and was surprised to see the 1 week lockout from launch for the sales.
I'm still surprised that they haven't run afoul of anti-gambling legislation and am curious as to what is in place to prevent money-laundering, &c.
That said, I'd still love to see an instance like to that of the short story ``Catacomb'' from _Dragon Magazine_ May 1985. For those who haven't read the story it begins here:
``For a properly designed thing, production in quantity will become cheaper, if the quantities hit the numbers required for efficiencies of scale to be triggered.''
- give a minor (unable to sign contracts) a pre-paid $100 credit card
- go to the store where it's being sold, pay w/ the pre-paid CC and use its number to sign up for payment of the XBox Live contract
If you make it out of the store and the store can't track you down and Microsoft can't find the XBox based on its serial number (you'd have to ensure that it never connected to the internet while running Microsoft's software) it might be workable.
Would one be able to install XBox Media Center on such a machine?
The thing is, in large quantities, production should become cheaper, and there is a way to address #2 --- just put in a limit on each reward level which isn't readily mass-produced --- that's what Thomas Phinney did w/ his Call of C'Thulhu font Cristoforo:
The missiles in Cuba were offensive, these are defensive --- big difference.
This is nothing more than an admission on the part of the Russians that their economy isn't able to build enough missiles to off-set these defenses, which pains them, since arguably it was an inability of their economy to build enough war materiel to provide sufficient targets for the U.S. to blow up on the Ho Chi Minh trail _and_ sufficient military exports for other countries _and_ build enough missiles to counter their perception of the Strategic Defense Initiative _and_ keep their people feed and happy.
As one teacher of mine opined, a country whose government can't supply their people w/ toilet paper will eventually have a change of government.
Comics themselves are a bit too busy for a 3-year old.
My son had a bunch of beginning reader books which were re-tellings of bits of the Spiderman movies and they were far more approachable for him.
When the kid can be trusted w/ spending money, then he can buy Marvel Adventures comics and other age-appropriate things (you'll need to _always_ check this in this post Comics Code Authority age).
>Wasn't military spending one of the causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire?
It was a lack of military spending and an inability to adapt their military to cope w/ changes in military technology (the development of the composite bow by the horsemen of Central Asia) which resulted in the downfall of the Roman Empire, that and dry-rot from w/in due to a dis-affected population (a huge majority of which were slaves) which wearied of being manipulated so as to make the wealthy and powerful, wealthier and more powerful (seem familiar).
H. Beam Piper put forth that handedness develops when a culture becomes aware of anatomy and learns to fight w/ the heart being guarded by twisting the body.
Yes, there are, all to the glory of the Fuehrer and the Third Reich. Yeah, right.
Already posted this elsewhere --- Sen. Alan Cranston, on his return to the U.S. from Germany, finding an expurgated version for sale which had some Americans admiring Hitler, translated all the unpleasant parts, and published them:
There needs to be a control in place so that only the compleat text is published, preferably w/ footnotes detailing the inaccuracies and lies and putting forward the unambiguous facts.
I bought Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ from the Sony Reader Store for my PRS-600 and the book was so rife w/ errors as to be essentially unreadable --- I actually had to look up some bits on books.google.com in order to understand some passages.
I purchased Robert Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ and (tried to) read it over the weekend --- the book had so many errors, I wound up proofreading it instead:
- all discretionary and non-breaking hyphens show up as question marks in the text - lots of extraneous hyphens - a couple of chapter titles are mis-spelled - There're a couple of typos which are so bad as to confuse the meaning of the text (a word specifically referencing a tabu mentioned in an earlier paragraph is replaced w/ gibberish) - they even get the year of his birth wrong on the last page, rendering it as 190? instead of 1907
Here's an e-mail I sent to Tor Books:
I purchased a copy of Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ and it was so rife w/ errors that rather than enjoying reading it, I found myself proofreading it over the weekend. Apparently this ebook was _never_ proofread, since it has numerous errors, including mis-spelled chapter heads, question marks placed wherever there was a discretionary or non-breaking hyphen, a slash instead of an italic capital ``I'', &c.
