Compuserve had MMO games back in the '80's. Islands of Kesmai was an RPG. It was ASCII based, but otherwise quite recognizable as a member of the the MMORPG genre.
A lot of old 8 bit software we grew up with won't even run on most modern platform, but they're still "protected."
One is due to the other.
Not true. A very good example would be M.U.L.E.. Lots of people would like to make clones or updates of MULE. Some have even done it. However, any such attempt violates the copyright of Dani Buten, who died in '98. So people who loved that game either have to get an 8-bit system running, break the law, or wait until its copyright expires in 2073.
So perhaps when I'm 105 I can legally play MULE again. Assuming Congress doesn't retroactively extend Dani's copyright yet again
Unfortunately, it is a thinly veiled threat to the president of the university that funding or job could be on the line if he lets Dawkins speak.
Important to note here is that the Oklahoma legislature just got taken over by the Republicans last month, and that the president of OU is a Democrat (and ex governor). The threat may very well be more the point than any real concerns about Dawkins.
The real issue here is that, for the first time since possibly statehood, the Republicans have just taken over the Oklahoma state legislature. Since this is pretty much their first time ever to be relevant, they are really anxious to make their mark, and do it now. The fat kids who always had their faces pressed up against the glass at the legislative candy store suddenly have the keys, and they are going hog-wild.
To give you further examples, in the last couple of weeks we Okies have also seen bills to:
o Outlaw the wearing of Muslim head coverings on driver's licences
o Weaken worker's comp
o Prevent teacher's unions from engaging in political activity
o Make it harder to persue "pain and suffering" claims in court.
My personal favorite was the School Prayer bill we barely managed to get killed in committee. It would have allowed for student-led school prayer at mandatory attendence events, but stipulated that the prayer leaders had to be "school leaders". Their definition of school leaders included, I shit you not, head Cheerleaders and the captain of the football team.
We were wondering aloud what would happen if a school just happened to have a Wiccan captain of the football team...
If you just look on the surface, the Tarpit predictions were clearly wrong. 2010 is only 10 months away, so if Windows is going to be "as dead as CP/M", it had better get started.
On the other hand, a lot of the predictions in there do seem to be in the process of coming true. For instance, when Tarpit was written, MS never bothered to pay stock dividends because investors were always more than pleased with just the stock's growth. That has changed, and now they are having to pay a relatively huge dividend just to keep stockholders happy. This is the classic sign of a http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2009/01/microsoft-stock.htmldead growth stock. To top it off, TFA makes a lot of the same predictions. Both have as their thesis that Microsoft will have to OpenSource to survive. The main difference in tone is that Tarpit's author thought they probably wouldn't, and TFA's author thinks they probably will.
You could argue that their logic is just as much BS now as it was a decade ago. Could argue it well in fact. However, one could also argue that Tarpit's main flaw was in trying to "extrapolate the exponential" in the optimistic way it did, and that the rest of the argument is sound and in the process of becoming reality.
So it's not about gravity being discrete, it's about space and time being discrete, which shows up as a jitter-like noise in the gravity-wave measuring experiment.
So the universe isn't actually analog at all...It's digital. It just looks analog to us due to all the anti-aliasing.
Before I started using this for hiring I paid to have three people already on staff fill out a profile. I knew these guys, we had worked together for at least a year. I was astonished by the detail with with the person interpreting the test could describe the personalities of our folks. Things like "Joe is a pretty smart guy but he tends not to over exert himself, and yet no-one ever gets mad at him because he is so charming.". Maybe you had to be there and maybe you need to know Joe but the description was spot on.
This sounds so much like someone describing their description of a person written on their astrological sign that I had to laugh. That description, if you look at it carefully is very general, and could probably be used to describe every human being on the planet on certian days.
I remember when I first started working back in the '80's an older worker (baby-boomer) decided she was going to guess my astrological sign from her knowlege of my personality. I decided to test her in return and didn't give her any help whatsoever. I swear to God she went through eleven different signs of the Zodiac without ever once getting mine. Each time she was convinced she had it now, and had an explanation of why.
So if it makes you feel better to run prospective employees past your house Astronomers before hiring, go right ahead. Just don't try to convince me that its science.
The old stuff was always failing and had a bunch of problems...
Thank you.
They were talking "software crisis" and complaining about crappy code back when I was in school in the '80s. Before then, back in the vaccum tube days, I understand computer owners often had to employ a guy full-time to ride around on a unicycle with a backpack full of tubes to replace failed vaccum tubes on the computer all day. How reliable do you think results from those machines were?
Lots of folks here have various problems with H1B's (as you can see from the large number of responses).
However, for the purposes of this discussion the biggest problem is indeed that envelope stuffed with cash going overseas. Stimulating the economy is all about getting cash flowing around. Sending money overseas siphons some off out of the (US) system. It helps stimulate the economy in Equador (or wherever), which I suppose is cool too, but hardly the effect we are trying to achieve.
