Really? I have only anecdotal evidence to counter with, but while I do know several people who pirate movies and a great many people who go to theaters to see movies, these circles do not generally overlap.
With the exception of certain blockbusters that they want the theater experience for, the pirates I know are pirates because they feel theater tickets are too expensive and so do not attend. I suppose it's possible that everyone except me and the friends I'm with whom I know are not pirates are, in fact, rampant movie downloaders. It just seems unlikely to me because, if you're downloading movies because it's free, why would you pay to see one?
Even if true, showing these commercials to the entire theater seems like a bad policy to me. As I understand it, the MPAA's (and really every IP producer's) biggest problem is with large-scale piracy operations. People who make and sell bootleg copies of movies, music CDs, and software. In recent days they've been going after the little guys as well, I know, but even now their busts are usually just on high-volume traders. Now, I can accept that amongst a bunch of college students (who, in my town at least, rarely make up even the majority of a theater audience) a fair many will have downloaded a movie at some point. I don't really think that these are the people that the MPAA is after, though. The movie-downloaders that I know only do it because of the price issue (which is probably why you seem to associate it with college students; we're usually poor). If they had not been able to download the movie, they would simply not have seen it at all, or borrowed the DVD from a more financially stable friend. They aren't costing the MPAA a sale by downloading the movie, so logically cannot be the MPAA's targets. The targets, then, must be the people who download habitually for some other reason: namely, profit. The Taiwanese, as you mentioned, and, in recently growing numbers, people in the US and other western nations. It seems dramatically unlikely to me that these people will be in the theaters and even less likely that they would be swayed by the commercial.
So who is the MPAA targetting with their messages? If it's not me, the non-pirate, and it's not the high-volume pirate who isn't there in the first place, and it's not my friends the casual pirates who don't pirate what they can afford to see legitimately and so don't cost anyone anything, then who is it?
The only answer I can see is that they're targetting some small portion of the population who see movies in theaters, but buy bootlegs for their home collections because DVDs are too expensive for their taste. This brings us back to my interpretation of your roofer analogy: why is this a good technique? Why not lower DVD prices, market on the quality of DVD transfers and included bonus materials, and get DVDs out faster to beat the pirates? The possibility of making someone feel pity on a laborer whom they don't know from Adam in order to make them want to shell out more money for a DVD doesn't seem like a winning strategy, to me. Given that piracy hasn't stopped since these ads came out and, as everyone on this thread has said, nobody has much respect for the campaign, why are they doing it? It just doesn't make sense. It's not like the stuntman asked the MPAA to have a spot before his movie. The MPAA tried it first with big name stars and producers to no avail, so got the little guys in on the action. That means that this is no more and no less than a marketing strategy by the MPAA to sell more DVDs through pity. Since when did pity become a valid selling strategy? Will I be seeing makeup ads depicting animal testing next and telling me, "Don't let the bunnies have died for nothing, buy Clinique!"?
I state again: I am not a pirate. These pity-spots have no effect on me but to further degrade my respect for the motion picture business. My continued patronage of their films is proof that my respect has not been completely destroyed; I do enjoy some mo
It's not that jobs are or are not being lost; that's tangential. The point is the medium of the message: a pity-mercial in front of a movie that I paid to see. I'm not complaining because it's being shown to me; I understand that I can just not go if I don't want to see it (except the first time, when I don't know it's coming). I'm complaining because it's a stupid waste of my time. They're complaining to me, the paying customer. I'm not the target. The target should be the pirates, if they're hoping to pity someone into not pirating. My very presence in the theater proves that I am not pirating this movie, unless I have a camera under my coat. I would wager that a vanishingly small percentage of the people viewing the movies that these things run in front of have a camera under their coats, so these messages are falling on ears that can do nothing to help them.
The only possible purpose of me, the non-pirate, seeing this message is that I might be persuaded to sympathize with the MPAA and, in some future vote, vote for tighter controls on IP and harsher punishments for pirates. If that's the point then I find the pity-spots not only pointless but also offensive! If you want my vote, give me facts. Show me how piracy is hurting your business with numbers, not some alleged cameraman who may well just be another actor bemoaning his fate. And I mean real numbers, not "Pirates steal millions of movie copies a year!" Tell me how many, in real numbers, and then show me studies by impartial agencies describing how many fewer copies of that movie were sold because of it. Maybe that will persuade me. Bob The Boom Mic Man's kids aren't going to.
Yes, piracy can cause the loss of jobs. Yes, that is bad. I agree. I say this in hopes that you stop preaching that point to the choir just as I wish the MPAA would stop preaching anti-piracy to the choir. And we know it's the choir because the pirates are at home, watching pirated copies of the movie that don't have the commercial.
In fact, I don't roof houses. That's not really relavent, though, because the stuntman/cameraman/whathaveyou doesn't sell movies. He gets paid up front, does his job in the movie, and then leaves. The amount taken in at the box office and from DVD sales really has no bearing on his job's pay (until, perhaps, piracy becomes so rampant that production companies are not raking in profits at the rate that they are, in which case I suppose someone would have to start taking pay cuts; but I suspect it would be the stars first, not the union labor). So we'll leave the house roofing intact.
The situation is not analogous to me being a roofer. It's analogous to me being in IT, which I am, and some group going around doing free house roofing. Except that they're not actually roofing houses, because the pirates targetted by these announcements are not making movies. They're not actually stealing DVDs or movie tickets, either, so stealing house roofs wouldn't work either. The only fitting analogy I can come up with is that some wacked-out-of-their-gourds group is going around distributing pamphlets to home owners with instructions on how to replace their own roofs.
Now, these wackos are taking away the jobs of the house roofers because people can roof their own houses for free! Why pay for labor if you don't have to? Right?
So the roofers association is up in a huff and wants a stop put to this. Suing the pamphlet producers isn't working, so one day as I go to the diner (because I don't Have to go to the diner, it's volountary, like the movies) I sit down for my lunch and it's served by...a roofer! He holds out my sandwich, which I've already paid for without being told that he would be there, but refuses to let me have it until he's told me about these nefarious people publishing their roof-installation pamphlets. I protest, "But... I know nothing of roof insallation! I have no such pamphlet nor would I know how to publish one!" Yet he continues on, undaunted, and finishes out his teary spiel about his hungry children and the artistry of his shingling job, then leaves me with my sandwich.
Do I have to go back to the diner? No... but I do like those sandwiches. Does it suck for the roofer? Well, yeah. But I don't think he should be giving me unprovoked solicitation for his cause when I have no real ability to support it except the continue doing what I've already been doing. I also don't think that coming up to me during lunch and begging my pity is the right solution for him. Perhaps he should try lowering his price and emphasising the assurance of quality one gets with a professional roofing, or his company's warranty system, or demonstrating that his roofs are Better roofs than the ones in the pamphlets.
