Why is it that the scientists can detect an ozone hole, provide a fix, show that the fix solved the problem, and then be LOUDLY IGNORED by the liars in congress.
Oh. The CFL manufacturers had less money than the oil people. Sorry. I forgot...
It's the only way. When we had it, politics was more civil and more responsive. Since it's been gone, there's nothing but a greed-fest in public discourse. Who cares if it's a lie if you get ratings? With the Fairness Doctrine in place, the liar gets an immediate shellacking.
DO NOT TRUST THE CHINESE! (But eat their food, wear their clothes, use their electronics) DO NOT TRUST THE USA! (But obey their laws, enjoy their movies, work for their money) DO NOT TRUST THE IRANIANS (But ignore their democratic progress and ignore their people's work for peace)
Here's the real answer: DO NOT TRUST YOURSELF, because you're an idiot.
Distrust is for the weak. Optimistic skepticism and honest effort are for the strong.
I send you a heaping spoonful of good luck. You're the only person that actually looked into what was going on and reported on it. You also changed my view of the situation with facts not rants.
If people weren't so hell bent on not paying taxes we wouldn't have this problem. I hear people say "I don't have kids, why should I pay for school tax"
Guess what? You went to a school? You PAY for a school! Otherwise, go live in a third world country.
Did you know that in California it takes a 2/3rds majority to raise taxes but only a 51/49 vote to spend more money??? Now we're having massive teacher and police layoffs because republican assholes and cheating democrats aren't willing to man up and pay their dues.
I love paying taxes. I use them to buy civilization.
Stephenson actually sucks. There. I've said it.
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
Tonnes of respect for what he's done, but his stories aren't really that great at all. Even Snowcrash which I did enjoy always felt like a pooly told story to me. It had great moments but for the most part was just too unrealistically gratuitous.
What people should really read is Vernor Vinge. Everything by him is excellent. Strong concepts, believable characters, Crisply written.
I like iTunes specifically because it doesn't waste my time with themes and skins and color choices. How cares what your music player looks like? How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
I'll grant that some competition might drive additional features into iTunes, but please please please can we stop acting like altering the UI of a program does anything even remotely useful?
Competition is good and all, but this is just annoying. It only exists to muddy the waters.
I'm just waiting for MS to announce that they will no longer speak english, but will communicate only in Anglush-Sharp. A language in which every noun is copyrighted by Microsoft and only MS approved verbs will generate an intelligible response.
You guys have hit the nail on the head. I don't care about opinions. I want a list of solid facts. As such, I'd like a service that takes any web based news article and splits it into a list of sentences. People can then add True/False/Opinion to each line along with references showing the truthiness or falshoodity of each line.
Once that is done, I can just set my threshold to ignore opinion and only accept items that have not been overwhelmingly marked false.
The biggest problem in America today is that people present opinions as if they were facts and repeat them ad nausium until they are believed. It has got to stop.
Want to sign up to help me build a service like that? Send me a message and we'll build an open source, citation-required, zero-opinion news system.
GWT has been absolutely fantastic for me. My project is basically a kiosk with a specific functionality built in. This is nice because I didn't have to worry about integrating with any legacy UI.
I'll tell you this tho: I'm never writing JavaScript again.
Obama was smart to vote for this, even though he opposed it!
1) It would have passed anyway without his vote 2) McCain abstained, so Obama can hammer him as being 'weak' on terrorism and bring more Republicans away from the McCain camp.
It's just like any other tactical game. If you give away something that doesn't matter (a vote on a lost cause) to gain something valuable (a weapon against your opponent) then you're playing a smart game.
Because you can be damn sure that if they pass this law people will finally make sure to heavily encrypt what they say on the internet.
Then again, it's almost certain that they're already reading all the e-mail. This law is probably just to prevent them from getting sued about it later. Ug
Re:They did not go up in price, the dollar went do
on
$60 Games Are Here To Stay
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Are You F**KING NUTS?
The dot com bubble happened because of INFLATION? The dot com bubble made Many Many Many people wealthy, and kept the economy going for quite a few years. Then the charlatans became too common and the economy corrected. Inflation had ZERO to do with it. Over eager investment in stupid ideas is why the bubble burst.
