Ahh, set top boxes, payware... ok, now it makes sense. I thought for a minute that Sony - the king of DRM-infested crapware and hair-brained rootkit schemes was actually going to do something positive. Hey - if google goes along with this, does that make them an evil company yet?
I've had 2 American cars in my lifetime. Both of them brand new from the dealer.
A Ford, where the driver's side window got stuck 2 weeks after buying it. Then the passenger side window got stuck a month after that. Then about 4 months later the accelerator cable snapped. Then the gear shift LEVER broke off in my hand. Then the transmission went... then I sold it.
A Chevy, which had the "standard" water pump problem for the model at 20,000 miles. Then at 40,000 miles it caught fire due to a ruptured fuel line cleverly placed right above the exhaust manifold, and almost killed me.
Strangely, I haven't ever had trouble with the 8 Hondas, Nissans and Toyotas I have had since then.
So to GM: even with fancy bells and whistles I will never buy a GM car (or an American car) again. It would just be a few years before the competition included an improved version of this technology anyway.
You have yet to experience driving through fog so thick you cannot see past the front hood of your car or rain pouring so quickly the wipers do nothing.
Hint: This is when you pull over and wait for the weather to clear before killing yourself/someone else.
Why exactly shouldn't GM look towards the future, that's what successful companies do you know.
Yes my father still has some Moon tickets from Pan Am. That was another company "looking towards the future". Unfortunately after Pan Am went bankrupt, no one else seems to want to honor those tickets...
Just a little hint, "looking towards the future" does not MAKE a company successful. It's a luxury that successful companies can allow themselves in order to stay ahead of the competition. In GM's case, however, returning to PROFITABILITY should be the priority. Gambling on exotic technologies that would only marginally increase sales is not the surest path to profitability. But hey what do I care - I'm not American, it's not like I am the one footing the bill for all of this crap.
If Toyota, once the paragon of automotive quality, can bork up the drive-by-wire system,
This is an allegation and has not been proven. In fact, the inability for any independent third party to reproduce this error after all this time makes it highly unlikely that a manufacturing/design error in fact exists. What is far more likely is that there could have been some isolated problems, and everyone else is jumping on the "ME TOO OMG FREE MONIES" bandwagon, hoping to get rich from an eventual lawsuit based on their fraudulent claims. Once again the American "jackpot justice" system is striking a blow for idiocy.
Early sales are often one of the big quantifiers in whether a studio will start working on a sequel
The author says this as if a sequel is a good thing. If it's true that all sequels are better than the original version, wouldn't the wise choice be to skip version 1 and buy the sequel?
It's hot in Suez. The dice are on the table. The long sobs of autumn violins, wounding my heart with a monotonous languor.
Funny, the Germans never suspected that the above meant: "Attack all telephone lines. Sabotage railway lines. D-day has begun, sabotage railway lines in the West, general mobilization: attack munitions dumps, transmissions, rail networks and German convoys".
This is how you hide things in plain sight. It's better than encryption because, well, there are no passwords to be thrown in jail over. Of course the guy on the other end has to know what he's doing.
The cancer industry has no incentive to find a cancer cure.
There's no such thing as a cancer cure until the day we can re-write our genetic code to prevent mutation due to time, transcription errors, ionizing radiation and interference from thousands of different chemicals. Therefore the "cancer industry" knows it is in no danger of being put out of business - ever. There is no conspiracy - you just have to understand what cancer is and how it happens to realize that it will always be a part of human life. If you live long enough, cancer is almost guaranteed.
More trade, which then possibly leads to more stability.
No, you didn't read the article, did you? This isn't about trade. China is accepting raw materials from your country in exchange for being hooked up to this rail service. Consider it a giant straw through which China will suck up Asia and Europe's raw materials. China has been doing a lot of this bartering lately - avoiding paying cash for things in exchange for construction, trade contracts, or goods. Goodness knows they have the manpower.
Please take a number and stand behind the perpetual motion people. When I'm done with them, I will explain the few finite set of cases where this method DOES work, and you can assume that in the infinite number of OTHER cases, this method does NOT work.
Aren't they getting tired of this crap? First it was the North Koreans and it turned out to be some random idiots. Then it was the Chinese, and again it turned out to be some random idiots. Now it's the Iranians... three guesses as to who is REALLY responsible for THIS new "attack"?
Perhaps the real question is why are these computers so easy to crack in the first place...
Hmm, what's that? You don't see anything wrong in the Catholic church?
An institution that used to torture people and burn them at the stake in order to "save" their souls, that used to preach its agenda in Latin (which no one understood) until less than a century ago. It teaches that everything bad that happens to you is YOUR FAULT, for which you should seek confession to accept forgiveness AND is also part of God's "plan" and therefore you should just shut up and accept it. Catholicism teaches people that they should do NOTHING (except, of course, pay the tithe), that God will do everything for them.