Of course, it's still a flawed analogy since actual roof-pamphlet-producers might come to the diner and be swayed by his message. Real movie pirates probably don't go to the movies. I don't know, because I don't pirate movies. I just hear about them in the theaters.
I, myself, am one of those college kids who laughs at the MPAA pre-movie pity-mercials.
As such, I'd just like to say that:
1) I'm watching this drek after having paid twice as much to see the movie in the theater than to rent it (and thus, presumably, have a more enjoyable experience)
2) I've lived away from my parents for the past six years, since before I graduated highschool, much less college.
3) I pay my own way through college with money from the job that I already have which pays more than some of my professors make a year and, since I intend to someday Be a professor, may well pay more than I will be making after college
So if I want to laugh at the screen as an alternative to crying at the stupidity of our species, I think it's my right.
Since MMORPGs (or MMPGs or MMOGs or whatever over-long acronym is in style now) are at heart just graphical extensions of the old text-based MUD model, why not extend the MUD model of player-created content?
MMOGs seem to want either all or nothing: the whole system is centered around player-created content, or the system is locked down with only the company's own developers creating new content. The closest one seems to get to a middle-of-the-road are things like Star Wars: Galaxies 'player cities' and the ubiquitous crafting skills. While nice, these things were relatively standard faire on MUDs for players and the nothing-but-player-content of There or Second Life are approximately mirrored by the old talker-type MOOs and MUSHes.
What seems to be missing, in my opinion anyway, is the ability for players to become content creators in a fixed world. In the MUD system there was generally the possibility that a dedicated player who showed some interest and aptitude could become part of the world's development staff. Usually this required some basic pre-requisites (time online, a level reached, a % of the game world explored, some sort of 'builder test', etc). Provided that they were fulfilled, one could attain a staff-member status on the MUD and go on to create the fixed or semi-fixed world in which the players moved.
For those not familiar with the concept, consider Everquest. When the developers wished to add a new area to the world, an expansion pack was generally released. The content of these expansions was created by game developers in an office complex somewhere and generally was only basically based on player desires and expectations (this can obviously be argued one way or another, but is not the point). Player houses and the like could be created without the release of an expansion pack as they were just a fixture within the larger fixed-world format of the game. Within the MUD system model, designated players could create the sort of content that would normally be deigned to an expansion release. New dungeons, new cities, etc. Because the average player doesn't know how to program and has little or no 3d graphics skills, their toolset would be obviously limited. On MUDs, builder characters were generally limited to a menu-based on-line creation system or some basic scripting language that accomplished the task with no knowledge of the underlying code. For graphics MMPGs, similar could be accomplished using toolsets, scripting languages and pre-defined graphic object sets created for the purpose.
The obvious problems with such a system, intellectual property rights and consistency of quality, are fairly easily addressed. One agrees at the outset that created works are the property of the parent company, waiving rights to content created this way. To maintain quality across the board, either enact a content review system by company staffed teams, allow a wider set of so-flagged characters to 'beta test' the new content, or a mixture of both. Content created by players would thus not be accessable to the populace at large until it was verified not only to be of good quality, but to fit into the larger world-theme of the game.
Of course, you could look at it as un-paid labor to do the job that the game producers should be doing themselves. The same could be said of MUDs, though. I built and coded for a mud for years with no form of compensation besides player gratitude. I did it because I enjoyed the game and wanted to provide new challenges and places to explore for my fellow players. Given the hardcore-ness of a lot of the MMPGers out there and their dedication to the game, I've often wondered why no game has set up a system like this. MUDs have existed for so long despite being text-only for a reason. The opportunity to take part in the game's development is a great draw that can, for a lot of people, myself included, even outstrip the lure of playing the game itself. Imagine the popularity of an already popular game like Everquest or FF XI if the
1. A lorentz transformation is a mathematical operation used in reativistic velocity calculations that keeps the speed of light constant (note that this is a very broad generalization, there are many, many sources for a more detailed description if you're interested).
2. Expelling a single atom of propellant at any velocity will not do a great deal in your favor. One atom of, for instance, lead, travelling at 90% of light speed would impart sufficient energy on its emitter to cause 1 atom of lead to move at 90% of light speed in the opposite direction. If your emitter is composed of lighter elements, more than one might be accellerated to the same velocity as that single lead atom. However, if your spacecraft is much larger than an atom (which, presumably, it would be), your single-atom drive would not get you anywhere very fast. One mole of lead masses 207.2 grams. Let's assume that you build some sort of super-light vehicle that masses in at 1000kg. That would be 4826.25 times heaver than 1 mole of lead. This means that the force imparted by the departure of your single atom at near light speed would be spread across a volume 2.905x10^26 more massive than it is.
3. Zero point energy does, in fact, exist. There is experimental proof from very reputable sources proving that there is such a thing. The question is not its existence, it's the feasability of harvesting the energy. The most obvious example of the application of zero point energy is the casimir force: the force pulling two parallel metal plates together. You can actually set up a casimir effect experiment in your own garage if you want to.
The problem is that the casimir effect pulls equally in opposite directions on the two plates. This leaves no way to harness that energy for use. If one could create an asymmetric casimir generator then it could easily be used to propel a spacecraft without reaction mass. Too bad no one knows how to do that, or even if it's possible.
Now, I'm certainly not saying that GCT is for real. They look to be about as bogus as they come (and on a tangetial topic, why do 'technology' 'companies' that are really cover schemes for fleecing invenstors always have such hideous web pages? The Onion has a professional-looking page that has fooled real journalists on several occasions; all the tools used to create it are available to people like GCT, so why do their pages always look so uniformly bad?). I'm just saying that it's at least basically possible to harness the energy source (though using it to counteract gravity is another matter entirely).
Well, if you use an 8 terabyte equivalence for 1 Library of Congress (the actual definition seems to be a bit slippery, and that's the first one I found on a Googling)...
Theoretical Nano-Ram storage capacity == 1x10^12 bits / cm^2 1x10^12 bits = 1.25x10^11 bytes = 116.4 Gigabytes That's 0.114 Libraries of Congress per cm^2.
An iPod, according to Apple's website, is 4.1 by 2.4 inches (it's also.62 to.73 inches thick, but since we don't know how thick nano-ram is, let's just assume a wafer the size of an iPod).
1in = 2.540cm 4.1in = 9.840 cm 2.4in = 6.096 cm
Let's chop a cm off each of those to account for the casing, structural bits, and soldering points that aren't actually storage space. That gives us a size of 8.840cmx5.096cm for our hypothetical nanoPod (so on a tangent, how long before some company introduces the new 'e' and starts dubbing products 'nRAM', the 'nPod', 'nTel nSide', etc?). That's a surface area of 45.049cm^2. Given our previous determination that we can store 0.114 LoC on 1cm^2, we arrive at a figure of 5.136 LoC/i(or LoC/n for nPod, as the case may be).
