"Several notable commercial titles developed using the Torque engine include Blockland, Marble Blast Gold, Minions of Mirth, TubeTwist, Ultimate Duck Hunting, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, ThinkTanks, The Destiny of Zorro, Penny Arcade Adventures and most recently, indie video games S.P.A.Z. and Frozen Synapse."
Sorry, but apart from the last two (who don't exactly excel in their fields, though FS is a good enough turn-based shooter to be fun in multiplayer), that's not a good advertisement.
And a game engine is a game engine. It just takes work away from programmers who already know how to write one, if they could be bothered, so they can focus on the game itself rather than trivialities (and lots of indie studios make their own engines because it's just that much easier if you keep it all in-house and know what every line does). It's a time-saving device, not a miracle of engineering.
To say the article summary has some hyperbole is to understate it dramatically.
Don't worry about frequency - just make them pay for it.
Price per stock traded per day. Trade in one stock, your daily fee is $X. Trade in two stocks that day? That'll be $X^2. Your third trade will cost $X^3 and so on. (Or some such similar mathematical relationship).
Then if you make the one good, careful decision, you aren't penalised. If you make multiple trades that are sure to make you money, you aren't penalised. If the market for that stock is collapsing and you NEED to get out, you'll pay it.
If you just want to play the numbers by trading in everything every fraction of a second and scoop off only the cream, then it's going to cost you BILLIONS per day.
It might have flaws but returning stability and reinserting good, thought-out decision-making back to the exchanges isn't one of them.
And if they couldn't turn it off, they'd just concatenate all their lines.
More importantly, I'd infinitely prefer a version that warned if there was a screen full of comment and no code.
If you need that much comment, it's too important to hope that the guy maintaining the code keeps it up to date and everyone who uses that part of it reads and understands the comment. It should be explained elsewhere and a big red notice "DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT READING X" should be put on the code itself.
Documentation external to the code is pointless and worthless. It gets out of date, glosses over implementation details, doesn't directly reference code (only by function, normally, and functions can be HUGE) and doesn't state much that couldn't be found through introspection.
Documentation in comments has the opposite problem. It describes ONLY the implementation details, stays (pretty much, if you're good) up-to-date, stays with the function/method/class/objects being described, and states only things that you *CAN'T* see with just a brief look at the code.
And, in the end, the code is the master of what ACTUALLY happens.
So it's not really an easily solvable problem by some editor paradigm. External documentation solves different problems to in-code commenting, and are usually even written by different kinds of people, and neither of which tell you what's ACTUALLY going to happen.
If documentation was just-that-easy to fix, we'd have done it already. But it's more a political, professional, and personal problem than it is anything some magic "system" can fix.
And, to a trained programmer, hundreds of lines of comments are pretty much treated as whitespace whether they have collapsible trees of source or not. That's why we colour them that way, so they don't get in the way of real work. And also, we need them out of the way and have learned to ignore that colour when we're coding and ignore the code when we're commenting.
They are two separate entities, and you have to "context-switch" to comment or to code (usual procedure is code until it works, then comment it). And other documentation is entirely separate and a totally different ball-game.
And, of course, the real questions are "what dilution?", "for how long?" and "where?"
Household vinegar is acidic (down to pH 2.4 or even lower). It just matters what dilution you have it in. Do you know what I use to clean the windscreen wipers on my car? Vinegar. I've never once worried about the paint job underneath them melting off because of vinegar.
If I wipe it off (or wash it away, or whatever) quick, I could pour just about anything on there.
And if I do it on a nice, waxed, plain part not near any edges or corners, I'd get away with it even easier.
But, yes, that's the point. You THINK he said that he's poured some horrendous acid on the car, where actually he's poured some acid of unknown dilution onto a small, waxed portion of a fresh car and in fact then immediately neutralised the acid anyway.
The problem is what people THINK he said compared to what he ACTUALLY said. And that only gets solved by educating people.
"This loan is at the lowest we've EVER offered!". Great. But if it's still 20% more than the competition offer every day, it's not much of a bargain.
"Suppose Alice has a qubit in some arbitrary quantum state
The components of a maximally entangled two-qubit state are distributed to Alice and Bob.
In the end, the qubit in Bob's possession will be in the desired state."
So what Alice is doing is actually modifying the REMOTE qubits to be identical to the LOCAL qubits AFTER the initial information exchange has occurred. You're now literally turning someone's remote blank paper into a copy of the document you have yourself by using a little set of numbers that you determined between yourself last week.
Well, in most civilised countries in the world, advertisements CAN'T lie. That's pretty much the problem.
The other side of the coin is whether people THINK something that the advert IMPLIES but doesn't actually say. If you're stupid enough to fall for those tricks, then you really will believe that advertising lies all the time.
That's not to say that lies don't happen. It's just an entirely different kind of "lie" to what the average person would think.
Watching the shopping channels is entertainment on a dull night for no other reason than spotting the holes and flaws in the truths they tell (Do it - assume they are 100% true and then see how they can say those things without telling a lie, it's quite fun to do. Do the same with magicians, psychics, etc. and notice the same tricks happening).
Last night on QVC: "This ceramic frying pan can cook at a hotter heat than any metal pan on the market". Well, yes. It probably can. But I wouldn't EVER cook at those temperatures and surely my gas stovetop or, indeed, my frying pan would melt trying to do that before I need worry about buying a ceramic one".
"This pan wipes clean with one swipe" - yes, it does. Because you've got hot, fresh, watery/oily sauce that you poured onto it just a second ago and a huge tough man scraping a heavy, clean, damp dishcloth over after scraping off the sauce with a metal implement.
"While the traditional non-stick pan is much harder to clean" - no, because the over-smiley female presenter is hardly pushing, with a dry, small, flimsy dishcloth (and no metal implement) on a pre-dried stain of (presumably) the same sauce that probably has been cooked on and dried for hours.
Completely truthful. Absolutely 100% misleading. There's a difference.
Given that you're more than likely to send military personnel (e.g. NASA pilots) on the mission, military rations would do.
They would sustain high levels of activity. They would be as weight-efficient as possible. They would provide all necessary nutrients for long term use. They would provide a varied menu.
And the people eating them will probably not care about the rations.
Eating the same food over and over again isn't going to drive you anywhere near insane unless you were unstable already. You'd get bored, that's about it. Like working abroad and getting sick of foreign food, it's not going to kill you and if you're military-trained (or even just professional), you will not care or notice because, damn, you're on Mars!
And you pack a monthly "special meal" to combat long-term boredom.
The solution, however, seems to be NOT to send up pre-packaged meals. Send up ingredients and a bunch of recipes. Sure, there's problems with cooking in such environments but surely they have to be solved and that's the BEST time to solve them before we have to prepare ALL food on Earth and send it up around the Solar System.
Send up raw ingredients. Find ways to solve the preparation and cooking problems. Then the crew can have whatever they like to eat, whenever they want, and nothing they don't like and solve the problem for everyone else. And every few meals, have bubble-n-squeak or some "leftover" kind of meal out of the bits you'd normally waste.
Produce a game I want to play, and make it a program that I don't cringe as I try to install it.
It's not hard. Hundreds of them are on my PC at the moment. I don't think there's a single Ubisoft one among them (except some really old games before they started bundling pure shit along with their shitty games and trying to sell it for full price).
The DRM doesn't stop the pirates. The DRM does stop me.
If it's taken you this long to listen, believe and understand what people have been saying to you for YEARS, I see no reason to reward your years of ignorance now.
I once knew an American girl who came to visit in England. She came over with a friend of mine and then we were all travelling on to Corfu. On the queue to airport security on the way to Heathrow to fly to Corfu, she pulled something out of her bag and said "Is this alright to take on the plane if they don't allow fluids? It's been in my bag for months"
It was a CS spray. Totally, 100% illegal to even own in the UK, let alone bring with you in your hand luggage from America to the UK, unchecked.
