone manufacturers for that matter, have made that I've never understood.
Lack of USB support. All the PDAs and cell phones I've seen come with a proprietary port... that I invariably end up getting a usb adapter for. Why the hell don't they just have a USB port at the bottom of the device? Is the hardware too complex?
Think about all the USB devices that this would give you access to... first of all usb keyboards, which are standard and would not require a ton of drivers. Think about the ability to use USB thumb drives to exchange your data...
Other devices like printers would probably be less well supported, seeing as a ton of drivers would need to be stored on the device, but still... it would be sweet.
I think most of us who have worked in the game industry have seen a lot of this. Mostly, the effect has been that few games show blood, gore, and nudity in any detail. Bascially, they seem to adhere to the ESRB ratings. If you think about it, there's a lot of violence in games, but it is always depicted in certain cartoonish ways against opponents that are strongly recognizable as human. Frankly, it doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world.
Does anyone know of any particular *abuses* of this power? Like removal of political content?
Although I think the articles make some generalizations which may be unfair, the point is essentially true. It is scummy to call yourself a professional at something, but then self yourself on sex, unless selling sex is your job of course. I personally just do not respect women who use their bodies to get ahead.
Also, I think that the article was essentially complaining (once you remove a few inflammatory generalizations) is that gamers selling sex are taking away sponsorship opportunities from people who are actually *good* at video games. Now, personally, I don't take professional video game playing that seriously... but if the same thing happened to me at work, I'd be pretty pissed.
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They can't agree on merging one... so the obvious answer is just to drop one format. There is already very little incentive to buy this very expensive next generation format... failing to pick a univeral standard will probably just kill the whole thing.
Anyway, right now the high def dvds are looking a lot like lazerdisk, in the sense that it will be too expensive for anyone to buy it, and by the time it becomes cheap there will be a better standard out. There's just too much competition in the storage space for this dumbass strategy to work. Just because DVD was a success doesn't mean that the successor to DVD will be.
My bet is that what we will end up doing for hi def movies, is using the existing DVD media, but changing the format from mpeg-2, to something that compresses better like mpeg-4 or windows media. Extra processing power to do decompression may get a lot cheaper a lot faster than these lazers are.
You have to consider that at this point, PVRs already have the power to do streaming video decompression, and compression of video. It's not hard to imagine increasing the processing power there and adding additional functionality like a divx dvd player, and some basic video games (roms anyone?). You could probably do something equivalent with a modded first gen xbox.
DVDs were essentially high tech VCRs, which made sense at the time, but these days if people are going to spend more than $50 on some piece of electronics, they expect it to do a lot more than just play videos on their tv.
I can see them becoming a little bit more successful on the PCs and on consoles. PCs need a way to back up more and more massive data, and consoles need lots of space for more content. That's the primary reason that I'm pretty optimistic about the PS3. Video games are becoming enourmous in terms of space. These disks are on the order of 50 GB, which not that long ago was the size of an entire harddrive. Can game makers fill up all that space with artwork and video? Probably not yet, but I suspect we will start to see some extremely high resolution textures on the 2nd generation PS3 games. Maybe there's just not that much need to expand in that direction... but I suspect that game makers will find some interesting way to make use of the extra space. The main problem I see is lack of exclusive titles these days, game makers need to make their games generic so they can port them from system to system. Thus, the limitations of the xbox 360 will probably keep game makers from taking too much advantage of special things the PS3 can do that can't be ported.
if not what we need. Obviously a compromise of convenience over security. Kind of surprising that microsoft is doing this now, after having finally started taking security more seriously... SP2 actually seemed to be locked down pretty tight, in terms of the firewall being turned on, automatic updates on, probably some rate limiting stuff to slow down DDOS attacks (also seemed to slow down some p2p traffic, maybe that's just anecdotal though). I guess its sad, but kind of predictable, giving all the whining people did over SP2... I still know plenty of people that refuse to run it, just get the security patches and add them to SP1.
was mario brothers.
seriously.
