Thankfully there's still a sporting tournament which can't be bought by money/technology (see: Olympics, NFL, MLB etc).
You can have all the computers and scientists in the world working out strategies etc, but in this game it can all be destroyed by a single moment of genius from someone who grew up in a shanty town without ever seeing a computer.
Alcohol is part of the flavour of beer. Take out the alcohol and it tastes completely different. There is also no way to remove alcohol from beer without ruining it.
There are also effects of alcohol besides resistance between neurons.
Who are you to say people are stupid for watching medical dramas? You sound like an arrogant elitist, the sort who would only watch something if no-one else did, then wonder why they cancelled it.
Heck sometimes I think those people are threatened when a new show like firefly comes on. they just don't know how to classify it so they don't bother watching it.
Utterly unbelievable. With an attitude like that, no wonder it was cancelled. People like you probably don't believe in watching commercials either as they're for people more stupid than you, so there's no profitability in showing things you want to watch anyway.
What if I thought that Firefly was stupid, with a stupid, lowest-common denominator script, laughable dialogue and low quality actors? Does that mean you're stupid for watching it?
The tow behind trailer for long range trips? Already being built and be on the market shortly, because it's a good idea, the article was covered here on slashdot at least once that I recall, so it is you who are kidding yourself that this isn't possible.
That idea's dead in the water. It would mean you could only go at caravan speeds, and where would you park?
mining concerns and warehouses use electric drive vehicles all the time. while joe public has concerns-like yours-those folks are just going to work and getting the job done daily with "ohh dangerous high electric voltages", all over the world.
And when something goes wrong with them, they have to get expensive specialists to come out and fix them. They also have banks of batteries constantly charging up so they can swap them out when they run out. Fancy having a few giant batteries in your front garden and a hoist?
For all the crap about deliberately crippling them, it would only take ONE manufacturer anywhere in the world to make them, if they were viable.
Electric cars are a threat to auto makers because there is much less stuff to break and they are simpler to make
I would have thought that the added complexity of high-power electronics would make them MORE complicated to make and fix. You would need a qualified electrician to fix it rather than a mechanic. Forget home repairs. And being simpler to make would be a BONUS to manufacturers.
and they are a threat to governments because there is no way to apply the road fuel tax to them
That is a legitimate concern, as taxing proportionally to distance travelled is the fairest way to fund road maintenance. Would you instead prefer a giant fixed-rate annual road tax to replace lost revenue?
You can theoretically own an electric vehicle, own some solar panels, and eventually be driving for pretty darn cheap per mile.
What a surprise that theoretical advantages didn't turn into actual success. Anything can work in theory.
As to range,50-100 miles on a charge is doable *now*, which would handle just millions of commuter profiles
Just that small problem of charging. Two minutes in the petrol station, versus several hours waiting for your car to charge. Charging at home is only practical for people with garages. It doesn't help people who have to park in the street, but then the sandal-wearing liberal elite generally don't care about such people.
that is *easily* extended and handled by having an additional tow behind trailer with a fuel burning generator in it for trips, which would then morph your ride "on demand" into a hybrid vehicle..
You're joking right?
Pure electric cars are a clear cut example of what is called "disruptive technology" that threatens big auto, big oil and big government.
If electronic cars were in high demand, and simple to manufacturer, then by the simple laws of market-vacuums, at least ONE entrepeneur or car manufacturer would have stepped in and started mass-producing them to get one step ahead of the competition.
Considering how many rich corporations and venture capitalists there are who are desperate to make more money, and desperate to find any niche that isn't filled (most products/industries are saturated), if electronic cars were viable, there would be a gold rush to make them. Don't talk to be about big-oil conspiracies, where there's money to be made, there will be people trying to make it.
Big government against it? That would explain why various governments and opposition parties have environmental agendas, encouraging less car use and more public transport?
You're joking right? As opposed to baseball or basketball games that last seven days, or gridiron games that are so boring the stadium is empty BEFORE it finishes?
Can you imagine there are countries where women would NEVER be employed by local companies, and the only companies offering jobs to women are from outside the country?... So it is VERY much in your interest that this kind of exploitation ceases to exist.
Offering jobs to people who otherwise would be begging on the streets because no-one else will employ them is exploitation?
Because they're a tie-breaker? After 120 minutes there is a need to end the game abruptly, other methods have been suggested or tried, and they have not been as fair or as satisfactory. Replays are not practical anymore.