House is the exact same thing. Stupid investors bought bad investments because they thought they could. Good for the sellers. Good for for me who fixed up and flipped two houses and then got the hell out of the market. For a while the cheap money helped a lot of people. Then people got stupid and it had to stop. That has absolutely nothing to do with inflation. That has to do with human nature and emotional purchasing.
A boom/bust cycle is NORMAL and HEALTHY. Every thing in the world is cyclical. If you have no cycle, you have no growth period and no correction period. If there is no cycle, the economy becomes stagnant and unless you already have money there is no way to earn good money. Sitting on my cash in the hopes that deflation will cause its value to grow slowly is a great plan to avoid risk and an even better plan to avoid reward.
In a cyclic economy the bulls make money, the bears can make money and the pigs get slaughtered. In a flat non-boom/bust economy only the pigs who already have money can make money and anyone who wants to make money either through working hard or through buying smart has no opportunity to do either.
Don't be a dogma-quoter. Use your brain about what caused something to happen.
Which is the most successful: Zune, Vista or the 360? Even the latest Office software got lukewarm reviews.
I've played with dev kits for the 360 and they're really a dream to use. (No I don't work for MS or any affiliated company) All the developers I spoke to wanted to work on a 360 more than anything else because they did a great job of making the system easy to develop games on. (in fairness, I haven't gotten to see a Wii dev kit, but I heard nothing but complaints from the people using PS/3 kits)
Some one else said that MS gave things until the 3rd generation. That would imply all the rest of this gen and a whole additional gen before MS pulls any plugs. Besides, against the Wii the 360 has fabulous staying power. By the time the next gen comes around they'll be able to make a 360 for $3.60.
Plus, Sony will be bankrupt by then. Sure the Wii is doing better than expected, but the whole goal of the 360 was to get the PS/2&3 out of their way. It has succeeded.
The way Sony bet their entire company on the PS/3 just to watch the consoles sit in stacks beside the "Wii Sold Out" signs mean the imminent bankruptcy of Sony as a company. Pity all the Japanese that have the retirement funds wrapped up in Sony investments because that company is going to die. In fact, I will posit that if the PS/3 doesn't pull itself together this Christmas, Sony will implode to a tiny shell of its former self by the following Christmas. They've invested too much into the product for basically no return. It makes the 360 look like a gold mine in comparison.
So we'll have Wii60 for most of ten years. Sony will be out of the market. Some other pointless companies will make another try and fail. In the end it will be Nintendo, MS on Console and MS on PC.
I'm not employed by any game company. If I had any financial motivation it would be toward MS winning since I can code games on their console using their open dev tools.
That said, the Wii kicks and continues to kick everyone else's ass. Last night after playing so much golden axe and boxing that I couldn't stand it any more I decided "Hey I want to see some better graphics" I loaded up my 360, looked at the games I had available and none of them sounded all that appealing. I tried "Small Arms" and it just didn't look so amazing that it was more fun to play. Same with PocketBike. Considered loading up Dead Rising but didn't want to invest the time. Nothing else grabbed me so I went right back to the Wii for a few more rounds of tennis and went to bed.
Like it or Hate it, the Wii has more staying power than any of the other consoles, graphics or not. You can say that Nintendo stock is over priced if you want, but people said that about google for ages and then their stock price rose anyway.
People are fundamentally fed up with products that don't work / don't do what they claim / are so over-hyped that I have to tune them out just to think. The people of the world want simple services that actually and reliably work. Google and Nintendo are delivering that and so the market is rewarding them and will continue to do so for quite some time. I'm betting that I'll have a lot more fun playing Smash Brothers with my friends than playing Halo with whiny ass, vomit talking, on-line clans.
I love my 360. And someday I'll buy a (lower cost) PS3 just for the eye candy. But when I want to play a game, I keep on going back to the Wii even after having it for quite a while.
A) See wildly unconstitutional bill, supported by a zealous minority. B) Realize that if you vote for it the zealots will vote for you and if not they'll bully you in the media. C) Realize that the bill will be immediately overturned by the judiciary, who are not under the same vote pressure. D) Pass the bill, reap the rewards, trust the judges to do their jobs and shut down the bill.
