Looks to me like they did blame him. I mean they did sentence him to death.
It's just the part where they move past that and start blaming everything around him that makes me think they're overreaching. Do they honestly think that if he'd only played Solitare that he wouldn't be violent? I don't think so. He may have gotten some inspiration from the game, but ultimately the choice to do it was not dictated by Take Two or Rockstar or anybody but himself.
Hollywood agenda? Brokeback was in the theatres for a long time because there was a devoted fanbase watching it over and over again. Plus, there weren't many good movies coming out after it to bump it off.
Worse, the MITRE team was killed by the wind, or more accurately by dust devils. they kept having dust devils blow in front of the sensors, causing the vehicle to make an emergency avoidance manuver (oh no! Something jumped in front of me!). One of these manuvers left the vehicle in a bush, unable to move because it couldn't find a clear way out of the bush.
Free accounts are just that, free. They last forever, and they earn L$50 a week if you log in during that week at all. They don't expire, you can continue using the free account for as long as you like. The limitations include lower limits on the currency trading system and the inability to own land outright, although there are many people in SL who will gladly rent you land.
Premium accounts earn L$500/week weather you log in or not. They cost $10/month. You also get 512m^2 of land ownership (tier). This means you can own 512m^2 of land (after you buy it). If it's your first account, you can buy "first land" which costs L$1/m^2. If you want to own a larger plot of land, you have to tier up, which basically means paying more to LL each month to own more land. Eventually you can get to the point where you own an entire server's worth of land, but it'll run you an extra $200/month. Tier is the primary way LL makes money on SL.
There are other limitations. The complexity of the objects you can build permanently on the land is limited by how much land you own. All objects in SL are built out of simple geometric shapes called primitives (prims). There is a limit of a bit over 100 prims per 512m^2. While you can make some fairly interesting things with only 100ish prims, most of the really impressive stuff in the game uses thousands of prims.
SL is less of a game and more of a toy. If you love building stuff out of blocks, this is seriously the game for you. It's like getting to play with legos and then showing it to the whole world. One thing I should point out before anybody gets the wrong idea: You can distort a prim quite a bit, making it far more interesting to play around with than simple static blocks.:) If you're not the creative type and you get bored unless there's some monster that needs slaying, then don't even bother installing SL. There's nothing for you there.
I remember overclocking my first PC. I ended up overclocking it about 33% and managed to get it to the point where it played Starcraft smoothly. Other than that, I've not seen much point in overclocking.
Yeah, I get tired of hitting "Attack->With my Sword" a gazillion times too. I just hope there's a way to override the player's actions in battle when you want them to do something unusual.
Also, if the system is not sophisticated enough it could be a problem. Say I run up on an ice creature, normally I'd have the mage cast "fire" on it. Is there going to be a rule like "Target (Fire Weak) creature"? The article made it sound very primitive, although I can easily see the battle system designed to require no more knowledge than the scripting system has.
The entire first page of the article seemed like a waste too. Some players are too dumb to realize that some huge monster right outside town shouldn't be attacked, even though it's obviously going to crush you? The game is "too hard" because they're morons? On the other hand, the writer might have just been unfair and lumping legitimate complaints about the difficulty in with people who are total retards and complain the first time they get game over.
This will also be great news to my old roomate who played FF games for the storyline and considered the battles a nusance that he had to get through to get more story. On the other hand, he's found the past few FF games a bit too hard for him (he never stops and levels up his characters anywhere, nor does he like farming spells or whatnot to power up his items), so who knows?
Slashdot isn't peer reviewed, at least not as far as the top level stories are concerned. The comments are peer reviewed, and in general the system seems to work reasonably well, certainly better than the selection process for the stories at least.
Maybe there is something to all of those internet kooks afterall? This is hardly the first time I've seen talk of creating (or nullifying) gravity by spinning superconductors around, sometimes with electromagnetic charge and sometimes without.
The problem usually comes when someone wants to see the experiment replicated. For some reason the effect always seems to go away when other people are looking. Or worse, other people notice things like "you've got a lot of evaporating liquid nitrogen flying past your mass sensor, isn't that going to affect the readings?