Now personally I think it is still a win for us to get skilled workers in from other countries. Hopefully you will decide to stay and perhaps even become a citizen one day. One of this country's biggest advantages has always been that we drew in the best, brightest, and most ambitious people in the world. I'll risk the monetary bleed-off. Hope to see you here.
Can we calculate how many jobs are lost as the indirect result of pulling $30 billion out of the economy via taxation?
Probably. However, they are talking about lowering taxes for most folk. The rich people who will get a tax hike (actually, they just are allowing Bush's temporary tax break giveaway to the rich to expire), generally don't spend as large a % of their money as the rest of us, and they don't do it as quickly. Stimulating the economy is all about getting dollars flowing from person to person quickly. Giving $X to a guy living paycheck to paycheck has a much bigger impact on the economy because that guy is going to go out and spend every penny of that money immediately. So it is quite likely the net effect on the economy for both moves would be positive. I'd be interested to see an analysis.
You'd be right to warn that in the long run the piper will have to be paid. The way it is supposed to work is that the government spends like a drunken sailor during the bad times, and then when times are good cuts the deficit back down to help keep the economy from overheating. The problem with this theory is that nobody ever wants to play scrooge with their voters when times are good.
The clear difference between Mississippi and Louisiana was that one place heeded the warnings and didn't wait for the government to hand-hold them
What a load of right-wing claptrap!
There was no difference between rural/smalltown Louisiana and rural/smalltown Mississippi. Both were totally devestated, and both had similar levels of death and breakdown in government services.
The difference between New Orleans and Mississippi is probably what you are thinking of. Do you not recognize at least a wee difference in scale here? New Orleans was a major city with over a million people in the metro area. More than half of those were packed densely into a very small area which is almost entirely below sea level, and is only connected to the outside world by 3 causeways/bridges. Most of those people are quite poor, and unlike the rural poor, have no personal transport at all. Even other large costal cities tend to have good access to the hinterland for evacuations, but New Orleans is south of a big lake with only one very long causeway crossing it.
There is frankly no way the city could have hoped to cope off its own resources. You can say the state should have stepped in, but really the state doesn't have much more to draw on than the city did. Natural disasters (and unnatural ones) hitting major cities like this are one of the main things we need a federal government for.
Oh, and by the way, the rural areas of Mississippi were completely devastated, and have not yet recovered. The only reason you don't hear about it as much is that the numbers are smaller. George Bush doesn't care about poor white people either.
look at the Maher Arar case where a Canadian was intercepted at JFK international, rendered to Syria by the CIA and tortured in Syria.
The "best" part of that story (not mentioned in the article, but gone over in detail in Jane Mayer's The Dark Side), is that the guy was totally innocent of any involvement in terrorisim. So why did the US government pick him up?
Well...it turns out that another suspect who was being tortured happened to know the guy, and threw his name up to his torturers to make them stop for little while.
Further who is buying all the games? Best Buy has a whole isle devoted to PC games
They used to have three aisles devoted to them, with another one or two devoted to productivity apps and Operating Systems (including Red Hat boxes). Now they have shunted the PC games off into one small aisle on the disused side of the store. Some of Microsoft's OS flavors are avialable on a second isle, along with a bunch of budget crap.
I don't think there is really any way to make the case that PC games aren't at a low ebb right now. They are.
Personally, I'd blame MMOs. I used to buy a bit less than 1 PC game a month, but for the last few years MMO's take up *all* my free time. There's none to spare for another game, no matter how cool it is.
The Computer Science entry course ("CS101") has traditionally been centered on data strutures. What possible good could learning about queues and stacks do for a high school student who isn't going into CS when they graduate?
I suppose a class on very basic programming might be useful. Concepts like iteration, selection, subroutines, etc. Perhaps a little basic instruction on code quality. If nothing else, that might help folks write Excel or Word (or whatever) macros, which is a skill useful to anyone who is ever going to hold an office job.
Good thing they made a deal with Sony/BMG though. That's Rick Astely's publisher. They'd hardly have any content left if they had to remove every Rickroll.
Slashdot Mirror
Compuserve had MMO games back in the '80's. Islands of Kesmai was an RPG. It was ASCII based, but otherwise quite recognizable as a member of the the MMORPG genre.
The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of such things, and they have made repeated statements that they aren't sure such things are patentable.
A lot of old 8 bit software we grew up with won't even run on most modern platform, but they're still "protected."
One is due to the other.
Not true. A very good example would be M.U.L.E.. Lots of people would like to make clones or updates of MULE. Some have even done it. However, any such attempt violates the copyright of Dani Buten, who died in '98. So people who loved that game either have to get an 8-bit system running, break the law, or wait until its copyright expires in 2073.