While this is better than Islam, which teaches people that they should rise up and kill the infidel, Catholicism destroys the human mind.
It is a known and proven fact that *MOST* of the Native Americans died because of diseases
Yes especially when American generals are handing out blankets from the small-pox wards of their hospitals to the natives as gifts. Please don't be so deluded, the examples don't stop there. How about America give back the land it took from Mexico? How about England release Scotland, N. Ireland and Wales? Hey, why don't the Normans rise up and no wait, anyone with Viking blood should kick Elizabeth out and re-claim the throne?
Where exactly do you draw the line? When wars are fought and won, they are WON. Bringing up old scores only leads to ENDLESS violence. This makes you a trouble-maker, you become EXACTLY the sort of person that you claim you are not. You want to reverse history to restore peace? OK, then we should all kill ourselves because ALL of our ancestors have been guilty of murder since the dawn of humanity. Stop spreading the violence and hate, and look forwards to the future instead of back at the past. Yeah the Chinese have done bad things. SO HAS EVERYONE ELSE. Shoving the Dalai Lama in their face at every possible opportunity is nothing more than hypocrisy. How about the Chinese make deals with the INDEPENDENT native nations, and sell them guns and weapons and offer them military support? How would that make Americans feel?
Meh, politics are full of the same lunacy as religion and sports. Neither you nor I live in Tibet. Neither you nor I were around when the Jews massacred the Canaanites. Yet the middle east has been fighting for thousands of years and achieving WHAT? Learn from this instead of being an idiot and unthinkingly repeating something because someone else said it.
First rule of medicine (well no, not really, it's probably down there around number 87) is "Thou shalt not brute force medicine".
Of course looking at medical shows, no wonder the public believes that the medical art consists of rattling off possible diagnoses at random and running tests until a magical positive result is found. And good for Dr. Lupski if he found a genetic cause for his disease. However after what was probably not a trivial expense, at the end of the day he went home knowing that, well, he had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Er yeah, but he already knew that.
Above putative rule #87 is another rule: If a particular test will not change your diagnosis if it gives a positive (or negative) result, don't do the test. Because tests use up limited resources like paper, reagents, labs, money and time. And especially the patient (or his insurer) usually doesn't have an unlimited supply of these things. While as a doctor I could theoretically order every test in the world to rule out that the stuff oozing out of your nose is not caused by anything other than the common cold (cerebro-spinal fluid leaks, anyone?), the ART of being a doctor is making the RIGHT diagnosis and ordering the minimum RIGHT tests to confirm that diagnosis.
This is something that the medical community has forgotten, somewhere along the way through technological progress (read - lots of neat toys to play with) and defensive medicine (I did the tests so if I get sued I can prove that I thought of this). Of course going out and getting your whole genome sequenced will make lots of biotech companies very very happy. Of course once in a while someone somewhere will discover some condition they never knew they had. However firstly if it's in your genes there's not much you can do about it anyway except in very rare cases, and secondly exactly how much will this cost again? Maybe when the $5 genome sequencing is available this could be an option for mass screening, but for now - please, let's use some common sense. Especially when the costs of doing something like this are born by OTHER people - like in insurance or state run health care scenarios.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't necessarily mean you SHOULD do something. But hey, I'm just an aging family doctor, what do I know.
More importantly, how good of a job have the "other" parties done to address your areas of concern? Obviously not so well, since they are STILL problems that you see as needing a fix.
Your kind of thinking is what keeps democracy enslaved in a useless two-party system where both parties do an absolutely terrible job at everything. Why don't you take a chance for once and assume that a new guy might do no worse than predecessors on all the "other" issues but at least do a damned good job within one special area?
1. Give The Game away free (sans DRM and assorted BS), let people pay for it on an honor/donations basis if they like playing it.
Actually my experience with Silent Hunter 5 (having played the game somehow for a frustrating hour or so) is that I don't want it even for free. The game sucks balls. I guess the only good thing about this whole experience is that I updated my video driver.
what i don't get is why are they scrapping a working design?
For the same reason people no longer use crossbows?
I mean, the crossbow is a working design. It can let just about any amateur kill a man from a distance. It makes no noise. Yet for some reason people are convinced that assault rifles are the way to go...
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, set top boxes, payware... ok, now it makes sense. I thought for a minute that Sony - the king of DRM-infested crapware and hair-brained rootkit schemes was actually going to do something positive. Hey - if google goes along with this, does that make them an evil company yet?
I've had 2 American cars in my lifetime. Both of them brand new from the dealer.
