I read the article. I was responding to the comment (see the subject: 'Re: I agree'), maybe you should reread the comment I was responding to, or for the first time.
To answer your remarks.... The list of products they are commenting on is mostly toys... not video games themselves. I don't see the harm in an action figure - even if it is tied into an M rated game. Look at Star Wars action figures, they ALL had weapons, yet nobody sees anything wrong with a 5 year old playing with them. And while I agree to some extent that a game like Street Fighter 2 that has some sound bites referencing blood, death, etal... and maybe should not be rated E, the fact is that it was rated E by the video game ratings association and that rating should be respected or it's worthless. Besides that, the game is purely cartoon violence. It's not as if the game is hiding that it's about violence, c'mon just look at the title. If a parent doesn't want their child to play a fighting game, this one is pretty easy not to buy.
Isn't that why these products have ratings on them? Even teen horror movies are rated R, yes they're marketing towards teens, but they still have that rating and these days theaters are quick to card teenages trying to get into R-rated films. Video games are just like movies, some are targetted to kids, some aren't. Most stores won't let kids purchase adult rated videos, nor will they let them purchase adult rated games.
Why do we need another organization to further classify these products? It's as if they're telling parents, "We know you let your 10 year old kids play 'M' rated games, but these ones are really bad so you should think twice."
If the rating is so meaningless in the first place, then why have it at all? Doesn't it all come back to good parenting?
Huh? At 5 minutes per disc, that's 12 discs per hour. ~33 hours for 400 discs -OR- $1.20/hour. Of course, I don't believe it took the kid 5 minutes to rip each cd. Besides $40 to a 13 yr old is 'a lot' of money for sitting on your ass. It's better than mowing lawns or shovelling snow anyway.
Re:Nitpick part II
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 3, Informative
1/1000th of a day is a Swatch.beat that they use in their 'Internet Time'. You can buy all sorts of Swatches that will display the time in.beats (@500 == 12:00 noon in their system).
Of course the price to purchase the software is going up! The cost to write the software only goes up. The reason why hardware costs so much less to produce than it did 20 years ago is that manufacturing advances increase density of components and it requires much less valuable material to produce the same thing.
Can you apply that to software? Maybe.. if by manufacturing advances you can say that Visual Studio makes Microsoft's software engineers more effective at writing code. But we all know that's not true, at least on the scale that would be required to reduce a team of programmers by a factor of 2 (or more) each year to justify decreasing the price at the same rate as hardware decreases. Sure MS could say that because they're going to sell 100 million copies of XP they will adjust the price accordingly, but they are like any publisher - book, music, movie. They set a price where they will turn a profit after some X number of copies are sold.
It's a business, they have to pay thousands of real people to write code. And they continue to pay them even after the product it released, so the revenue from the software sales pays their salaries. Yes, they are huge and could probably afford to charge less. But why should they? It's a business and the market will currently bear the price they set. In 5 years, who knows, maybe it won't. Maybe Open Source will have a strong enough foothold that people won't tolerate these prices.
BTW - the cost of software preloaded on PC's from major manufacturers is pennies on the dollar compared to what you pay retail. It's the same for corporations who pay for volume licensing. Probably much closer to what it actually costs to produce the software.
Oh, and FYI, while I'm sure Nintendo appreciates their listing N64 as a "relative success," they might have preferred that the authors at least INCLUDE the Super NES on the list.
I just couldn't believe that the TurboGraphx 16 was bolded and the SNES wasn't even there. The SNES was an excellent system in its day. I mean just look at Street Fighter 2 - it was nearly identical to the arcade version. This was a game that was so popular that companies were manufacturing arcade quality controllers so you could play SF2 at home and do dragon punches without destroying your thumbs. There was no console on the market at that point able to compete with it. Sure the Genesis had technically better hardware, and the Neo Geo was fantastic (but who could afford it?). But it all comes back to the games, right? And the SNES simply had better games, for the money, than anything else out there.
Re: $3417 per capita....
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
That probably has something to do with the fact that nearly everyone who lives there is Native American and this is probably a reservation. Quote interesting though... really makes you think.