She was hastily silenced by her English companion, who dropped it into one of those "prohibited water bottle" bins, and we just moved down the line.
She would have been arrested on the spot if she was carrying it in the UK (even owning it is arrestable!). But she'd managed to go through the US customs, through UK customs and only because SHE pulled it out on her second trip through did anyone even know it was there. And this was only a few years ago - still recent enough to have the liquids-on-planes paranoia.
What you're talking about is little to do with resolution so much as colour gamut, accurate reproduction and (yes) true 3D.
Also your eye is pretty bad unless it's looking directly as something. Then that thing comes into focus because you focus on it. That can't happen with a screen showing already-chosen focus on something else. So no matter how you squint, your eyes can't get the background trees into focus when they pass over them (and thus it's not "real") - and they probably pass over them several times a second while you're watching content that you've never seen before.
What you're saying is that watching a flat box showing colour reproductions of pre-recorded 2D imagery isn't like "real-life". And it isn't. Because even the best colour elements in a TV can't replicate real-life (and some people can even perceive UV and not know it!), even the best 3D TV can't provide depth to the image sufficiently, even the best camera doesn't record everything in "focus-free" format so that you *CAN* focus on any part of the image you like, etc. etc. etc. In the same way that Stereo, 5.1, 7.2, or anything else you choose cannot accurately reproduce an arbitrary sound in an arbitrary location around your head.
The room for improvement is not in resolution. You honestly *cannot* resolve it at a decent distance with a pure datastream (companies badly compressing video? That's another issue entirely). Even though you *can* see the light of a candle in complete darkness from MILES away, you're not measuring the same things.
The best room for improvement would probably be proper "free-focus" imagery. Where you can put up an image and I can see EVERY pixel in pin-sharp detail whether it was one mile away from the camera or one inch (and not have to refocus my eyes, or to fool them sufficiently that they AUTOMATICALLY refocus themselves). Because that pixel element behind the actor's shoulder ISN'T REALLY six foot behind the one that represents his shoulder when it's displayed, so it will not look "real".
Until you have proper, full, 3D and such free-focus media, you won't get what you want. And we know how well 3D has gone down - just as well as it does every time it's "reinvented" for another generation.
- No public bug tracking is required. Closed development process is a myth - it merely packages plain source installs of everything it uses and pushes patches upstream. Actual patches above-and-beyond the version is states it uses of a particular app/library are virtually zero.
- A primitive character-mode installer that lets you install it on ANYTHING. Literally, anything. And not worry about whether it supports VESA even, let alone KMS.
-.All administration is done from the command line. So you don't NEED X. Perfect for server installs, in my experience, but perfectly serviceable as a desktop if you want (which one? Have them all!)
- No dependency tracking - true, but the base install contains everything you need for a pretty substantial install. And if you're installing servers and working machine rather than desktops, you probably don't need to touch anything.
- Minimal feature set? Same as every other distro, just maybe not as integrated and automatic as you would like. That's a plus to me - I can tell EXACTLY what's going to load when and can cut out the crap on the installer before it even gets off the disk. Oh, and it runs all the latest kernels just fine.
If you think of PC's as "things that need a GUI", it's probably not for you. If you think of PC's as "things that get a job done, reliably, every time, with the minimum of extraneous resources consumed", then it's fabulous.
Hell, it took about two-three days to get ArmedSlack (the ARM port) working on Raspberry Pi. Still the only thing I'd use on that device, given it's low footprint and having to boot off my 2Gb card. And when you intend the distro to do nothing more than track GPS, dial up 3G, integrate with external electronics, etc. then a 100Mb install that still can be SSH'd into without even having to go looking for what to install is a big plus. And no GUI required.
The thing that distinguishes Slackware is that it was the first EVER distro. And it hasn't changed much. Sweet, simple, small, stable. Hell, I have 10+ year old machines still running on Slack.
I was moving some PC's that were bolted to the desks they stood on.
Basically, the security plates were a large metal plate, secured with epoxy to the PC, to give a large surface area that then took a stiff 10mm metal cable which tied them to the desks.
I didn't want to damage the PC casing or the desk so I had a look at what the school they were in had. They had a box of unlabelled keys along with some spare cables (so presumably they were the right keys if you could be bothered to try them all in every combination for 50+ PC's). I just didn't have the time.
I could see there was no way to cut through the cable. I could see the steel plate would need a hacksaw to release the cable of its own accord. I could see that there was no way to take the cable from the desk without damaging the desk.
So I got a flat-blade screwdriver, inserted it between the plate and the PC casing, and whacked it a bit. I mean, hitting it with a hammer to the point of deforming the casing on the "test" PC I was using. I must have been trying to prise it off for 20+ minutes.
Then, completely by accident, I rotated the screwdriver. The whole plate popped off and fell on the floor. There was some resin residue on the PC case but nothing to worry about.
Hell, I thought, must have been all the bashing or I got lucky or they weren't secured properly, or the epoxy was old or something. Turns out, no. You can pull the cable with two feet placed on the casing and hold your own weight and more and not make any headway to getting it off. You can bash at it all day long and destroy the casing. You can deform the metal to the point where it's unusable and still it won't let go.
But put a flatblade even the smallest amount into the gap between plate and casing, and twist with no more torque than needed to do up a screw and it fell off. Consistently. Every time. Every PC. No matter the age or install date of that particular epoxy / plate or the surface it was adhering to.
The ironic thing? The school then asked me if I could re-attach those cables to the PC in their new locations. The only comforting thought as I did so (after HOURS of trying to scrape the epoxy residue off so I could re-glue them) was that some burglar might spend hours trying to pull and separate the PC's by brute force and not know how easy they were to remove.
Didn't matter, though. We had SmartWater on them and they weren't worth the price of the SmartWater database registration, let alone all the hassle. But, hey, I was being paid.
Only an American could ask that with a straight face.
"It's just that today... where do you honestly want to be treated?"
Any country that won't bankrupt me to do so. Because there's no point in being treated if you then have nowhere to live, recuperate, no life to enjoy after and have to work (while in ill health) for the next 20 years to pay it off. I would love to be treated in a perfect hospital with every medicine and treatment available and have it all done while people bring me cocktails and rub my feet. Of course. But the truth is that it's a choice being PAYING LOTS OF MONEY and being treated okay, or PAYING NOTHING and being treated when necessary.
If I cut my finger, I'll do it myself. If I sprain my leg, I'll do it myself or walk into a hospital if it really develops complications. If I break my leg, I have to go to hospital. If I break my spine, I have to go to hospital. If I get cancer, I have to go to hospital.
At no point would I ever *PAY* for those services. Think about that. I get cancer, I probably have 10-20 years at most if it's serious and will never truly rid myself of it, and I get ALL my treatment paid for me. How much would that cost on insurance, and how much would that cost if you had no insurance and had to pay cash? Now what if I'm diagnosed with, say, cerebral palsy at birth? How much is my insurance going to be then? Have you even SEEN the cost of quite basic medical treatment?
My country, the UK, is shit and wonderful at the same time but wouldn't expect a dying man to pay for his own care (maybe his car parking at the hospital, but that's a minor issue in comparison). The hospital might be crap. It might have worse care rates than private wards. The staff might be belligerent. But I'm not running up debts that I will never be able to pay while I'm laying there unconscious and can't do anything about it.
In the UK, the healthy pay for the sick. In the US, the healthy pay (next to) nothing and the sick are left to fend for themselves.
Nice attitude to humanity, there.
I never to sit there, adding to the stress of my illness, with what might happen to my insurance payments, or my house, or my family, or anything else.