I've got a 42MB Notes file exported from my Sony PRS-600 which highlights all of the errors, things like:
Inside front cover: ``From Mars to Venus—to danger-filled advenTures...'' - should be adventures
``...ever managed to become Space Cadets at the Space Academy Young men such as Matt and Tex...'' - missing period, should be ``...Space Academy. Young men...''
pg. 11 ``... thin air stood Hay-worth Hall...'' - extraneous hyphen, should be Hayworth
pg. 22 ``...it had a score showing in it—"yjT Well, he thought...'' - missing end punctuation and closing quote mark, the score is gibberish--- should be ``37'' (had to look that up on the Google Books copy).
pg. 27 ``Lieutenant Ezra Dahlguisty Who Helped Create the Tradition of the Patrol—ig6g-igg6. - Dahlquist. gibberish at the end should be a pair of years, probably 1969--1996.
pg. 30 ``Don't play 'iron man.'There's no sense...'' - space missing between single quote and ``T''
And it goes on and on like that, w/ a lot of the errors actually confusing the meaning of the text.
Agreed, we do need to clear LEO-space --- but I just can't see the economic incentive of recycling as a major component of that effort. Getting an asteroid in orbit and a foundry going first would help that along though.
The only issue like that for the Wii has been that some first generation Wii units had faulty disc drives which can't read dual-layer game disks --- purchase such a game, find out it won't play and contact Nintendo customer service --- AIUI they'll replace the drive.
Interesting idea, but there's not _that_ much of it, it's scattered and in a lot of different orbits, so would require a _lot_ of energy to get each bit.
I dunno. I think the 100 has benefited from improvements in battery technology. Time was when the joke was that Radio Shack created the Model 100 to _sell_ batteries (and it drew slightly too much for the rechargeables of that era to power it, so one would tape a battery to the outside of the case and wire that in to the others).
I think I still have an old magazine which has an editorial where they make this joke (including a mention of how many friends one had to sign up for the ``Battery of the month club'' to power one's Model 100).
I'm not seeing an equivalent to a Wii Remote / Nunchuk and games which use it in an interesting way for a PC. So, motion control gaming (and the fact that the Wii is low-power) is a big win for Nintendo.
I've had an awful lot of fun playing Red Steel 2 and Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (and to a lesser extent the IR-aimed shooting games like Goldeneye 007 and Metroid Prime Trilogy).
Ages ago, I read a statement that an ounce of gold (or $20 back when the U.S. was on the gold standard) would buy one a top-of-the-line Brooks Brothers suit or Colt revolver and that while $20 wouldn't, an ounce of gold still would (this would've been in the late '70s) --- interestingly one can now get 2 suits, or a revolver (and a third of a second one) for an ounce of gold now, which would tend to support the notion that gold is somewhat over-valued now.
The problem there is the number of charging stations needed at a busy station --- fuel pumps already don't make much money for a station, increasing the time to 30 minutes would require a much higher profit margin.
One can make an argument that the investment banking boom was more of a problem --- when the best and brightest graduates of the top colleges of the country are getting sucked up by investment groups so that they can earn such groups some slightly larger percentage of profit than was earned previously by creating Haskell programs for High-Frequency Trading that leaves companies doing real work and real science and real advancement of the human condition behind.
The note that one can use Libre Office as a replacement for FrameMaker is interesting though.
The one feature I've always wanted to see in Word was for the style formatting area to have each paragraph style be a pop-up menu which one can click on (or better still tab to) and change the current paragraph style w/ the keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything interesting written yet on this?
I did find:
http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/05/15/an-introduction-to-the-diablo-3-economy-for-wow-players/
and was surprised to see the 1 week lockout from launch for the sales.
I'm still surprised that they haven't run afoul of anti-gambling legislation and am curious as to what is in place to prevent money-laundering, &c.
That said, I'd still love to see an instance like to that of the short story ``Catacomb'' from _Dragon Magazine_ May 1985. For those who haven't read the story it begins here:
http://henrysstories.blogspot.com/2011/03/catacomb-part-1-of-5.html
William
Let me rephrase then (I agree w/ you).