Still, effective anti-grav in my lifetime would be quite a breakthough.
The internet is ALWAYS just about to run out of bandwidth (well in a few years). I remember back in 1996 or so when it was real bad. The thing is, the internet isn't static. People are always upgrading bits here and there. It's not like we don't have the technology for much faster connections, it's just so new that most people havn't deployed it yet.
That said, there may be a couple of lean years in our future. Back in 1996 when bandwidth started getting scarce while the demand was shooting up, the various telcos were stepping all over each other to build as much infrastructure as possible. Around 2000 or so we were greatly overbuilt in many areas and combined with the dot.com boom it put the brakes on new building. 6 years later and the telcos are naturally reluctant to go on a big building spree again, so they're taking it slow, and it may end up being a bit too slow depending on how much the internet grows (although growth has been flattening out in the first world, so perhaps it won't be a problem after all).
Re:Cool, but I'm still nervous about the firm
on
PayPal Goes Mobile
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· Score: 1
You know, I've always been a bit suspicious of that site. I'm not saying Paypal is the best company in the world or anything, but a lot of the stories sound like "I'd managed to scam this guy and it was great but then Paypal locked me out, maybe if I make enough noise and embarrass them enough they'll open my account long enough for me to grab the money and run".
I'm by no means a high volume Paypal user, but these stories do make me suspicious, especially when someone is advertising some competitor I've never heard of (rule 1 of online transactions: If somoene ONLY wants to go through some "escrow" site you've never heard of, run).
Sounds like you have some halfassed TV that accepts both PAL and NTSC inputs, but doesn't account for the resolution differences. Normally if you play a PAL game on an NTSC TV or vice versa, the picture will roll in addition to being squashed.
Of course the PSx and PS2 hardware is the same on both sides of the pond. The games are pretty much the same too. The only difference is a file on the disc that has the line "FORMAT = NTSC" or "FORMAT = PAL" or something like it. It would be trivial for Sony to just get rid of that line entirely and have the owner choose which format (perhaps defaulting to the correct format based on the country it was sold in) when they first power on the console.
Except that it takes time and money to dub the movie into foreign languages. Even subtitles take time, and if a movie tanks in the US you probably don't want to bother. On the other hand, if some unknown comes out of nowhere and blows away the US box office, then you might be scrambling to find voice actors to get it in your country as fast as possible.
I'd hope the prototype looked better. That thing is rather boxy for something that came out in 2002. Looks more like a late 80s/early 90s car to me, save for the headlight arrangement.
You skimmed over 40 pages in 15 minutes? That's about 22 and a half seconds per page, which in most of my textbooks would get you maybe a couple of keywords if you're lucky.
It's stage two that always got me. I could spend a couple of hours getting good and familiar with something that looked important, only to have the professor completely skip over it for whatever reason. Knowing what I know today, I'm sure I could choose the important topics better, but back then I was still learning.
It was helpful for that one professor that always stuck one or two problems on each test that he never even mentioned in class, much less cover. It was pretty good at knocking a letter grade or two off of people who didn't read the whole book, but was kinda bad for people who misunderstood some part of the material and didn't even realize it until they got their test back.
Given how well Libertarian candidates do in most elections, I have to say that the grandparent is apparently not alone.
Me, I actually voted Libertarian once, before I realized the party was just full of tax dodging fat cats. I agree with them on their social issues, but I think the fiscal policy would be a disaster. It's rare that you ever hear a Libertarian discuss what they would do about preserving shared resources. They would turn the whole country into a case study for the Tragedy of the Commons if they could, and lord help you if you fall on hard times. Being a die hard Libertarian means not caring that some percentage of the people (and there will _always_ be a percentage that can't support themselves) starve/freeze to death because trying to change the situation would involve the government doing more than just keeping peace and order. Adam Smith's invisible hand doesn't help anything that doesn't involve money.
However, I do agree with their positions sometimes. Especially when it's clear that the current government needs to be _much_ more fiscally responsable than it currently is. I could never vote for one of them again, but I do think they have the right idea in certain areas, especially with social issues.