So perhaps when I'm 105 I can legally play MULE again. Assuming Congress doesn't retroactively extend Dani's copyright yet again
Unfortunately, it is a thinly veiled threat to the president of the university that funding or job could be on the line if he lets Dawkins speak.
Important to note here is that the Oklahoma legislature just got taken over by the Republicans last month, and that the president of OU is a Democrat (and ex governor). The threat may very well be more the point than any real concerns about Dawkins.
The real issue here is that, for the first time since possibly statehood, the Republicans have just taken over the Oklahoma state legislature. Since this is pretty much their first time ever to be relevant, they are really anxious to make their mark, and do it now. The fat kids who always had their faces pressed up against the glass at the legislative candy store suddenly have the keys, and they are going hog-wild. To give you further examples, in the last couple of weeks we Okies have also seen bills to: o Outlaw the wearing of Muslim head coverings on driver's licences o Weaken worker's comp o Prevent teacher's unions from engaging in political activity o Make it harder to persue "pain and suffering" claims in court. My personal favorite was the School Prayer bill we barely managed to get killed in committee. It would have allowed for student-led school prayer at mandatory attendence events, but stipulated that the prayer leaders had to be "school leaders". Their definition of school leaders included, I shit you not, head Cheerleaders and the captain of the football team. We were wondering aloud what would happen if a school just happened to have a Wiccan captain of the football team...
Dude, Christian Scientists don't count.
It is very interesting how this article compares with http://www.cyberconf.org/~cynbe/rants/lastdino.htmThe Last Dinosaur and the Tarpits of Doom, which is just this month a decade old.
If you just look on the surface, the Tarpit predictions were clearly wrong. 2010 is only 10 months away, so if Windows is going to be "as dead as CP/M", it had better get started.
On the other hand, a lot of the predictions in there do seem to be in the process of coming true. For instance, when Tarpit was written, MS never bothered to pay stock dividends because investors were always more than pleased with just the stock's growth. That has changed, and now they are having to pay a relatively huge dividend just to keep stockholders happy. This is the classic sign of a http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2009/01/microsoft-stock.htmldead growth stock. To top it off, TFA makes a lot of the same predictions. Both have as their thesis that Microsoft will have to OpenSource to survive. The main difference in tone is that Tarpit's author thought they probably wouldn't, and TFA's author thinks they probably will.
You could argue that their logic is just as much BS now as it was a decade ago. Could argue it well in fact. However, one could also argue that Tarpit's main flaw was in trying to "extrapolate the exponential" in the optimistic way it did, and that the rest of the argument is sound and in the process of becoming reality.
So it's not about gravity being discrete, it's about space and time being discrete, which shows up as a jitter-like noise in the gravity-wave measuring experiment.
So the universe isn't actually analog at all...It's digital. It just looks analog to us due to all the anti-aliasing.
The first question clearly is going to be: Will Grues be a playable race?
Do have any idea how many fucking books have swear words?
It's worse than that. It would outlaw showing pretty much any R rated movie, and very many PG13's.
That was a fork.
Before I started using this for hiring I paid to have three people already on staff fill out a profile. I knew these guys, we had worked together for at least a year. I was astonished by the detail with with the person interpreting the test could describe the personalities of our folks. Things like "Joe is a pretty smart guy but he tends not to over exert himself, and yet no-one ever gets mad at him because he is so charming.". Maybe you had to be there and maybe you need to know Joe but the description was spot on.
This sounds so much like someone describing their description of a person written on their astrological sign that I had to laugh. That description, if you look at it carefully is very general, and could probably be used to describe every human being on the planet on certian days. I remember when I first started working back in the '80's an older worker (baby-boomer) decided she was going to guess my astrological sign from her knowlege of my personality. I decided to test her in return and didn't give her any help whatsoever. I swear to God she went through eleven different signs of the Zodiac without ever once getting mine. Each time she was convinced she had it now, and had an explanation of why. So if it makes you feel better to run prospective employees past your house Astronomers before hiring, go right ahead. Just don't try to convince me that its science.
The old stuff was always failing and had a bunch of problems...
Thank you.
They were talking "software crisis" and complaining about crappy code back when I was in school in the '80s. Before then, back in the vaccum tube days, I understand computer owners often had to employ a guy full-time to ride around on a unicycle with a backpack full of tubes to replace failed vaccum tubes on the computer all day. How reliable do you think results from those machines were?
Agreed. My HTC Touch Pro does everything this Palm device is reported to do as well.
Lots of folks here have various problems with H1B's (as you can see from the large number of responses).
However, for the purposes of this discussion the biggest problem is indeed that envelope stuffed with cash going overseas. Stimulating the economy is all about getting cash flowing around. Sending money overseas siphons some off out of the (US) system. It helps stimulate the economy in Equador (or wherever), which I suppose is cool too, but hardly the effect we are trying to achieve.