Sorry, given the choice, I'd go to a hospital where the treatment is "free" and the only cost is the queue and the waiting time. Because the simple, economic fact is that *I* cannot afford to pay for anything serious (and wouldn't go to hospital for anything that wasn't) and I already pay as-much, if-not-more tax than the US and we do just fine on "free" healthcare.
Literally - if I went on holiday to the US I have to buy a travel medical insurance that I *NEVER* have to purchase in the EU. Because if I break my leg in Spain, the treatment will be paid for by the UK. If I break my leg in the US, they won't pay (because of your ridiculous healthcare arrangements) and I have to BUDGET THAT INTO MY HOLIDAY. If I fall into a coma in the US, whether my fault or not, that's me bankrupt back in my own country trying to pay off the US medical bills. Or I can pay a fortune for insurance that NOBODY in the EU requires me to have. (And, yes, US residents are charged for the cost of their healthcare in the EU but they are used to it!). I actually have to take it into account just holidaying in the US.
Either pay for everyone's healthcare out of my taxes, or ask me to pay towards everyone's healthcare as a separate payment. Don't pay for some of it out of my taxes, then make me pay for anything above a slight cold, and then make insurances compulsory, and then let insurers set the prices how they like (the point of insurance should be to cover EVERYONE for an equal price - i.e. if you all pay $100 a month, then the guy who needs a $10 operation gets it as does the guy who needs 100 $10,000 operations - otherwise you are just paying for your own healthcare).
And, in the UK, I have the option. I have complete, free, blanket NHS protection on anything I ever do. I can also pay fo
What makes you think that they will stop just because their account doesn't get closed?
They will not notice the efficacy of their spam, they will just keep signing up and spamming. And you'll play whack-a-mole trying to put all their accounts into sandboxes.
Just how often does a spammer go back to see if his comment posted or not, or if his email got through? Rarely. Spam works on the basis of mass volume. Put a billion adverts on a billion websites and your sales will increase somehow. And the price of those adverts is next to zero after the first few thousand.
It won't work, but it will make a lot of hassle for you, from storage to filtering to just plain bandwidth if you have a thousand spammers realising they can auto-sign-up and spam you endlessly.
It's like running a "honeypot". You'll gather lots of data at great expense and resources. But you won't stop the spam.
Okay, so why hasn't he been arrested on terrorism charges yet?
Offering to build a nuclear reactor and, of all places, in Korea? I thought there were export laws about things like that?
Not to mention, he's obviously well-funded, has planted malware on every computer in the world (and thus indirectly funds all piracy and peer-to-peer networks).
Seriously? We're chasing after some pillock in an embassy when Bill Gates is building private nuclear reactors in war-torn countries?
8 hours sleep. 8 hours work. 8 hours leisure (which INCLUDES travel to/from work and everything else).
I think you should be grateful that you get ONE HALF of my entire waking life every weekday. And I *earn* the weekends by not doing a crappy job.
Weekends are also my buffer if you don't pay me enough, I have an emergency of some kind that needs me to work for money, or whatever else. Out of respect for the working agreements, I won't do that as a night-shift or after work during the week without your permission, but if I suddenly need to earn money at the weekends too - that's *my* business. Even if it's just flogging some old tat on eBay or a boot sale.
And there is "work" outside of paid work too - I either have to pay some professional to do some DIY or do it myself. Either way, that's more of my earned money and free time I burn up *NOT* lazing around the house.
Anything above and beyond that is for something:
- that was caused by something stupid that I did (including lack of planning!). I *will* rectify my mistakes if they've caused some provable, detrimental effect on the business. That's professional pride.
- is absolutely vital, cannot be put off, and cannot be done by others during the working day, is voluntary and that I will expect back in kind (notice: not money necessarily, but when I want a day off later in the year, or better tools, or training, or whatever, you better not get snarky about it).
Anything outside those criteria? You're trying to steal my life for your company and the only recompense I can possibly EVER reap is money (if anything!) which can't cover the sort of ills that work like that can cause.
If you regularly work more hours than that, you either have no concept of life outside work, value money too much, or you are, quite honestly, weak-willed or mentally ill (e.g. depression, anxiety, etc. causing you to not want to say No).
The bigger question is: What does the company get out of employing tired drones? Savings on wages for any "free" work they can make you do? That's about it. They should be hiring someone else instead, if they cared about their customers, products or services. Better an extra part-timer for a year than wearing your best workers into the ground chasing some mythical business utopia. And if they can't afford that? Then they were doing business on a knife-edge all along and are probably better off without staff anyway.
You can ask me nicely and "bribe" me for some short-term changes to my contract. Anything longer and you're not upholding your responsibility to your customers or your staff by doing a shoddy job where you should have hired more people.
When you have half my waking life during work-days and you want more? Then I look elsewhere for someone running their business properly rather than a cash cow obtained by grinding up lesser employees.
And, really, if you can't do something in 8 hours, 5 days a week, then you have problems bigger than what you can squeeze out of your employees. Some of the most productive countries in the world work less, on average. And anyone who's worked for themselves knows - you actually earn a LOT more when you just do the job and nothing more, get paid for the day, and go home.
Hell, when I was doing THIS EXACT JOB, but on a self-employed basis, I was earning the same money in less than half the working time. The difference is stability - chasing potential customers, economic fluctuations, insurance, etc. is all a gamble. At any time, you could be doing NO work at all, and not be able to find any. The way out of that is to scale up so that losses are absorbed by profits elsewhere, etc. which is a net gain - you actually make more money out of 10 people working 8 hours than you do 1 person working 80 if you do it right. The *stability* of a good job that you like is just-about worth half-your-money.
The cost of even the best job is unlikely to be worth half-your-waking-life, though.
Desert Strike System Shock 2 Start of NHL series Start of Wing Commander series Start of FIFA series Start of Need for Speed series Ultima Online Start of NASCAR series Start of Command & Conquer series Start of Dungeon Keeper series Start of SimCity series Start of Medal of Honor series
00's titles:
American McGee's Alice Start of SSX series Start of James Bond series Start of Harry Potter series Start of The Sims series Start of Burnout series Start of Battlefield series Dark Age of Camelot Start of Crysis series Start of Rock Band series Start of Skate series Start of Mass Effect series Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Start of Spore series Start of Army of Two series Start of Dead Space series Mirror's Edge Start of Dragon Age series
2012 (expected) titles: Madden NFL 13 The Sims 3: Supernatural The Sims 3: Seasons NHL 13 FIFA 13 NBA Live 13 Medal of Honor: Warfighter Need for Speed: Most Wanted Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar
EA have some fabulous games and series on that list. Trouble is they are all pre-2010, and all either introduced new genres or built upon existing titles well. The 2010+ titles? Just yet-another-iteration of some of their worst series.
Come on, EA, you bought up Bullfrog and any number of fantastic developers / franchises and then milked them to death while inflicting horrible DRM and pricing on your customers. How about doing what you USED to do, which was START series of games, not run them into the ground?
And tech (as in physical hardware) doesn't exist without a viable business behind it.
The problem is quite simple - you have to buy computers capable of running the game, buy the game, buy the techs to support that all, buy the datacenter space and bandwidth to keep up, buy other things to capture the image and compress the streams, etc. and then sell it to the user for less than the cost of the game itself.
It doesn't work. And, that aside, it was nothing more than video-streaming of a moving image, something that we've had sorted for about 10 years now, and sending inputs to remote programs. It was basically "VNC with knobs on", optimised for games and nothing fabulous. The problem is not the tech, it's the business not existing behind it.
Some things work in the cloud because you can make savings, consolidate hardware, use one user's downtime to run another's uptime, etc. But with games, there's just too much required.
I used it. Once. They were offering free full-plays of WH40K: Space Marine. I got an account, got the game. Admittedly, it was a relief not to have to install much and to just connect straight to the game. But once inside, to me, it was an inferior window onto the game. Good enough to see what it was like, but only good enough to actually BUY the game elsewhere.