I never understood why Libertarians donate to current Republicans. If there's anything Bush Jr has shown, it's that he doesn't care one lick about "smaller government".
It doesn't help that most teachers are vary vague about what they plan to cover in the next period. I don't have time to read the 40+ pages for each topic to get the 2 or 3 pages the professor is actually planning to cover.
It's not like that is the only class I'm taking. When I get back I have to split my time between two or three projects for other classes, homework assignments, and perhaps even eating and sleeping at some point. I really hate when professors think your time is completely mutable. Oh, I know I havn't assigned homework in a couple of weeks, so do problems 47 through 92 by the next class period. Great, that's probably 6 hours of work, which I could do if I didn't have an English paper and computer program with mid-project deadlines in the same week and a mandatory 4 hour field trip from Geology.
Heh, I remember reading one Ayn Rand book when I was in High School. I can't even remember which book it was (it was the one with the Frank Lloyd Wright character who blows up a subdivision at the end, Atlas Shrugged maybe?). My thought at the time was that there could never be more than one of those guys in the world ever. If two of them met and disagreed on something, they would be trapped in eternal selfdestructive deadlock. It was selfish and would never work in a real society, at least that's what I thought in High School.
I remember there was a scholarship available to people who read the book and did a report on it. I did my report on exactly how the philosophy is a dead end street. Looking back, I'm pretty sure the people who offered the scholarship were the kind of people who wouldn't look at that kind of paper favorably.
What makes you think Roberts is going to rule in favor of reduction (or even non-expansion) of copyright? Everything I've seen about his history suggests that he'd be pretty pro-business on the issue (I.E. pro-Disney).
I'm just putting up here what the slides said. There was an undertone of "Yeah, we know SLI systems are too powerful, but look, you could maybe offload the physics to one of the cards and the SLI system of today is the single card system of tomorrow, hear that developers?"
Slashdot Mirror
* Put it in
Looks to me like they did blame him. I mean they did sentence him to death.
It's just the part where they move past that and start blaming everything around him that makes me think they're overreaching. Do they honestly think that if he'd only played Solitare that he wouldn't be violent? I don't think so. He may have gotten some inspiration from the game, but ultimately the choice to do it was not dictated by Take Two or Rockstar or anybody but himself.
Hollywood agenda? Brokeback was in the theatres for a long time because there was a devoted fanbase watching it over and over again. Plus, there weren't many good movies coming out after it to bump it off.
Worse, the MITRE team was killed by the wind, or more accurately by dust devils. they kept having dust devils blow in front of the sensors, causing the vehicle to make an emergency avoidance manuver (oh no! Something jumped in front of me!). One of these manuvers left the vehicle in a bush, unable to move because it couldn't find a clear way out of the bush.
You're misreading the account structure.
:) If you're not the creative type and you get bored unless there's some monster that needs slaying, then don't even bother installing SL. There's nothing for you there.
Free accounts are just that, free. They last forever, and they earn L$50 a week if you log in during that week at all. They don't expire, you can continue using the free account for as long as you like. The limitations include lower limits on the currency trading system and the inability to own land outright, although there are many people in SL who will gladly rent you land.
Premium accounts earn L$500/week weather you log in or not. They cost $10/month. You also get 512m^2 of land ownership (tier). This means you can own 512m^2 of land (after you buy it). If it's your first account, you can buy "first land" which costs L$1/m^2. If you want to own a larger plot of land, you have to tier up, which basically means paying more to LL each month to own more land. Eventually you can get to the point where you own an entire server's worth of land, but it'll run you an extra $200/month. Tier is the primary way LL makes money on SL.
There are other limitations. The complexity of the objects you can build permanently on the land is limited by how much land you own. All objects in SL are built out of simple geometric shapes called primitives (prims). There is a limit of a bit over 100 prims per 512m^2. While you can make some fairly interesting things with only 100ish prims, most of the really impressive stuff in the game uses thousands of prims.