Now personally I think it is still a win for us to get skilled workers in from other countries. Hopefully you will decide to stay and perhaps even become a citizen one day. One of this country's biggest advantages has always been that we drew in the best, brightest, and most ambitious people in the world. I'll risk the monetary bleed-off. Hope to see you here.
Can we calculate how many jobs are lost as the indirect result of pulling $30 billion out of the economy via taxation?
Probably. However, they are talking about lowering taxes for most folk. The rich people who will get a tax hike (actually, they just are allowing Bush's temporary tax break giveaway to the rich to expire), generally don't spend as large a % of their money as the rest of us, and they don't do it as quickly. Stimulating the economy is all about getting dollars flowing from person to person quickly. Giving $X to a guy living paycheck to paycheck has a much bigger impact on the economy because that guy is going to go out and spend every penny of that money immediately. So it is quite likely the net effect on the economy for both moves would be positive. I'd be interested to see an analysis.
You'd be right to warn that in the long run the piper will have to be paid. The way it is supposed to work is that the government spends like a drunken sailor during the bad times, and then when times are good cuts the deficit back down to help keep the economy from overheating. The problem with this theory is that nobody ever wants to play scrooge with their voters when times are good.
2008 was the year that it was discovered that not paying for something does not equal getting it free
You mean rediscovered. Those of us who were around in the 70's watching "free" broadcast TV and listening to "free" radio already knew this.
So Bush's advisers clearly thought Blanco was incompetent and discussed using the Insurrection Act to send Federal troops and decided against it.
Bush's advisers always think everyone else is incompetent. Guess who it turned out was really incompetent?
The clear difference between Mississippi and Louisiana was that one place heeded the warnings and didn't wait for the government to hand-hold them
What a load of right-wing claptrap!
There was no difference between rural/smalltown Louisiana and rural/smalltown Mississippi. Both were totally devestated, and both had similar levels of death and breakdown in government services.
The difference between New Orleans and Mississippi is probably what you are thinking of. Do you not recognize at least a wee difference in scale here? New Orleans was a major city with over a million people in the metro area. More than half of those were packed densely into a very small area which is almost entirely below sea level, and is only connected to the outside world by 3 causeways/bridges. Most of those people are quite poor, and unlike the rural poor, have no personal transport at all. Even other large costal cities tend to have good access to the hinterland for evacuations, but New Orleans is south of a big lake with only one very long causeway crossing it.
There is frankly no way the city could have hoped to cope off its own resources. You can say the state should have stepped in, but really the state doesn't have much more to draw on than the city did. Natural disasters (and unnatural ones) hitting major cities like this are one of the main things we need a federal government for.
Oh, and by the way, the rural areas of Mississippi were completely devastated, and have not yet recovered. The only reason you don't hear about it as much is that the numbers are smaller. George Bush doesn't care about poor white people either.
look at the Maher Arar case where a Canadian was intercepted at JFK international, rendered to Syria by the CIA and tortured in Syria.
The "best" part of that story (not mentioned in the article, but gone over in detail in Jane Mayer's The Dark Side), is that the guy was totally innocent of any involvement in terrorisim. So why did the US government pick him up?
Well...it turns out that another suspect who was being tortured happened to know the guy, and threw his name up to his torturers to make them stop for little while.
Doesn't it just make you proud to be an American?
This proves that the Intelligent Designer:
- has Alzheimer's disease
Actually, that would explain a lot...
Further who is buying all the games? Best Buy has a whole isle devoted to PC games
They used to have three aisles devoted to them, with another one or two devoted to productivity apps and Operating Systems (including Red Hat boxes). Now they have shunted the PC games off into one small aisle on the disused side of the store. Some of Microsoft's OS flavors are avialable on a second isle, along with a bunch of budget crap.
I don't think there is really any way to make the case that PC games aren't at a low ebb right now. They are.
Personally, I'd blame MMOs. I used to buy a bit less than 1 PC game a month, but for the last few years MMO's take up *all* my free time. There's none to spare for another game, no matter how cool it is.
The Computer Science entry course ("CS101") has traditionally been centered on data strutures. What possible good could learning about queues and stacks do for a high school student who isn't going into CS when they graduate?
I suppose a class on very basic programming might be useful. Concepts like iteration, selection, subroutines, etc. Perhaps a little basic instruction on code quality. If nothing else, that might help folks write Excel or Word (or whatever) macros, which is a skill useful to anyone who is ever going to hold an office job.
Considering
I'm having a hard time trying to feel bad for the Google folks on this one.
Good thing they made a deal with Sony/BMG though. That's Rick Astely's publisher. They'd hardly have any content left if they had to remove every Rickroll.