> "Who needs crusty old rubbish like the Victorian era or World War II? > Instead, an Ofsted report leaked to The Guardian details of proposals > to teach UK primary school children how to use Wikipedia, Twitter, > podcasts and blogs"
Why not teach them how to download pr0n and rocket jump off a guy's head while you're at it?
Dumbasses. Just more politicians jumping on the too-late bandwagon again.
> So why not go all the way and give it the capability to do generalized, accelerated 2D and 3D rendering?
Because it would be easier for a 3D app vendor to wrap a browser around their 3D engine than the other way around. Much like how Intel got scared as 3D cards rocketed by their processors in capacitor density and so on, such that a Pentium core became something they might one day just tuck into the corner of their chips.
> "Researchers from Philips Electronics plan to describe a jacket > they have lined with vibration motors to study the effects of > touch on a movie viewer's emotional response to what the characters are experiencing.
I claim a patent on pants lined with vibration motors!
Ok, here's some things to make this llamabot, if you will, seem realistic:
If killed very quickly, it should/shout "Bot! Bot! Cheater!" then log off.
It runs around the corner, stops, turns a bit, stops, then runs a bit, then stops, then turns a bit to you, and you point-blank it with a rocket launcher, it disconnects a few seconds later without saying a word.
You should be able to give it a free rocket launcher, then when it rounds the corner and you start kicking it in the back to kill it, it/shouts "Stop that! Stop it! I'm going to another server!
When you rocket-blast it into lava, it should/shout "You suxxxorz! I'm going to another server!
It should run up to you, face first, and starts shooting its single-barrel shotgun at you, even though it just heard the dongle-dongle sound of you picking up the Glowing Rune of Asspoundery.
It names itself "Wolfferrine".
It names itself "The Rouge".
It tries to name itself "his mother's" in hopes that, when someone gets killed by a rocket launcher, the system will announce it as "Soandso just took his mother's rocket up the wazzoo!", but it should name itself instead "you mother" so it comes out like "Soandso just took you mother rocket up the wazzoo!"
Better than that! Keep in mind "They have released a GreaseMonkey script that automatically clicks on all AdSense ads."
Google Guy 1: Shit! I can't believe this. Now what are we gonna do?
Google Guy 2: Dammmmit! Wait...WAIT I KNOW! We can tell who's using that script because they're clicking on every damned AdSense ad, right?
GG1: Right...
GG2: So, idiot, that's almost 100% engineering types with high incomes. Now we just assemble this knowledge into a list, wait a month or two, then sell the list for god only knows what to Dell, Blackberry, Apple, World of Warcraft, you name it! Son of a bitch that list is worth its weight in gold! Advertisers live their whole lives without developing such a dense, yet large list of people with too much money.
And by revealing this, I hope to help Slashdot & co. avoid a mistake, although there's an Ayn Randian side of me that just wants to sit back and watch you guys make a sharp turn at high speed and run into a brick wall.
Interesting you should mention drugs. We know the War on Drugs is failing due to the decreasing cost and increasing quality of the drugs, which means more competition.
Looking at this development -- plug-and-play malware kits, and they'll now host it for a little more, and it's clear the same thing's happening here.
> It is a 90,000 kW monster delivering a total of 140,000 N
Hey, that's almost as much as my 3/4 mile long Maelstrom battleship's impulse drive puts out in Eve Online!
F'ing got popped over the weekend thanks to idiot communication from my defending alliance and I came thru the portal they were at, only to see they had all fled and 30 reds were there.
> but the ridiculous packaging used to ship a few tiny objects > by some shippers is pretty shameful.
It's designed to be bulky so you can't slip small things like MP3 players into your pocket easily, and designed to be hard to open to make it hard to open it in the store and slip it into your pocket easily.
That's the rationale behind those hated hard-to-open packs.
And bigger items, like electronics for shipping, need good industrial packing to prevent damage. Yeah you could jam a bunch of radios all next to each other, then pack 'em for sale after getting here, but that's not gonna prevent them from being damaged as they sail across the ocean.