And I can't *imagine* the expense that my hour-or-so playthrough actually required to deploy that quickly and hand me a working copy of the game on a remote server with 1Mbps+ streaming of the video image.
There never was a problem with the tech once broadband became popular. There was *ALWAYS* going to be a problem with the business model, back-end hardware required, and aiming it at gamers. And, to be honest, even a techie should have seen that coming.
It's literally back-of-the-napkin maths that would have stopped me ever working for them. But hell, as a consumer, I took advantage of a free run-through of a (then) full-price game and then ended up buying it off Steam (which was the same price as OnLive "lifetime" subscription which only actually lasted three years).
OnLive's business model required people to own a computer in order to play games on a remote computer. The problem is, at the quality level that they could play them, most people already had a computer capable of playing them because of the LUDICROUS specs on even basic hardware now and OnLive was just an unnecessary level of indirection.
That's how any sensible person regards things, religion or not. I don't care what *you* believe, the fact is that *X* is true in millions of fair experiments. If you want to believe in a God, fine, he "made" it happen that way. I can't prove or disprove that so one person's belief that it's true is just as valid as another's that it isn't.
If it were as simple as saying "Let's just get along", there wouldn't be a problem. This guy, for instance, wants to teach absolute nonsense that goes against observable, recorded, verified fact as if it *IS* science. It's like me demanding that all History classes teach that Winston Churchill's last words were "Aw, fuck it, put The Simpsons on TV, would ya?".
The fact is that with creationism, especially, you're not dealing with sensible, reasonable people. You're dealing with people who think that a religion is only a way to trot out complete bollocks and attack people who say something against it.
You can live your life by a book. Nobody's stopping you. Hell, it can be Fifty Shades of Grey, Beatrix Potter, Aesop's Fables (which predates the Bible, incidentally) or the Bible. Nobody cares. But when living your life by that book interferes with *MY* books, then you have a problem. If you want to believe the world is round and lives on the back of a turtle, not a problem. But then just what goes on in your head when you take a round-the-world flight?
And when other elements of that book are provably nothing more than works of fiction, we have a bigger problem. And when you want to shove it down my throat, and everyone else's, and masquerade it as "science" (when you yourself have zero science qualifications) because you think there can only be one answer and everyone should only listen to you, then we have an even bigger problem.
It's no worse than turning up at your very first ever Maths lesson, when you have zero aptitude for Maths, and saying "2 + 2 = 4? Pfft. Wrong! I don't believe it! And you can never teach that to anyone!"
No scientist of any repute will tell you what to think, or tell you they can prove God does / doesn't exist. They don't particularly care. But they will tell you if they think you're wrong, and they'll back up their assertions. And if you try to go against thousands of years of science, you need to have the proof to back that up. If you don't have proof but continue to assert it, they will just rule you out as a crackpot until you do. Most crackpots NEVER make it out of the crackpot category because they DON'T try to proof themselves right in any recognised fashion.
It's a shame that the religious people *don't* just ignore the people who go against their beliefs. The world would be a much quieter place.
My girlfriend works in medical research. She was once teaching a class of PhD's and asked them how they would go about sexing a skeleton. One of them literally, seriously and actually said "Count the ribs".
It's bad enough already, let's not make things worse. Just think what will happen to those students who WANT to be biologists, anatomists, etc. who are taught like that and then go on to higher education somewhere else. Just how much do they want your children to be laughed at, basically?
Not watched the Mythbusters episode about the lie detector? Apart from the absolute rubbish asserting that polygraphs work (despite there being NO scientific evidence that they have ever or could ever work and vast evidence to the contrary - and HUGE problems with their experiment setup in the first place), they do a bit where they stick people in MRI's, EEG's, fMRI's, etc.
Basically, it's hard to tell without a very good MRI scan happening *as* the person lies, real consequences if they are found out, complete amateurs being tested, no counter-measures being taken by them, huge amounts of analysis, etc. to say if someone is lying. But if someone doesn't want it to be known they are lying, it's almost impossible to tell from any external measurement.
And if you can't do it with medical-grade EEG or room-sized MRI results, you can't do it with a gaming headset for the next 30 years.
Hell, the US is just about the only "first-world" country that's EVER allowed polygraph results to be used as "evidence" in a court of law.
It's just that shite, and unreliable, a method to detect what someone is thinking. And if you can lie automatically and convincingly, then you have nothing *TO* detect in the brain. At least until you can *literally* read people's thoughts as if they were sentences being spoken aloud about what they intend to do.
Hell, our knowledge of the brain at the moment stems mainly from waiting for someone to have a bolt fired through their brain by accident and seeing what facility they lose and what parts of the brain were damaged. Above and beyond that, the brain's a black box of which we can only measure "activity" by way of measure electromagnetic changes. That's like trying to tell what colour object is inside a opaque box that you can't touch by waving a metal detector near it.
Hell, Europe is "closer" to the oil-producing countries and we're still paying £1.30 / 1.30 Euro a LITRE which is 6 $USD for a US gallon. And you know what? People still pay it, because there is still no viable alternative. Drive anywhere in Europe, it's all the same.
I sat down, did lots of calculations and set my own limit a while back - at £2 per litre, that's $12 for a US gallon, I have to *start* reconsidering the amount of driving I do. Chances are that by the time it hits that, interest rates will have risen to match, salaries will have risen to match, fuel efficiencies will have risen to match, I'll need a new car anyway, and public transport prices will still be as ridiculous as they are now.
And my reconsideration might just be "Well, nothing I can do about it" or even just "Actually, the relative value is still the same". It's not going to be "Oh, wow, I have to go out and spend tens of thousands on a new car with a new fuel, the money for which I'll have "saved" before it ends up as scrap metal." without some hugely drastic amount of physics being changed so that it's viable.
Until anything approaching 60 mpg can be gotten out of a *SECONDHAND* car with ranges of 400-500 miles, where I can fuel up ANYWHERE without having to consult lists of stations and maps, where I can repair the car for no more than an ordinary one and where I can trade in that car for some decent percentage of the original price I paid, then every other technology is going to lose out.
Hell, I did some maths the other day. If you add up the price of every car I've ever owned, every repair I've ever done (not including my own time), and fuel for several years, it *STILL* doesn't come to the price of one of the fancy hybrid cars that they want me to buy. Hell, for some models I wouldn't even get the second-hand price. In the face of such economics, it's no shock that the people who actually travel a lot aren't buying alternative fuel cars.
For £300, I have a car that's lasted 4 years with me and required about £300 of repairs and parts in all that time. It burns £400 a month in petrol but I get 50mpg (UK gallon!). That's almost impossible to compete against with such technology. A complete engine replacement for my car? About £300 off the scrap heap or a grand or two for something "newer".
When alternative fuel will honestly cost me more money than I've ever spent on my current car + fuel for a year before I even start driving it, it's hard to pitch those technologies. And replacing one hundred granny's cars who do 10 miles a month is pointless if you could replace just one heavy road user with a decent car.
Hell, I don't even care about speed, I'd poodle along in the slow lane quite happily, so long as it was motorway-capable (which means at least 60mph by law in my country). But you just CANNOT get close to anything the petrol offers at the moment, and petrol can quite literally double in price and STILL it would be more worthwhile. It would have to literally quadruple or more in price to actually price myself out of using it, and then things like LPG conversion (was quoted £800 for a full conversion last year) would probably get me another doubling of price before I was priced out again.
Petrol is amazingly cheap for what it gives you compared to EVERYTHING else that's at the cutting edge of research.
Slashdot Mirror
"Several notable commercial titles developed using the Torque engine include Blockland, Marble Blast Gold, Minions of Mirth, TubeTwist, Ultimate Duck Hunting, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, ThinkTanks, The Destiny of Zorro, Penny Arcade Adventures and most recently, indie video games S.P.A.Z. and Frozen Synapse."