>Speed. Quite simply, a monolithic kernel like the one used in Linux or most of the other Open Source
>Unix clones is inherently two to three times faster for integer calculations than the Mach microkernel
>presently used in OS X 10.4. That's why the world hasn't embraced xServes, for example, because for
>simple web or database service they are slower and serve fewer users.
What do monolithic kernels have to do with integer calculations? Sounds like Cringely doesn't know what a microkernel is... This sounds like a "new intel processors will make your internet faster" kind of argument.
Not really. It's stupid to dump the padding to disk, and it is stupid to not put things in network byte order, but not everything should be in plaintext... that's a tremendous waste of space and makes random file IO impossible in many cases since records aren't of uniform size.
It seems wildly inaccurate to call these guys environmentalists...
s _1_13/ai_82352618 ...
Don Young in particular is one of the guys trying to get us to drill in ANWR (alaska national wildlife reserve). He receives a lot of money from the oil industry, and in the past suggested that the world trade center attacks might have been carried out by "eco-terrorists"...
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1594/i
>Young told a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News that responsibility could lie with groups other than
>Islamic fundamentalists. "If you watched what happened in Genoa, in Italy, and even in Seattle, there's
>some expertise in that field," said Young. "I'm not sure they're that dedicated, but ecoterrorists
>there's a strong possibility that could be one of the groups."
Its surprising how often oil industry figures and others are able to hijack environmentalist sentaments in this country...
The problematic part is at the end of part 2: "... forty-four seconds west. ID by rows." On April 19th, sculptor Sanborn contacted one of the Kryptos Group moderators to say, "No, that last part is wrong." He also indicated that there was a missing character on the sculpture, probably something that would have resulted in a plaintext "X" before that section. He said that he had thought that with the missing character, the section in question would have come out to be an unintelligible scramble. Instead, he was astounded to see that by sheer chance, the resulting random text had turned out to be apparently intelligible English, "ID BY ROWS", although that was not what was intended.
what are the odds of that?
Ebert began by explaining why he felt a movie (particularly the girls gone wild kind) was not an experience equivalent to that of reading a great novel like, say, 'The Great Gatsby,' because movies don't delve very deeply into what it means to be human.
ah, I see. So with unrefined rapeseed oil, we can skip the step of moving to a hydrogen based economy, and move directly to a "rape" based economy. Where "rape" is the fancy new term for "unrefined rapeseed oil". I'm sure that "rape" will make all of our lives much better.
I really don't see why people should buy a computer or console just for this kind of trivial functionality that could be wrapped into existing devices...
All of this "media center" crap will probably eventually be included either
1. as part of the tv
2. (more likely) as part of the PVR device your cable company will be renting you
If you think about it, its pretty stupid that right now you have to buy a 400-500 dollar device (computer or xbox360...or modded *original* xbox, although that's cheaper) to get access to mp3, avi, and jpeg files on your tv...
I wouldn't get too caught up in learning every dinky scripting language out there.. if you want to invest time learning a new language learn a primary language.. maybe a cool one like Haskel or Ocaml.
The ultimate "scripting" language is of course.. bash... or zsh. As long as you don't need to do too much math, you can do fairly complicated things in bash and do it *fast* by virtue of the fact that everything you do just launches a native binary, usually written in c, that's specialized for performing whatever task you are doing. Shell scripts also make it easy to do some parallelism via pipes.
Also, just launching the environment for a lot of other interpreted languages (java esp) takes longer than many bash scripts run.
Of course bash is oriented towards handling text files and has lots of limitations outside of that field (basic math operations require launching bc and storing results as strings in environment variables) but if you primarily do text manipulation, you can probably do it pretty darn fast and easy with bash.
Generally architecture changes, compiler version changes, break code on large projects. Over a million lines of code, any tiny little difference in the platform that the original developers didn't think to account for will come up *somewhere*. A good example of this is if you are dumping data structures to disk or network and write a size_t variable. Suddenly, you can no longer communicate between 32 bit and 64 bit versions of your software.