``For a properly designed thing, production in quantity will become cheaper, if the quantities hit the numbers required for efficiencies of scale to be triggered.''
Is that precise enough?
Lessee, one could:
- give a minor (unable to sign contracts) a pre-paid $100 credit card
- go to the store where it's being sold, pay w/ the pre-paid CC and use its number to sign up for payment of the XBox Live contract
If you make it out of the store and the store can't track you down and Microsoft can't find the XBox based on its serial number (you'd have to ensure that it never connected to the internet while running Microsoft's software) it might be workable.
Would one be able to install XBox Media Center on such a machine?
William
Yeah, it'll be the Audrey / iOpener all over again, based on how they enforce that.
William
The thing is, in large quantities, production should become cheaper, and there is a way to address #2 --- just put in a limit on each reward level which isn't readily mass-produced --- that's what Thomas Phinney did w/ his Call of C'Thulhu font Cristoforo:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tphinney/cristoforo-reviving-victorian-fonts-with-a-cthulhu
William
The missiles in Cuba were offensive, these are defensive --- big difference.
This is nothing more than an admission on the part of the Russians that their economy isn't able to build enough missiles to off-set these defenses, which pains them, since arguably it was an inability of their economy to build enough war materiel to provide sufficient targets for the U.S. to blow up on the Ho Chi Minh trail _and_ sufficient military exports for other countries _and_ build enough missiles to counter their perception of the Strategic Defense Initiative _and_ keep their people feed and happy.
As one teacher of mine opined, a country whose government can't supply their people w/ toilet paper will eventually have a change of government.
Comics themselves are a bit too busy for a 3-year old.
My son had a bunch of beginning reader books which were re-tellings of bits of the Spiderman movies and they were far more approachable for him.
When the kid can be trusted w/ spending money, then he can buy Marvel Adventures comics and other age-appropriate things (you'll need to _always_ check this in this post Comics Code Authority age).
Collateral damage and accidental civilian casualties are not murder.
an AC asked:
>Wasn't military spending one of the causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire?
It was a lack of military spending and an inability to adapt their military to cope w/ changes in military technology (the development of the composite bow by the horsemen of Central Asia) which resulted in the downfall of the Roman Empire, that and dry-rot from w/in due to a dis-affected population (a huge majority of which were slaves) which wearied of being manipulated so as to make the wealthy and powerful, wealthier and more powerful (seem familiar).
William
H. Beam Piper put forth that handedness develops when a culture becomes aware of anatomy and learns to fight w/ the heart being guarded by twisting the body.
Yes, there are, all to the glory of the Fuehrer and the Third Reich. Yeah, right.
Already posted this elsewhere --- Sen. Alan Cranston, on his return to the U.S. from Germany, finding an expurgated version for sale which had some Americans admiring Hitler, translated all the unpleasant parts, and published them:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Cranston/cranston-con2.html
The problem is that in the past, it was edited down by the Nazi party, so as to be unobjectionable --- arguably even admirable.
It was such a condensed version which was published in the U.S. before Word War II and which had many Americans admiring Hitler.
Sen. Alan Cranston, on his return to the U.S. from Germany, finding this version for sale, translated all the unpleasant parts, and published them:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Cranston/cranston-con2.html
There needs to be a control in place so that only the compleat text is published, preferably w/ footnotes detailing the inaccuracies and lies and putting forward the unambiguous facts.
William
I bought Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ from the Sony Reader Store for my PRS-600 and the book was so rife w/ errors as to be essentially unreadable --- I actually had to look up some bits on books.google.com in order to understand some passages.
I purchased Robert Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ and (tried to) read it over the weekend --- the book had so many errors, I wound up proofreading it instead:
- all discretionary and non-breaking hyphens show up as question marks in the text
- lots of extraneous hyphens
- a couple of chapter titles are mis-spelled
- There're a couple of typos which are so bad as to confuse the meaning of the text (a word specifically referencing a tabu mentioned in an earlier paragraph is replaced w/ gibberish)
- they even get the year of his birth wrong on the last page, rendering it as 190? instead of 1907
Here's an e-mail I sent to Tor Books:
I purchased a copy of Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ and it was so rife w/ errors that rather than enjoying reading it, I found myself proofreading it over the weekend. Apparently this ebook was _never_ proofread, since it has numerous errors, including mis-spelled chapter heads, question marks placed wherever there was a discretionary or non-breaking hyphen, a slash instead of an italic capital ``I'', &c.