Sorry, but apart from the last two (who don't exactly excel in their fields, though FS is a good enough turn-based shooter to be fun in multiplayer), that's not a good advertisement.
And a game engine is a game engine. It just takes work away from programmers who already know how to write one, if they could be bothered, so they can focus on the game itself rather than trivialities (and lots of indie studios make their own engines because it's just that much easier if you keep it all in-house and know what every line does). It's a time-saving device, not a miracle of engineering.
To say the article summary has some hyperbole is to understate it dramatically.
Don't worry about frequency - just make them pay for it.
Price per stock traded per day. Trade in one stock, your daily fee is $X. Trade in two stocks that day? That'll be $X^2. Your third trade will cost $X^3 and so on. (Or some such similar mathematical relationship).
Then if you make the one good, careful decision, you aren't penalised. If you make multiple trades that are sure to make you money, you aren't penalised. If the market for that stock is collapsing and you NEED to get out, you'll pay it.
If you just want to play the numbers by trading in everything every fraction of a second and scoop off only the cream, then it's going to cost you BILLIONS per day.
It might have flaws but returning stability and reinserting good, thought-out decision-making back to the exchanges isn't one of them.
And if they couldn't turn it off, they'd just concatenate all their lines.
More importantly, I'd infinitely prefer a version that warned if there was a screen full of comment and no code.
If you need that much comment, it's too important to hope that the guy maintaining the code keeps it up to date and everyone who uses that part of it reads and understands the comment. It should be explained elsewhere and a big red notice "DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT READING X" should be put on the code itself.
Documentation external to the code is pointless and worthless. It gets out of date, glosses over implementation details, doesn't directly reference code (only by function, normally, and functions can be HUGE) and doesn't state much that couldn't be found through introspection.
Documentation in comments has the opposite problem. It describes ONLY the implementation details, stays (pretty much, if you're good) up-to-date, stays with the function/method/class/objects being described, and states only things that you *CAN'T* see with just a brief look at the code.
And, in the end, the code is the master of what ACTUALLY happens.
So it's not really an easily solvable problem by some editor paradigm. External documentation solves different problems to in-code commenting, and are usually even written by different kinds of people, and neither of which tell you what's ACTUALLY going to happen.
If documentation was just-that-easy to fix, we'd have done it already. But it's more a political, professional, and personal problem than it is anything some magic "system" can fix.
And, to a trained programmer, hundreds of lines of comments are pretty much treated as whitespace whether they have collapsible trees of source or not. That's why we colour them that way, so they don't get in the way of real work. And also, we need them out of the way and have learned to ignore that colour when we're coding and ignore the code when we're commenting.
They are two separate entities, and you have to "context-switch" to comment or to code (usual procedure is code until it works, then comment it). And other documentation is entirely separate and a totally different ball-game.
Dihydrogen monoxide is a component of acid rain, and kills thousands of people every year.
100% truthful.
100% misleading.
And, of course, the real questions are "what dilution?", "for how long?" and "where?"
Household vinegar is acidic (down to pH 2.4 or even lower). It just matters what dilution you have it in. Do you know what I use to clean the windscreen wipers on my car? Vinegar. I've never once worried about the paint job underneath them melting off because of vinegar.
If I wipe it off (or wash it away, or whatever) quick, I could pour just about anything on there.
And if I do it on a nice, waxed, plain part not near any edges or corners, I'd get away with it even easier.
But, yes, that's the point. You THINK he said that he's poured some horrendous acid on the car, where actually he's poured some acid of unknown dilution onto a small, waxed portion of a fresh car and in fact then immediately neutralised the acid anyway.
The problem is what people THINK he said compared to what he ACTUALLY said. And that only gets solved by educating people.
"This loan is at the lowest we've EVER offered!". Great. But if it's still 20% more than the competition offer every day, it's not much of a bargain.
It's not quite as simple as teleportation, it's just given that name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
Most specifically:
"Suppose Alice has a qubit in some arbitrary quantum state
The components of a maximally entangled two-qubit state are distributed to Alice and Bob.
In the end, the qubit in Bob's possession will be in the desired state."
So what Alice is doing is actually modifying the REMOTE qubits to be identical to the LOCAL qubits AFTER the initial information exchange has occurred. You're now literally turning someone's remote blank paper into a copy of the document you have yourself by using a little set of numbers that you determined between yourself last week.
Well, in most civilised countries in the world, advertisements CAN'T lie. That's pretty much the problem.
The other side of the coin is whether people THINK something that the advert IMPLIES but doesn't actually say. If you're stupid enough to fall for those tricks, then you really will believe that advertising lies all the time.
That's not to say that lies don't happen. It's just an entirely different kind of "lie" to what the average person would think.
Watching the shopping channels is entertainment on a dull night for no other reason than spotting the holes and flaws in the truths they tell (Do it - assume they are 100% true and then see how they can say those things without telling a lie, it's quite fun to do. Do the same with magicians, psychics, etc. and notice the same tricks happening).
Last night on QVC: "This ceramic frying pan can cook at a hotter heat than any metal pan on the market". Well, yes. It probably can. But I wouldn't EVER cook at those temperatures and surely my gas stovetop or, indeed, my frying pan would melt trying to do that before I need worry about buying a ceramic one".
"This pan wipes clean with one swipe" - yes, it does. Because you've got hot, fresh, watery/oily sauce that you poured onto it just a second ago and a huge tough man scraping a heavy, clean, damp dishcloth over after scraping off the sauce with a metal implement.
"While the traditional non-stick pan is much harder to clean" - no, because the over-smiley female presenter is hardly pushing, with a dry, small, flimsy dishcloth (and no metal implement) on a pre-dried stain of (presumably) the same sauce that probably has been cooked on and dried for hours.
Completely truthful. Absolutely 100% misleading. There's a difference.
Given that you're more than likely to send military personnel (e.g. NASA pilots) on the mission, military rations would do.
They would sustain high levels of activity. They would be as weight-efficient as possible. They would provide all necessary nutrients for long term use. They would provide a varied menu.
And the people eating them will probably not care about the rations.
Eating the same food over and over again isn't going to drive you anywhere near insane unless you were unstable already. You'd get bored, that's about it. Like working abroad and getting sick of foreign food, it's not going to kill you and if you're military-trained (or even just professional), you will not care or notice because, damn, you're on Mars!
And you pack a monthly "special meal" to combat long-term boredom.
The solution, however, seems to be NOT to send up pre-packaged meals. Send up ingredients and a bunch of recipes. Sure, there's problems with cooking in such environments but surely they have to be solved and that's the BEST time to solve them before we have to prepare ALL food on Earth and send it up around the Solar System.
Send up raw ingredients. Find ways to solve the preparation and cooking problems. Then the crew can have whatever they like to eat, whenever they want, and nothing they don't like and solve the problem for everyone else. And every few meals, have bubble-n-squeak or some "leftover" kind of meal out of the bits you'd normally waste.
Produce a game I want to play, and make it a program that I don't cringe as I try to install it.
It's not hard. Hundreds of them are on my PC at the moment. I don't think there's a single Ubisoft one among them (except some really old games before they started bundling pure shit along with their shitty games and trying to sell it for full price).
The DRM doesn't stop the pirates.
The DRM does stop me.
If it's taken you this long to listen, believe and understand what people have been saying to you for YEARS, I see no reason to reward your years of ignorance now.
I once knew an American girl who came to visit in England. She came over with a friend of mine and then we were all travelling on to Corfu. On the queue to airport security on the way to Heathrow to fly to Corfu, she pulled something out of her bag and said "Is this alright to take on the plane if they don't allow fluids? It's been in my bag for months"
It was a CS spray. Totally, 100% illegal to even own in the UK, let alone bring with you in your hand luggage from America to the UK, unchecked.