White - 499
Black - 5
American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut - 9374
Asian or Pacific Islander - 5
Other race - 19
Re:IT's not for you!
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Take a look at this: http://www.gwu.edu/~econ270/Taejoon.html it's from 1996 but that's not too long ago to make it invalid. People in Shanghai make ~$1000/yr (USD) and nearly everyone else in the country is making less than $200. That's 5x the income. Per capita income in New York is not 5x that of Idaho - or anywhere else in the US - per capita income in New York is around 20% higher than the national average.
So, what have we learned? People in Idaho can afford to buy cars, people in rural China cannot. People in Idaho can afford to have a quality of life as good as those in New York, those in rural China cannot. And for that matter, most people in urban china can't afford to buy a car, to say nothing of a $3k motor scooter. That would be like average Joe in New York city making $25k/year buying a $75k car.
Try freezing a stick of butter and dropping it into a bowl of water. Sinks right to the bottom. Being that water expands when it's in the temperature range where it starts to freeze, and everything else in the universe contracts (afaik). Water is unique that way.. it's really cool too if you think about it because if water didn't expand then we wouldn't have ice on the tops of lakes there would be no life on earth.
But anyway if you have lots of fat in the mix, it should sink when it gets cold because as a whole it will be more dense than the water surrounding it.
Big Bummer. This is a language that needs more exposure. I'd love to use it in place of perl if there were more toolbox modules out there for it. It needs to reach a critical mass before the really complicated modules, like template toolkit, get written - and before they get written people aren't able to write the quick and dirty programs (that languages like perl are famous for) that give it the critical mass... vicious circle.
It's not even about having a special effects budget - it's about the difference in makeup technologies from the 60's to the 80's, and the need to make the Klingons more menacing to give movie goers a better sense of why they were the enemy. When they started making the movies they wanted to have a cool looking enemy - plain and simple - and the Klingons as they were done in th e 60's just didn't cut it. Back then it was enough to make them give them a ghoti and a bad hair cut... which apparently fit them to the stereotype that americans had of the Soviets.
I think he was implying that the extremist regime would have to either be kicked out, or start instituting some form of freedom and democracy. The Taliban has done a lot of good, if you can call it that, for the Afghan people. They feel safe to go outside because they aren't being robbed on the street. Their lives are better than they were 5 years ago... they are still starving of course... and they could have been receiving aid, if the Taliban wern't harboring a terrorist for the past 3 years. I'm sure the people there don't realize that it's their Taliban who is responsible - so it will probably be difficult to get them out with the people's support.
I still just can't get over that they destroyed all those ancient statues. Don't they have other things to worry about? Aren't there better ways to spend their time/money than to destroy works of art?
Most of the people in the underdeveloped world don't even understand that there are sexually transmitted diseases out there that kill people. They are starving. They are dying from one of many diseases that we in the 'western' world got rid of ages ago. They are living in tents and shacks. Homeless people in the western world have better lives than these people. They couldn't afford to buy drugs if they wanted to. Their lives suck and sex is an escape. What do you want to happen? To feed people in exchange for sterilization? Sterilizing somone who lives in a 3rd world country is like giving them a license to have unprotected disease spreading sex. Birth control is not the answer to the world's problems - it's only a part of it - the largest part is education.
Re:Ravages of the new economy
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 1
Heheheheh - true true. Though I figured I'd give HP the benefit of the doubt and at the same time not sound like the Linux zealot I am. Maybe HP will decide that it's not worth porting the Tru64 features into HP/UX and they'll just open source it. It could happen... (tm)
Re:Ravages of the new economy
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 1
You never know about which unix might get killed. Yes, the product would die - HP is too stuck on themselves to give up their flagship unix - but all the coolness of Tru64 should live on merged into HP/UX as long as the Tru64 programmers don't get the axe for being redundant.