A Ford, where the driver's side window got stuck 2 weeks after buying it. Then the passenger side window got stuck a month after that. Then about 4 months later the accelerator cable snapped. Then the gear shift LEVER broke off in my hand. Then the transmission went... then I sold it.
A Chevy, which had the "standard" water pump problem for the model at 20,000 miles. Then at 40,000 miles it caught fire due to a ruptured fuel line cleverly placed right above the exhaust manifold, and almost killed me.
Strangely, I haven't ever had trouble with the 8 Hondas, Nissans and Toyotas I have had since then.
So to GM: even with fancy bells and whistles I will never buy a GM car (or an American car) again. It would just be a few years before the competition included an improved version of this technology anyway.
You have yet to experience driving through fog so thick you cannot see past the front hood of your car or rain pouring so quickly the wipers do nothing.
Hint: This is when you pull over and wait for the weather to clear before killing yourself/someone else.
Why exactly shouldn't GM look towards the future, that's what successful companies do you know.
Yes my father still has some Moon tickets from Pan Am. That was another company "looking towards the future". Unfortunately after Pan Am went bankrupt, no one else seems to want to honor those tickets...
Just a little hint, "looking towards the future" does not MAKE a company successful. It's a luxury that successful companies can allow themselves in order to stay ahead of the competition. In GM's case, however, returning to PROFITABILITY should be the priority. Gambling on exotic technologies that would only marginally increase sales is not the surest path to profitability. But hey what do I care - I'm not American, it's not like I am the one footing the bill for all of this crap.
If Toyota, once the paragon of automotive quality, can bork up the drive-by-wire system,
This is an allegation and has not been proven. In fact, the inability for any independent third party to reproduce this error after all this time makes it highly unlikely that a manufacturing/design error in fact exists. What is far more likely is that there could have been some isolated problems, and everyone else is jumping on the "ME TOO OMG FREE MONIES" bandwagon, hoping to get rich from an eventual lawsuit based on their fraudulent claims. Once again the American "jackpot justice" system is striking a blow for idiocy.
I still won't buy a car from them.
Early sales are often one of the big quantifiers in whether a studio will start working on a sequel
The author says this as if a sequel is a good thing. If it's true that all sequels are better than the original version, wouldn't the wise choice be to skip version 1 and buy the sequel?
It's hot in Suez. The dice are on the table. The long sobs of autumn violins, wounding my heart with a monotonous languor.
Funny, the Germans never suspected that the above meant: "Attack all telephone lines. Sabotage railway lines. D-day has begun, sabotage railway lines in the West, general mobilization: attack munitions dumps, transmissions, rail networks and German convoys".
This is how you hide things in plain sight. It's better than encryption because, well, there are no passwords to be thrown in jail over. Of course the guy on the other end has to know what he's doing.
A cancer cure would not be about that, but rather about minimizing the damage after it happens.
Sorry to split hairs but you're talking about a cancer TREATMENT, not a cure.
The cancer industry has no incentive to find a cancer cure.
There's no such thing as a cancer cure until the day we can re-write our genetic code to prevent mutation due to time, transcription errors, ionizing radiation and interference from thousands of different chemicals. Therefore the "cancer industry" knows it is in no danger of being put out of business - ever. There is no conspiracy - you just have to understand what cancer is and how it happens to realize that it will always be a part of human life. If you live long enough, cancer is almost guaranteed.
More trade, which then possibly leads to more stability.
No, you didn't read the article, did you? This isn't about trade. China is accepting raw materials from your country in exchange for being hooked up to this rail service. Consider it a giant straw through which China will suck up Asia and Europe's raw materials. China has been doing a lot of this bartering lately - avoiding paying cash for things in exchange for construction, trade contracts, or goods. Goodness knows they have the manpower.
Through some of the most politically unstable regions of the world. What could possibly go wrong?
Someone has discovered the white-list.
Please take a number and stand behind the perpetual motion people. When I'm done with them, I will explain the few finite set of cases where this method DOES work, and you can assume that in the infinite number of OTHER cases, this method does NOT work.
Aren't they getting tired of this crap? First it was the North Koreans and it turned out to be some random idiots. Then it was the Chinese, and again it turned out to be some random idiots. Now it's the Iranians... three guesses as to who is REALLY responsible for THIS new "attack"?
Perhaps the real question is why are these computers so easy to crack in the first place...
Hmm, what's that? You don't see anything wrong in the Catholic church?
An institution that used to torture people and burn them at the stake in order to "save" their souls, that used to preach its agenda in Latin (which no one understood) until less than a century ago. It teaches that everything bad that happens to you is YOUR FAULT, for which you should seek confession to accept forgiveness AND is also part of God's "plan" and therefore you should just shut up and accept it. Catholicism teaches people that they should do NOTHING (except, of course, pay the tithe), that God will do everything for them.