Then, technically, wouldn't people who believe that that thing on their computer is a drink holder or that wearing a tinfoil hat will protect them from the alien/government mind-control satellites have 'validated' their 'knowledge'? I'm sure that they have just as much conviction about their beliefs as your average creationist (or evolutionist, for that matter). And since the scientific method does not have to apply, what difference does it make that the drink holder says CD-ROM on it?
Re:Slashdot: Don't bother linking to Flash-only si
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Beautiful Case Modding
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Y'know, this always annoys me... If people want to browse without flash or javascript, more power to them, but don't try to tell the world it's evil and unnecessary.
Yes, you can make a perfectly good information bearing website out of pure HTML. If you're a company trying to promote your business, or just a person trying to promote themselves, then you probably do want to use the most backward-compatable code you possibly can. But not all of the internet is about doing business. I know it's hard to imagine, given that it has more ads than NYC, but there are parts of the internet not entirely about self-promotion.
HTML and its variants can also be an artistic medium; easily as much so as actual programming languages or traditional media. Maybe you believe that nothing on a webpage should move, but perhaps a web designer with an artistic streak feels that his personal, non-promotional webpage really Needs to have a spiffy rotating interface. If you don't like it, don't go look at it, but don't try to tell us all how to design webpages. This guy's page is just about his personal case-modding. He's not trying to sell cases or promote himself for something. He's not even offering any content that you might really need access to. He's writing about his artistic expression, and I can't think of any more appropriate subject matter to be creative in the formatting of. I'm sure he could have made a very sleek, stream-lined, professional page in pure HTML with PNG images, but he apparently didn't want to. I happen to have flash and javascript both enabled, and (as a former professional web designer with an artistic bent who never used flash or javascript for a professional page) I thought it looked pretty good.
So if you don't like flash, then fine, turn it off and be happy. But don't say that if it's not pure HTML it's not worth looking at. It's like saying that painters should only be allowed to use black and white, so as to not offend the colorblind.
The reason everyone's making 3rd person shooter games is the same one that drove everyone to make platform games back in the NES/SNES/Genesis days. They follow a simple formula, have some level cliches to keep you from having to work too hard on ideas, and with the vast number of others out there it's easy just to copy ideas directly if it gets too hard.
Everything now-a-days has to be 3d (Why this is, I don't know. I'd really like to play another side-scrolling sprite-based Mario Brothers game), and while games like Crash Bandicoot, Sonic Adventures, and Mario64 did well in certain markets, they're not the kinds of titles that sell anymore. They manifestly lack flashy graphics and things exploding, which are what sells games, apparently. As such, the console market had to move on to something else. FPSes have a pretty tight upper limit as to what you can innovate, and most releases focus on the newer, flashier, more-memory-eating graphics than any actual difference in gameplay. Console game authors can't rely on hardware upgrades to support their latest endeavour, so FPS games are pretty much right out. Third-person shooters (or just 3rd person adventure games in general, to include games like Onimusha that fit the mold but lack the guns) give you a little more freedom to innovate ("In this one you play a ninja frog with 76 secret tongue attacks to unlock!") without really moving Too far away from the "slightly-maze-like levels with plenty of moving things to make scream, bleed, and stop moving" formula.
So until someone comes up with a new display medium, we'll probably be stuck with an ever increasing selection of 3rd person adventure games and progressively more movie-like RPGs to play on consoles.
If someone is producing good quality whatever in good quantities, then it should be absolutely irrelevant if they are playing computer chess while chatting with their buddies about D&D.
Exactly, and I wish more managers realized this.
My current managers have a reasonable handle on it, but I've had people in the past that simply did not understand that someone could be productive without constantly looking busy. I talk to friends outside the company via IM quite a lot during work hours, not to mention browsing slashdot, yet I'm still the most productive person in my department. Because I'm a good employee, my overseers turn a blind eye to pretty much anything I feel like doing as long as my work quality stays high. Other people in the department slacked off playing games and such when they really weren't good enough workers to afford the distraction, and they no longer work for the company. It's really that simple, and anyone who thinks the road to high productivity is rules upheld with an iron fist is just deluding themselves.
Using a repeater sharing orbit with Mercury that's perpindicular to the line between Mars and Earth, transmission time would be ~22.36 minutes each way:)
If you have, adjust the window as appropriate and don't send the packet
Naughty, naughty. Still need to send the packet or you generate a causality loop. You already received the response for the packet you're about to send, you see. If you don't send it, then what was the response to?
It's bad enough having inexperienced coders leaving memory leaks and infinite loops lying around; now we'll have reality leaks and causal loops to watch out for, too. "Woops, I forgot a semicolon and now French people speak German..."
As a long-time Comic Book Guy Physique Geek (tm) who finally decided to lose some weight a year ago, what kind of shape does one need to be in before starting in on martial arts?
There's a Kung Fu place just up the street (behind the Subway, oddly enough), but I always wimp out when I decide to go check it out. I started off weighing in at about 285lbs (at 6'3) of mainly fat last year and have by now dropped down to 220 (my goal being 185), but I can't help still feeling like a lardo. I mean, I'm only now after months of running (admittedly with a month or so break in the middle) getting up near 2 miles a day and it still takes me nearly a half hour to do it.
So be bluntly honest; what does it take to make it as a beginner martial artist? Are there any particular physical requirements that I should be sure I can achieve before I even think about signing up?
I know it says it's controlled by Debian and their GPLed robot code (requisite geekly 'whee!'), but how do you actually Use the thing? Do you have to be plugged into a computer and whacking away at a keyboard with your real hand to make the artificial hand move? Do you have to pre-program movements for it? I looked for it on the page, but darned if I could find it.
At the risk of being flamed from here to Topeka...
OS X on x86 might be nice in that it's a userfriendly OS other than Windows for people to use, but it's not the grail that you and a lot of the Mac-advocates here seem to expect.
Do you know why OS X is such a nice OS? Because it runs on Apple computers. And I'm not saying that Apple computers are better than x86 computers, I'm just saying that they're made and controlled by Apple. They have all the specs on all the hardware down to as low a level as they care to look. They can optomize the OS to run on the PPC processor, to read from Apple HD's, to use Apple CD drives... And none of them will ever do anything that the software doesn't expect. There won't be any weird missing functionality in the drivers. Every hardware glitch or driver bug that may exist is ready and available in a database for the OS programmers.
Porting OS X to x86 would be the functional equivalent of running console emulators on your PC. MAME and the various old-system (genesis, NES, SNES, TurboGrafix...) emulators work fine because modern computers are So much faster than the original hardware that the fact that none of the hardware is at all like what those games were optomized for doesn't matter. Motorola processors may be out of date compared to AMD/Intel processors, but not nearly so much as, say, a 1988 arcade cabinet to AMD/Intel processors.