We should experiment on death row inmates. There are lots of things we could do with them after they are put to death. I for one would be very much in favor of cryogenically freezing and then attempting to revive death row inmates. Give them the option, be put to death *this way* and maybe you'll come back to life (so to speak). I bet most inmates would like that opportunity. They are destined to be put to death -- if it so happens that the procedure is successful, then let them live the rest of their natural lives in prison.
There are lots of things we could do to prisoners that would not be cruel or unusual and would advance medical science greatly. Of course, all experiments should be voluntary, and they really ought to be compensated in some manner regardless of the outcome. If the compensation were great enough there would be lots of takers for any experiment, no matter how dangerous. Most people who are in jail are gamblers of some sort, and they always think they are going to beat the odds or they wouldn't have attempted the crime that put them in jail in the first place.
That's the whole point though -- they wanted to demonstrate that a plane could fly in air this thin. The principle of this design lets it be used as a kind of low cost mobile satelite on earth - AND - as like a surveyor plane on Mars. They could cover the planet, up close, in much less time than it would take a ground vehicle to do it. And since it's completely electric running solar during the day and batteries at night it can basically fly forever (until it breaks anyway).
Funny, sure.
Overrated, yes.
Troll, no doubt.
Offtopic, of course it is...
Insightful.... Insightful?!? C'mon... What kinda crack was that moderator smoking?
That's almost what the link at the end of the story does. It does everything but patch the infected host. It would be funny as hell to just disable IIS on every infected box that connects to yours.
I have to second that! That is the most beautiful argument I've heard in favor of allowing this type of research. Something that everyone really needs to be aware of when they try to argue that you are a human being from the moment of conception.
A good question for those who believe in such things (I don't), is when is 'soul' imbued into the embryo? It obviously can't be there at any time when the cells can split apart into multiple viable embryos. The next stage the cells reach is where they begin to differentiate between fetal and placental tissue. So maybe then? I believe is possible to split into twins after the embryo goes down that road.
There are a couple of alternatives though. Maybe there is a soul from conception but then when the cell(s) split off on their own, a new soul is immediately created. Or.. every cell has its own little soul and the work collectively to become the big human soul. Yeah, that's the ticket - micro-souls that join together to become a macro-soul. Yeah! That's the ticket! Now I just have form a religion based around that theory and I'll have followers as far as the eye can see! Moohahahah!
Slashdot Mirror
To answer your remarks.... The list of products they are commenting on is mostly toys... not video games themselves. I don't see the harm in an action figure - even if it is tied into an M rated game. Look at Star Wars action figures, they ALL had weapons, yet nobody sees anything wrong with a 5 year old playing with them. And while I agree to some extent that a game like Street Fighter 2 that has some sound bites referencing blood, death, etal... and maybe should not be rated E, the fact is that it was rated E by the video game ratings association and that rating should be respected or it's worthless. Besides that, the game is purely cartoon violence. It's not as if the game is hiding that it's about violence, c'mon just look at the title. If a parent doesn't want their child to play a fighting game, this one is pretty easy not to buy.
Why do we need another organization to further classify these products? It's as if they're telling parents, "We know you let your 10 year old kids play 'M' rated games, but these ones are really bad so you should think twice."
If the rating is so meaningless in the first place, then why have it at all? Doesn't it all come back to good parenting?
Huh? At 5 minutes per disc, that's 12 discs per hour. ~33 hours for 400 discs -OR- $1.20/hour. Of course, I don't believe it took the kid 5 minutes to rip each cd. Besides $40 to a 13 yr old is 'a lot' of money for sitting on your ass. It's better than mowing lawns or shovelling snow anyway.
1/1000th of a day is a Swatch .beat that they use in their 'Internet Time'. You can buy all sorts of Swatches that will display the time in .beats (@500 == 12:00 noon in their system).
Can you apply that to software? Maybe.. if by manufacturing advances you can say that Visual Studio makes Microsoft's software engineers more effective at writing code. But we all know that's not true, at least on the scale that would be required to reduce a team of programmers by a factor of 2 (or more) each year to justify decreasing the price at the same rate as hardware decreases. Sure MS could say that because they're going to sell 100 million copies of XP they will adjust the price accordingly, but they are like any publisher - book, music, movie. They set a price where they will turn a profit after some X number of copies are sold.
