This is a bit of a holdover from the days when the NASDAQ was technically not an exchange, but a mere quotation system (with trading done over-the-counter); hence NYSE securities were called "listed" and NASDAQ ones were called "OTC". Now that NASDAQ is a proper stock exchange, the SEC has allowed NASDAQ to retain 3-letter symbols on securities that move to the NASDAQ from some other exchange (as they are just as much "listed" as NYSE securities). So we will soon see some three-letter symbols on NASDAQ, though they do not yet have the authority to assign three-letter symbols to new issues.
Thanks for showing your open hate at the end there, MH42. Nice to know that marxists are still empty violent rebel types.
Your economic theory is interesting but baseless. If you get out a map you can draw arbitrary lines on it and make any silly economic point that you please. Suppose you draw a line around downtown San Francisco, and you notice that goods and services come in while only trash goes out. You haven't made an economic point about downtown San Francisco; you've just found where some rich people live.
National borders are of similar, diminishing relevance. I know that you believe that an American is somehow "worth" more than someone in China, but it's not really true; all men are created equal, and most of them manage to stay that way. Goods and services move into the US rather than out because the people in the US have more money.
Sure, it won't always be that way; taking money away from the rich has always been the favorite pastime of the poor. But your predicions of collapse and calamity are far from likely. The US economy still produces a huge amount of product, despite what John Edwards would have you believe. Enough to pay off those debts easily enough should China come looking for their money.
That's not cynical at all; it's just a fact. When I write a letter to my Congressman (Burgess, an administration stooge), that's not called lobbying; it's maybe "petitioning" or "wasting ink" if you prefer. If there's a campaign contribution attached, or some kind of expensive perk, that's lobbying. Since lobbying makes use of material rewards to help get the message across, it's merely a legal form of bribery.
This is not remotely similar to the issue with the International Criminal Court. The ICC is an organization that the United States has simply declined to join. That's not some kind of "exemption".
Not that the US hasn't sought or received such exemptions in the context of other international organizations, but the US has no legal obligation of any kind to participate in the ICC. Some people feel that the US should feel a moral obligation, but this is unlikely as long as nations like China and Russia continue to also abstain from membership.
Your average person on the street will say "uh, I dunno, it just plays what's on my iTunes"
Most of the rest of them will have no clue what formats their 'MP3 player' plays, but most of them do in fact support AAC. The older el-cheapo devices that didn't will mostly be in a drawer collecting dust. The tiny minority with an MP3-only device are likely to be less interested in (purchased) online music, since they figured out years ago that none of the major online music stores were selling something that would work for them.
MP3 may have some name recognition, but it's really just jargon. Lots of people think the iTunes store sells MP3s.
I'm going to have to go with racism (along with some age discrimination). Everybody watches violent movies and drinks; tobacco and guns cut across cultural boundaries. But much of the music with swearing is seen as "young black people" music and so Walmart got lots of angry letters demanding that it be taken out of the store. Your fundamentalist types don't want their children growing up listening to "black" music and disrespecting authority, as wholesome as those activities may be.
I see two points to Apple, one to Walmart, and one tie. AAC is a superior format to MP3, and you have to be digging pretty deep to find a recent device that doesn't support it. It's also just as open as MP3 (and created by the same people).
I'm serious, I think this is actually an important question.
Of course it's an important question!
Read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter for a peek at the answer. But in essence, it turns out that everything gets very weird when the mathematics which describe reality start to describe themselves.
Yeah, people are simplistic in the way that they think about these things. The complaints seem to come mostly from people who go through a whole pile of new releases. New releases are a problem for any rental place, since there is a big surge in demand for the first few weeks, but you can't make enough profit to justify purchasing a huge supply of DVDs to meet that demand.
Netflix gives priority on these in-demand DVDs to the people who rent the least, as you say. Some people think this means that they have some system to "slow down" people who rent too much, but my experience is that you can go through a large number of DVDs as long as you aren't fixated on new releases. But "new release prioritization" doesn't make a sexy complainer campaign slogan the way "throttling" does.
You are speaking of "brute force" and "heuristics" as if any strategy must be entirely one or the other. I think we should see these as two ends of a spectrum. Deep Blue certainly did use heuristics to narrow the search tree, and Kasparov certainly considered many possible future positions before making every move. The difference between the two is that Deep Blue's heuristics are much simpler, while it can explore many more avenues; Kasparov's heuristics are very much more advanced, but his speed at exploring the search tree is much slower.
No, that's backwards -- SBC (owners of Cingular) bought the corpse that was once AT&T.
People go on and on about AT&T around here as if the current company is the same one that existed five years ago. Truth is that by 2005 there was almost nothing left of the old AT&T.
Yeah, you think they would have changed the product! What with all the complaints on Slashdot, and the millions and millions of dollars. I know which one I'd listen to!