The difference is that the entire game doesn't consist of this
No, the entire game consists of adverts, replays and idiotic banter from the commentators. In a score/minutes watched ratio, American football is actually pretty low scoring. And low playing. There are few near-scoring opportunities at all, most of the time they're just running into each other in the middle.
It is more a test of who can't screw up kicking a goal. Is this a fair measure of a football player?
They've disconnected themselves from the very communities they serve.
What percentage of the community they 'serve' will actually be affected by this? Not a large enough percentage for it to matter. Most people don't work at the BoA or know anyone who does, this issue will completely pass them by.
If anyone here owns this stock, I recommend they sell within the next year or so. A company this arrogantly ignorant doesn't deserve your money.
If I owned stocks in a company that was making itself more efficient, I wouldn't sell them. You sell when the company's getting worse, not better.
I don't see what they're doing that's so 'arrogantly ignorant', and I'm not sure how being born in the right country gives you a right to a job. If I had money in this bank I'd rather they spent their money on my interest, not on the bloated wages of American workers.
Let's not pretend that Americans are better at counting money than those evil foreigners from the 'Axis of Evil'.
Stealing takes far more balls than sitting behind a desk. Personally I think that capitalist upper-class scum who hoard excessive possessions deserve to have them trimmed how and again. If you're rich enough to own a car AND an electronic device, then you can afford insurance, so what are you complaining about?
Btw 9-5 5 days a week is nothing, try working 7-7 7 days a week then complain.
For those (especially in North America) who lack education, Wales is a small western European country of about 3.5 million people.
To be correct, Wales is a small western European principality of about 2.9 million people.
It's a principality because it's controlled by the first-born son of the English monarch, and has been since the 13th century. To be technically correct, Wales is a province of England, rather than a country in itself. Sort of like Hawaii or Puerto Rico is to America.
According to this article, about 130 million US viewers watched the 2006 Super Bowl. The Worldwide figure is about 1 billion (or, as you would put it: 1,000,000,000)
Actually, that billion was a potential audience, i.e. how many it was broadcast to. I think that actually two million watched it outside of North America.
Watching people get excited over an almost goal makes me laugh everytime.
Watching people get excited at a basketball score every 2 seconds makes me laugh everytime. That really is the sport of people with ADD.
Are you telling me gridiron fans don't get excited when one of their players is tackled just before reaching the tryline? Or that a baseball fan isn't excited when a player hits the ball that just falls short of going into the crowd?
And penalties is no way in the world to decide a game - what a joke.
Why not? It's the greatest and most nerve-wracking spectacle in sport. Nothing comes close.
It's beautiful in its simplicity. A simple, twelve-yard kick. Not like in ice-hockey where you get to run up and get comfortable on the puck, you have to hit it cold. A penalty kick is the easiest thing to do in football, but in a situation where if you miss, your country is eliminated from the world cup, breaking the hearts of tens of millions of your countrymen watching on TV, it becomes the hardest thing to do in the world. It's so straightforward to score a penalty, that humiliation of missing is crushing, the pressure is unmatched anywhere in sport.
The sixty-yard walk from the centre-circle to the penalty spot becomes sixty miles. The eight-foot by eight-yard goal becomes eight by eight inches. The six-foot seven goalkeeper becomes sixty feet tall, the ball is a lump of iron. Your legs become heavy, a billion people are watching you, waiting for you to fail and humiliate yourself.
it's still relatively young but things like this (charging to see the games) are impeding the wide adoptation of it. Companies are so short-sighed and just want to profit as much as they can, instead of stepping back and letting us American see the games for free and help build a soccer fan-base that could be comparable to any other.
Aren't Americans used to paying for cable TV anyway? All the World Cup games are on ESPN, with some on ABC, what percentage of households do they reach?
Not many broadcast channels in America would be willing to flood their schedules with the World Cup. Can you imagine some fat American housewife turning on to watch Oprah only to find it's been cancelled for Ecuador vs Poland?
1680x1050 is horrible resolution for 20" of screen space, but I guess if you value size more than pixels, then this is the laptop for you.
High resolutions are overrated. Most applications/OSes don't work well at high resolutions anyway, they struggle to consistently scale the fonts and images, so you end up with sections of tiny text and tiny images.
For most users, high resolution only makes things slightly sharper, execpt for those geeks with inch-thick glasses who have everything in 8pt fonts at 1920x1200, but then there's probably a reason why they wear inch-thick glasses.
Oh yeah...don't forget the Holy 17 Pounds Batman! I'd be willing to bet that doesn't count the power brick. Does it come with wheels and a pull handle?