OS X would be slow on x86. Since it's based on a Unix core instead of some totally proprietary thing it probably would still be easily usable, but it would Not have the performance that Mac-advocates so praise when poo-poo'ing the 'MhZ Myth'. But even worse than the speed hit; it would be unstable. Mac Products 'Just Work' because Apple OS programmers can take the latest build down to a lab, load it on all the machines there and see ever possible major hardware configuration change. The ones that crash, they check the hardware docs and fix the bug. If MS could do that, or if Linux hackers could do that, I have no doubt that Every OS would 'Just Work'.
OS X on x86 (and all this assumes that Apple ports it to open hardware, not proprietary Mac Hardware that's just based on a processor made in a factory with AMD on the sign) would make Apple a lot of money up front, but would be a horrible, horrible idea with their current business model. They Rely on the fact that their hardware is proprietary, and not because they can price it however they want ('cause it's really not That expensive); it's because they have absolute control over how you set up your PC. People slammed MS for giving favor to certain manufacturers, but Apple is worse a thousand times over.
So in conclusion, as I've ranted long enough, if Apple releases an OS X that runs on my 1GhZ AMD, I'll give it a shot, sure. I mean, really, what do I have to lose? And I'm sure a lot of people will do the exact same thing. But you'll have a whole lot of Mac-advocates (Maccies? Macacates?) left sputtering, "Illegal Operation? But..but... It USED to Just Work!"
The reason that electric cars have universally sucked is Because they've been regular cars with a big battery. GM realized this, looked at Ford and others plans for fuel cell cars and said, "This sucks. Gasoline will be gone in 50 years, tops, and cars are going to suck ass. Let's not do that." Not those words, obviously, but that's what I got out of the article (I read the print version in Wired a week ago).
GM started over from the ground up because they're not building a gas-burning internal-combusion-powered car. They're building a wheeled conveyance that uses hydrogen as a power source and electric motors to drive the wheels. Other than the fact that both have wheels and have to carry humans, there are no common factors. The GM design concept lets them make cars that look like cars and run like cars. They can put on a body that looks just like a Suburban (well, as close as possible without infringing on designs), has the same accelleration profile, sounds the same, and has the same interior. Or they can make a car that looks like it fell out of a sci-fi flick, goes 0-60 in 3 seconds, is driven from the back seat with two joysticks, and is completely silent. And they could do either one for the same price.
Given the situation with dimishing fossil fuels and growing public demand for environment-friendly vehciles, I think GM is the only one taking a realistic approach to this. Everyone else is making a half-hearted for-show effort at building a fuel-cell car and just assuming that the status quo will continue for another hundred years. Gas-based cars are all they've known for their entire corporate lives, and the bigger the company the more resistant to change.
Barring some major failure in fuel cell development in the next 8 years, I don't think there's any question that GM will succeed. The question is what will happen when gas prices are at $20 a gallon and GM is the only company to have a viable alternative, probably with patents falling out their ears. I'd really like to know what will happen to Ford and Toyota when they're caught with their pants down. Even if they don't hit their 2010 deadline, GM will have a decade of R&D and billions of dollars investment above everyone else when it hits the fan and there is no gasoline left.
Ah, complicated like trusting webpages complicated?
I don't know how many times a day I get popups to trust Gator Spyware Inc. or whomever. I know well enough to hit No, but there's a big fat OK button there, and even a friendly little "Always trust content from Evil Advertising Ltd." checkbox.
I'm sure people do pause the first time they get one, but the warning text is in little black type and the "CLICK HERE TO GET FREE CARS!" bit is in stand-out-ish blue type. Where do you think Joe User is looking when he hits OK? MS seems to feel that this is sufficient warning before trusting someone at a random webpage to initiate a download and then run the downloaded software with no more interference from you, the user, so how much more complex do you expect them to make running programs actually On your computer?
I would be not at all surprised if the first time someone runs an untrusted application they get a friendly little paperclip in a police uniform asking if they always want to trust content from this source.
I've little doubt it will happen eventually. It will probably be a while before such implants are available legally as cosmetic surgery, though.
Even once artifical devices capable of functioning better than organic ones are available, they'll be nominally for people who really need them. Those who just Want the added functionality will either live without it or go to less inhibited countries and get it done in second-rate surgeries while hoping they avoid infection. Eventually someone will realize the revenue being lost that way and open it up further. And once the initial revulsion of society goes away (when previously handicapped people are wandering around with artificial parts and some sort of etiquitte is devised for asking, "Did you lose your arm, or is that on purpose?") they'll likely be as common as breast implants and facelifts.
The real question is how will society change when such things are available? If we can all (or at least the rich) get bionic eyes that let us see across a broader band of the EM spectrum, what will the world look like? Sculptures made of mildly radioactive materials that glow when you turn your eyes to the right setting, lead-based paint in advertising and just general signage to make sure you can see it if you're functioning in X-ray mode. Heck, x-ray-absorbing clothing to keep peeping toms away... It'd be a heck of a thing. And that's just eyes.
Okay, I've got to ask. How do you use a computer if you're deaf and blind? Are you just 'legally blind' where you can still see, but have to have the resolution set to ENORMOUS and use a magnifying glass?
I don't mean to be rude or anything, but I've always wondered how deaf-blind people manage to live their lives. It seems like it would be a nigh-impossible struggle to communicate at all.
While I agree that calculators can inhibit really learning the underlying concepts, I think a lot of today's courses are geared with calculators in mind.
Making an accurate graph takes a lot longer by hand than it does by calculator, especially if you're just learning the concepts. Not to mention the length of time it takes to do all the long, large-number-ridden equations to get the values you're graphing. All the math classes I've taken have used a number of graphs that probably would have taken the class half the alloted time to graph any one of, but are rendered in a few seconds on the calculator. Similarly, professors tend to assign dozens or, in some cases, well over a hundred problems per class session. If you're allowing calculators on homework, then that's fine. But if you've never used the calculator in class, you're probably going to have next to no idea how to use one. Graphing calculators are hardly intuitive, and I was fast failing an algebra course simply because I didn't have the right model. The tests would ask for intercepts at points with 5 and 6 digits of precision, and while I could do it by hand it was hardly speedy enough to find all the answers in the allotted time.
Modern hybrid cars don't get plugged into electrical outlets. They use some sort of conservation strategy to burn gasoline in order to charge up a battery while you're driving, that way you run part of the time purely on electric power. Thus, you still fill it up with gas; just less often than normal. That's why you'll see hybrid cars advertising some big number of miles-per-gallon.
So yeah, hybrids aren't as clean as a purely electrical or hydrogen fuel-cell car would be, but they have significantly less emissions-per-mile than a regular car simply because they burn less fuel over time.
(Note, I may be totally off about the battery charging thing. I don't know or claim to know how they work exactly, but I know that's the basic premise. Anyone with more details, please post. I'd like to know more but have never found myself motivated to go look:))
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's what I'm talking about. Thank you.
Yarr!
Really? I have only anecdotal evidence to counter with, but while I do know several people who pirate movies and a great many people who go to theaters to see movies, these circles do not generally overlap.