While this is better than Islam, which teaches people that they should rise up and kill the infidel, Catholicism destroys the human mind.
Is that a new kind of doughnut?
I ended up with a severe kidney infection from refusing to use the bathroom at school.
Liar.
It is a known and proven fact that *MOST* of the Native Americans died because of diseases
Yes especially when American generals are handing out blankets from the small-pox wards of their hospitals to the natives as gifts. Please don't be so deluded, the examples don't stop there. How about America give back the land it took from Mexico? How about England release Scotland, N. Ireland and Wales? Hey, why don't the Normans rise up and no wait, anyone with Viking blood should kick Elizabeth out and re-claim the throne?
Where exactly do you draw the line? When wars are fought and won, they are WON. Bringing up old scores only leads to ENDLESS violence. This makes you a trouble-maker, you become EXACTLY the sort of person that you claim you are not. You want to reverse history to restore peace? OK, then we should all kill ourselves because ALL of our ancestors have been guilty of murder since the dawn of humanity. Stop spreading the violence and hate, and look forwards to the future instead of back at the past. Yeah the Chinese have done bad things. SO HAS EVERYONE ELSE. Shoving the Dalai Lama in their face at every possible opportunity is nothing more than hypocrisy. How about the Chinese make deals with the INDEPENDENT native nations, and sell them guns and weapons and offer them military support? How would that make Americans feel?
Meh, politics are full of the same lunacy as religion and sports. Neither you nor I live in Tibet. Neither you nor I were around when the Jews massacred the Canaanites. Yet the middle east has been fighting for thousands of years and achieving WHAT? Learn from this instead of being an idiot and unthinkingly repeating something because someone else said it.
First rule of medicine (well no, not really, it's probably down there around number 87) is "Thou shalt not brute force medicine".
Of course looking at medical shows, no wonder the public believes that the medical art consists of rattling off possible diagnoses at random and running tests until a magical positive result is found. And good for Dr. Lupski if he found a genetic cause for his disease. However after what was probably not a trivial expense, at the end of the day he went home knowing that, well, he had Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Er yeah, but he already knew that.
Above putative rule #87 is another rule: If a particular test will not change your diagnosis if it gives a positive (or negative) result, don't do the test. Because tests use up limited resources like paper, reagents, labs, money and time. And especially the patient (or his insurer) usually doesn't have an unlimited supply of these things. While as a doctor I could theoretically order every test in the world to rule out that the stuff oozing out of your nose is not caused by anything other than the common cold (cerebro-spinal fluid leaks, anyone?), the ART of being a doctor is making the RIGHT diagnosis and ordering the minimum RIGHT tests to confirm that diagnosis.
This is something that the medical community has forgotten, somewhere along the way through technological progress (read - lots of neat toys to play with) and defensive medicine (I did the tests so if I get sued I can prove that I thought of this). Of course going out and getting your whole genome sequenced will make lots of biotech companies very very happy. Of course once in a while someone somewhere will discover some condition they never knew they had. However firstly if it's in your genes there's not much you can do about it anyway except in very rare cases, and secondly exactly how much will this cost again? Maybe when the $5 genome sequencing is available this could be an option for mass screening, but for now - please, let's use some common sense. Especially when the costs of doing something like this are born by OTHER people - like in insurance or state run health care scenarios.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't necessarily mean you SHOULD do something. But hey, I'm just an aging family doctor, what do I know.
we had evidence based medicine. Now we have court based medicine?
Remind me exactly when were politicians, judges and lawyers given a license to practice medicine again?
College kids claim to know it all.
Yes, it may be MIT. However let's see what happens AFTER you graduate...
More importantly, how good of a job have the "other" parties done to address your areas of concern? Obviously not so well, since they are STILL problems that you see as needing a fix.
Your kind of thinking is what keeps democracy enslaved in a useless two-party system where both parties do an absolutely terrible job at everything. Why don't you take a chance for once and assume that a new guy might do no worse than predecessors on all the "other" issues but at least do a damned good job within one special area?
Getting up at 4am is a great cure for insomnia.
1. Give The Game away free (sans DRM and assorted BS), let people pay for it on an honor/donations basis if they like playing it.
Actually my experience with Silent Hunter 5 (having played the game somehow for a frustrating hour or so) is that I don't want it even for free. The game sucks balls. I guess the only good thing about this whole experience is that I updated my video driver.
what i don't get is why are they scrapping a working design?
For the same reason people no longer use crossbows?
I mean, the crossbow is a working design. It can let just about any amateur kill a man from a distance. It makes no noise. Yet for some reason people are convinced that assault rifles are the way to go...