> 'NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept > few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost > all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency'
Christ, it's called a cash hemorrhage inducement for consultation, and it shouldn't be a problem for a government spending in excess of $3+ trillion a year and growing rapidly. Offering 10 guys a million each to consult would raise the budget barely 0.0003%
> As a doctor, I would just add that doctors that are nice, and doctors that > are skilled, are weakly correlated.
Utterly, unbelievably sickening, but true.
The statistics as to whether a doctor will get sued highly correlate with his "bedside manner", and very little with his actual competency or the disasters he causes.
In other words, House would be the most sued doctor on the planet, even though he saves just about everybody.
And that ain't right, of course. But this world wasn't built by critical thinking, but by greed and lawsuits and so on.
Got a problem with that? Don't talk to me, talk to your Congressman.
> "Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay.
I don't see what's so lacking in entertainment by introducing your own char into an open world with all stats set to 255. Sounds like a fun time to me!
Are you going to keep electing politicians who ripped Windows away from you, leaving you high and dry with nothing but Linux?
How 'bout gramma, grampa, mom, dad, and 95%+ of the rest of the population who has problems using the mouse, much less tar -xveffing stuff?
That stuff isn't about you techies -- it's about the masses who vote, which isn't you.
Besides, Microsoft is trading off easing these things in exchange for providing illegal backdoors for law enforcement. "Everybody knows it", so there's no point pretending the actual situmication is on the level we're discussing here.
As someone who's sick of crap like walking into the famed cantina in Mos Eisley and hearing the music and seeing the patrons drinking, only to realize there isn't one damned real human there, I love the PvP.
It's not like PvP in other games, which is mostly 1 person getting ganked by a couple of roaming punks with way too much time on their hands.
No, this is essentially Realm vs. Realm PvP, where the realms self-assemble and carve out their own "realms".
By the way, this expansion pack introduces several thousand new star systems to be explored and conquered, if your alliance has the lobes for it.
Apparently there will be temporary wormholes ala Star Trek: Next Generation, complete with them disappearing, leaving you hours and fifty jumps away from where you were if you aren't careful. Seems like it'll be tied to some kind of max number of ships/tonnage going through before it closes. Gonna send a self-sufficient fleet through "just in case"?
> You know what I found out? PvP is a *lot* of wasted time waiting around to get the > advantage over the other guys who are waiting around doing the same thing to you.
Yes, but when you do, it's a beautiful thing. Unlike your FPS kill which 99% of the time is not. And I love FPS games, was in a very good Quake clan way back before most of you were even born.
On the flip side, when you're "popped" trying to scurry through 0.0 (no guards whatsover space) because you warped to a gate crowded with punks, and warp quickly through to get away, and the other side is camped, too, you're furious. You may even ragequit for 24 hours or more.
But you'll be back. Eve people know what I'm talking about. Longer-term plans to build up fleets, and hog out a hole of control in 0.0 space with your alliance (a guild of guilds, so to speak, or corporation of corporations, in Eve-lingo.) Shit, alliance-chat, someone says one of our stations is under attack with at least 6 capital ships, 2 carriers, 12 battleships, and a bunch of support ships. We've gotta tell the roaming fleet (the alliance-internal "pick up group" of people who wanna be a quick-react force) to get serious. Send out the link, everybody fleet up!
Unless you wanna lose 20 billion or more worth of hardware.
On the other hand, if donkey guild to build in a no man's land too close to a gate to your controlled space, sometimes you've just gotta teach those bastards a lesson.
Well Lucas shows that just because you have an end doesn't mean you can't still screw it up and keep it alive by prebirthing it. Time goes both directions, -equal wise.
And if George has perma-wrapped both ends now, I'm sure he'll strike out along a new time axis somehow. The prequels weren't about $300 million movies. They were about $2 billion in licensing before the first one was even made. The whole cost of the movie is nothing more than a loss leader for that.
> "If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... > that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we > are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews of The Berman Institute of Bioethics.
Screw that!
Just give me a chip I can plug-n-play a yappy personality so I can get with hot chicks like this.
How many dudes have you given the "can't we just be friends line" to, Debra? I got news for you, some people have no problem scrapping parts of their personality. Unload that shit like a deformed leg for a beautiful one grown in a lab, thanksforplayingbie.
