This is games.slashdot.org. EA is the only game company. Any supposed "other" game companies are either worthless, or EA just hasn't gotten around to acquiring them yet.
In Canada we have a "Good samaritan" law, such that you can be held liable for inaction, if a court finds that you had a reasonable chance of being able to help someone in need, without putting yourself in danger, and you didn't. It has been used fairly infrequently, but it does exist.
For example, if you see a car accident on the side of the road, and no one else has stopped yet, you are obligated to stop and see if you can provide any assistance.
Similar situation here. We (me and my co-conspirator) just set up a Linux server at home, ran Bugzilla on it, started using it from work. Got other people onboard. Started linking it into programs for bug reporting. It became indispensible.
Then someone asked IT why it was so slow to load pages. We explained the situation to them, and it was decided we'd have to move it in-house. After several failed attempts to get it running on Windows... well, suffice it to say we now have a friendly little Linux box sitting on the network.
Do you understand what "for us" means? To clairify my point (I was unclear, and I apologise for that)
The drug companies are not directly subsidized. This would result in free (or cheap) drugs for everyone, including internet pharmacies. This is what people are suggesting happens. This is not the case.
Instead, the drug companies develop the drugs on their own, set a price (probably overpriced), and then, when a Canadian is perscribed that drug by a doctor, the government's health insurance will pay the full asking price set by the drug manufacturer.
Perhaps these are both subsidies, but the latter is not the kind of subsidy that was being suggested in the post I replied to.
I agree. Having cheap furniture in your boardroom may be a tactic used by some of the lean and mean companies, but you can certainly have an extremely profitable business even if you do have a "colossal waste of money" for a boardroom -- almost every mid-sized or larger company has a richly outfitted boardroom, because unfortunately it does make a difference in the kind of clients you can attract when you're using that room for demos or consultations or whatever.
Just like wearing a suit or a nice watch or a nice set of shoes. No one wants to admit that it makes a difference, because it *shouldn't*. But the world isn't fair, and it does make a difference. Most people are actually that superficial, even if they don't know it...
Re:Mixed feeling
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Please shut your mouth if you don't know what you're talking about.
The cost is not directly subsidised by any tax dollars, sorry. No, just because we have socialized health care does not mean drugs do not have a price, it's just that most of that price is paid by the government for us. The drugs are still cheaper. There are several reasons why, and I've seen some of them discussed in this thread already.
But government subsidy simply is not one of the reasons.
Just because they're a bunch of pissed off kids who are annoyed about Steam just like you are, does that somehow invalidate their complaints or even their feelings?
Interesting side note to ponder: The ranting kids got their message up on Slashdot, while your complaint to Valve was probably just dumped in the trash. Shouting and whining can sometimes actually get things changed. But I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Lawyers generally make very fine people, at least all the ones I've ever met in a professional or non-professional sense. It's the people who hire them who are likely to be shitty people. It normally takes at least one shitty person for a matter to end up in court, so you're likely to have at least a 50% shitty person rate right off the bat.
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. You're not supposed to be getting an education for a career anymore. You have a career. "Med school" is a career. "Law school" is a career.
The point of continuing education is not replace your IT knowledge, it's to supplement it. You should be looking for things that can specialize you as an IT person somehow. The more unique a skill set, the higher the pay will be, it's simply supply and demand.
IT is a harder field to supplement than most, but some things to consider include computer science, languages, aerospace engineering, civil engineering, eletrical engineering, accounting, education, business administration, basically anything that will make you a more attractive candidate. No, I know, you can get all the degrees you want and employers will never be banging on your door trying to hire you. Only a lot of experience and a sterling reputation will get you that, and even then it's somewhat exaggurated. But all it takes is for one employer to come along and decide that you'll do. It might be something as simple as a job running a small network for an international non-profit organization that requires you to know such-and-such language, or it could be that a fledgling company that's going to end up being the next Yahoo or eBay wants to bring you onboard as their CTO. You just never know. Education opens doors, and it's as simple as that.
