I'm fairly certain I recall AC2 having instanced dungeons. EverQuest 2 also has them. There might have been others. EQ2 is really cool, incidently, I'm enjoying it a lot. I'd love to see WOW, but alas I'm in Germany and Blizzard apparently thinks it's a really cool idea to restrict their betas to North America. I guess I could try to work around that with the upcoming "open" beta but I can't be arsed. Maybe they'll have EU beta or demo eventually, I certainly won't consider buying without trying for a couple of weeks.
As for Blizzard, they might get an award for producing lots of good games, but they should also get one for producing some of the most rabid fanboys. Especially WOW has got a huge number of people treating it like some kind of second coming, people who go away from other MMRPGs hating the genre thinking WOW will magically totally remove the grind from the game. I'm sure many of those really will like it a lot, but I don't know whether it's because they needed the Blizzard label to give it a real go or because the genre as a whole has progressed a lot since the first days of EverQuest. I'm also sure, and have witnessed, a lot of those people who hated MMRPGs will be direly disappointed my WOW. (Note that as I said, I haven't seen it myself, and I'm sure I'll personally like it a lot - but I tend to like MMRPGs in general.)
The article text refers to the Settler's of Catan without explaining what that actually is (ie a popular board game). So people who don't know what that is have a hard time understanding anything. Furthermore, this happens quite often on Slashdot. The editors, of course, could just write two sentences to explain it everytime it seems necessary, but they don't.
I agree the way grandparent said this was a tad confusing.
Yeah, you can argue that way. The way I meant it, that's just another model, basing your predictions on the evidence available from the past. There certainly can be more than one model (I guess I did let that one slip) and which one of those models is the most accurate is up for scientific discussion. That said, I'm neither qualified to participate in a scientific discussion on that topic, nor would I want to have one on Slashdot.:)
Let's not get all philosophical here, but really the best guess is all you can do in nearly all situations. And that's really the purpose of natural science; it's a process to improve the best guess of how our surroundings work.
Finally, here is article that that argues that rises in atmospheric CO2 are not a cause for alarm: PortlandTribune.com | Rise in CO2 levels is no cause for alarm
For what it's worth: The article - it's really just a brief op-ed piece - is fairly old (Fri, Jun 20, 2003), does not deal with the "leap" dealt with in the original article, and is written by the "environmental policy director at Cascade Policy Institute, a free-market think tank in Portland".
It's most certainly flawed, and I'm sure the people working on those models are very aware of that. Perhaps it's a natural phenomenon, perhaps not, probably it's a combination, but what do I know. You get a better idea as to what is the case by working with and improving on the existing models. And at any point in time, the respective existing model is all you've got to base a sound argument on.
The fee is not per household (or per Internet connection), but per device.
While the part you quote is quite insightful, saying it's per device is still incorrect or to the very least extremely easy to misunderstand. Per device would entail that even a one person household would have to pay n times the base fee if there are n devices in that household. That is not the case. What is the case that households are fairly irrelevant to the GEZ - if you have access to a device in your home, and you have a certain monthly income, you have to pay. As far as I understand it.:)
Man, *that* is some _FUCKED_UP_ mark up[s] and some propositus spelling ${pronoun/title} are USING THERE!/* makes it FAIRLY hard to ${read/comprehend} and you *LOOK* like AN IDIOT[S] */
You also pay for schools although you might not have any children, you also pay for health care you might not need, you pay for infrastructure you'll never use. That said, I agree with the GP that the GEZ should be abolished and replaced by a tax-financed system. Doesn't make sense to have two parallel systems in place.
You needed IE6 to use eBay? Odd. eBay recommends IE 5.5 or above, or the "latest" version of Netscape, which I guess means any recent Gecko version. Neither Netscape or Opera are guaranteed to work, though, although personally it has always worked fine for me with both - must've been a fairly obscure feature.:)
Ah. Opera offers access to the background image via the context menu, including saving it. It also can be set to ignore right-click prevention. Still a nice idea, though. Good enough to deter casual users, which is probably all they can hope for.
Well, it does get 2mm thicker for embracing convergence. 2mm might not seem like much, but it's at least visible for a device as small as an iPod. And to quote today's Penny Arcade on the GameBoy DS: "gadgets like this are supposed to get smaller not bigger".