She was hastily silenced by her English companion, who dropped it into one of those "prohibited water bottle" bins, and we just moved down the line.
She would have been arrested on the spot if she was carrying it in the UK (even owning it is arrestable!). But she'd managed to go through the US customs, through UK customs and only because SHE pulled it out on her second trip through did anyone even know it was there. And this was only a few years ago - still recent enough to have the liquids-on-planes paranoia.
What you're talking about is little to do with resolution so much as colour gamut, accurate reproduction and (yes) true 3D.
Also your eye is pretty bad unless it's looking directly as something. Then that thing comes into focus because you focus on it. That can't happen with a screen showing already-chosen focus on something else. So no matter how you squint, your eyes can't get the background trees into focus when they pass over them (and thus it's not "real") - and they probably pass over them several times a second while you're watching content that you've never seen before.
What you're saying is that watching a flat box showing colour reproductions of pre-recorded 2D imagery isn't like "real-life". And it isn't. Because even the best colour elements in a TV can't replicate real-life (and some people can even perceive UV and not know it!), even the best 3D TV can't provide depth to the image sufficiently, even the best camera doesn't record everything in "focus-free" format so that you *CAN* focus on any part of the image you like, etc. etc. etc. In the same way that Stereo, 5.1, 7.2, or anything else you choose cannot accurately reproduce an arbitrary sound in an arbitrary location around your head.
The room for improvement is not in resolution. You honestly *cannot* resolve it at a decent distance with a pure datastream (companies badly compressing video? That's another issue entirely). Even though you *can* see the light of a candle in complete darkness from MILES away, you're not measuring the same things.
The best room for improvement would probably be proper "free-focus" imagery. Where you can put up an image and I can see EVERY pixel in pin-sharp detail whether it was one mile away from the camera or one inch (and not have to refocus my eyes, or to fool them sufficiently that they AUTOMATICALLY refocus themselves). Because that pixel element behind the actor's shoulder ISN'T REALLY six foot behind the one that represents his shoulder when it's displayed, so it will not look "real".
Until you have proper, full, 3D and such free-focus media, you won't get what you want. And we know how well 3D has gone down - just as well as it does every time it's "reinvented" for another generation.
Because:
- No public bug tracking is required. Closed development process is a myth - it merely packages plain source installs of everything it uses and pushes patches upstream. Actual patches above-and-beyond the version is states it uses of a particular app/library are virtually zero.
- A primitive character-mode installer that lets you install it on ANYTHING. Literally, anything. And not worry about whether it supports VESA even, let alone KMS.
-.All administration is done from the command line. So you don't NEED X. Perfect for server installs, in my experience, but perfectly serviceable as a desktop if you want (which one? Have them all!)
- No dependency tracking - true, but the base install contains everything you need for a pretty substantial install. And if you're installing servers and working machine rather than desktops, you probably don't need to touch anything.
- Minimal feature set? Same as every other distro, just maybe not as integrated and automatic as you would like. That's a plus to me - I can tell EXACTLY what's going to load when and can cut out the crap on the installer before it even gets off the disk. Oh, and it runs all the latest kernels just fine.
If you think of PC's as "things that need a GUI", it's probably not for you. If you think of PC's as "things that get a job done, reliably, every time, with the minimum of extraneous resources consumed", then it's fabulous.
Hell, it took about two-three days to get ArmedSlack (the ARM port) working on Raspberry Pi. Still the only thing I'd use on that device, given it's low footprint and having to boot off my 2Gb card. And when you intend the distro to do nothing more than track GPS, dial up 3G, integrate with external electronics, etc. then a 100Mb install that still can be SSH'd into without even having to go looking for what to install is a big plus. And no GUI required.
The thing that distinguishes Slackware is that it was the first EVER distro. And it hasn't changed much. Sweet, simple, small, stable. Hell, I have 10+ year old machines still running on Slack.
I was moving some PC's that were bolted to the desks they stood on.
Basically, the security plates were a large metal plate, secured with epoxy to the PC, to give a large surface area that then took a stiff 10mm metal cable which tied them to the desks.
I didn't want to damage the PC casing or the desk so I had a look at what the school they were in had. They had a box of unlabelled keys along with some spare cables (so presumably they were the right keys if you could be bothered to try them all in every combination for 50+ PC's). I just didn't have the time.
I could see there was no way to cut through the cable. I could see the steel plate would need a hacksaw to release the cable of its own accord. I could see that there was no way to take the cable from the desk without damaging the desk.
So I got a flat-blade screwdriver, inserted it between the plate and the PC casing, and whacked it a bit. I mean, hitting it with a hammer to the point of deforming the casing on the "test" PC I was using. I must have been trying to prise it off for 20+ minutes.
Then, completely by accident, I rotated the screwdriver. The whole plate popped off and fell on the floor. There was some resin residue on the PC case but nothing to worry about.
Hell, I thought, must have been all the bashing or I got lucky or they weren't secured properly, or the epoxy was old or something. Turns out, no. You can pull the cable with two feet placed on the casing and hold your own weight and more and not make any headway to getting it off. You can bash at it all day long and destroy the casing. You can deform the metal to the point where it's unusable and still it won't let go.
But put a flatblade even the smallest amount into the gap between plate and casing, and twist with no more torque than needed to do up a screw and it fell off. Consistently. Every time. Every PC. No matter the age or install date of that particular epoxy / plate or the surface it was adhering to.
The ironic thing? The school then asked me if I could re-attach those cables to the PC in their new locations. The only comforting thought as I did so (after HOURS of trying to scrape the epoxy residue off so I could re-glue them) was that some burglar might spend hours trying to pull and separate the PC's by brute force and not know how easy they were to remove.
Didn't matter, though. We had SmartWater on them and they weren't worth the price of the SmartWater database registration, let alone all the hassle. But, hey, I was being paid.
Only an American could ask that with a straight face.
"It's just that today... where do you honestly want to be treated?"
Any country that won't bankrupt me to do so. Because there's no point in being treated if you then have nowhere to live, recuperate, no life to enjoy after and have to work (while in ill health) for the next 20 years to pay it off. I would love to be treated in a perfect hospital with every medicine and treatment available and have it all done while people bring me cocktails and rub my feet. Of course. But the truth is that it's a choice being PAYING LOTS OF MONEY and being treated okay, or PAYING NOTHING and being treated when necessary.
If I cut my finger, I'll do it myself.
If I sprain my leg, I'll do it myself or walk into a hospital if it really develops complications.
If I break my leg, I have to go to hospital.
If I break my spine, I have to go to hospital.
If I get cancer, I have to go to hospital.
At no point would I ever *PAY* for those services. Think about that. I get cancer, I probably have 10-20 years at most if it's serious and will never truly rid myself of it, and I get ALL my treatment paid for me. How much would that cost on insurance, and how much would that cost if you had no insurance and had to pay cash? Now what if I'm diagnosed with, say, cerebral palsy at birth? How much is my insurance going to be then? Have you even SEEN the cost of quite basic medical treatment?
My country, the UK, is shit and wonderful at the same time but wouldn't expect a dying man to pay for his own care (maybe his car parking at the hospital, but that's a minor issue in comparison). The hospital might be crap. It might have worse care rates than private wards. The staff might be belligerent. But I'm not running up debts that I will never be able to pay while I'm laying there unconscious and can't do anything about it.
In the UK, the healthy pay for the sick.
In the US, the healthy pay (next to) nothing and the sick are left to fend for themselves.
Nice attitude to humanity, there.
I never to sit there, adding to the stress of my illness, with what might happen to my insurance payments, or my house, or my family, or anything else.