As a general rule, "just a recompile" *never happens* for any architecture and compiler change on a project above a certain size. Compiler writers break compatibility with some little ol' thing they don't think anyone is using, but which everyone is actually using in *every* version, fail to implement uncommon or difficult language features, add non standard features that other compilers don't support. Then application developers do things like not swapping to network byte order and using architecture dependent data types (size_t as in the example). Between different unices, header file contents will change.
The fixes are often not that hard (usually trivial) to do between say versions of the same compiler, or endian switches... but they are still there and annoy the hell out off people trying to compile old open source software on a new platform, like say macosx was a few years ago and x86 64 is now. There's always growing pains.
I seriously doubt that WINE supports the speech API. Last I heard only the most commonly used elements of win32 were supported. Maybe someone more familiar with WINE would care to comment.
I've always heard that windows support for multiple processors was pretty limited. Is this still the case? Is limited multi proc support for windows encouraging the development of this technology? Does load balancing of processes or threads across processors happen automatically?
I keep hearing that people get dual proc or dual core machines like the apple core duos, but that one proc or core lies dead under windows. Is this actually the case? Is this just a driver problem specific to a few machines? Do you need windows server 2003 or something?
Duke Nukem should do this instead of making their own game. Just take half life 2, and swap out the dialogue and a few face textures, and wala.
The way I see it is that there are currently just too many patentables in computer software. Some reform is needed, such as not allowing companies to patent "operation X, which is old, *applied to* market Y which is new" type patents, which are the real stupid ones. However, the majority of annoying patents like this will go away, because such a mass of prior art will exist, that you can be pretty much guaranteed that someone will have done something like it before unless it is truly inventive. That's not to say that bad patents won't be granted, but it will become pretty easy to get lawsuits like this dismissed with a little research.
Does anyone else see this optimistic view of the future? Am I just naive?
Look at the Avernum games that they are releasing now. They are just remakes of the old exile games they made. That would be *great* if the remake was an appreciable improvement on the original. Exile I, II, and III were great games, especially for mac users, since there were so few other rpgs for the mac at the time. If you haven't played them before, check out Exile III/Avernum III. Exile III was kind of a cross between elder scrolls and a tactical RPG. However, the only real improvement between the exile series and the avernum series is that they switched from low res grid graphics... to low res isometric graphics... They also keep reusing art between games, and I often recognize "stock" sounds from exile in other games. Although to their credit, I fondly associate those stock sounds the most with exile.
I played the Nethergate demo back in the day, and it was actually pretty cool. All of their stories have cool plots, and their gameplay mechanic *is* actually pretty enjoyable, even if it hasn't changed in over a decade... What they really need is to get out of their rut, get some outside investment, hire a few full time fantasy artists, and maybe another programmer, and put together a game that has the great stories, combat, and quests of the previous ones, but also has nice looking *graphics* to appeal to a wider audience... maybe even get it sold at retail.
Being an indy developer shouldn't mean that you have no budget whatsoever for your product... no company should be run like that. It's impossible to compete.
The only reason nethergate failed, is that spiderweb has locked itself into the "retro rpg" niche market. The "hisorical retro rpg" is a niche within a niche. Also, it would be nice if they kept supporting the project... you can no longer run it on the latest (intel) macs, which kind of hampers it from becoming some future "cult classic."
I fondly look forward to the day when spiderweb either gets outside investment, or Vogel goes to work for a larger company as a game designer. However, that doesn't seem likely, as they seem pretty committed to doing extremely low budget games...
>Matrox TripleHead Triples Your Viewing Pleasure
Awesome, but... when did Matrox expand into the prostitution business?
As many have pointed out, while Moore may once have been with greenpeace, he is no longer any sort of environmentalist. Currently he's working for the timber lobby among others and using his former title as founder of greenpeace to dupe people into thinking that he represents the environmentalist movement. A quick search for "Patrick Moore timber" on google will give you the real story.
