Oh, the incumbents will do everything possible to try to fuck up WiMax, you just know it. WiFi isn't a practical threat outside a few urban cores, yet they fight that too.
Changing laws in the middle of the game isn't great, that's true. But that just makes it all the worse if DSL should be changed back to being more heavily regulated at some point in the future, but the FCC still decides to deregulate it now. DSL is a natural monopoly. DSL line owners should be forced to share. Period.
Someone kicks/shoots/spears you until you're 90% dead. Are you:
a) running around as fast and capably as you were when you had 100% health, or:
b) barely moving, you want to curl up into a little ball, and hope someone takes you to a hospital so you can just lay there for a few months?
People with almost no health move slowly, so that the body parts that are still attached stay attached. Yet very few games implement this. Why? Because reality sucks.
Yes, in fact, women ARE attracted to guys with muscles. A more legitimate complaint might be that, currently, many fewer women play games than men, and so most game content is likely geared towards men and not women. But let's not unecessarily stereotype women while we're at it.
Deliberately damaged blankets similar to the one aboard Discovery were tested overnight in a wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center in California to help engineers and aerodynamicists calculate when during entry debris might rip away, what sort of trajectory it might follow and whether an impact could cause serious damage to the shuttle's rear wing elevons, rudder/speed brake or aft rocket pods.
But the wind tunnel tests, along with additional analyses, showed the blanket posed no significant threat to Discovery's return to Earth.
"We have new analysis that shows debris transport would be no issue and we came to the same conclusion with the Ames (wind) tunnel tests," Payette told the crew today. "So basically, no EVA 4 (fourth spacewalk)."
But the only reason MS is unprofitable now is because they're investing in future market share. They wouldn't do it otherwise.
Nintendo doesn't seem to be investing in the future. Just the opposite, their main selling point is that they're profiting from the past. Less investment now gives you profits right now, but gives you a future where there's no demand for your product.
Cross-genre games can be fun, but it's also good to give the player choice in games.
Some people don't like RPGs, so it may frustrate those people when, 70% through a single-player FPS game, they have to stop and spend an excessive amount of time leveling up their character. Same for stealth games, there's probably a contingent of people who just find them irksome, and would rather avoid those games, even if they're only 20% of an otherwise excellent game.
Re:Un-intelligent Design is not just inherently...
on
Equal Time For Creationism
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course. Science can't make any claim regarding the existence of an Intelligent Creator. So... discussions about an Intelligent Creator don't belong in science class. Science classes also aren't the right place for discussing the existance of Pikachu or Scooby-Doo or Santa Claus.
Presidents' views will never affect actual scientific discovery or prevailing scientific opinion.
However, science and philosophy/ethics and politics are increasingly overlapping (Is the earth flat? Does the sun revolve around the earth? how beneficial might stem-cell research be? When does life start (to the extent that science can give any clues)? Has the environment definitely started warming up lately? Is environmental warming caused by humans, or is it a natural unavoidable cycle? Is planting trees good or sometimes bad? Could drilling in ANWR possibly remotely have a neutral effect on the environment?) In this overlap, the president's opinion DOES matter.
Western leaders might think about banning games like the recent Grand Theft Auto game, where it clearly has a very large amount of violence compared to other games. They might even think about wanting to ban games like Counter Strike, but they'd have such a huge backlash I doubt they'd succeed.
But I don't think western leaders would ever try to ban PVP RPG's... casting fireballs at people and running around with 50 pounds of armor on is clearly a fantasy. Maybe if there were a series of incidents where school children got their heads cut off with swords, but any attempt like that is likely to be very unsucsessful, and more humorous than anything.
Ahh, that makes sense, thanks for explaining it that way. The Chinese government sometimes seems very difficult to understand by westerners. In the US, I think we're used to thinking of most communist leaders as completely nuts, but China is clearly not nuts, since they've been able to foster an environment where their economy can grow very quickly (even while maintaining a fairly rigid social policy).