Well, first you need to get onto the premises with a truckload of explosives. Good luck. Then, you need to get through the containment buildings made out of 3-foot thick concrete. Then there is a large air gap inside, mostly full of cooling system components. After you get through that, you need to get through the reactor shielding, at least 6 inches or more of solid lead. Inside that is the core, which is a collection of metal-sheathed fuel rods immersed in water and probably in excess of 2500 degrees. I have no idea what you plan on doing to that with mere explosives, but it probably won't accomplish what you want. The nuclear reaction will break down the second the fuel rods are seperated from one another. And the fuel rods themselves are not the really dangerous part as far as irradiation of a wide area is concerned.
The dangerous stuff is what can get caught up in wind currents and dispersed and deposited elsewhere. Particularly dangerous is radioactive iodine, which gets absorbed by humans and concentrated into your thyroid glands. A fuel rod isn't going to irradiate the air or the countryside, it will simply land somewhere and irradiate that spot a lot. To generate lots of the airborne radioactive iodine that is the stuff that really kills people, you need a working reactor, outgassing like Chernobyl was!
Also, nuclear reactors don't explode like nuclear bombs. Nuclear bombs are extremely complicated devices, and while I don't know the specifics (for obvious reasons) I am sure that creating one is not nearly as simple as "Take lots of radioactive stuff and put it all together and it'll explode!" There is a reason they require 'weapons-grade' uranium and plutonium, which is not present in any realistic quantity in a commercial nuclear powerplant. Nuclear reactors will just meltdown, which is not an explosion, it is as the name implies simply melting into a pool of molten hot radioactive metal which cannot be handled by humans anymore. We just cover it up with concrete like we did at Chernobyl and leave it there until it runs out of radioactive fuel.
Try defending yourself against an assault charge by saying "your Honor, I did push him on the ground and kick his ribs, but I was being careful not to kick him hard enough to injure him, so it's not an assault."
Assuming the guy wasn't injured, you could probably pull that off. There's no injury, there's no intent to injure, what part of this is a crime? Touching someone without their permission is not (yet) illegal as far as I know.
I hate cellphones too, and do not own one. I hate the phones, I hate the pricing, I hate the services, I hate the companies involved.... however, curious little devices like the Nokia 6820 are starting to woo me towards the dark side. As data fees continue to decrease, Mobile Internet is starting to become attractive.
Converting heat to electricity is kinda impossible given the current laws of thermodynamics
What the hell are you talking about? Do you even know what the laws of thermodynamics are? I guarantee they have nothing to do with converting heat to electricity. It's not particularly easy to convert heat to electricity, especially not directly, but it's far from impossible. In fact, that's where more than 95% of our electricity comes from in one way or another.
There are plenty of ways to convert heat to electricity. Your thermostat probably has one. It's called a thermocouple, and is used in almost all modern temperature sensors. It's two different types of metal (often zinc and copper) joined together. When heated, one wants to expand at a different rate from the other, but it can't because it is attached to the other, and electricity is generated instead.
Indirectly there are even more ways. The Stirling Engine is a fairly obvious one. Less obvious are the main types of power plant we use to generate base load power around the world:
Nuclear: Cooling water runs past the core, gets heated to ridiculous temperatures, expands into steam and drives turbines in the process.
Coal, Natural gas, Oil, Wood: Fuel burns to boil water which expands into steam to drive turbines
Solar (powerplant, not photovoltaic cells): Sunlight is focused by mirrors to boil water which expands into steam to drive turbines.
Amazing how rudimentary our power systems are when you think about it, but yes, the majority of our power comes from the simple process of converting heat to kinetic energy via an expanding gas, which then is converted to rotational energy by a turbine, and finally into electricity using those quaint little nearly 100% efficient bundles of copper we call a generator.
Admittedly, none of these scale down particularly well, and none of them work well or at all when presented with a diffuse, low temperature source of heat instead of a direct, high temperature source. But to claim it's impossible is just plain ludicrous.