So Google negotiated this deal with a guild that was the authorized, legal representative of all these writers, and it, and by extension, they, negotiated this crappy deal?
Unless Google bribed someone, there's nothing illegal about it. Mismanagement on the part of the writers' guild, perhaps, but nothing illegal.
As for monopoly, so what? None of these books were in print. Nobody wanted them. Nobody else, including Microsoft, had the moxie to do this scanning project. There is no monopoly in the classic sense.
It's like saying a single drug store in a tiny little town has a monopoly when, in fact, the town can barely even justify the one, and that only with hard work from the druggist.
Issues to be addressed:
1. Did the guild scam the writers somehow? Who was deciding it should proceed as it did? "Follow the money" should do the trick here.
That is all. Nothing wrong by Amazon. No "monopoly" in any kind of meaningful sense -- nobody wanted those books, much less use them in a online-scan project. And, barring fraud in #1, nothing wrong by the guild or the writers. Stupidity, perhaps. Say "awwwww" when you go to bed tonight, I guess.
> This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company, > Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal.
I'm sure the bid said, "accessible via any computer with a web browser"? Or "apps available under x, y, and z OS's", or some such?
Quite frankly, although Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's. Or the doof who put together the RFQ for this particular service for not being more specific about what kinds of computers can access it.
> Microsoft Sees Linux As Bigger Competitor Than Apple
Apple's not a competitor to Microsoft. It's kind of like a tough guy in a movie who picks up one of the bad guy lackies and uses him as a shield against bullets.
Microsoft uses them and their continued existence, at Microsoft's pleasure, as an argument to government that they're not a monopoly. Linux is in much the same spot.
Linux Fan: No, Linux is (blah blah blah blah)
Microsoft: Whatever. I respect your power. Just stay away from 99.9% of the profit center out there.
Re:Wait, I have a better example
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
An Indian woman at work just named her kid Aryan. I declined to bring it up since it would do nothing but make her feel bad anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
> has exploded as a supernova at a much earlier date than the one predicted by astronomers
Astronomer: Our sun will explode in 5 million years.
Innumerate Person: Oh no! That's horrible!
Astonemer: 5 million years is a long time away, ma'am.
Innumerate Person: Oh! I thought you said 50,000 years. Whew!
> "Who needs crusty old rubbish like the Victorian era or World War II?
> Instead, an Ofsted report leaked to The Guardian details of proposals
> to teach UK primary school children how to use Wikipedia, Twitter,
> podcasts and blogs"
Why not teach them how to download pr0n and rocket jump off a guy's head while you're at it?
Dumbasses. Just more politicians jumping on the too-late bandwagon again.
> So why not go all the way and give it the capability to do generalized, accelerated 2D and 3D rendering?
Because it would be easier for a 3D app vendor to wrap a browser around their 3D engine than the other way around. Much like how Intel got scared as 3D cards rocketed by their processors in capacitor density and so on, such that a Pentium core became something they might one day just tuck into the corner of their chips.
I'd settle for being able to tell the browser to tell Flash to stop using 100% CPU.
Seedy? Jacket?
Imagination of a petunia.
> "Researchers from Philips Electronics plan to describe a jacket
> they have lined with vibration motors to study the effects of
> touch on a movie viewer's emotional response to what the characters are experiencing.
I claim a patent on pants lined with vibration motors!
> Believable Stupidity In Game AI
Ok, here's some things to make this llamabot, if you will, seem realistic:
> The line is from one of Harlans more famous books and goes
> " "REPENT Harlequin !" Said the TICTOC man."
Fixed it for you. Harlanquin was a leftover from the G^^nP's post.
Ok, I think we've got it all correct now, finally.
Better than that! Keep in mind "They have released a GreaseMonkey script that automatically clicks on all AdSense ads."
Google Guy 1: Shit! I can't believe this. Now what are we gonna do?
Google Guy 2: Dammmmit! Wait...WAIT I KNOW! We can tell who's using that script because they're clicking on every damned AdSense ad, right?
GG1: Right...