SL is less of a game and more of a toy. If you love building stuff out of blocks, this is seriously the game for you. It's like getting to play with legos and then showing it to the whole world. One thing I should point out before anybody gets the wrong idea: You can distort a prim quite a bit, making it far more interesting to play around with than simple static blocks.
I remember overclocking my first PC. I ended up overclocking it about 33% and managed to get it to the point where it played Starcraft smoothly. Other than that, I've not seen much point in overclocking.
Amen. Holographic storage has been 12-24 months away for over a decade now.
Yeah, I get tired of hitting "Attack->With my Sword" a gazillion times too. I just hope there's a way to override the player's actions in battle when you want them to do something unusual.
Also, if the system is not sophisticated enough it could be a problem. Say I run up on an ice creature, normally I'd have the mage cast "fire" on it. Is there going to be a rule like "Target (Fire Weak) creature"? The article made it sound very primitive, although I can easily see the battle system designed to require no more knowledge than the scripting system has.
The entire first page of the article seemed like a waste too. Some players are too dumb to realize that some huge monster right outside town shouldn't be attacked, even though it's obviously going to crush you? The game is "too hard" because they're morons? On the other hand, the writer might have just been unfair and lumping legitimate complaints about the difficulty in with people who are total retards and complain the first time they get game over.
This will also be great news to my old roomate who played FF games for the storyline and considered the battles a nusance that he had to get through to get more story. On the other hand, he's found the past few FF games a bit too hard for him (he never stops and levels up his characters anywhere, nor does he like farming spells or whatnot to power up his items), so who knows?
Slashdot isn't peer reviewed, at least not as far as the top level stories are concerned. The comments are peer reviewed, and in general the system seems to work reasonably well, certainly better than the selection process for the stories at least.
Of course that's the same thing the internet kooks always say...
Maybe there is something to all of those internet kooks afterall? This is hardly the first time I've seen talk of creating (or nullifying) gravity by spinning superconductors around, sometimes with electromagnetic charge and sometimes without.
The problem usually comes when someone wants to see the experiment replicated. For some reason the effect always seems to go away when other people are looking. Or worse, other people notice things like "you've got a lot of evaporating liquid nitrogen flying past your mass sensor, isn't that going to affect the readings?
Still, effective anti-grav in my lifetime would be quite a breakthough.
The internet is ALWAYS just about to run out of bandwidth (well in a few years). I remember back in 1996 or so when it was real bad. The thing is, the internet isn't static. People are always upgrading bits here and there. It's not like we don't have the technology for much faster connections, it's just so new that most people havn't deployed it yet.
That said, there may be a couple of lean years in our future. Back in 1996 when bandwidth started getting scarce while the demand was shooting up, the various telcos were stepping all over each other to build as much infrastructure as possible. Around 2000 or so we were greatly overbuilt in many areas and combined with the dot.com boom it put the brakes on new building. 6 years later and the telcos are naturally reluctant to go on a big building spree again, so they're taking it slow, and it may end up being a bit too slow depending on how much the internet grows (although growth has been flattening out in the first world, so perhaps it won't be a problem after all).
You know, I've always been a bit suspicious of that site. I'm not saying Paypal is the best company in the world or anything, but a lot of the stories sound like "I'd managed to scam this guy and it was great but then Paypal locked me out, maybe if I make enough noise and embarrass them enough they'll open my account long enough for me to grab the money and run".
I'm by no means a high volume Paypal user, but these stories do make me suspicious, especially when someone is advertising some competitor I've never heard of (rule 1 of online transactions: If somoene ONLY wants to go through some "escrow" site you've never heard of, run).
Sounds like you have some halfassed TV that accepts both PAL and NTSC inputs, but doesn't account for the resolution differences. Normally if you play a PAL game on an NTSC TV or vice versa, the picture will roll in addition to being squashed.
Of course the PSx and PS2 hardware is the same on both sides of the pond. The games are pretty much the same too. The only difference is a file on the disc that has the line "FORMAT = NTSC" or "FORMAT = PAL" or something like it. It would be trivial for Sony to just get rid of that line entirely and have the owner choose which format (perhaps defaulting to the correct format based on the country it was sold in) when they first power on the console.