With the exception of certain blockbusters that they want the theater experience for, the pirates I know are pirates because they feel theater tickets are too expensive and so do not attend. I suppose it's possible that everyone except me and the friends I'm with whom I know are not pirates are, in fact, rampant movie downloaders. It just seems unlikely to me because, if you're downloading movies because it's free, why would you pay to see one?
Even if true, showing these commercials to the entire theater seems like a bad policy to me. As I understand it, the MPAA's (and really every IP producer's) biggest problem is with large-scale piracy operations. People who make and sell bootleg copies of movies, music CDs, and software. In recent days they've been going after the little guys as well, I know, but even now their busts are usually just on high-volume traders. Now, I can accept that amongst a bunch of college students (who, in my town at least, rarely make up even the majority of a theater audience) a fair many will have downloaded a movie at some point. I don't really think that these are the people that the MPAA is after, though. The movie-downloaders that I know only do it because of the price issue (which is probably why you seem to associate it with college students; we're usually poor). If they had not been able to download the movie, they would simply not have seen it at all, or borrowed the DVD from a more financially stable friend. They aren't costing the MPAA a sale by downloading the movie, so logically cannot be the MPAA's targets. The targets, then, must be the people who download habitually for some other reason: namely, profit. The Taiwanese, as you mentioned, and, in recently growing numbers, people in the US and other western nations. It seems dramatically unlikely to me that these people will be in the theaters and even less likely that they would be swayed by the commercial.
So who is the MPAA targetting with their messages? If it's not me, the non-pirate, and it's not the high-volume pirate who isn't there in the first place, and it's not my friends the casual pirates who don't pirate what they can afford to see legitimately and so don't cost anyone anything, then who is it?
The only answer I can see is that they're targetting some small portion of the population who see movies in theaters, but buy bootlegs for their home collections because DVDs are too expensive for their taste. This brings us back to my interpretation of your roofer analogy: why is this a good technique? Why not lower DVD prices, market on the quality of DVD transfers and included bonus materials, and get DVDs out faster to beat the pirates? The possibility of making someone feel pity on a laborer whom they don't know from Adam in order to make them want to shell out more money for a DVD doesn't seem like a winning strategy, to me. Given that piracy hasn't stopped since these ads came out and, as everyone on this thread has said, nobody has much respect for the campaign, why are they doing it? It just doesn't make sense. It's not like the stuntman asked the MPAA to have a spot before his movie. The MPAA tried it first with big name stars and producers to no avail, so got the little guys in on the action. That means that this is no more and no less than a marketing strategy by the MPAA to sell more DVDs through pity. Since when did pity become a valid selling strategy? Will I be seeing makeup ads depicting animal testing next and telling me, "Don't let the bunnies have died for nothing, buy Clinique!"?
I state again: I am not a pirate. These pity-spots have no effect on me but to further degrade my respect for the motion picture business. My continued patronage of their films is proof that my respect has not been completely destroyed; I do enjoy some mo
Are you deliberately missing the point?
It's not that jobs are or are not being lost; that's tangential. The point is the medium of the message: a pity-mercial in front of a movie that I paid to see. I'm not complaining because it's being shown to me; I understand that I can just not go if I don't want to see it (except the first time, when I don't know it's coming). I'm complaining because it's a stupid waste of my time. They're complaining to me, the paying customer. I'm not the target. The target should be the pirates, if they're hoping to pity someone into not pirating. My very presence in the theater proves that I am not pirating this movie, unless I have a camera under my coat. I would wager that a vanishingly small percentage of the people viewing the movies that these things run in front of have a camera under their coats, so these messages are falling on ears that can do nothing to help them.
The only possible purpose of me, the non-pirate, seeing this message is that I might be persuaded to sympathize with the MPAA and, in some future vote, vote for tighter controls on IP and harsher punishments for pirates. If that's the point then I find the pity-spots not only pointless but also offensive! If you want my vote, give me facts. Show me how piracy is hurting your business with numbers, not some alleged cameraman who may well just be another actor bemoaning his fate. And I mean real numbers, not "Pirates steal millions of movie copies a year!" Tell me how many, in real numbers, and then show me studies by impartial agencies describing how many fewer copies of that movie were sold because of it. Maybe that will persuade me. Bob The Boom Mic Man's kids aren't going to.
Yes, piracy can cause the loss of jobs. Yes, that is bad. I agree. I say this in hopes that you stop preaching that point to the choir just as I wish the MPAA would stop preaching anti-piracy to the choir. And we know it's the choir because the pirates are at home, watching pirated copies of the movie that don't have the commercial.
Shame your analogy is completely invalid.
In fact, I don't roof houses. That's not really relavent, though, because the stuntman/cameraman/whathaveyou doesn't sell movies. He gets paid up front, does his job in the movie, and then leaves. The amount taken in at the box office and from DVD sales really has no bearing on his job's pay (until, perhaps, piracy becomes so rampant that production companies are not raking in profits at the rate that they are, in which case I suppose someone would have to start taking pay cuts; but I suspect it would be the stars first, not the union labor). So we'll leave the house roofing intact.
The situation is not analogous to me being a roofer. It's analogous to me being in IT, which I am, and some group going around doing free house roofing. Except that they're not actually roofing houses, because the pirates targetted by these announcements are not making movies. They're not actually stealing DVDs or movie tickets, either, so stealing house roofs wouldn't work either. The only fitting analogy I can come up with is that some wacked-out-of-their-gourds group is going around distributing pamphlets to home owners with instructions on how to replace their own roofs.
Now, these wackos are taking away the jobs of the house roofers because people can roof their own houses for free! Why pay for labor if you don't have to? Right?
So the roofers association is up in a huff and wants a stop put to this. Suing the pamphlet producers isn't working, so one day as I go to the diner (because I don't Have to go to the diner, it's volountary, like the movies) I sit down for my lunch and it's served by...a roofer! He holds out my sandwich, which I've already paid for without being told that he would be there, but refuses to let me have it until he's told me about these nefarious people publishing their roof-installation pamphlets. I protest, "But... I know nothing of roof insallation! I have no such pamphlet nor would I know how to publish one!" Yet he continues on, undaunted, and finishes out his teary spiel about his hungry children and the artistry of his shingling job, then leaves me with my sandwich.
Do I have to go back to the diner? No... but I do like those sandwiches. Does it suck for the roofer? Well, yeah. But I don't think he should be giving me unprovoked solicitation for his cause when I have no real ability to support it except the continue doing what I've already been doing. I also don't think that coming up to me during lunch and begging my pity is the right solution for him. Perhaps he should try lowering his price and emphasising the assurance of quality one gets with a professional roofing, or his company's warranty system, or demonstrating that his roofs are Better roofs than the ones in the pamphlets.
Of course, it's still a flawed analogy since actual roof-pamphlet-producers might come to the diner and be swayed by his message. Real movie pirates probably don't go to the movies. I don't know, because I don't pirate movies. I just hear about them in the theaters.