Lame, cheap and easy. All it costs is voter money and wasted time, but tax money is free so who cares!
This is why we call it politics instead of governance.
so my name is in my file. I don't even care if my name is impossibly well hidden in the file such that when my wife gets a copy she has my name in it. I would happily trade being able to play my music on whatever device I want and also take some responsibility for it not getting all over the internet over the current hassle-fest of today.
To me, it's no different than the VIN number on a car. You take that VIN number and it will tell you everyone that's ever owned the car. If they've got a same/similar thing for the music file, great.
To me, watermarking is the only solution fair to content owners and users, and NO I don't work for anyone involved with any of this.
I had a macbook but it was too damn slow, so I bought a 64 bit, 17inch monster laptop. It had everything, it could play games, have two documents open side by side, it was a beast. I had owned that macbook for almost three years before I gave up on it and bought the PC laptop.
I handed that PC laptop to the trash bin after only 12 months. I couldn't hot swap the battery. I couldn't tell how full the battery was until the stupid thing had booted. It's case was plastic and broke. It got stuffed with stupid software that I couldn't uninstall. I put Suse Linux on it, but it's a cutting edge funky laptop so nothing worked. I went back to windows with a fresh install but the CD ROM drive was loose and unless I held it in its bay the speakers would spew static. Finally it just gave up and the mousepad wouldn't work any more.
During this time I had given my old macbook to my stay-at-home wife and mother of my three year old. The three year old threw it while the plug was in an horribly bent the chassis. But it still worked. My wife is nursing the baby and it turns out that human breasts can spray that milk quite a distance. My macbook had breast milk spattered all over it and in every crevice. It still worked! The three year old stuffed something into the DVD drive to prevent us getting the disk out. After we finally got the disk extracted, everything continued to work. The laptop is over five years old and has literally been around the work with me. It still works fine.
Needless to say, I just bought my second MacBook. With 2GB of ram and 2.1Ghz standard the performance has been excellent.
Bottom Line: PC Hardware sucks because no one is in control of it. (Even Dell and Sony can't get it right) Apple has the best hardware for their computers, the best hardware for their music players and I suspect will have the best hardware for their phones. OS X even bugs me a bit, but the fact is that their product is better than the PC products. Vista will be years before it stops sucking. XP on the MacBook might be viable, but realistically, everything I care about runs on both platforms.
It's not about being in the elite. It's not about catchy adds (tho they are funny and true). It's not about corporate personality or hype or history or market 'statistics' (lies, damn lies, statistics, etc). It's about finding and using the best tool available for doing my job.
Who in their right mind would enter a real war scenariou after playing a few rounds of counter-strike? I used to be very good, top of the server for ten games streaks. Almost never did I survive every single round. If I can't survive after extensive in-game training with nerfed weapons what makes me think I'd survive a real war where people are really honest trying to make my life stop.
GTA is a tonne of fun, but how much would I pay it if every wrecked car involved watching my character sit in the hospital for two weeks? Only a moron doesn't make that connection.
Killing thousands of zombies in Dead Rising doesn't make me think, 'hey killing people is easy' except to the extent that I think 'hey, if it's this easy for me to kill somebody, then it's that easy for someone to kill me. Shit.'
Personally I'd like violent games to come with the insane warning stickers you see on appliances:
WARNING: If you try this in Real Life you will LOSE LIMBS, ENTER A VEGATIVE STATE or DIE PAINFULLLY. WARNING: Save game technology DOES NOT EXIST in Real LIfe WARNING: Acceptable in-game behavior may result in getting A KNEE SLAMMED INTO YOUR CROTCH in Real Life
Slashdot Mirror
I am not associated with them, nor employed by them. But I've used them for many projects now and been generally happy with the result.
My user name included! And my slashdot user number is 4074!
Why is it that the scientists can detect an ozone hole, provide a fix, show that the fix solved the problem, and then be LOUDLY IGNORED by the liars in congress.
Oh. The CFL manufacturers had less money than the oil people. Sorry. I forgot...