Seventeen pounds is only 7.7kg, if you can't carry that then you must have a wasting disorder.
Slashdot Mirror
Thankfully there's still a sporting tournament which can't be bought by money/technology (see: Olympics, NFL, MLB etc).
You can have all the computers and scientists in the world working out strategies etc, but in this game it can all be destroyed by a single moment of genius from someone who grew up in a shanty town without ever seeing a computer.
In a busy town centre or a supermarket car park? No chance.
It's designed for people a garage and room for a bank of batteries constantly charging up.
Alcohol is part of the flavour of beer. Take out the alcohol and it tastes completely different. There is also no way to remove alcohol from beer without ruining it.
There are also effects of alcohol besides resistance between neurons.
Utterly unbelievable. With an attitude like that, no wonder it was cancelled. People like you probably don't believe in watching commercials either as they're for people more stupid than you, so there's no profitability in showing things you want to watch anyway.
What if I thought that Firefly was stupid, with a stupid, lowest-common denominator script, laughable dialogue and low quality actors? Does that mean you're stupid for watching it?
It only samples a very small demographic: people who want to be monitored.
The tow behind trailer for long range trips? Already being built and be on the market shortly, because it's a good idea, the article was covered here on slashdot at least once that I recall, so it is you who are kidding yourself that this isn't possible.
That idea's dead in the water. It would mean you could only go at caravan speeds, and where would you park?
This firewall only applies to people within China, Westerners will be fine, the Olypmics isn't the World Cup, not many will be travelling to watch it.
mining concerns and warehouses use electric drive vehicles all the time. while joe public has concerns-like yours-those folks are just going to work and getting the job done daily with "ohh dangerous high electric voltages", all over the world.
And when something goes wrong with them, they have to get expensive specialists to come out and fix them. They also have banks of batteries constantly charging up so they can swap them out when they run out. Fancy having a few giant batteries in your front garden and a hoist?
For all the crap about deliberately crippling them, it would only take ONE manufacturer anywhere in the world to make them, if they were viable.
I would have thought that the added complexity of high-power electronics would make them MORE complicated to make and fix. You would need a qualified electrician to fix it rather than a mechanic. Forget home repairs. And being simpler to make would be a BONUS to manufacturers.
That is a legitimate concern, as taxing proportionally to distance travelled is the fairest way to fund road maintenance. Would you instead prefer a giant fixed-rate annual road tax to replace lost revenue?
What a surprise that theoretical advantages didn't turn into actual success. Anything can work in theory.
Just that small problem of charging. Two minutes in the petrol station, versus several hours waiting for your car to charge. Charging at home is only practical for people with garages. It doesn't help people who have to park in the street, but then the sandal-wearing liberal elite generally don't care about such people.
You're joking right?
If electronic cars were in high demand, and simple to manufacturer, then by the simple laws of market-vacuums, at least ONE entrepeneur or car manufacturer would have stepped in and started mass-producing them to get one step ahead of the competition.
Considering how many rich corporations and venture capitalists there are who are desperate to make more money, and desperate to find any niche that isn't filled (most products/industries are saturated), if electronic cars were viable, there would be a gold rush to make them. Don't talk to be about big-oil conspiracies, where there's money to be made, there will be people trying to make it.
Big government against it? That would explain why various governments and opposition parties have environmental agendas, encouraging less car use and more public transport?
You're joking right? As opposed to baseball or basketball games that last seven days, or gridiron games that are so boring the stadium is empty BEFORE it finishes?
You're assuming two things:
1. That there is only one demographic which plays games.
2. That you speak for them.
People don't want adverts on TV, or in magazines or on the radio.
But they still work.
By costs of living, I think he's talking about important things like food and clothing, not Western frivolities.
Can you imagine there are countries where women would NEVER be employed by local companies, and the only companies offering jobs to women are from outside the country? ...
So it is VERY much in your interest that this kind of exploitation ceases to exist.
Offering jobs to people who otherwise would be begging on the streets because no-one else will employ them is exploitation?
Because they're a tie-breaker? After 120 minutes there is a need to end the game abruptly, other methods have been suggested or tried, and they have not been as fair or as satisfactory. Replays are not practical anymore.
The difference is that the entire game doesn't consist of this
No, the entire game consists of adverts, replays and idiotic banter from the commentators. In a score/minutes watched ratio, American football is actually pretty low scoring. And low playing. There are few near-scoring opportunities at all, most of the time they're just running into each other in the middle.
It is more a test of who can't screw up kicking a goal. Is this a fair measure of a football player?