That said, I guess the iPod already got smaller - it's called the iPod mini. With that available, it might be all right for the iPod to go a slightly different direction: away from the pure MP3 player to, well, whatever they have in mind. Maybe a standard iPod will play videos eventually, although Jobs previously said he doesn't like that. Personally, I think the iPod mini is a cooler device anyway, smaller with still plenty of music for a day or two. But I know others don't think so.
Google really does a lot of things now. And many of them have the chance of becoming as essential as their web searching feature and perhaps their ad business already is.
Google does web searching, advertising, usenet portal, web boards, webmail, price listings, news aggregation, searching within books, within white pages, within maps, and various other sources, paid web searching, blogging, a dictionary and a calculator and now SMS access to some of their services - I'm sure that if this takes off, access to many more will follow. It also does the whole thing in multiple countries, ie. I just got the mapping service that used to be exclusive to Canada and the US (I think) here in Germany, along with train schedule information.
And the weird thing is, as far as I can see they are as good or better at every single of those services as any other service provider specialising on it. One of the reasons for that is the fact that they're smart about it: apart from some core services, they don't try to replace existing services but rather sticks to being a portal easing access to the information. So when looking for maps of an area, you get multiple links to prominent mapping services showing just that area. And instead of creating a whole new train schedule for Germany, they just translate your query to one for the (very good) official service of the train company. The key difference being that I already have quick access to Google, and that I can use a written query to get the information instead of using a form. In a way, Google is the renaisance of the CLI over GUIs.
While this is a fun analogy, there's a difference: using someone's AP is not a passive activity. Looking at the airwaves in search for active APs is not an issue, it just becomes one when you try to use the AP to connect to its owner's network. The light analogy doesn't fit, you'd have to cast light back into the house and interact with the lamp, but that doesn't make a lot of sense.:) Or look at it that way, it's like using a IR remote to turn on the light on the front porch so that you can read by it.
Note that I'm not opposed to using open APs - for the moment, I've set mine up as open because I don't mind people using it - just saying the analogy doesn't really apply.
Judging by the FAQ, publishers send books to Google to get them scanned and indexed. I assume that when they send their books, they also agree to give Google a license to use the materials in the way described.
That said, I'm still curious how this will work out. There are many issues. For one, it will have to gain a critical mass of books to be more than a novelty. And if it really works as described above, they rely on others to bring books to them. With anyone else, I'd be very sceptical, but Google does have the sheer brand power to actually get publishers to send in books. On the other hand, maybe sent in books are just part of it and they also index books out of their own volition, which as you said brings up copyright concerns. If that works out, I'm curious to see how they will enforce the viewing limitations. It says that you'll be able to view the two pages before and after the one you found. It also says it records data to track which books you've already seen, assumingly to prevent you from seeing more than those 5 or another number of pages of any book, ever. It does not say whether or not you're required to log in an account, but that would seem to be the only way to prevent people from simply refusing a cookie or clearing them to see another 5 pages. Of course, Google is using accounts for most of it's add-on services, at least as an option, but I think it'd be a first for an account required to gain access to a certain search engine feature. And of course even with accounts, they wouldn't be very safe at all from malignent users, who could run multiple accounts, or groups of users who pool their pages to get the whole thing. Granted, it would take many users and more importantly a lot of time to get a 300 page novel, but groups working together to violate copyrights using an enormous amount of technical know-how are hardly new to the Internet. It's probably simpler to just scan and OCR the whole thing yourself, though.
Re:Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet
on
Gmail Adds Features
·
· Score: 1
Frames? IFrames? Changing an (I)Frames location refreshes it's contents but not the entire page. That's the only thing I can think of, it's not exactly the same though.
In response to the signature: Want a more mature forum than Slashdot? Try Technocrat.net
Okay, so I did, and it doesn't work. I figured it's some obscure joke I don't get, but the WHOIS record says it's registered for Bruce Perens so I guess it should be valid.
Yeah, I'm off topic, mod me down if you want to be a meanie, but I'm telling mom!
According to US military, some European countries spend nearly the same amount of GDP on defense as the USA. On the average, EU would have to spend additional 2.5% of GDP on defense, to match the USA. Now, according to Goethe Institut, EU spent on average in 1999 around 28% of GDP on welfare. Moving 2.5% from welfare to defense would be a noticeable, but not drastic policy shift.