I'm afraid the Nintendo fans already went apeshit over Super Paper Mario, and are soon to go apeshit over Mario Galaxy. Neither game got as much press as LittleBigPlanet.
Not that there's anything wrong with LittleBigPlanet, but to date nobody has actually played the game. User-generated content didn't do much for the sales of Mario vs DK for the DS.
Years after most people had figured out that the Internet wasn't a virtual world, the idiot media was still going on about "cyberspace". So somebody figured out that if you actually developed the product that the idiot media imagined, you'd get loads of free PR. It doesn't matter that the product is useless.
The handful of teaser videos that show actual gameplay look cool and unique. Beyond that, there is not really much to say, but it's sort of a breath of fresh air for PS3 owners hoping that the hardware will deliver on its promise. The game wouldn't draw nearly as much attention if it was being developed for any other console.
This is far from pedantry. Using terms suggesting that someone would be convicted or held liable for a "GPL violation" suggests that a court must uphold the GPL as valid for such a lawsuit to be successful. This makes people believe (erroneously) that the GPL is a questionable document that needs to be tested in court.
On the contrary, a standard legal action against someone not in compliance with the terms of the GPL would be a simple copyright infringement case; the onus is on the defendant to show that they had a valid license (and met its terms).
It's not surprising that Ebert would miss the point of games, as it seems that everybody else does. Whenever this discussion comes up, we'll get pages and pages that go on about the plot or characters or music or whatever, but this isn't the answer; these are mere accidents, non-game art that's attached to a game.
To speak of games as (high) art, we must explore the foundation of the form, and that isn't the plot or music or story, though a great story can be told in a game's context. The art in games is in the experience that they create for the player; the feeling of doing something or being something that you're really not. This isn't a traditional emotional experience that you might get from literature, but that doesn't mean its value is less. We have literature to make us sad or happy or lonely -- games are something different, and that's why this new form is such a treasure.
Wrong game, Dude. Super Paper Mario is a Wii game. You've picked up on an old N64 game, so it's not surprising that the demographic would be a little younger, seeing as how that was like ten years ago.
I've heard this claim, but I think it's part of the "battery mythology" -- that delightful set of whacky, misguided beliefs you'll hear about batteries.
Generally a lithium-ion will wear out in a few years no matter what you do, but people always feel guilty for some reason, and try to think up something that they did which would have caused the battery to fail. For that matter, li-ions often fail earlier than that for no apparent reason, though this is likely due to defective batteries or poorly-designed chargers (consider the old ThinkPad 600, which could eat a battery a month). Many users rarely use the battery, so they reason that the failure must have been caused by leaving it on the charger all the time (thinking back to the old days of ni-cads and always-on chargers, no doubt).
Modern laptops don't charge the battery when it's fully charged and plugged in, so there's no reason why this effect would occur. But back to the point -- yes, you'll have to replace your laptop battery every 2-3 years at a cost of $150-200, and other laptop maintenance items are certainly more expensive than their desktop counterparts, but many people don't think about that at the time of purchase.
I'm sure you can think of some better reasons, but most of the ones you've given aren't any good. Desktops have to be plugged in all the time anyway, so it's not as if limited laptop battery life can be held as a point for desktops. I/O devices plug in to laptops just as well as they do to desktops, now that we use standard connectors for peripherals (USB/Firewire). I've never seen a clamshell hinge wear out, though I'm sure it's possible. You can plug a desktop keyboard into a laptop when it's at your desk, and lots of people do. Same with monitors or whatever else.
The reason laptops are starting to outsell desktops is simply that the cost premium has all but disappeared. So people tend to prefer the mobility (even if they don't always use it) over the ability to add internal drives or peripherals (which they certainly never use).
Well, I don't think it's that simple. Fear is not exactly a rational process -- we can be afraid of things for bad reasons or for no reason, because the world is very complex and fear is a fairly simplistic instinct. For many people, it would be a great help if their fear could be brought more under the control of their intelligence.
Take swallowing a live hamster, for instance; your intelligence should be good enough to prevent that, even if you're not afraid. But if you weren't irrationally afraid of rodents with tails, you'd own a rat in the first place, as they are much better pets.
Commercial nuclear reactors, at least in the US, are controlled via relays, not integrated circuits. The control room for a nuclear plant looks a lot like the array of switches and dials on the spacecraft in the movie Apollo 13, scaled up to fill a large room. You might see some more modern technology used for recording or monitoring purposes, but the fundamental operations are not based on anything as unreliable as software.