It might happen in the movies for mp3 players too, but gasoline doesn't shock combust. None of the consumer grade fuels do. At least, not for any reasonable definition of 'shock'. Nor is it particularly likely that the extremely low internal voltage in the device will short circuit catastrophically and arc substantially enough to ignite the somehow-ruptured fuel canister.
Basically, when was the last time you saw a dropped lighter explode? And they have a much flimsier construction than electronic devices running microgenerators probably will.
It's kinda unavoidable if you want to have games that are current in regards to technology
No, it really isn't. This is what shows that game development is a very immature industry at the moment. There is no reason a game should have to be so tightly laced to the graphics engine, or to the sound system, or the physics engine, or the network implementation, that you cannot upgrade those components to a newer component with relative ease, if not plug-and-play ease. The problem is that such things are not compartmentalized properly. Even the ones you get from third parties are expected to modifiable so you can start tying game specific code in there. That's really unneccesary, and is reminscent of the reason software development in general moved from procedural programming to object oriented programming to virtual machines and ever onwards.
I'm not saying that it's easy, cheaper, or will create better games, I'm just saying there are ways of building a program so you don't have such an intense schedule. Game developers will discover that eventually, assuming something happens to make them care.
The moral vegetarians/vegans are the ones you're referring to. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the way they're approaching the problem: Remember, cows eat grain too. Much more of it than we do in fact. But that's not the only reason people become vegans or vegetarians. There are environmental reasons and there are health reasons too.
The environmentals claim that producing enough meat to feed a human takes at least 10 times as much arable land (for the grain to feed the animals), takes much more water, and creates much more waste, than it would to simply cut out the middle-man and eat the grain directly. If everyone suddenly turned vegetarian, we'd have a huge surplus of grain left over. Some of the farms would probably go out of business (sorry, environmentalists don't let businesses get in their way) and return their fields to fallow, giving some precious habitat back to the wildlife.
The health people have some legitimate and some imagined concerns. For certain, factory farms and even family farms are pumping more and more antibiotics, chemicals, drugs, and hormones into the animals, often without any regard for whether they actually need it, it's just standard procedure. I can't say whether this is in fact a health risk or not, but it makes me uneasy personally, and it's one of the main reasons I like to eat vegetarian dishes when I can. At least the pesticides are supposed to wash off...
"I haven't seen Evil Dead 2... yet" is from the movie High Fidelity. It's from a scene in which Rob is trying to figure out whether the addition of the word "yet" implies that you're planning to or not.
Ok, and what's wrong with that? What's wrong with wanting to avoid eating food that's close to humanity in any way, especially in its level of intelligence? I could say you're drawing an arbitrary line too by deciding that you don't want to eat dogs or cats or even other humans for that matter, and you only want to eat the less intelligent animals and plants. That's not an arbitrary line, though, and neither is the line between things with brains and things without.
Regardless, it is about minimizing your impact. Before we began breeding animals for our food, the impact was largely regulated by nature. Now that we're advanced enough to farm our own plants and animals, we as a society need to start taking the responsibility that comes with that, and choose a compromise between how much we need, and how much we impact the environment as a result.
Disclaimer: I am not a vegan, but I understand why someone would want to be. But it doesn't have to be all or nothing, in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with simply reducing your reliance on animal products.
The more countries work together, the more will be achieved.
You're assuming that all countries will keep their space agencies' funding at past levels. In practice, this does not happen. Every country expects the rest to be able to shoulder some of their burden for them without noticing. Everyone cuts back, and you end up with a completely anemic worldwide space program.
So in practice it is more like outsourcing than it is like collaboration.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I wonder if Palm really secretly enjoys screwing their products up and going the complete wrong direction with them.
The answer to your question has two parts:
This is games.slashdot.org.
EA is the only game company. Any supposed "other" game companies are either worthless, or EA just hasn't gotten around to acquiring them yet.