Realistically, what portion of their enormous profits are from minors? How many families are wealthy enough to afford to pay an hourly fee soley so their kid can play the game?
Though there are tweaks that Blizzard could make to the game. I suppose minors could be prevented from playing on the WoW PVP servers. But I don't see how they could credibly remove the PVP flag from normal servers, since there's that whole, you know, horde vs alliance thing that's kind of hard to fix. I suppose at the worst, you'd be able to have alliance walking around inside Orgrimmar but not able to hurt anything, and everyone would instantly realize that they're a teenager. But that'd still be bizarre.
Maybe simply removing the Honor system from minor players would be enough to fall within the letter of the law, since it then provides no benefit for minors to kill other players?
I'm really curious... Why do the Chinese leaders have the self-restraint to not ban games altogether, but they don't have the self-restraint to ban games with PK elements? Obviously they have the power to do either of these things. Are some of the chinese leaders avid gamers, and therefore recognize the value of games? Does the lure of foreign investment provide at least some influence on the leaders to not be so heavy-handed, but at the same time the leaders think that banning minor-PK isn't heavy handed? It's just kind of a weird decision to make, IMHO.
Practical engineering of any kind (EE, RF,...) always involves coming up with the best design you can given a a range of constraints (which include time, money, staff, rate of change of constraints, etc).
Good engineers are ones who can come up with the best product possible, given those constraints.
Joel is saying that only the best products really matter, and so only the best engineers really matter.
Me? I graduated 5 years ago, bachelor's in CS, and have worked at a Fortune 100 company since then. My favorite languages are Perl and javascript, but things like Postscript/Forth, Tcl, Lisp, and make influence me a lot. VB 3 & 4 were definitely standouts.
I can be cool to you, but my perception is that the discussion goes downhill quickly if anything is said that you don't agree with (eg. the Memory-Optimization Hoax thread that seems like it will continue to go on until one of you two don't have the physical strength to type any more). But I'll give technical conversation a try anyway.
Regarding your comments about ActiveX vs XUL, I don't think that XUL is going to create many holes. Javascript is heavily sandboxed, and ActiveX is not. There are a few ways to easily create holes in those sandboxes, and that's what's accidentally happened with Greasemonkey. But I don't think that it will be a common occurance for accidental holes to be created, because there are only a handful of ways to create such holes.
1.) I do believe extraterrestrial life exists. Absolutely. I am a believer in God, and in no known religion did God ever say to any of his propets as far as I know "You are my ONLY children"... it's a big universe folks, think about it!
SETI's an awesome effort & concept! A truly noble effort, in a world that is powered TOO much of the time on greed & corruption as well as pursuit of the "Holy Dollar"... Hope it helps find "E.T", & not the borg, you know?
Not really. MSIE has only two options that are a net-gain for everyone.
continue to ignore their browser, and users will eventually move to competitors who are much better equiped to handle the situation
actually keep up with their competitors. This costs virtually nothing for microsoft. Mozilla and Opera give away their browsers, yet are able to actually assign sufficient coders to the project to release a decent product. Microsoft has vast sums of money, and can't keep up. What does that say?
If Microsoft chooses the middle road -- implementing fixes just fast enough to keep people from leaving in droves -- then it's a net loss for everyone but microsoft. Yes, people will stay because 1) they don't have to install anything new, and 2) they don't have to learn new behavior / keystrokes. Microsoft is intentionally keeping customers based on only those two things, but that's a huge drag on innovation in web browsers.
Like a lot of things in the constitution, your right to protected free speech ends when it starts hurting other people/organizations/multinational corporations etc.
But there are laws that go beyond that. Threatening the president doesn't actually do harm to him (or in 2008, "her"). Mailing obscene material to a customer who paid money for it doesn't harm anybody (material created when the actor/actress is under duress, especially child porn, definitely hurts someone, but "obscenity" isn't defined anywhere near that narrowly). Advertising RF equipment, and mentioning only its potential illegal uses doesn't directly hurt anyone. Writing P2P software and mentioning its potential illegal uses also doesn't directly hurt someone.