That said, I personally agree that nuclear power is the best option in most places in the world. It is certainly *not* the perfect option, but the technology has slowly but steadily improved over time, whereas the alternative, fossil fuels, have become more expensive and not a whole lot cleaner.
Solar power has also improved greatly in efficiency over the years, but solar power is only viable in certain places. The same could be said of wind, geo thermal, and hydro power. They are great options where available... but nuclear power represents the only general purpose replacement for hydrocarbons.
My state, Washington, is run almost entirely on hydro power, which provides us with cheap and reliable power. However, even with the large number of damable rivers, there's still excess need for power, which is split pretty evenly between coal and nuclear power. The thing is, that while nuclear is more environmentally friendly, and doesn't rise in cost with increasing fossil fuel prices, it still comes with its own problems. Additionally, cleaning up the hanford nuclear site has been a nightmare, especially for the people downwind... and the federal government has been remarkably slow to clean up the mess they made. This has done a lot to sour public perception of nuclear technology.
If you are interested in nuclear power, hanford is important to consider. The site was of course used for developing weapons (enriching uranium specifically I believe...), but there's a lot to be learned from the cleanup effort... specifically, that it goes very slowly, and that the federal government pinches every dime they can in the effort. I think that the estimated end of the cleanup is sometime in 2030, not counting further delays... Considering that other messes are likely to happen with widespread enough nuclear power, no matter how careful we are, the slowness of federal cleanup efforts could really become a problem.
His comments about global warming are utter lies. It is a verifiable fact that climate change is happening as we speak, for whatever reason.
Administering a nation of 300 million people is not a job for morons, although some morons have got it anyway. Historically, we've had some extremely bright people running the country.
From wikipedia:
In addition to his political career, Jefferson was also an agriculturalist, horticulturist, architect, etymologist, archaeologist, mathematician, cryptographer, surveyor, paleontologist, author, lawyer, inventor, violinist, and the founder of the University of Virginia.
Jefferson wasn't alone either.
There was a period of time when smart people pretty much took over the world, called the Enlightenment. You really don't know anything meaningful about American history unless you know what and why the Enlightenment was... which is sad, because few do. The very existence of our country and modern ideas about democracy are owed to the intellectual revolution of those days.
In recent years, we've had Bill Clinton, who was a rhode scholar. Anyone know who was the smartest president of the 20th century?
Here's a nice article on the relative intelligence and stupidity of various presidents.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010622.html
haaaaah?
There have been a number of design decisions that palm and other PDA manufacturers, and cell phone manufacturers for that matter, have made that I've never understood.
Lack of USB support. All the PDAs and cell phones I've seen come with a proprietary port... that I invariably end up getting a usb adapter for. Why the hell don't they just have a USB port at the bottom of the device? Is the hardware too complex?
Think about all the USB devices that this would give you access to... first of all usb keyboards, which are standard and would not require a ton of drivers. Think about the ability to use USB thumb drives to exchange your data...
Other devices like printers would probably be less well supported, seeing as a ton of drivers would need to be stored on the device, but still... it would be sweet.
I think most of us who have worked in the game industry have seen a lot of this. Mostly, the effect has been that few games show blood, gore, and nudity in any detail. Bascially, they seem to adhere to the ESRB ratings. If you think about it, there's a lot of violence in games, but it is always depicted in certain cartoonish ways against opponents that are strongly recognizable as human. Frankly, it doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world.
Does anyone know of any particular *abuses* of this power? Like removal of political content?
Although I think the articles make some generalizations which may be unfair, the point is essentially true. It is scummy to call yourself a professional at something, but then self yourself on sex, unless selling sex is your job of course. I personally just do not respect women who use their bodies to get ahead.
Also, I think that the article was essentially complaining (once you remove a few inflammatory generalizations) is that gamers selling sex are taking away sponsorship opportunities from people who are actually *good* at video games. Now, personally, I don't take professional video game playing that seriously... but if the same thing happened to me at work, I'd be pretty pissed.