In Canada we have a "Good samaritan" law, such that you can be held liable for inaction, if a court finds that you had a reasonable chance of being able to help someone in need, without putting yourself in danger, and you didn't. It has been used fairly infrequently, but it does exist.
For example, if you see a car accident on the side of the road, and no one else has stopped yet, you are obligated to stop and see if you can provide any assistance.
Similar situation here. We (me and my co-conspirator) just set up a Linux server at home, ran Bugzilla on it, started using it from work. Got other people onboard. Started linking it into programs for bug reporting. It became indispensible.
Then someone asked IT why it was so slow to load pages. We explained the situation to them, and it was decided we'd have to move it in-house. After several failed attempts to get it running on Windows... well, suffice it to say we now have a friendly little Linux box sitting on the network.
Do you understand what "for us" means? To clairify my point (I was unclear, and I apologise for that)
The drug companies are not directly subsidized. This would result in free (or cheap) drugs for everyone, including internet pharmacies. This is what people are suggesting happens. This is not the case.
Instead, the drug companies develop the drugs on their own, set a price (probably overpriced), and then, when a Canadian is perscribed that drug by a doctor, the government's health insurance will pay the full asking price set by the drug manufacturer.
Perhaps these are both subsidies, but the latter is not the kind of subsidy that was being suggested in the post I replied to.
I agree. Having cheap furniture in your boardroom may be a tactic used by some of the lean and mean companies, but you can certainly have an extremely profitable business even if you do have a "colossal waste of money" for a boardroom -- almost every mid-sized or larger company has a richly outfitted boardroom, because unfortunately it does make a difference in the kind of clients you can attract when you're using that room for demos or consultations or whatever.
Just like wearing a suit or a nice watch or a nice set of shoes. No one wants to admit that it makes a difference, because it *shouldn't*. But the world isn't fair, and it does make a difference. Most people are actually that superficial, even if they don't know it...
Please shut your mouth if you don't know what you're talking about.
The cost is not directly subsidised by any tax dollars, sorry. No, just because we have socialized health care does not mean drugs do not have a price, it's just that most of that price is paid by the government for us. The drugs are still cheaper. There are several reasons why, and I've seen some of them discussed in this thread already.
But government subsidy simply is not one of the reasons.
Just because they're a bunch of pissed off kids who are annoyed about Steam just like you are, does that somehow invalidate their complaints or even their feelings?
Interesting side note to ponder: The ranting kids got their message up on Slashdot, while your complaint to Valve was probably just dumped in the trash. Shouting and whining can sometimes actually get things changed. But I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Lawyers generally make very fine people, at least all the ones I've ever met in a professional or non-professional sense. It's the people who hire them who are likely to be shitty people. It normally takes at least one shitty person for a matter to end up in court, so you're likely to have at least a 50% shitty person rate right off the bat.
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. You're not supposed to be getting an education for a career anymore. You have a career. "Med school" is a career. "Law school" is a career.
The point of continuing education is not replace your IT knowledge, it's to supplement it. You should be looking for things that can specialize you as an IT person somehow. The more unique a skill set, the higher the pay will be, it's simply supply and demand.
IT is a harder field to supplement than most, but some things to consider include computer science, languages, aerospace engineering, civil engineering, eletrical engineering, accounting, education, business administration, basically anything that will make you a more attractive candidate. No, I know, you can get all the degrees you want and employers will never be banging on your door trying to hire you. Only a lot of experience and a sterling reputation will get you that, and even then it's somewhat exaggurated. But all it takes is for one employer to come along and decide that you'll do. It might be something as simple as a job running a small network for an international non-profit organization that requires you to know such-and-such language, or it could be that a fledgling company that's going to end up being the next Yahoo or eBay wants to bring you onboard as their CTO. You just never know. Education opens doors, and it's as simple as that.
I second this. Steam's concept isn't revolutionary, and it's very poorly implemented to boot Get over it.