Yes.
They've disconnected themselves from the very communities they serve.
What percentage of the community they 'serve' will actually be affected by this? Not a large enough percentage for it to matter. Most people don't work at the BoA or know anyone who does, this issue will completely pass them by.
If anyone here owns this stock, I recommend they sell within the next year or so. A company this arrogantly ignorant doesn't deserve your money.
If I owned stocks in a company that was making itself more efficient, I wouldn't sell them. You sell when the company's getting worse, not better.
I don't see what they're doing that's so 'arrogantly ignorant', and I'm not sure how being born in the right country gives you a right to a job. If I had money in this bank I'd rather they spent their money on my interest, not on the bloated wages of American workers.
Let's not pretend that Americans are better at counting money than those evil foreigners from the 'Axis of Evil'.
Stealing takes far more balls than sitting behind a desk. Personally I think that capitalist upper-class scum who hoard excessive possessions deserve to have them trimmed how and again. If you're rich enough to own a car AND an electronic device, then you can afford insurance, so what are you complaining about?
Btw 9-5 5 days a week is nothing, try working 7-7 7 days a week then complain.
To be correct, Wales is a small western European principality of about 2.9 million people.
It's a principality because it's controlled by the first-born son of the English monarch, and has been since the 13th century. To be technically correct, Wales is a province of England, rather than a country in itself. Sort of like Hawaii or Puerto Rico is to America.
Actually, that billion was a potential audience, i.e. how many it was broadcast to. I think that actually two million watched it outside of North America.
Watching people get excited at a basketball score every 2 seconds makes me laugh everytime. That really is the sport of people with ADD.
Are you telling me gridiron fans don't get excited when one of their players is tackled just before reaching the tryline? Or that a baseball fan isn't excited when a player hits the ball that just falls short of going into the crowd?
Why not? It's the greatest and most nerve-wracking spectacle in sport. Nothing comes close.
It's beautiful in its simplicity. A simple, twelve-yard kick. Not like in ice-hockey where you get to run up and get comfortable on the puck, you have to hit it cold. A penalty kick is the easiest thing to do in football, but in a situation where if you miss, your country is eliminated from the world cup, breaking the hearts of tens of millions of your countrymen watching on TV, it becomes the hardest thing to do in the world. It's so straightforward to score a penalty, that humiliation of missing is crushing, the pressure is unmatched anywhere in sport.
The sixty-yard walk from the centre-circle to the penalty spot becomes sixty miles. The eight-foot by eight-yard goal becomes eight by eight inches. The six-foot seven goalkeeper becomes sixty feet tall, the ball is a lump of iron. Your legs become heavy, a billion people are watching you, waiting for you to fail and humiliate yourself.
A joke? I don't think so.
Aren't Americans used to paying for cable TV anyway? All the World Cup games are on ESPN, with some on ABC, what percentage of households do they reach?
Not many broadcast channels in America would be willing to flood their schedules with the World Cup. Can you imagine some fat American housewife turning on to watch Oprah only to find it's been cancelled for Ecuador vs Poland?
Buy groceries and try to avoid the ball-shaped coke cans and the "win a ticket" competitions on EVERY SINGLE piece of crap you buy.
Don't buy the ball-shaped cans (haven't even seen them), don't enter the win a ticket competitions.
Go to work and try to find ANY subject to talk about that doesn't involve it.
I've been to work today and had several conversations that weren't about the World Cup, and England kick-off tomorrow.
Why would someone who hates the World Cup even open a World Cup article, let alone post in it? Two words: Attention-seeking.
Won by people who were interested in paying less taxes on their large slave-run businesses? Yeah naive communism really won out over capitalism there.
1680x1050 is horrible resolution for 20" of screen space, but I guess if you value size more than pixels, then this is the laptop for you.
High resolutions are overrated. Most applications/OSes don't work well at high resolutions anyway, they struggle to consistently scale the fonts and images, so you end up with sections of tiny text and tiny images.
For most users, high resolution only makes things slightly sharper, execpt for those geeks with inch-thick glasses who have everything in 8pt fonts at 1920x1200, but then there's probably a reason why they wear inch-thick glasses.
Oh yeah...don't forget the Holy 17 Pounds Batman! I'd be willing to bet that doesn't count the power brick. Does it come with wheels and a pull handle?
Seventeen pounds is only 7.7kg, if you can't carry that then you must have a wasting disorder.
With two regimes, like in the cold war, a show of strength on both sides prevented a major direct conflict.
And that worked splendidly in the 1910s.