I, myself, am one of those college kids who laughs at the MPAA pre-movie pity-mercials.
As such, I'd just like to say that:
1) I'm watching this drek after having paid twice as much to see the movie in the theater than to rent it (and thus, presumably, have a more enjoyable experience)
2) I've lived away from my parents for the past six years, since before I graduated highschool, much less college.
3) I pay my own way through college with money from the job that I already have which pays more than some of my professors make a year and, since I intend to someday Be a professor, may well pay more than I will be making after college
So if I want to laugh at the screen as an alternative to crying at the stupidity of our species, I think it's my right.
Since MMORPGs (or MMPGs or MMOGs or whatever over-long acronym is in style now) are at heart just graphical extensions of the old text-based MUD model, why not extend the MUD model of player-created content?
MMOGs seem to want either all or nothing: the whole system is centered around player-created content, or the system is locked down with only the company's own developers creating new content. The closest one seems to get to a middle-of-the-road are things like Star Wars: Galaxies 'player cities' and the ubiquitous crafting skills. While nice, these things were relatively standard faire on MUDs for players and the nothing-but-player-content of There or Second Life are approximately mirrored by the old talker-type MOOs and MUSHes.
What seems to be missing, in my opinion anyway, is the ability for players to become content creators in a fixed world. In the MUD system there was generally the possibility that a dedicated player who showed some interest and aptitude could become part of the world's development staff. Usually this required some basic pre-requisites (time online, a level reached, a % of the game world explored, some sort of 'builder test', etc). Provided that they were fulfilled, one could attain a staff-member status on the MUD and go on to create the fixed or semi-fixed world in which the players moved.
For those not familiar with the concept, consider Everquest. When the developers wished to add a new area to the world, an expansion pack was generally released. The content of these expansions was created by game developers in an office complex somewhere and generally was only basically based on player desires and expectations (this can obviously be argued one way or another, but is not the point). Player houses and the like could be created without the release of an expansion pack as they were just a fixture within the larger fixed-world format of the game.
Within the MUD system model, designated players could create the sort of content that would normally be deigned to an expansion release. New dungeons, new cities, etc. Because the average player doesn't know how to program and has little or no 3d graphics skills, their toolset would be obviously limited. On MUDs, builder characters were generally limited to a menu-based on-line creation system or some basic scripting language that accomplished the task with no knowledge of the underlying code. For graphics MMPGs, similar could be accomplished using toolsets, scripting languages and pre-defined graphic object sets created for the purpose.
The obvious problems with such a system, intellectual property rights and consistency of quality, are fairly easily addressed. One agrees at the outset that created works are the property of the parent company, waiving rights to content created this way. To maintain quality across the board, either enact a content review system by company staffed teams, allow a wider set of so-flagged characters to 'beta test' the new content, or a mixture of both. Content created by players would thus not be accessable to the populace at large until it was verified not only to be of good quality, but to fit into the larger world-theme of the game.
Of course, you could look at it as un-paid labor to do the job that the game producers should be doing themselves. The same could be said of MUDs, though. I built and coded for a mud for years with no form of compensation besides player gratitude. I did it because I enjoyed the game and wanted to provide new challenges and places to explore for my fellow players. Given the hardcore-ness of a lot of the MMPGers out there and their dedication to the game, I've often wondered why no game has set up a system like this. MUDs have existed for so long despite being text-only for a reason. The opportunity to take part in the game's development is a great draw that can, for a lot of people, myself included, even outstrip the lure of playing the game itself. Imagine the popularity of an already popular game like Everquest or FF XI if the
1. A lorentz transformation is a mathematical operation used in reativistic velocity calculations that keeps the speed of light constant (note that this is a very broad generalization, there are many, many sources for a more detailed description if you're interested).
2. Expelling a single atom of propellant at any velocity will not do a great deal in your favor. One atom of, for instance, lead, travelling at 90% of light speed would impart sufficient energy on its emitter to cause 1 atom of lead to move at 90% of light speed in the opposite direction. If your emitter is composed of lighter elements, more than one might be accellerated to the same velocity as that single lead atom. However, if your spacecraft is much larger than an atom (which, presumably, it would be), your single-atom drive would not get you anywhere very fast.
One mole of lead masses 207.2 grams. Let's assume that you build some sort of super-light vehicle that masses in at 1000kg. That would be 4826.25 times heaver than 1 mole of lead. This means that the force imparted by the departure of your single atom at near light speed would be spread across a volume 2.905x10^26 more massive than it is.
3. Zero point energy does, in fact, exist. There is experimental proof from very reputable sources proving that there is such a thing. The question is not its existence, it's the feasability of harvesting the energy. The most obvious example of the application of zero point energy is the casimir force: the force pulling two parallel metal plates together. You can actually set up a casimir effect experiment in your own garage if you want to.
The problem is that the casimir effect pulls equally in opposite directions on the two plates. This leaves no way to harness that energy for use. If one could create an asymmetric casimir generator then it could easily be used to propel a spacecraft without reaction mass. Too bad no one knows how to do that, or even if it's possible.
Now, I'm certainly not saying that GCT is for real. They look to be about as bogus as they come (and on a tangetial topic, why do 'technology' 'companies' that are really cover schemes for fleecing invenstors always have such hideous web pages? The Onion has a professional-looking page that has fooled real journalists on several occasions; all the tools used to create it are available to people like GCT, so why do their pages always look so uniformly bad?). I'm just saying that it's at least basically possible to harness the energy source (though using it to counteract gravity is another matter entirely).
--Dreamweaver
Well, if you use an 8 terabyte equivalence for 1 Library of Congress (the actual definition seems to be a bit slippery, and that's the first one I found on a Googling)...
.62 to .73 inches thick, but since we don't know how thick nano-ram is, let's just assume a wafer the size of an iPod).
Theoretical Nano-Ram storage capacity == 1x10^12 bits / cm^2
1x10^12 bits = 1.25x10^11 bytes = 116.4 Gigabytes
That's 0.114 Libraries of Congress per cm^2.
An iPod, according to Apple's website, is 4.1 by 2.4 inches (it's also
1in = 2.540cm
4.1in = 9.840 cm
2.4in = 6.096 cm
Let's chop a cm off each of those to account for the casing, structural bits, and soldering points that aren't actually storage space. That gives us a size of 8.840cmx5.096cm for our hypothetical nanoPod (so on a tangent, how long before some company introduces the new 'e' and starts dubbing products 'nRAM', the 'nPod', 'nTel nSide', etc?). That's a surface area of 45.049cm^2.
Given our previous determination that we can store 0.114 LoC on 1cm^2, we arrive at a figure of 5.136 LoC/i(or LoC/n for nPod, as the case may be).