It's the only way. When we had it, politics was more civil and more responsive. Since it's been gone, there's nothing but a greed-fest in public discourse. Who cares if it's a lie if you get ratings? With the Fairness Doctrine in place, the liar gets an immediate shellacking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine
Right day. Wrong evil AI. Come on people!!!
TRUST NO ONE!
DO NOT TRUST THE CHINESE! (But eat their food, wear their clothes, use their electronics)
DO NOT TRUST THE USA! (But obey their laws, enjoy their movies, work for their money)
DO NOT TRUST THE IRANIANS (But ignore their democratic progress and ignore their people's work for peace)
Here's the real answer:
DO NOT TRUST YOURSELF, because you're an idiot.
Distrust is for the weak. Optimistic skepticism and honest effort are for the strong.
I send you a heaping spoonful of good luck. You're the only person that actually looked into what was going on and reported on it. You also changed my view of the situation with facts not rants.
More power to you.
If people weren't so hell bent on not paying taxes we wouldn't have this problem. I hear people say "I don't have kids, why should I pay for school tax"
Guess what? You went to a school? You PAY for a school! Otherwise, go live in a third world country.
Did you know that in California it takes a 2/3rds majority to raise taxes but only a 51/49 vote to spend more money??? Now we're having massive teacher and police layoffs because republican assholes and cheating democrats aren't willing to man up and pay their dues.
I love paying taxes.
I use them to buy civilization.
Tonnes of respect for what he's done, but his stories aren't really that great at all. Even Snowcrash which I did enjoy always felt like a pooly told story to me. It had great moments but for the most part was just too unrealistically gratuitous.
What people should really read is Vernor Vinge. Everything by him is excellent. Strong concepts, believable characters, Crisply written.
Yes, yes. Blow people up, Nuke millions, fist-fights, shootings, betrayal, lies: all good fun.
But the implication that adults actually enjoy sex more than they enjoy killing each other: BLASPHEMY!
When it comes to sex Americans are sick and stupid.
Murder=good / Sex=bad: OMGWTFBBQ???
I like iTunes specifically because it doesn't waste my time with themes and skins and color choices. How cares what your music player looks like? How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
I'll grant that some competition might drive additional features into iTunes, but please please please can we stop acting like altering the UI of a program does anything even remotely useful?
Competition is good and all, but this is just annoying. It only exists to muddy the waters.
I'm just waiting for MS to announce that they will no longer speak english, but will communicate only in Anglush-Sharp. A language in which every noun is copyrighted by Microsoft and only MS approved verbs will generate an intelligible response.
You guys have hit the nail on the head. I don't care about opinions. I want a list of solid facts. As such, I'd like a service that takes any web based news article and splits it into a list of sentences. People can then add True/False/Opinion to each line along with references showing the truthiness or falshoodity of each line.
Once that is done, I can just set my threshold to ignore opinion and only accept items that have not been overwhelmingly marked false.
The biggest problem in America today is that people present opinions as if they were facts and repeat them ad nausium until they are believed. It has got to stop.
Want to sign up to help me build a service like that? Send me a message and we'll build an open source, citation-required, zero-opinion news system.
Of course it's insanely complicated to use. If everyone can do it easily you don't need to hire and IBM/M$ consultant to help you with it.
They don't care about you getting your work done, they care about making money.
GWT has been absolutely fantastic for me. My project is basically a kiosk with a specific functionality built in. This is nice because I didn't have to worry about integrating with any legacy UI.
I'll tell you this tho: I'm never writing JavaScript again.
Obama was smart to vote for this, even though he opposed it!
1) It would have passed anyway without his vote
2) McCain abstained, so Obama can hammer him as being 'weak' on terrorism and bring more Republicans away from the McCain camp.
It's just like any other tactical game. If you give away something that doesn't matter (a vote on a lost cause) to gain something valuable (a weapon against your opponent) then you're playing a smart game.
hell
yes
(BTW: They lie. They will NOT be more horny after marriage.)
Because you can be damn sure that if they pass this law people will finally make sure to heavily encrypt what they say on the internet.