Except that it takes time and money to dub the movie into foreign languages. Even subtitles take time, and if a movie tanks in the US you probably don't want to bother. On the other hand, if some unknown comes out of nowhere and blows away the US box office, then you might be scrambling to find voice actors to get it in your country as fast as possible.
You're one of those guys who likes the look of the Scion xB aren't you?
I'd hope the prototype looked better. That thing is rather boxy for something that came out in 2002. Looks more like a late 80s/early 90s car to me, save for the headlight arrangement.
You skimmed over 40 pages in 15 minutes? That's about 22 and a half seconds per page, which in most of my textbooks would get you maybe a couple of keywords if you're lucky.
It's stage two that always got me. I could spend a couple of hours getting good and familiar with something that looked important, only to have the professor completely skip over it for whatever reason. Knowing what I know today, I'm sure I could choose the important topics better, but back then I was still learning.
It was helpful for that one professor that always stuck one or two problems on each test that he never even mentioned in class, much less cover. It was pretty good at knocking a letter grade or two off of people who didn't read the whole book, but was kinda bad for people who misunderstood some part of the material and didn't even realize it until they got their test back.
Given how well Libertarian candidates do in most elections, I have to say that the grandparent is apparently not alone.
Me, I actually voted Libertarian once, before I realized the party was just full of tax dodging fat cats. I agree with them on their social issues, but I think the fiscal policy would be a disaster. It's rare that you ever hear a Libertarian discuss what they would do about preserving shared resources. They would turn the whole country into a case study for the Tragedy of the Commons if they could, and lord help you if you fall on hard times. Being a die hard Libertarian means not caring that some percentage of the people (and there will _always_ be a percentage that can't support themselves) starve/freeze to death because trying to change the situation would involve the government doing more than just keeping peace and order. Adam Smith's invisible hand doesn't help anything that doesn't involve money.
However, I do agree with their positions sometimes. Especially when it's clear that the current government needs to be _much_ more fiscally responsable than it currently is. I could never vote for one of them again, but I do think they have the right idea in certain areas, especially with social issues.
I never understood why Libertarians donate to current Republicans. If there's anything Bush Jr has shown, it's that he doesn't care one lick about "smaller government".
It doesn't help that most teachers are vary vague about what they plan to cover in the next period. I don't have time to read the 40+ pages for each topic to get the 2 or 3 pages the professor is actually planning to cover.
It's not like that is the only class I'm taking. When I get back I have to split my time between two or three projects for other classes, homework assignments, and perhaps even eating and sleeping at some point. I really hate when professors think your time is completely mutable. Oh, I know I havn't assigned homework in a couple of weeks, so do problems 47 through 92 by the next class period. Great, that's probably 6 hours of work, which I could do if I didn't have an English paper and computer program with mid-project deadlines in the same week and a mandatory 4 hour field trip from Geology.
Heh, I remember reading one Ayn Rand book when I was in High School. I can't even remember which book it was (it was the one with the Frank Lloyd Wright character who blows up a subdivision at the end, Atlas Shrugged maybe?). My thought at the time was that there could never be more than one of those guys in the world ever. If two of them met and disagreed on something, they would be trapped in eternal selfdestructive deadlock. It was selfish and would never work in a real society, at least that's what I thought in High School.
I remember there was a scholarship available to people who read the book and did a report on it. I did my report on exactly how the philosophy is a dead end street. Looking back, I'm pretty sure the people who offered the scholarship were the kind of people who wouldn't look at that kind of paper favorably.
What makes you think Roberts is going to rule in favor of reduction (or even non-expansion) of copyright? Everything I've seen about his history suggests that he'd be pretty pro-business on the issue (I.E. pro-Disney).
$1000 == Ouch. Definatly a high end laptop feature. That's more than many people pay for their whole laptop.
I'm just putting up here what the slides said. There was an undertone of "Yeah, we know SLI systems are too powerful, but look, you could maybe offload the physics to one of the cards and the SLI system of today is the single card system of tomorrow, hear that developers?"