Sorry, given the choice, I'd go to a hospital where the treatment is "free" and the only cost is the queue and the waiting time. Because the simple, economic fact is that *I* cannot afford to pay for anything serious (and wouldn't go to hospital for anything that wasn't) and I already pay as-much, if-not-more tax than the US and we do just fine on "free" healthcare.
Literally - if I went on holiday to the US I have to buy a travel medical insurance that I *NEVER* have to purchase in the EU. Because if I break my leg in Spain, the treatment will be paid for by the UK. If I break my leg in the US, they won't pay (because of your ridiculous healthcare arrangements) and I have to BUDGET THAT INTO MY HOLIDAY. If I fall into a coma in the US, whether my fault or not, that's me bankrupt back in my own country trying to pay off the US medical bills. Or I can pay a fortune for insurance that NOBODY in the EU requires me to have. (And, yes, US residents are charged for the cost of their healthcare in the EU but they are used to it!). I actually have to take it into account just holidaying in the US.
Either pay for everyone's healthcare out of my taxes, or ask me to pay towards everyone's healthcare as a separate payment. Don't pay for some of it out of my taxes, then make me pay for anything above a slight cold, and then make insurances compulsory, and then let insurers set the prices how they like (the point of insurance should be to cover EVERYONE for an equal price - i.e. if you all pay $100 a month, then the guy who needs a $10 operation gets it as does the guy who needs 100 $10,000 operations - otherwise you are just paying for your own healthcare).
And, in the UK, I have the option. I have complete, free, blanket NHS protection on anything I ever do. I can also pay fo
What makes you think that they will stop just because their account doesn't get closed?
They will not notice the efficacy of their spam, they will just keep signing up and spamming. And you'll play whack-a-mole trying to put all their accounts into sandboxes.
Just how often does a spammer go back to see if his comment posted or not, or if his email got through? Rarely. Spam works on the basis of mass volume. Put a billion adverts on a billion websites and your sales will increase somehow. And the price of those adverts is next to zero after the first few thousand.
It won't work, but it will make a lot of hassle for you, from storage to filtering to just plain bandwidth if you have a thousand spammers realising they can auto-sign-up and spam you endlessly.
It's like running a "honeypot". You'll gather lots of data at great expense and resources. But you won't stop the spam.
Okay, so why hasn't he been arrested on terrorism charges yet?
Offering to build a nuclear reactor and, of all places, in Korea? I thought there were export laws about things like that?
Not to mention, he's obviously well-funded, has planted malware on every computer in the world (and thus indirectly funds all piracy and peer-to-peer networks).
Seriously? We're chasing after some pillock in an embassy when Bill Gates is building private nuclear reactors in war-torn countries?
8 hours sleep.
8 hours work.
8 hours leisure (which INCLUDES travel to/from work and everything else).
I think you should be grateful that you get ONE HALF of my entire waking life every weekday. And I *earn* the weekends by not doing a crappy job.
Weekends are also my buffer if you don't pay me enough, I have an emergency of some kind that needs me to work for money, or whatever else. Out of respect for the working agreements, I won't do that as a night-shift or after work during the week without your permission, but if I suddenly need to earn money at the weekends too - that's *my* business. Even if it's just flogging some old tat on eBay or a boot sale.
And there is "work" outside of paid work too - I either have to pay some professional to do some DIY or do it myself. Either way, that's more of my earned money and free time I burn up *NOT* lazing around the house.
Anything above and beyond that is for something:
- that was caused by something stupid that I did (including lack of planning!). I *will* rectify my mistakes if they've caused some provable, detrimental effect on the business. That's professional pride.
- is absolutely vital, cannot be put off, and cannot be done by others during the working day, is voluntary and that I will expect back in kind (notice: not money necessarily, but when I want a day off later in the year, or better tools, or training, or whatever, you better not get snarky about it).
Anything outside those criteria? You're trying to steal my life for your company and the only recompense I can possibly EVER reap is money (if anything!) which can't cover the sort of ills that work like that can cause.
If you regularly work more hours than that, you either have no concept of life outside work, value money too much, or you are, quite honestly, weak-willed or mentally ill (e.g. depression, anxiety, etc. causing you to not want to say No).
The bigger question is: What does the company get out of employing tired drones? Savings on wages for any "free" work they can make you do? That's about it. They should be hiring someone else instead, if they cared about their customers, products or services. Better an extra part-timer for a year than wearing your best workers into the ground chasing some mythical business utopia. And if they can't afford that? Then they were doing business on a knife-edge all along and are probably better off without staff anyway.
You can ask me nicely and "bribe" me for some short-term changes to my contract. Anything longer and you're not upholding your responsibility to your customers or your staff by doing a shoddy job where you should have hired more people.
When you have half my waking life during work-days and you want more? Then I look elsewhere for someone running their business properly rather than a cash cow obtained by grinding up lesser employees.
And, really, if you can't do something in 8 hours, 5 days a week, then you have problems bigger than what you can squeeze out of your employees. Some of the most productive countries in the world work less, on average. And anyone who's worked for themselves knows - you actually earn a LOT more when you just do the job and nothing more, get paid for the day, and go home.
Hell, when I was doing THIS EXACT JOB, but on a self-employed basis, I was earning the same money in less than half the working time. The difference is stability - chasing potential customers, economic fluctuations, insurance, etc. is all a gamble. At any time, you could be doing NO work at all, and not be able to find any. The way out of that is to scale up so that losses are absorbed by profits elsewhere, etc. which is a net gain - you actually make more money out of 10 people working 8 hours than you do 1 person working 80 if you do it right. The *stability* of a good job that you like is just-about worth half-your-money.
The cost of even the best job is unlikely to be worth half-your-waking-life, though.
Bloody hell, people. You hav
Compare and contrast:
1990's titles:
Desert Strike
System Shock 2
Start of NHL series
Start of Wing Commander series
Start of FIFA series
Start of Need for Speed series
Ultima Online
Start of NASCAR series
Start of Command & Conquer series
Start of Dungeon Keeper series
Start of SimCity series
Start of Medal of Honor series
00's titles:
American McGee's Alice
Start of SSX series
Start of James Bond series
Start of Harry Potter series
Start of The Sims series
Start of Burnout series
Start of Battlefield series
Dark Age of Camelot
Start of Crysis series
Start of Rock Band series
Start of Skate series
Start of Mass Effect series
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
Start of Spore series
Start of Army of Two series
Start of Dead Space series
Mirror's Edge
Start of Dragon Age series
2012 (expected) titles:
Madden NFL 13
The Sims 3: Supernatural
The Sims 3: Seasons
NHL 13
FIFA 13
NBA Live 13
Medal of Honor: Warfighter
Need for Speed: Most Wanted
Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar
EA have some fabulous games and series on that list. Trouble is they are all pre-2010, and all either introduced new genres or built upon existing titles well. The 2010+ titles? Just yet-another-iteration of some of their worst series.
Come on, EA, you bought up Bullfrog and any number of fantastic developers / franchises and then milked them to death while inflicting horrible DRM and pricing on your customers. How about doing what you USED to do, which was START series of games, not run them into the ground?
And tech (as in physical hardware) doesn't exist without a viable business behind it.
The problem is quite simple - you have to buy computers capable of running the game, buy the game, buy the techs to support that all, buy the datacenter space and bandwidth to keep up, buy other things to capture the image and compress the streams, etc. and then sell it to the user for less than the cost of the game itself.
It doesn't work. And, that aside, it was nothing more than video-streaming of a moving image, something that we've had sorted for about 10 years now, and sending inputs to remote programs. It was basically "VNC with knobs on", optimised for games and nothing fabulous. The problem is not the tech, it's the business not existing behind it.
Some things work in the cloud because you can make savings, consolidate hardware, use one user's downtime to run another's uptime, etc. But with games, there's just too much required.