If you watch the "crowbar" video, where they actually do a bunch of cell phones, you can clearly see some small explosions. Of course, the iPhone uses a lithium-polymer battery, not lithium-ion, so it's unlikely to explode anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a bit of a holdover from the days when the NASDAQ was technically not an exchange, but a mere quotation system (with trading done over-the-counter); hence NYSE securities were called "listed" and NASDAQ ones were called "OTC". Now that NASDAQ is a proper stock exchange, the SEC has allowed NASDAQ to retain 3-letter symbols on securities that move to the NASDAQ from some other exchange (as they are just as much "listed" as NYSE securities). So we will soon see some three-letter symbols on NASDAQ, though they do not yet have the authority to assign three-letter symbols to new issues.
Thanks for showing your open hate at the end there, MH42. Nice to know that marxists are still empty violent rebel types.
Your economic theory is interesting but baseless. If you get out a map you can draw arbitrary lines on it and make any silly economic point that you please. Suppose you draw a line around downtown San Francisco, and you notice that goods and services come in while only trash goes out. You haven't made an economic point about downtown San Francisco; you've just found where some rich people live.
National borders are of similar, diminishing relevance. I know that you believe that an American is somehow "worth" more than someone in China, but it's not really true; all men are created equal, and most of them manage to stay that way. Goods and services move into the US rather than out because the people in the US have more money.
Sure, it won't always be that way; taking money away from the rich has always been the favorite pastime of the poor. But your predicions of collapse and calamity are far from likely. The US economy still produces a huge amount of product, despite what John Edwards would have you believe. Enough to pay off those debts easily enough should China come looking for their money.
That's not cynical at all; it's just a fact. When I write a letter to my Congressman (Burgess, an administration stooge), that's not called lobbying; it's maybe "petitioning" or "wasting ink" if you prefer. If there's a campaign contribution attached, or some kind of expensive perk, that's lobbying. Since lobbying makes use of material rewards to help get the message across, it's merely a legal form of bribery.
This is not remotely similar to the issue with the International Criminal Court. The ICC is an organization that the United States has simply declined to join. That's not some kind of "exemption".
Not that the US hasn't sought or received such exemptions in the context of other international organizations, but the US has no legal obligation of any kind to participate in the ICC. Some people feel that the US should feel a moral obligation, but this is unlikely as long as nations like China and Russia continue to also abstain from membership.
Your average person on the street will say "uh, I dunno, it just plays what's on my iTunes"
Most of the rest of them will have no clue what formats their 'MP3 player' plays, but most of them do in fact support AAC. The older el-cheapo devices that didn't will mostly be in a drawer collecting dust. The tiny minority with an MP3-only device are likely to be less interested in (purchased) online music, since they figured out years ago that none of the major online music stores were selling something that would work for them.
MP3 may have some name recognition, but it's really just jargon. Lots of people think the iTunes store sells MP3s.
I'm going to have to go with racism (along with some age discrimination). Everybody watches violent movies and drinks; tobacco and guns cut across cultural boundaries. But much of the music with swearing is seen as "young black people" music and so Walmart got lots of angry letters demanding that it be taken out of the store. Your fundamentalist types don't want their children growing up listening to "black" music and disrespecting authority, as wholesome as those activities may be.
I see two points to Apple, one to Walmart, and one tie. AAC is a superior format to MP3, and you have to be digging pretty deep to find a recent device that doesn't support it. It's also just as open as MP3 (and created by the same people).
I'm serious, I think this is actually an important question.
Of course it's an important question!
Read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter for a peek at the answer. But in essence, it turns out that everything gets very weird when the mathematics which describe reality start to describe themselves.
Yeah, people are simplistic in the way that they think about these things. The complaints seem to come mostly from people who go through a whole pile of new releases. New releases are a problem for any rental place, since there is a big surge in demand for the first few weeks, but you can't make enough profit to justify purchasing a huge supply of DVDs to meet that demand.
Netflix gives priority on these in-demand DVDs to the people who rent the least, as you say. Some people think this means that they have some system to "slow down" people who rent too much, but my experience is that you can go through a large number of DVDs as long as you aren't fixated on new releases. But "new release prioritization" doesn't make a sexy complainer campaign slogan the way "throttling" does.
You are speaking of "brute force" and "heuristics" as if any strategy must be entirely one or the other. I think we should see these as two ends of a spectrum. Deep Blue certainly did use heuristics to narrow the search tree, and Kasparov certainly considered many possible future positions before making every move. The difference between the two is that Deep Blue's heuristics are much simpler, while it can explore many more avenues; Kasparov's heuristics are very much more advanced, but his speed at exploring the search tree is much slower.
No, that's backwards -- SBC (owners of Cingular) bought the corpse that was once AT&T.
People go on and on about AT&T around here as if the current company is the same one that existed five years ago. Truth is that by 2005 there was almost nothing left of the old AT&T.
Yeah, you think they would have changed the product! What with all the complaints on Slashdot, and the millions and millions of dollars. I know which one I'd listen to!