GG2: So, idiot, that's almost 100% engineering types with high incomes. Now we just assemble this knowledge into a list, wait a month or two, then sell the list for god only knows what to Dell, Blackberry, Apple, World of Warcraft, you name it! Son of a bitch that list is worth its weight in gold! Advertisers live their whole lives without developing such a dense, yet large list of people with too much money.
And by revealing this, I hope to help Slashdot & co. avoid a mistake, although there's an Ayn Randian side of me that just wants to sit back and watch you guys make a sharp turn at high speed and run into a brick wall.
Interesting you should mention drugs. We know the War on Drugs is failing due to the decreasing cost and increasing quality of the drugs, which means more competition.
Looking at this development -- plug-and-play malware kits, and they'll now host it for a little more, and it's clear the same thing's happening here.
> It is a 90,000 kW monster delivering a total of 140,000 N
Hey, that's almost as much as my 3/4 mile long Maelstrom battleship's impulse drive puts out in Eve Online!
F'ing got popped over the weekend thanks to idiot communication from my defending alliance and I came thru the portal they were at, only to see they had all fled and 30 reds were there.
> but the ridiculous packaging used to ship a few tiny objects
> by some shippers is pretty shameful.
It's designed to be bulky so you can't slip small things like MP3 players into your pocket easily, and designed to be hard to open to make it hard to open it in the store and slip it into your pocket easily.
That's the rationale behind those hated hard-to-open packs.
And bigger items, like electronics for shipping, need good industrial packing to prevent damage. Yeah you could jam a bunch of radios all next to each other, then pack 'em for sale after getting here, but that's not gonna prevent them from being damaged as they sail across the ocean.
> 'NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept
> few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost
> all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency'
Christ, it's called a cash hemorrhage inducement for consultation, and it shouldn't be a problem for a government spending in excess of $3+ trillion a year and growing rapidly. Offering 10 guys a million each to consult would raise the budget barely 0.0003%
> It's not sci-fi, but rather advanced robotics research which is leading Intel
> to envision shape-shifting smartphones
It's embarassing enough to be in a business meeting and have your brother call to the forgotten custom ringtone of "I Like Big Butts".
Now you've gotta worry about the phone turning into a penis or vagina shape?
> As a doctor, I would just add that doctors that are nice, and doctors that
> are skilled, are weakly correlated.
Utterly, unbelievably sickening, but true.
The statistics as to whether a doctor will get sued highly correlate with his "bedside manner", and very little with his actual competency or the disasters he causes.
In other words, House would be the most sued doctor on the planet, even though he saves just about everybody.
And that ain't right, of course. But this world wasn't built by critical thinking, but by greed and lawsuits and so on.
Got a problem with that? Don't talk to me, talk to your Congressman.
> Celebrating cultural diversity? You've got to be fucking kidding me.
Quite frankly, I'm awed as a rhetoritician that they've adopted the phraseology of their enemies. You guys get an A!
As critical thinkers, you're epic fail, but as populism goes, way!
> "Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay.
I don't see what's so lacking in entertainment by introducing your own char into an open world with all stats set to 255. Sounds like a fun time to me!
Are you going to keep electing politicians who ripped Windows away from you, leaving you high and dry with nothing but Linux?
How 'bout gramma, grampa, mom, dad, and 95%+ of the rest of the population who has problems using the mouse, much less tar -xveffing stuff?
That stuff isn't about you techies -- it's about the masses who vote, which isn't you.
Besides, Microsoft is trading off easing these things in exchange for providing illegal backdoors for law enforcement. "Everybody knows it", so there's no point pretending the actual situmication is on the level we're discussing here.
As someone who's sick of crap like walking into the famed cantina in Mos Eisley and hearing the music and seeing the patrons drinking, only to realize there isn't one damned real human there, I love the PvP.
It's not like PvP in other games, which is mostly 1 person getting ganked by a couple of roaming punks with way too much time on their hands.
No, this is essentially Realm vs. Realm PvP, where the realms self-assemble and carve out their own "realms".
By the way, this expansion pack introduces several thousand new star systems to be explored and conquered, if your alliance has the lobes for it.
Apparently there will be temporary wormholes ala Star Trek: Next Generation, complete with them disappearing, leaving you hours and fifty jumps away from where you were if you aren't careful. Seems like it'll be tied to some kind of max number of ships/tonnage going through before it closes. Gonna send a self-sufficient fleet through "just in case"?