Some of them are possible indrect causes of damage, but absolutely still require another person to take the next step and choose do something actually illegal (eg. hurt the president, eavesdrop, pirate).
Right, but as I mentioned in my post, that's not 100% perfect either.
The first problem is that env isn't located in (or accessible from)/usr/bin/ in all flavors of unix. This usually isn't a problem, but when it is a problem, the user gets a very cryptic error. ("./parent_script.py not found").
The second problem is that different kernels parse the remaining arguments differently. So if you did this:
#!/usr/bin/env python -W all
On linux, python would see the following args:
argv[0] = "W -all" argv[1] = "parent_script.py"
While on Solaris, python would see these args:
argv[0] = "parent_script.py"
Obviously that could create some cross-platform differences in behavior.
The biggest issue is that there's no standard and consistent behavior across Unix flavors. If we had that, we'd be all set.
If anyone can give actual provable examples of the US government abridging Constitutionally protected free speech, I'd love to hear it.
That's easy. The constitution and the federal and state laws have many many rules. Some of them are in conflict. It's not always clear which of the rules in conflict trumps the other. When there's some disagreement about which one should win, some people have legitimate room to say that the first amendment is being overruled. Our speech isn't being "trampled" per-se, but it is being limited, and some of the limits may seem kind of silly in some cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Changing laws in the middle of the game isn't great, that's true. But that just makes it all the worse if DSL should be changed back to being more heavily regulated at some point in the future, but the FCC still decides to deregulate it now. DSL is a natural monopoly. DSL line owners should be forced to share. Period.
Someone kicks/shoots/spears you until you're 90% dead. Are you:
People with almost no health move slowly, so that the body parts that are still attached stay attached. Yet very few games implement this. Why? Because reality sucks.Yes, in fact, women ARE attracted to guys with muscles. A more legitimate complaint might be that, currently, many fewer women play games than men, and so most game content is likely geared towards men and not women. But let's not unecessarily stereotype women while we're at it.
Nintendo doesn't seem to be investing in the future. Just the opposite, their main selling point is that they're profiting from the past. Less investment now gives you profits right now, but gives you a future where there's no demand for your product.
Some people don't like RPGs, so it may frustrate those people when, 70% through a single-player FPS game, they have to stop and spend an excessive amount of time leveling up their character. Same for stealth games, there's probably a contingent of people who just find them irksome, and would rather avoid those games, even if they're only 20% of an otherwise excellent game.
Best technical description of clothes features, evar.
Of course. Science can't make any claim regarding the existence of an Intelligent Creator. So... discussions about an Intelligent Creator don't belong in science class. Science classes also aren't the right place for discussing the existance of Pikachu or Scooby-Doo or Santa Claus.
However, science and philosophy/ethics and politics are increasingly overlapping (Is the earth flat? Does the sun revolve around the earth? how beneficial might stem-cell research be? When does life start (to the extent that science can give any clues)? Has the environment definitely started warming up lately? Is environmental warming caused by humans, or is it a natural unavoidable cycle? Is planting trees good or sometimes bad? Could drilling in ANWR possibly remotely have a neutral effect on the environment?) In this overlap, the president's opinion DOES matter.
But I don't think western leaders would ever try to ban PVP RPG's... casting fireballs at people and running around with 50 pounds of armor on is clearly a fantasy. Maybe if there were a series of incidents where school children got their heads cut off with swords, but any attempt like that is likely to be very unsucsessful, and more humorous than anything.
Ahh, that makes sense, thanks for explaining it that way. The Chinese government sometimes seems very difficult to understand by westerners. In the US, I think we're used to thinking of most communist leaders as completely nuts, but China is clearly not nuts, since they've been able to foster an environment where their economy can grow very quickly (even while maintaining a fairly rigid social policy).