Then again, it's almost certain that they're already reading all the e-mail. This law is probably just to prevent them from getting sued about it later. Ug
Are You F**KING NUTS?
The dot com bubble happened because of INFLATION? The dot com bubble made Many Many Many people wealthy, and kept the economy going for quite a few years. Then the charlatans became too common and the economy corrected. Inflation had ZERO to do with it. Over eager investment in stupid ideas is why the bubble burst.
House is the exact same thing. Stupid investors bought bad investments because they thought they could. Good for the sellers. Good for for me who fixed up and flipped two houses and then got the hell out of the market. For a while the cheap money helped a lot of people. Then people got stupid and it had to stop. That has absolutely nothing to do with inflation. That has to do with human nature and emotional purchasing.
A boom/bust cycle is NORMAL and HEALTHY. Every thing in the world is cyclical. If you have no cycle, you have no growth period and no correction period. If there is no cycle, the economy becomes stagnant and unless you already have money there is no way to earn good money. Sitting on my cash in the hopes that deflation will cause its value to grow slowly is a great plan to avoid risk and an even better plan to avoid reward.
In a cyclic economy the bulls make money, the bears can make money and the pigs get slaughtered.
In a flat non-boom/bust economy only the pigs who already have money can make money and anyone who wants to make money either through working hard or through buying smart has no opportunity to do either.
Don't be a dogma-quoter. Use your brain about what caused something to happen.
Which is the most successful: Zune, Vista or the 360? Even the latest Office software got lukewarm reviews.
I've played with dev kits for the 360 and they're really a dream to use. (No I don't work for MS or any affiliated company) All the developers I spoke to wanted to work on a 360 more than anything else because they did a great job of making the system easy to develop games on. (in fairness, I haven't gotten to see a Wii dev kit, but I heard nothing but complaints from the people using PS/3 kits)
Some one else said that MS gave things until the 3rd generation. That would imply all the rest of this gen and a whole additional gen before MS pulls any plugs. Besides, against the Wii the 360 has fabulous staying power. By the time the next gen comes around they'll be able to make a 360 for $3.60.
Plus, Sony will be bankrupt by then. Sure the Wii is doing better than expected, but the whole goal of the 360 was to get the PS/2&3 out of their way. It has succeeded.
The way Sony bet their entire company on the PS/3 just to watch the consoles sit in stacks beside the "Wii Sold Out" signs mean the imminent bankruptcy of Sony as a company. Pity all the Japanese that have the retirement funds wrapped up in Sony investments because that company is going to die. In fact, I will posit that if the PS/3 doesn't pull itself together this Christmas, Sony will implode to a tiny shell of its former self by the following Christmas. They've invested too much into the product for basically no return. It makes the 360 look like a gold mine in comparison.
So we'll have Wii60 for most of ten years. Sony will be out of the market. Some other pointless companies will make another try and fail. In the end it will be Nintendo, MS on Console and MS on PC.
I'm not employed by any game company. If I had any financial motivation it would be toward MS winning since I can code games on their console using their open dev tools.
That said, the Wii kicks and continues to kick everyone else's ass. Last night after playing so much golden axe and boxing that I couldn't stand it any more I decided "Hey I want to see some better graphics" I loaded up my 360, looked at the games I had available and none of them sounded all that appealing. I tried "Small Arms" and it just didn't look so amazing that it was more fun to play. Same with PocketBike. Considered loading up Dead Rising but didn't want to invest the time. Nothing else grabbed me so I went right back to the Wii for a few more rounds of tennis and went to bed.
Like it or Hate it, the Wii has more staying power than any of the other consoles, graphics or not. You can say that Nintendo stock is over priced if you want, but people said that about google for ages and then their stock price rose anyway.
People are fundamentally fed up with products that don't work / don't do what they claim / are so over-hyped that I have to tune them out just to think. The people of the world want simple services that actually and reliably work. Google and Nintendo are delivering that and so the market is rewarding them and will continue to do so for quite some time. I'm betting that I'll have a lot more fun playing Smash Brothers with my friends than playing Halo with whiny ass, vomit talking, on-line clans.