Well, first you need to get onto the premises with a truckload of explosives. Good luck. Then, you need to get through the containment buildings made out of 3-foot thick concrete. Then there is a large air gap inside, mostly full of cooling system components. After you get through that, you need to get through the reactor shielding, at least 6 inches or more of solid lead. Inside that is the core, which is a collection of metal-sheathed fuel rods immersed in water and probably in excess of 2500 degrees. I have no idea what you plan on doing to that with mere explosives, but it probably won't accomplish what you want. The nuclear reaction will break down the second the fuel rods are seperated from one another. And the fuel rods themselves are not the really dangerous part as far as irradiation of a wide area is concerned.
The dangerous stuff is what can get caught up in wind currents and dispersed and deposited elsewhere. Particularly dangerous is radioactive iodine, which gets absorbed by humans and concentrated into your thyroid glands. A fuel rod isn't going to irradiate the air or the countryside, it will simply land somewhere and irradiate that spot a lot. To generate lots of the airborne radioactive iodine that is the stuff that really kills people, you need a working reactor, outgassing like Chernobyl was!
Also, nuclear reactors don't explode like nuclear bombs. Nuclear bombs are extremely complicated devices, and while I don't know the specifics (for obvious reasons) I am sure that creating one is not nearly as simple as "Take lots of radioactive stuff and put it all together and it'll explode!" There is a reason they require 'weapons-grade' uranium and plutonium, which is not present in any realistic quantity in a commercial nuclear powerplant. Nuclear reactors will just meltdown, which is not an explosion, it is as the name implies simply melting into a pool of molten hot radioactive metal which cannot be handled by humans anymore. We just cover it up with concrete like we did at Chernobyl and leave it there until it runs out of radioactive fuel.
Try defending yourself against an assault charge by saying "your Honor, I did push him on the ground and kick his ribs, but I was being careful not to kick him hard enough to injure him, so it's not an assault."
Assuming the guy wasn't injured, you could probably pull that off. There's no injury, there's no intent to injure, what part of this is a crime? Touching someone without their permission is not (yet) illegal as far as I know.
I hate cellphones too, and do not own one. I hate the phones, I hate the pricing, I hate the services, I hate the companies involved. ... however, curious little devices like the Nokia 6820 are starting to woo me towards the dark side. As data fees continue to decrease, Mobile Internet is starting to become attractive.
Bastards!
Converting heat to electricity is kinda impossible given the current laws of thermodynamics
What the hell are you talking about? Do you even know what the laws of thermodynamics are? I guarantee they have nothing to do with converting heat to electricity. It's not particularly easy to convert heat to electricity, especially not directly, but it's far from impossible. In fact, that's where more than 95% of our electricity comes from in one way or another.
There are plenty of ways to convert heat to electricity. Your thermostat probably has one. It's called a thermocouple, and is used in almost all modern temperature sensors. It's two different types of metal (often zinc and copper) joined together. When heated, one wants to expand at a different rate from the other, but it can't because it is attached to the other, and electricity is generated instead.
Indirectly there are even more ways. The Stirling Engine is a fairly obvious one. Less obvious are the main types of power plant we use to generate base load power around the world:
Nuclear: Cooling water runs past the core, gets heated to ridiculous temperatures, expands into steam and drives turbines in the process.
Coal, Natural gas, Oil, Wood: Fuel burns to boil water which expands into steam to drive turbines
Solar (powerplant, not photovoltaic cells): Sunlight is focused by mirrors to boil water which expands into steam to drive turbines.
Amazing how rudimentary our power systems are when you think about it, but yes, the majority of our power comes from the simple process of converting heat to kinetic energy via an expanding gas, which then is converted to rotational energy by a turbine, and finally into electricity using those quaint little nearly 100% efficient bundles of copper we call a generator.
Admittedly, none of these scale down particularly well, and none of them work well or at all when presented with a diffuse, low temperature source of heat instead of a direct, high temperature source. But to claim it's impossible is just plain ludicrous.