Then, technically, wouldn't people who believe that that thing on their computer is a drink holder or that wearing a tinfoil hat will protect them from the alien/government mind-control satellites have 'validated' their 'knowledge'? I'm sure that they have just as much conviction about their beliefs as your average creationist (or evolutionist, for that matter). And since the scientific method does not have to apply, what difference does it make that the drink holder says CD-ROM on it?
Y'know, this always annoys me... If people want to browse without flash or javascript, more power to them, but don't try to tell the world it's evil and unnecessary.
Yes, you can make a perfectly good information bearing website out of pure HTML. If you're a company trying to promote your business, or just a person trying to promote themselves, then you probably do want to use the most backward-compatable code you possibly can. But not all of the internet is about doing business. I know it's hard to imagine, given that it has more ads than NYC, but there are parts of the internet not entirely about self-promotion.
HTML and its variants can also be an artistic medium; easily as much so as actual programming languages or traditional media. Maybe you believe that nothing on a webpage should move, but perhaps a web designer with an artistic streak feels that his personal, non-promotional webpage really Needs to have a spiffy rotating interface. If you don't like it, don't go look at it, but don't try to tell us all how to design webpages. This guy's page is just about his personal case-modding. He's not trying to sell cases or promote himself for something. He's not even offering any content that you might really need access to. He's writing about his artistic expression, and I can't think of any more appropriate subject matter to be creative in the formatting of. I'm sure he could have made a very sleek, stream-lined, professional page in pure HTML with PNG images, but he apparently didn't want to. I happen to have flash and javascript both enabled, and (as a former professional web designer with an artistic bent who never used flash or javascript for a professional page) I thought it looked pretty good.
So if you don't like flash, then fine, turn it off and be happy. But don't say that if it's not pure HTML it's not worth looking at. It's like saying that painters should only be allowed to use black and white, so as to not offend the colorblind.
The reason everyone's making 3rd person shooter games is the same one that drove everyone to make platform games back in the NES/SNES/Genesis days. They follow a simple formula, have some level cliches to keep you from having to work too hard on ideas, and with the vast number of others out there it's easy just to copy ideas directly if it gets too hard.
Everything now-a-days has to be 3d (Why this is, I don't know. I'd really like to play another side-scrolling sprite-based Mario Brothers game), and while games like Crash Bandicoot, Sonic Adventures, and Mario64 did well in certain markets, they're not the kinds of titles that sell anymore. They manifestly lack flashy graphics and things exploding, which are what sells games, apparently. As such, the console market had to move on to something else. FPSes have a pretty tight upper limit as to what you can innovate, and most releases focus on the newer, flashier, more-memory-eating graphics than any actual difference in gameplay. Console game authors can't rely on hardware upgrades to support their latest endeavour, so FPS games are pretty much right out. Third-person shooters (or just 3rd person adventure games in general, to include games like Onimusha that fit the mold but lack the guns) give you a little more freedom to innovate ("In this one you play a ninja frog with 76 secret tongue attacks to unlock!") without really moving Too far away from the "slightly-maze-like levels with plenty of moving things to make scream, bleed, and stop moving" formula.
So until someone comes up with a new display medium, we'll probably be stuck with an ever increasing selection of 3rd person adventure games and progressively more movie-like RPGs to play on consoles.
If someone is producing good quality whatever in good quantities, then it should be absolutely irrelevant if they are playing computer chess while chatting with their buddies about D&D.
Exactly, and I wish more managers realized this.
My current managers have a reasonable handle on it, but I've had people in the past that simply did not understand that someone could be productive without constantly looking busy. I talk to friends outside the company via IM quite a lot during work hours, not to mention browsing slashdot, yet I'm still the most productive person in my department. Because I'm a good employee, my overseers turn a blind eye to pretty much anything I feel like doing as long as my work quality stays high. Other people in the department slacked off playing games and such when they really weren't good enough workers to afford the distraction, and they no longer work for the company. It's really that simple, and anyone who thinks the road to high productivity is rules upheld with an iron fist is just deluding themselves.
Using a repeater sharing orbit with Mercury that's perpindicular to the line between Mars and Earth, transmission time would be ~22.36 minutes each way :)
If you have, adjust the window as appropriate and don't send the packet
Naughty, naughty. Still need to send the packet or you generate a causality loop. You already received the response for the packet you're about to send, you see. If you don't send it, then what was the response to?
It's bad enough having inexperienced coders leaving memory leaks and infinite loops lying around; now we'll have reality leaks and causal loops to watch out for, too. "Woops, I forgot a semicolon and now French people speak German..."
As a long-time Comic Book Guy Physique Geek (tm) who finally decided to lose some weight a year ago, what kind of shape does one need to be in before starting in on martial arts?
There's a Kung Fu place just up the street (behind the Subway, oddly enough), but I always wimp out when I decide to go check it out. I started off weighing in at about 285lbs (at 6'3) of mainly fat last year and have by now dropped down to 220 (my goal being 185), but I can't help still feeling like a lardo. I mean, I'm only now after months of running (admittedly with a month or so break in the middle) getting up near 2 miles a day and it still takes me nearly a half hour to do it.
So be bluntly honest; what does it take to make it as a beginner martial artist? Are there any particular physical requirements that I should be sure I can achieve before I even think about signing up?
I know it says it's controlled by Debian and their GPLed robot code (requisite geekly 'whee!'), but how do you actually Use the thing? Do you have to be plugged into a computer and whacking away at a keyboard with your real hand to make the artificial hand move? Do you have to pre-program movements for it? I looked for it on the page, but darned if I could find it.
RiMpa, DiMpa, DuMpalee-doo, I've got another lawsuit for you.
RiMpa, DiMpa, DuMpalee-dee, I'm gonna sue you for stealing from me.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
At the risk of being flamed from here to Topeka...
OS X on x86 might be nice in that it's a userfriendly OS other than Windows for people to use, but it's not the grail that you and a lot of the Mac-advocates here seem to expect.
Do you know why OS X is such a nice OS? Because it runs on Apple computers. And I'm not saying that Apple computers are better than x86 computers, I'm just saying that they're made and controlled by Apple. They have all the specs on all the hardware down to as low a level as they care to look. They can optomize the OS to run on the PPC processor, to read from Apple HD's, to use Apple CD drives... And none of them will ever do anything that the software doesn't expect. There won't be any weird missing functionality in the drivers. Every hardware glitch or driver bug that may exist is ready and available in a database for the OS programmers.
Porting OS X to x86 would be the functional equivalent of running console emulators on your PC. MAME and the various old-system (genesis, NES, SNES, TurboGrafix...) emulators work fine because modern computers are So much faster than the original hardware that the fact that none of the hardware is at all like what those games were optomized for doesn't matter. Motorola processors may be out of date compared to AMD/Intel processors, but not nearly so much as, say, a 1988 arcade cabinet to AMD/Intel processors.