It's a business, they have to pay thousands of real people to write code. And they continue to pay them even after the product it released, so the revenue from the software sales pays their salaries. Yes, they are huge and could probably afford to charge less. But why should they? It's a business and the market will currently bear the price they set. In 5 years, who knows, maybe it won't. Maybe Open Source will have a strong enough foothold that people won't tolerate these prices.
BTW - the cost of software preloaded on PC's from major manufacturers is pennies on the dollar compared to what you pay retail. It's the same for corporations who pay for volume licensing. Probably much closer to what it actually costs to produce the software.
Oh, and FYI, while I'm sure Nintendo appreciates their listing N64 as a "relative success," they might have preferred that the authors at least INCLUDE the Super NES on the list.
I just couldn't believe that the TurboGraphx 16 was bolded and the SNES wasn't even there. The SNES was an excellent system in its day. I mean just look at Street Fighter 2 - it was nearly identical to the arcade version. This was a game that was so popular that companies were manufacturing arcade quality controllers so you could play SF2 at home and do dragon punches without destroying your thumbs. There was no console on the market at that point able to compete with it. Sure the Genesis had technically better hardware, and the Neo Geo was fantastic (but who could afford it?). But it all comes back to the games, right? And the SNES simply had better games, for the money, than anything else out there.
So, what have we learned? People in Idaho can afford to buy cars, people in rural China cannot. People in Idaho can afford to have a quality of life as good as those in New York, those in rural China cannot. And for that matter, most people in urban china can't afford to buy a car, to say nothing of a $3k motor scooter. That would be like average Joe in New York city making $25k/year buying a $75k car.
Try freezing a stick of butter and dropping it into a bowl of water. Sinks right to the bottom. Being that water expands when it's in the temperature range where it starts to freeze, and everything else in the universe contracts (afaik). Water is unique that way.. it's really cool too if you think about it because if water didn't expand then we wouldn't have ice on the tops of lakes there would be no life on earth.
But anyway if you have lots of fat in the mix, it should sink when it gets cold because as a whole it will be more dense than the water surrounding it.
Big Bummer. This is a language that needs more exposure. I'd love to use it in place of perl if there were more toolbox modules out there for it. It needs to reach a critical mass before the really complicated modules, like template toolkit, get written - and before they get written people aren't able to write the quick and dirty programs (that languages like perl are famous for) that give it the critical mass... vicious circle.
Ruby is an excellent lightweight language. They had made a comment that it was sadly not mentioned too often during this workshop.
- QVGA = 320x240
- VGA = 640x480
- SVGA = 800x600
- XGA = 1024x768
- SXGA = 1280x1024 (sometimes 1400x1050)
- UXGA = 1600x1200
I think he meant to say is that he has UXGA.LOL!! Yeah, I've seen that play on english before... probably too many times or I would have spelled the word correctly ;-) Can't believe I typed that!
It's not even about having a special effects budget - it's about the difference in makeup technologies from the 60's to the 80's, and the need to make the Klingons more menacing to give movie goers a better sense of why they were the enemy. When they started making the movies they wanted to have a cool looking enemy - plain and simple - and the Klingons as they were done in th e 60's just didn't cut it. Back then it was enough to make them give them a ghoti and a bad hair cut... which apparently fit them to the stereotype that americans had of the Soviets.
I think he was implying that the extremist regime would have to either be kicked out, or start instituting some form of freedom and democracy. The Taliban has done a lot of good, if you can call it that, for the Afghan people. They feel safe to go outside because they aren't being robbed on the street. Their lives are better than they were 5 years ago... they are still starving of course... and they could have been receiving aid, if the Taliban wern't harboring a terrorist for the past 3 years. I'm sure the people there don't realize that it's their Taliban who is responsible - so it will probably be difficult to get them out with the people's support.
I still just can't get over that they destroyed all those ancient statues. Don't they have other things to worry about? Aren't there better ways to spend their time/money than to destroy works of art?