It might happen in the movies for mp3 players too, but gasoline doesn't shock combust. None of the consumer grade fuels do. At least, not for any reasonable definition of 'shock'. Nor is it particularly likely that the extremely low internal voltage in the device will short circuit catastrophically and arc substantially enough to ignite the somehow-ruptured fuel canister.
Basically, when was the last time you saw a dropped lighter explode? And they have a much flimsier construction than electronic devices running microgenerators probably will.
It's kinda unavoidable if you want to have games that are current in regards to technology
No, it really isn't. This is what shows that game development is a very immature industry at the moment. There is no reason a game should have to be so tightly laced to the graphics engine, or to the sound system, or the physics engine, or the network implementation, that you cannot upgrade those components to a newer component with relative ease, if not plug-and-play ease. The problem is that such things are not compartmentalized properly. Even the ones you get from third parties are expected to modifiable so you can start tying game specific code in there. That's really unneccesary, and is reminscent of the reason software development in general moved from procedural programming to object oriented programming to virtual machines and ever onwards.
I'm not saying that it's easy, cheaper, or will create better games, I'm just saying there are ways of building a program so you don't have such an intense schedule. Game developers will discover that eventually, assuming something happens to make them care.
That's why man invented the phrase "Can I have that in writing?"
Er, no. 1 lightsecond = 299,792,458 meters.
The moral vegetarians/vegans are the ones you're referring to. And I don't think there's anything wrong with the way they're approaching the problem: Remember, cows eat grain too. Much more of it than we do in fact. But that's not the only reason people become vegans or vegetarians. There are environmental reasons and there are health reasons too.
The environmentals claim that producing enough meat to feed a human takes at least 10 times as much arable land (for the grain to feed the animals), takes much more water, and creates much more waste, than it would to simply cut out the middle-man and eat the grain directly. If everyone suddenly turned vegetarian, we'd have a huge surplus of grain left over. Some of the farms would probably go out of business (sorry, environmentalists don't let businesses get in their way) and return their fields to fallow, giving some precious habitat back to the wildlife.
The health people have some legitimate and some imagined concerns. For certain, factory farms and even family farms are pumping more and more antibiotics, chemicals, drugs, and hormones into the animals, often without any regard for whether they actually need it, it's just standard procedure. I can't say whether this is in fact a health risk or not, but it makes me uneasy personally, and it's one of the main reasons I like to eat vegetarian dishes when I can. At least the pesticides are supposed to wash off...
"I haven't seen Evil Dead 2... yet" is from the movie High Fidelity. It's from a scene in which Rob is trying to figure out whether the addition of the word "yet" implies that you're planning to or not.
Ok, and what's wrong with that? What's wrong with wanting to avoid eating food that's close to humanity in any way, especially in its level of intelligence? I could say you're drawing an arbitrary line too by deciding that you don't want to eat dogs or cats or even other humans for that matter, and you only want to eat the less intelligent animals and plants. That's not an arbitrary line, though, and neither is the line between things with brains and things without.
Regardless, it is about minimizing your impact. Before we began breeding animals for our food, the impact was largely regulated by nature. Now that we're advanced enough to farm our own plants and animals, we as a society need to start taking the responsibility that comes with that, and choose a compromise between how much we need, and how much we impact the environment as a result.
Disclaimer: I am not a vegan, but I understand why someone would want to be. But it doesn't have to be all or nothing, in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with simply reducing your reliance on animal products.
The more countries work together, the more will be achieved.
You're assuming that all countries will keep their space agencies' funding at past levels. In practice, this does not happen. Every country expects the rest to be able to shoulder some of their burden for them without noticing. Everyone cuts back, and you end up with a completely anemic worldwide space program.
So in practice it is more like outsourcing than it is like collaboration.
The guy is complaining loudly. As the subject says, what's the problem?
If it's tampered with, a call center is notified.
I guess the pirates have nothing to be afraid of then. Nothing useful ever came out of talking to a call center.