I'm afraid the Nintendo fans already went apeshit over Super Paper Mario, and are soon to go apeshit over Mario Galaxy. Neither game got as much press as LittleBigPlanet.
Not that there's anything wrong with LittleBigPlanet, but to date nobody has actually played the game. User-generated content didn't do much for the sales of Mario vs DK for the DS.
Years after most people had figured out that the Internet wasn't a virtual world, the idiot media was still going on about "cyberspace". So somebody figured out that if you actually developed the product that the idiot media imagined, you'd get loads of free PR. It doesn't matter that the product is useless.
The handful of teaser videos that show actual gameplay look cool and unique. Beyond that, there is not really much to say, but it's sort of a breath of fresh air for PS3 owners hoping that the hardware will deliver on its promise. The game wouldn't draw nearly as much attention if it was being developed for any other console.
This is far from pedantry. Using terms suggesting that someone would be convicted or held liable for a "GPL violation" suggests that a court must uphold the GPL as valid for such a lawsuit to be successful. This makes people believe (erroneously) that the GPL is a questionable document that needs to be tested in court.
On the contrary, a standard legal action against someone not in compliance with the terms of the GPL would be a simple copyright infringement case; the onus is on the defendant to show that they had a valid license (and met its terms).
It's not surprising that Ebert would miss the point of games, as it seems that everybody else does. Whenever this discussion comes up, we'll get pages and pages that go on about the plot or characters or music or whatever, but this isn't the answer; these are mere accidents, non-game art that's attached to a game.
To speak of games as (high) art, we must explore the foundation of the form, and that isn't the plot or music or story, though a great story can be told in a game's context. The art in games is in the experience that they create for the player; the feeling of doing something or being something that you're really not. This isn't a traditional emotional experience that you might get from literature, but that doesn't mean its value is less. We have literature to make us sad or happy or lonely -- games are something different, and that's why this new form is such a treasure.
Wrong game, Dude. Super Paper Mario is a Wii game. You've picked up on an old N64 game, so it's not surprising that the demographic would be a little younger, seeing as how that was like ten years ago.
I'm sorry that nobody got it, but it was funny -- thanks.
I've heard this claim, but I think it's part of the "battery mythology" -- that delightful set of whacky, misguided beliefs you'll hear about batteries.
Generally a lithium-ion will wear out in a few years no matter what you do, but people always feel guilty for some reason, and try to think up something that they did which would have caused the battery to fail. For that matter, li-ions often fail earlier than that for no apparent reason, though this is likely due to defective batteries or poorly-designed chargers (consider the old ThinkPad 600, which could eat a battery a month). Many users rarely use the battery, so they reason that the failure must have been caused by leaving it on the charger all the time (thinking back to the old days of ni-cads and always-on chargers, no doubt).
Modern laptops don't charge the battery when it's fully charged and plugged in, so there's no reason why this effect would occur. But back to the point -- yes, you'll have to replace your laptop battery every 2-3 years at a cost of $150-200, and other laptop maintenance items are certainly more expensive than their desktop counterparts, but many people don't think about that at the time of purchase.
I'm sure you can think of some better reasons, but most of the ones you've given aren't any good. Desktops have to be plugged in all the time anyway, so it's not as if limited laptop battery life can be held as a point for desktops. I/O devices plug in to laptops just as well as they do to desktops, now that we use standard connectors for peripherals (USB/Firewire). I've never seen a clamshell hinge wear out, though I'm sure it's possible. You can plug a desktop keyboard into a laptop when it's at your desk, and lots of people do. Same with monitors or whatever else.
The reason laptops are starting to outsell desktops is simply that the cost premium has all but disappeared. So people tend to prefer the mobility (even if they don't always use it) over the ability to add internal drives or peripherals (which they certainly never use).
You idiots have discovered the reason for the "Offtopic" mod, and also the reason why 5 mod points is never enough. Shut UP!
Well, I don't think it's that simple. Fear is not exactly a rational process -- we can be afraid of things for bad reasons or for no reason, because the world is very complex and fear is a fairly simplistic instinct. For many people, it would be a great help if their fear could be brought more under the control of their intelligence.
Take swallowing a live hamster, for instance; your intelligence should be good enough to prevent that, even if you're not afraid. But if you weren't irrationally afraid of rodents with tails, you'd own a rat in the first place, as they are much better pets.
Commercial nuclear reactors, at least in the US, are controlled via relays, not integrated circuits. The control room for a nuclear plant looks a lot like the array of switches and dials on the spacecraft in the movie Apollo 13, scaled up to fill a large room. You might see some more modern technology used for recording or monitoring purposes, but the fundamental operations are not based on anything as unreliable as software.
If you watch the "crowbar" video, where they actually do a bunch of cell phones, you can clearly see some small explosions. Of course, the iPhone uses a lithium-polymer battery, not lithium-ion, so it's unlikely to explode anyway.