Most of the people in the underdeveloped world don't even understand that there are sexually transmitted diseases out there that kill people. They are starving. They are dying from one of many diseases that we in the 'western' world got rid of ages ago. They are living in tents and shacks. Homeless people in the western world have better lives than these people. They couldn't afford to buy drugs if they wanted to. Their lives suck and sex is an escape. What do you want to happen? To feed people in exchange for sterilization? Sterilizing somone who lives in a 3rd world country is like giving them a license to have unprotected disease spreading sex. Birth control is not the answer to the world's problems - it's only a part of it - the largest part is education.
Heheheheh - true true. Though I figured I'd give HP the benefit of the doubt and at the same time not sound like the Linux zealot I am. Maybe HP will decide that it's not worth porting the Tru64 features into HP/UX and they'll just open source it. It could happen... (tm)
You never know about which unix might get killed. Yes, the product would die - HP is too stuck on themselves to give up their flagship unix - but all the coolness of Tru64 should live on merged into HP/UX as long as the Tru64 programmers don't get the axe for being redundant.
Guess we'll have to wait and see....
We should experiment on death row inmates. There are lots of things we could do with them after they are put to death. I for one would be very much in favor of cryogenically freezing and then attempting to revive death row inmates. Give them the option, be put to death *this way* and maybe you'll come back to life (so to speak). I bet most inmates would like that opportunity. They are destined to be put to death -- if it so happens that the procedure is successful, then let them live the rest of their natural lives in prison.
There are lots of things we could do to prisoners that would not be cruel or unusual and would advance medical science greatly. Of course, all experiments should be voluntary, and they really ought to be compensated in some manner regardless of the outcome. If the compensation were great enough there would be lots of takers for any experiment, no matter how dangerous. Most people who are in jail are gamblers of some sort, and they always think they are going to beat the odds or they wouldn't have attempted the crime that put them in jail in the first place.
That's the whole point though -- they wanted to demonstrate that a plane could fly in air this thin. The principle of this design lets it be used as a kind of low cost mobile satelite on earth - AND - as like a surveyor plane on Mars. They could cover the planet, up close, in much less time than it would take a ground vehicle to do it. And since it's completely electric running solar during the day and batteries at night it can basically fly forever (until it breaks anyway).
This updated story on Yahoo! says they made it to 96,500 before NASA decided to turn it around. Go NASA!
It's also got a bit more info about the craft itself, and their reasons for building it including purposes like Mars surveying missions.
Enjoy!
Moderation Totals:Offtopic=2, Troll=5, Insightful=1, Funny=17, Overrated=6, Total=31.
Funny, sure.
Overrated, yes.
Troll, no doubt.
Offtopic, of course it is...
Insightful.... Insightful?!? C'mon... What kinda crack was that moderator smoking?
That's almost what the link at the end of the story does. It does everything but patch the infected host. It would be funny as hell to just disable IIS on every infected box that connects to yours.
It looks like this (only /. won't let me put in the 200 or so X's):
/default.ida?~200*X%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%
u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7 801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0
003%u8b00%u531b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a HTTP/1.0" 404 298
209.98.92.1 - - [10/Aug/2001:21:20:35 -0500] "GET
I have to second that! That is the most beautiful argument I've heard in favor of allowing this type of research. Something that everyone really needs to be aware of when they try to argue that you are a human being from the moment of conception.
A good question for those who believe in such things (I don't), is when is 'soul' imbued into the embryo? It obviously can't be there at any time when the cells can split apart into multiple viable embryos. The next stage the cells reach is where they begin to differentiate between fetal and placental tissue. So maybe then? I believe is possible to split into twins after the embryo goes down that road.
There are a couple of alternatives though. Maybe there is a soul from conception but then when the cell(s) split off on their own, a new soul is immediately created. Or.. every cell has its own little soul and the work collectively to become the big human soul. Yeah, that's the ticket - micro-souls that join together to become a macro-soul. Yeah! That's the ticket! Now I just have form a religion based around that theory and I'll have followers as far as the eye can see! Moohahahah!