Though there are tweaks that Blizzard could make to the game. I suppose minors could be prevented from playing on the WoW PVP servers. But I don't see how they could credibly remove the PVP flag from normal servers, since there's that whole, you know, horde vs alliance thing that's kind of hard to fix. I suppose at the worst, you'd be able to have alliance walking around inside Orgrimmar but not able to hurt anything, and everyone would instantly realize that they're a teenager. But that'd still be bizarre.
Maybe simply removing the Honor system from minor players would be enough to fall within the letter of the law, since it then provides no benefit for minors to kill other players?
I'm really curious... Why do the Chinese leaders have the self-restraint to not ban games altogether, but they don't have the self-restraint to ban games with PK elements? Obviously they have the power to do either of these things. Are some of the chinese leaders avid gamers, and therefore recognize the value of games? Does the lure of foreign investment provide at least some influence on the leaders to not be so heavy-handed, but at the same time the leaders think that banning minor-PK isn't heavy handed? It's just kind of a weird decision to make, IMHO.
Good engineers are ones who can come up with the best product possible, given those constraints.
Joel is saying that only the best products really matter, and so only the best engineers really matter.
I can be cool to you, but my perception is that the discussion goes downhill quickly if anything is said that you don't agree with (eg. the Memory-Optimization Hoax thread that seems like it will continue to go on until one of you two don't have the physical strength to type any more). But I'll give technical conversation a try anyway.
Regarding your comments about ActiveX vs XUL, I don't think that XUL is going to create many holes. Javascript is heavily sandboxed, and ActiveX is not. There are a few ways to easily create holes in those sandboxes, and that's what's accidentally happened with Greasemonkey. But I don't think that it will be a common occurance for accidental holes to be created, because there are only a handful of ways to create such holes.
What did you study when you were in college? Did you go for the minor in CS, or/and were there other things you studied?
SETI's an awesome effort & concept! A truly noble effort, in a world that is powered TOO much of the time on greed & corruption as well as pursuit of the "Holy Dollar"... Hope it helps find "E.T", & not the borg, you know?
The real APK & yourself had a chuckle over this eh? Boy, you are in for one heck of a surprise soon is all I can say.
APK
P.S.=> You'll be hearing from my attorneys shortly... DO NOT EMAIL ME AGAIN! apk
end of discussion
- continue to ignore their browser, and users will eventually move to competitors who are much better equiped to handle the situation
- actually keep up with their competitors. This costs virtually nothing for microsoft. Mozilla and Opera give away their browsers, yet are able to actually assign sufficient coders to the project to release a decent product. Microsoft has vast sums of money, and can't keep up. What does that say?
If Microsoft chooses the middle road -- implementing fixes just fast enough to keep people from leaving in droves -- then it's a net loss for everyone but microsoft. Yes, people will stay because 1) they don't have to install anything new, and 2) they don't have to learn new behavior / keystrokes. Microsoft is intentionally keeping customers based on only those two things, but that's a huge drag on innovation in web browsers.The whole web is a big hack anyway. This is no different from severely mangling the user-agent string.
Some of them are possible indrect causes of damage, but absolutely still require another person to take the next step and choose do something actually illegal (eg. hurt the president, eavesdrop, pirate).
The first problem is that env isn't located in (or accessible from) /usr/bin/ in all flavors of unix. This usually isn't a problem, but when it is a problem, the user gets a very cryptic error. ("./parent_script.py not found").
The second problem is that different kernels parse the remaining arguments differently. So if you did this:
On linux, python would see the following args: While on Solaris, python would see these args:Obviously that could create some cross-platform differences in behavior.
The biggest issue is that there's no standard and consistent behavior across Unix flavors. If we had that, we'd be all set.
As if a million tuna cans cried out, and then were silenced?