Sweet!
> You know what I found out? PvP is a *lot* of wasted time waiting around to get the
> advantage over the other guys who are waiting around doing the same thing to you.
Yes, but when you do, it's a beautiful thing. Unlike your FPS kill which 99% of the time is not. And I love FPS games, was in a very good Quake clan way back before most of you were even born.
On the flip side, when you're "popped" trying to scurry through 0.0 (no guards whatsover space) because you warped to a gate crowded with punks, and warp quickly through to get away, and the other side is camped, too, you're furious. You may even ragequit for 24 hours or more.
But you'll be back. Eve people know what I'm talking about. Longer-term plans to build up fleets, and hog out a hole of control in 0.0 space with your alliance (a guild of guilds, so to speak, or corporation of corporations, in Eve-lingo.) Shit, alliance-chat, someone says one of our stations is under attack with at least 6 capital ships, 2 carriers, 12 battleships, and a bunch of support ships. We've gotta tell the roaming fleet (the alliance-internal "pick up group" of people who wanna be a quick-react force) to get serious. Send out the link, everybody fleet up!
Unless you wanna lose 20 billion or more worth of hardware.
On the other hand, if donkey guild to build in a no man's land too close to a gate to your controlled space, sometimes you've just gotta teach those bastards a lesson.
Well Lucas shows that just because you have an end doesn't mean you can't still screw it up and keep it alive by prebirthing it. Time goes both directions, -equal wise.
And if George has perma-wrapped both ends now, I'm sure he'll strike out along a new time axis somehow. The prequels weren't about $300 million movies. They were about $2 billion in licensing before the first one was even made. The whole cost of the movie is nothing more than a loss leader for that.
> "If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality...
> that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we
> are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews of The Berman Institute of Bioethics.
Screw that!
Just give me a chip I can plug-n-play a yappy personality so I can get with hot chicks like this.
How many dudes have you given the "can't we just be friends line" to, Debra? I got news for you, some people have no problem scrapping parts of their personality. Unload that shit like a deformed leg for a beautiful one grown in a lab, thanksforplayingbie.
So Google negotiated this deal with a guild that was the authorized, legal representative of all these writers, and it, and by extension, they, negotiated this crappy deal?
Unless Google bribed someone, there's nothing illegal about it. Mismanagement on the part of the writers' guild, perhaps, but nothing illegal.
As for monopoly, so what? None of these books were in print. Nobody wanted them. Nobody else, including Microsoft, had the moxie to do this scanning project. There is no monopoly in the classic sense.
It's like saying a single drug store in a tiny little town has a monopoly when, in fact, the town can barely even justify the one, and that only with hard work from the druggist.
Issues to be addressed:
1. Did the guild scam the writers somehow? Who was deciding it should proceed as it did? "Follow the money" should do the trick here.
That is all. Nothing wrong by Amazon. No "monopoly" in any kind of meaningful sense -- nobody wanted those books, much less use them in a online-scan project. And, barring fraud in #1, nothing wrong by the guild or the writers. Stupidity, perhaps. Say "awwwww" when you go to bed tonight, I guess.
> This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company,
> Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal.
I'm sure the bid said, "accessible via any computer with a web browser"? Or "apps available under x, y, and z OS's", or some such?
Quite frankly, although Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's. Or the doof who put together the RFQ for this particular service for not being more specific about what kinds of computers can access it.
> Microsoft Sees Linux As Bigger Competitor Than Apple
Apple's not a competitor to Microsoft. It's kind of like a tough guy in a movie who picks up one of the bad guy lackies and uses him as a shield against bullets.
Microsoft uses them and their continued existence, at Microsoft's pleasure, as an argument to government that they're not a monopoly. Linux is in much the same spot.
Linux Fan: No, Linux is (blah blah blah blah)
Microsoft: Whatever. I respect your power. Just stay away from 99.9% of the profit center out there.
An Indian woman at work just named her kid Aryan. I declined to bring it up since it would do nothing but make her feel bad anyway.
Must be a normal name over there.