I used it. Once. They were offering free full-plays of WH40K: Space Marine. I got an account, got the game. Admittedly, it was a relief not to have to install much and to just connect straight to the game. But once inside, to me, it was an inferior window onto the game. Good enough to see what it was like, but only good enough to actually BUY the game elsewhere.
And I can't *imagine* the expense that my hour-or-so playthrough actually required to deploy that quickly and hand me a working copy of the game on a remote server with 1Mbps+ streaming of the video image.
There never was a problem with the tech once broadband became popular. There was *ALWAYS* going to be a problem with the business model, back-end hardware required, and aiming it at gamers. And, to be honest, even a techie should have seen that coming.
It's literally back-of-the-napkin maths that would have stopped me ever working for them. But hell, as a consumer, I took advantage of a free run-through of a (then) full-price game and then ended up buying it off Steam (which was the same price as OnLive "lifetime" subscription which only actually lasted three years).
OnLive's business model required people to own a computer in order to play games on a remote computer. The problem is, at the quality level that they could play them, most people already had a computer capable of playing them because of the LUDICROUS specs on even basic hardware now and OnLive was just an unnecessary level of indirection.
That's how any sensible person regards things, religion or not. I don't care what *you* believe, the fact is that *X* is true in millions of fair experiments. If you want to believe in a God, fine, he "made" it happen that way. I can't prove or disprove that so one person's belief that it's true is just as valid as another's that it isn't.
If it were as simple as saying "Let's just get along", there wouldn't be a problem. This guy, for instance, wants to teach absolute nonsense that goes against observable, recorded, verified fact as if it *IS* science. It's like me demanding that all History classes teach that Winston Churchill's last words were "Aw, fuck it, put The Simpsons on TV, would ya?".
The fact is that with creationism, especially, you're not dealing with sensible, reasonable people. You're dealing with people who think that a religion is only a way to trot out complete bollocks and attack people who say something against it.
You can live your life by a book. Nobody's stopping you. Hell, it can be Fifty Shades of Grey, Beatrix Potter, Aesop's Fables (which predates the Bible, incidentally) or the Bible. Nobody cares. But when living your life by that book interferes with *MY* books, then you have a problem. If you want to believe the world is round and lives on the back of a turtle, not a problem. But then just what goes on in your head when you take a round-the-world flight?
And when other elements of that book are provably nothing more than works of fiction, we have a bigger problem. And when you want to shove it down my throat, and everyone else's, and masquerade it as "science" (when you yourself have zero science qualifications) because you think there can only be one answer and everyone should only listen to you, then we have an even bigger problem.
It's no worse than turning up at your very first ever Maths lesson, when you have zero aptitude for Maths, and saying "2 + 2 = 4? Pfft. Wrong! I don't believe it! And you can never teach that to anyone!"
No scientist of any repute will tell you what to think, or tell you they can prove God does / doesn't exist. They don't particularly care. But they will tell you if they think you're wrong, and they'll back up their assertions. And if you try to go against thousands of years of science, you need to have the proof to back that up. If you don't have proof but continue to assert it, they will just rule you out as a crackpot until you do. Most crackpots NEVER make it out of the crackpot category because they DON'T try to proof themselves right in any recognised fashion.
It's a shame that the religious people *don't* just ignore the people who go against their beliefs. The world would be a much quieter place.
My girlfriend works in medical research. She was once teaching a class of PhD's and asked them how they would go about sexing a skeleton. One of them literally, seriously and actually said "Count the ribs".
It's bad enough already, let's not make things worse. Just think what will happen to those students who WANT to be biologists, anatomists, etc. who are taught like that and then go on to higher education somewhere else. Just how much do they want your children to be laughed at, basically?
Not watched the Mythbusters episode about the lie detector? Apart from the absolute rubbish asserting that polygraphs work (despite there being NO scientific evidence that they have ever or could ever work and vast evidence to the contrary - and HUGE problems with their experiment setup in the first place), they do a bit where they stick people in MRI's, EEG's, fMRI's, etc.
Basically, it's hard to tell without a very good MRI scan happening *as* the person lies, real consequences if they are found out, complete amateurs being tested, no counter-measures being taken by them, huge amounts of analysis, etc. to say if someone is lying. But if someone doesn't want it to be known they are lying, it's almost impossible to tell from any external measurement.
And if you can't do it with medical-grade EEG or room-sized MRI results, you can't do it with a gaming headset for the next 30 years.
Hell, the US is just about the only "first-world" country that's EVER allowed polygraph results to be used as "evidence" in a court of law.
It's just that shite, and unreliable, a method to detect what someone is thinking. And if you can lie automatically and convincingly, then you have nothing *TO* detect in the brain. At least until you can *literally* read people's thoughts as if they were sentences being spoken aloud about what they intend to do.
Hell, our knowledge of the brain at the moment stems mainly from waiting for someone to have a bolt fired through their brain by accident and seeing what facility they lose and what parts of the brain were damaged. Above and beyond that, the brain's a black box of which we can only measure "activity" by way of measure electromagnetic changes. That's like trying to tell what colour object is inside a opaque box that you can't touch by waving a metal detector near it.
Provide API keys.
Revoke API keys of programs that abuse the system.
Not really that hard. I should think API DDoS is the least of their worries, to be honest.
Hell, Europe is "closer" to the oil-producing countries and we're still paying £1.30 / 1.30 Euro a LITRE which is 6 $USD for a US gallon. And you know what? People still pay it, because there is still no viable alternative. Drive anywhere in Europe, it's all the same.
I sat down, did lots of calculations and set my own limit a while back - at £2 per litre, that's $12 for a US gallon, I have to *start* reconsidering the amount of driving I do. Chances are that by the time it hits that, interest rates will have risen to match, salaries will have risen to match, fuel efficiencies will have risen to match, I'll need a new car anyway, and public transport prices will still be as ridiculous as they are now.
And my reconsideration might just be "Well, nothing I can do about it" or even just "Actually, the relative value is still the same". It's not going to be "Oh, wow, I have to go out and spend tens of thousands on a new car with a new fuel, the money for which I'll have "saved" before it ends up as scrap metal." without some hugely drastic amount of physics being changed so that it's viable.
Until anything approaching 60 mpg can be gotten out of a *SECONDHAND* car with ranges of 400-500 miles, where I can fuel up ANYWHERE without having to consult lists of stations and maps, where I can repair the car for no more than an ordinary one and where I can trade in that car for some decent percentage of the original price I paid, then every other technology is going to lose out.
Hell, I did some maths the other day. If you add up the price of every car I've ever owned, every repair I've ever done (not including my own time), and fuel for several years, it *STILL* doesn't come to the price of one of the fancy hybrid cars that they want me to buy. Hell, for some models I wouldn't even get the second-hand price. In the face of such economics, it's no shock that the people who actually travel a lot aren't buying alternative fuel cars.
For £300, I have a car that's lasted 4 years with me and required about £300 of repairs and parts in all that time. It burns £400 a month in petrol but I get 50mpg (UK gallon!). That's almost impossible to compete against with such technology. A complete engine replacement for my car? About £300 off the scrap heap or a grand or two for something "newer".
When alternative fuel will honestly cost me more money than I've ever spent on my current car + fuel for a year before I even start driving it, it's hard to pitch those technologies. And replacing one hundred granny's cars who do 10 miles a month is pointless if you could replace just one heavy road user with a decent car.
Hell, I don't even care about speed, I'd poodle along in the slow lane quite happily, so long as it was motorway-capable (which means at least 60mph by law in my country). But you just CANNOT get close to anything the petrol offers at the moment, and petrol can quite literally double in price and STILL it would be more worthwhile. It would have to literally quadruple or more in price to actually price myself out of using it, and then things like LPG conversion (was quoted £800 for a full conversion last year) would probably get me another doubling of price before I was priced out again.
Petrol is amazingly cheap for what it gives you compared to EVERYTHING else that's at the cutting edge of research.