OS X would be slow on x86. Since it's based on a Unix core instead of some totally proprietary thing it probably would still be easily usable, but it would Not have the performance that Mac-advocates so praise when poo-poo'ing the 'MhZ Myth'. But even worse than the speed hit; it would be unstable. Mac Products 'Just Work' because Apple OS programmers can take the latest build down to a lab, load it on all the machines there and see ever possible major hardware configuration change. The ones that crash, they check the hardware docs and fix the bug. If MS could do that, or if Linux hackers could do that, I have no doubt that Every OS would 'Just Work'.
OS X on x86 (and all this assumes that Apple ports it to open hardware, not proprietary Mac Hardware that's just based on a processor made in a factory with AMD on the sign) would make Apple a lot of money up front, but would be a horrible, horrible idea with their current business model. They Rely on the fact that their hardware is proprietary, and not because they can price it however they want ('cause it's really not That expensive); it's because they have absolute control over how you set up your PC. People slammed MS for giving favor to certain manufacturers, but Apple is worse a thousand times over.
So in conclusion, as I've ranted long enough, if Apple releases an OS X that runs on my 1GhZ AMD, I'll give it a shot, sure. I mean, really, what do I have to lose? And I'm sure a lot of people will do the exact same thing. But you'll have a whole lot of Mac-advocates (Maccies? Macacates?) left sputtering, "Illegal Operation? But..but... It USED to Just Work!"
The reason that electric cars have universally sucked is Because they've been regular cars with a big battery. GM realized this, looked at Ford and others plans for fuel cell cars and said, "This sucks. Gasoline will be gone in 50 years, tops, and cars are going to suck ass. Let's not do that." Not those words, obviously, but that's what I got out of the article (I read the print version in Wired a week ago).
GM started over from the ground up because they're not building a gas-burning internal-combusion-powered car. They're building a wheeled conveyance that uses hydrogen as a power source and electric motors to drive the wheels. Other than the fact that both have wheels and have to carry humans, there are no common factors. The GM design concept lets them make cars that look like cars and run like cars. They can put on a body that looks just like a Suburban (well, as close as possible without infringing on designs), has the same accelleration profile, sounds the same, and has the same interior. Or they can make a car that looks like it fell out of a sci-fi flick, goes 0-60 in 3 seconds, is driven from the back seat with two joysticks, and is completely silent. And they could do either one for the same price.
Given the situation with dimishing fossil fuels and growing public demand for environment-friendly vehciles, I think GM is the only one taking a realistic approach to this. Everyone else is making a half-hearted for-show effort at building a fuel-cell car and just assuming that the status quo will continue for another hundred years. Gas-based cars are all they've known for their entire corporate lives, and the bigger the company the more resistant to change.
Barring some major failure in fuel cell development in the next 8 years, I don't think there's any question that GM will succeed. The question is what will happen when gas prices are at $20 a gallon and GM is the only company to have a viable alternative, probably with patents falling out their ears. I'd really like to know what will happen to Ford and Toyota when they're caught with their pants down. Even if they don't hit their 2010 deadline, GM will have a decade of R&D and billions of dollars investment above everyone else when it hits the fan and there is no gasoline left.
Now where do I buy stock?
Ah, complicated like trusting webpages complicated?
I don't know how many times a day I get popups to trust Gator Spyware Inc. or whomever. I know well enough to hit No, but there's a big fat OK button there, and even a friendly little "Always trust content from Evil Advertising Ltd." checkbox.
I'm sure people do pause the first time they get one, but the warning text is in little black type and the "CLICK HERE TO GET FREE CARS!" bit is in stand-out-ish blue type. Where do you think Joe User is looking when he hits OK? MS seems to feel that this is sufficient warning before trusting someone at a random webpage to initiate a download and then run the downloaded software with no more interference from you, the user, so how much more complex do you expect them to make running programs actually On your computer?
I would be not at all surprised if the first time someone runs an untrusted application they get a friendly little paperclip in a police uniform asking if they always want to trust content from this source.
I've little doubt it will happen eventually. It will probably be a while before such implants are available legally as cosmetic surgery, though.
Even once artifical devices capable of functioning better than organic ones are available, they'll be nominally for people who really need them. Those who just Want the added functionality will either live without it or go to less inhibited countries and get it done in second-rate surgeries while hoping they avoid infection. Eventually someone will realize the revenue being lost that way and open it up further. And once the initial revulsion of society goes away (when previously handicapped people are wandering around with artificial parts and some sort of etiquitte is devised for asking, "Did you lose your arm, or is that on purpose?") they'll likely be as common as breast implants and facelifts.
The real question is how will society change when such things are available? If we can all (or at least the rich) get bionic eyes that let us see across a broader band of the EM spectrum, what will the world look like? Sculptures made of mildly radioactive materials that glow when you turn your eyes to the right setting, lead-based paint in advertising and just general signage to make sure you can see it if you're functioning in X-ray mode. Heck, x-ray-absorbing clothing to keep peeping toms away... It'd be a heck of a thing. And that's just eyes.
Okay, I've got to ask. How do you use a computer if you're deaf and blind? Are you just 'legally blind' where you can still see, but have to have the resolution set to ENORMOUS and use a magnifying glass?
I don't mean to be rude or anything, but I've always wondered how deaf-blind people manage to live their lives. It seems like it would be a nigh-impossible struggle to communicate at all.
My XP installation has crashed a few times. One of them was a BSOD, the others were just total system hangs.
While I agree that calculators can inhibit really learning the underlying concepts, I think a lot of today's courses are geared with calculators in mind.
Making an accurate graph takes a lot longer by hand than it does by calculator, especially if you're just learning the concepts. Not to mention the length of time it takes to do all the long, large-number-ridden equations to get the values you're graphing. All the math classes I've taken have used a number of graphs that probably would have taken the class half the alloted time to graph any one of, but are rendered in a few seconds on the calculator. Similarly, professors tend to assign dozens or, in some cases, well over a hundred problems per class session. If you're allowing calculators on homework, then that's fine. But if you've never used the calculator in class, you're probably going to have next to no idea how to use one. Graphing calculators are hardly intuitive, and I was fast failing an algebra course simply because I didn't have the right model. The tests would ask for intercepts at points with 5 and 6 digits of precision, and while I could do it by hand it was hardly speedy enough to find all the answers in the allotted time.
Modern hybrid cars don't get plugged into electrical outlets. They use some sort of conservation strategy to burn gasoline in order to charge up a battery while you're driving, that way you run part of the time purely on electric power. Thus, you still fill it up with gas; just less often than normal. That's why you'll see hybrid cars advertising some big number of miles-per-gallon.
:))
So yeah, hybrids aren't as clean as a purely electrical or hydrogen fuel-cell car would be, but they have significantly less emissions-per-mile than a regular car simply because they burn less fuel over time.
(Note, I may be totally off about the battery charging thing. I don't know or claim to know how they work exactly, but I know that's the basic premise. Anyone with more details, please post. I'd like to know more but have never found myself motivated to go look