I've got a 42MB Notes file exported from my Sony PRS-600 which highlights all of the errors, things like:
Inside front cover:
``From Mars to Venus—to danger-filled advenTures...''
- should be adventures
``...ever managed to become Space Cadets at the Space Academy Young men such as Matt and Tex...''
- missing period, should be ``...Space Academy. Young men...''
pg. 11 ``... thin air stood Hay-worth Hall...''
- extraneous hyphen, should be Hayworth
pg. 22 ``...it had a score showing in it—"yjT Well, he thought...''
- missing end punctuation and closing quote mark, the score is gibberish--- should be ``37'' (had to look that up on the Google Books copy).
pg. 27 ``Lieutenant Ezra Dahlguisty Who Helped Create the Tradition of the Patrol—ig6g-igg6.
- Dahlquist. gibberish at the end should be a pair of years, probably 1969--1996.
pg. 30 ``Don't play 'iron man.'There's no sense...''
- space missing between single quote and ``T''
And it goes on and on like that, w/ a lot of the errors actually confusing the meaning of the text.
Agreed, we do need to clear LEO-space --- but I just can't see the economic incentive of recycling as a major component of that effort. Getting an asteroid in orbit and a foundry going first would help that along though.
The only issue like that for the Wii has been that some first generation Wii units had faulty disc drives which can't read dual-layer game disks --- purchase such a game, find out it won't play and contact Nintendo customer service --- AIUI they'll replace the drive.
Interesting idea, but there's not _that_ much of it, it's scattered and in a lot of different orbits, so would require a _lot_ of energy to get each bit.
I dunno. I think the 100 has benefited from improvements in battery technology. Time was when the joke was that Radio Shack created the Model 100 to _sell_ batteries (and it drew slightly too much for the rechargeables of that era to power it, so one would tape a battery to the outside of the case and wire that in to the others).
I think I still have an old magazine which has an editorial where they make this joke (including a mention of how many friends one had to sign up for the ``Battery of the month club'' to power one's Model 100).
I'm not seeing an equivalent to a Wii Remote / Nunchuk and games which use it in an interesting way for a PC. So, motion control gaming (and the fact that the Wii is low-power) is a big win for Nintendo.
I've had an awful lot of fun playing Red Steel 2 and Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (and to a lesser extent the IR-aimed shooting games like Goldeneye 007 and Metroid Prime Trilogy).
William
Ages ago, I read a statement that an ounce of gold (or $20 back when the U.S. was on the gold standard) would buy one a top-of-the-line Brooks Brothers suit or Colt revolver and that while $20 wouldn't, an ounce of gold still would (this would've been in the late '70s) --- interestingly one can now get 2 suits, or a revolver (and a third of a second one) for an ounce of gold now, which would tend to support the notion that gold is somewhat over-valued now.
William
The problem there is the number of charging stations needed at a busy station --- fuel pumps already don't make much money for a station, increasing the time to 30 minutes would require a much higher profit margin.
One can make an argument that the investment banking boom was more of a problem --- when the best and brightest graduates of the top colleges of the country are getting sucked up by investment groups so that they can earn such groups some slightly larger percentage of profit than was earned previously by creating Haskell programs for High-Frequency Trading that leaves companies doing real work and real science and real advancement of the human condition behind.
IME one doesn't want stuff floating / moving around while editing --- leave that for when actually building the pages.
LyX:
http://www.lyx.org/
should address such awkwardness.
The note that one can use Libre Office as a replacement for FrameMaker is interesting though.
The one feature I've always wanted to see in Word was for the style formatting area to have each paragraph style be a pop-up menu which one can click on (or better still tab to) and change the current paragraph style w/ the keyboard.
I'd much rather have a shield belt / unit, though one wonders if it wouldn't have the same societal implications as Poul Anderson's novel _Shield_:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2150533.Shield
William