I love my 360. And someday I'll buy a (lower cost) PS3 just for the eye candy. But when I want to play a game, I keep on going back to the Wii even after having it for quite a while.
A) See wildly unconstitutional bill, supported by a zealous minority.
B) Realize that if you vote for it the zealots will vote for you and if not they'll bully you in the media.
C) Realize that the bill will be immediately overturned by the judiciary, who are not under the same vote pressure.
D) Pass the bill, reap the rewards, trust the judges to do their jobs and shut down the bill.
Lame, cheap and easy. All it costs is voter money and wasted time, but tax money is free so who cares!
This is why we call it politics instead of governance.
so my name is in my file. I don't even care if my name is impossibly well hidden in the file such that when my wife gets a copy she has my name in it. I would happily trade being able to play my music on whatever device I want and also take some responsibility for it not getting all over the internet over the current hassle-fest of today.
To me, it's no different than the VIN number on a car. You take that VIN number and it will tell you everyone that's ever owned the car. If they've got a same/similar thing for the music file, great.
To me, watermarking is the only solution fair to content owners and users, and NO I don't work for anyone involved with any of this.
I had a macbook but it was too damn slow, so I bought a 64 bit, 17inch monster laptop. It had everything, it could play games, have two documents open side by side, it was a beast. I had owned that macbook for almost three years before I gave up on it and bought the PC laptop.
I handed that PC laptop to the trash bin after only 12 months. I couldn't hot swap the battery. I couldn't tell how full the battery was until the stupid thing had booted. It's case was plastic and broke. It got stuffed with stupid software that I couldn't uninstall. I put Suse Linux on it, but it's a cutting edge funky laptop so nothing worked. I went back to windows with a fresh install but the CD ROM drive was loose and unless I held it in its bay the speakers would spew static. Finally it just gave up and the mousepad wouldn't work any more.
During this time I had given my old macbook to my stay-at-home wife and mother of my three year old. The three year old threw it while the plug was in an horribly bent the chassis. But it still worked. My wife is nursing the baby and it turns out that human breasts can spray that milk quite a distance. My macbook had breast milk spattered all over it and in every crevice. It still worked! The three year old stuffed something into the DVD drive to prevent us getting the disk out. After we finally got the disk extracted, everything continued to work. The laptop is over five years old and has literally been around the work with me. It still works fine.
Needless to say, I just bought my second MacBook. With 2GB of ram and 2.1Ghz standard the performance has been excellent.
Bottom Line: PC Hardware sucks because no one is in control of it. (Even Dell and Sony can't get it right) Apple has the best hardware for their computers, the best hardware for their music players and I suspect will have the best hardware for their phones. OS X even bugs me a bit, but the fact is that their product is better than the PC products. Vista will be years before it stops sucking. XP on the MacBook might be viable, but realistically, everything I care about runs on both platforms.
It's not about being in the elite. It's not about catchy adds (tho they are funny and true). It's not about corporate personality or hype or history or market 'statistics' (lies, damn lies, statistics, etc). It's about finding and using the best tool available for doing my job.
Current winner: Macbook Pro.
Who in their right mind would enter a real war scenariou after playing a few rounds of counter-strike?
I used to be very good, top of the server for ten games streaks. Almost never did I survive every single round. If I can't survive after extensive in-game training with nerfed weapons what makes me think I'd survive a real war where people are really honest trying to make my life stop.
GTA is a tonne of fun, but how much would I pay it if every wrecked car involved watching my character sit in the hospital for two weeks? Only a moron doesn't make that connection.
Killing thousands of zombies in Dead Rising doesn't make me think, 'hey killing people is easy' except to the extent that I think 'hey, if it's this easy for me to kill somebody, then it's that easy for someone to kill me. Shit.'
Personally I'd like violent games to come with the insane warning stickers you see on appliances:
WARNING: If you try this in Real Life you will LOSE LIMBS, ENTER A VEGATIVE STATE or DIE PAINFULLLY.
WARNING: Save game technology DOES NOT EXIST in Real LIfe
WARNING: Acceptable in-game behavior may result in getting A KNEE SLAMMED INTO YOUR CROTCH in Real Life