Since the US data is fairly old, I just checked those numbers, here's what I got for Germany: defense spending for 2001 (still fairly outdated, I know) was at 23 billion Euros, overall government spending in that year was at 960 billion. Of those, a whopping 513 billion were paid for social security, however all other departments spent amounts in the same order of magnitude as defense, e.g. 22 billion for infrastructure and 30 billion for law enforcement. The GDP in 2002 was at 2,108 billion. So defense spending was at 1.09% of the GDP. The US spends more then thrice that amount. And while a 2% increase might not seem large compared to the amount paid for social security, it is when you keep in mind that this is nearly as much as the budget of infrastructure and law enforcement combined. So yes, this is an extremely drastic policy shift.
All numbers are from the sites of the Statistische Bundesamt (German federal bureau of statistics), specifically here and here. Note that I might have gotten something terribly wrong, I'm not really good at this.;)
For all I care the Slashdot editors could come up with furries.slashdot.org or whatever subtopics they want, as long as I can turn them off. That said, I doubt the number of furries is anywhere close to the number of politically interested: the top 3 stories, and a total of seven out of the top 10 are political stories, with this story coming in close on the top 10 in post numbers. Slashdot is not just tech, apparently.
Keep in mind that a nation must dow aht is in its best interest, not the interest of the world.
Why the hell would that be so? Why can't nations act in a way that's in the interest of the world? That's a worst case assumption, some nations might act in that way - many do, I guess - but it's not a "must". The same goes for individuals; just because some people are jackasses and only look out for themselves, that doesn't have to apply for everybody.
You dont see the world get into a big tissy whenever some nation decides to buck the UN and do their own thing. Why should the US be looked at differently?
A country "bucking" the UN is more or less of an issue depending on the countries importance. Isn't that freaking obvious?! Of course it's not front page material if Trinidad decides to ignore some contract it agreed within the UN, and of course it is front page material if France, Japan, Russia do it - or if the US does.
Why must all other nations depend so heavily on the US?
Where the hell does that come from? I mean, it's true, and also quite trivial - today, all nations depends quite heavily on nearly all others (that's globalisation) - but it certainly wasn't the conclusion of your little argument there. The UN, in a way, depends on the US to play along, more so than it required Trinidad to do so, in the same way I outlined above. It needs the msot important countries to stick to the rules they themselves agreed to, anything else reduces it's importance. Not to zero, of course, even a UN without the US is still an important group.
Bah. You already know the answer. China might be the "most poluting[sic] economy" (I'm not sure, you didn't provide any numbers), but it's far from the most polluting per capita. Reduce the average per capita CO2 generation, and your way of reasoning might be considered fair. Eventually, China will need to stop increasing the CO2 generation, as well. On the one hand people whine that reducing CO2 emissions will hurt the highly developed economies of the rich countries, on the other hand the same people argue that poor, developing countries hurt their economies that still are on a significantly lower level.
If he had so much as hinted at joking about any of those things I'm sure there'd have been a hundred posts whining because of it. ("How can he except to be a president with that attitude" blah blah) Not that I necessarily disagree with you - I'm just saying.:)
Because they often "look odd", because they usually take like a second to light up, because they're not available in the "right sizes", because the initial investment is bigger even though it easily pays off; ie. because people tend to be morons.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fairly certain I recall AC2 having instanced dungeons. EverQuest 2 also has them. There might have been others. EQ2 is really cool, incidently, I'm enjoying it a lot. I'd love to see WOW, but alas I'm in Germany and Blizzard apparently thinks it's a really cool idea to restrict their betas to North America. I guess I could try to work around that with the upcoming "open" beta but I can't be arsed. Maybe they'll have EU beta or demo eventually, I certainly won't consider buying without trying for a couple of weeks.
As for Blizzard, they might get an award for producing lots of good games, but they should also get one for producing some of the most rabid fanboys. Especially WOW has got a huge number of people treating it like some kind of second coming, people who go away from other MMRPGs hating the genre thinking WOW will magically totally remove the grind from the game. I'm sure many of those really will like it a lot, but I don't know whether it's because they needed the Blizzard label to give it a real go or because the genre as a whole has progressed a lot since the first days of EverQuest. I'm also sure, and have witnessed, a lot of those people who hated MMRPGs will be direly disappointed my WOW. (Note that as I said, I haven't seen it myself, and I'm sure I'll personally like it a lot - but I tend to like MMRPGs in general.)
The article text refers to the Settler's of Catan without explaining what that actually is (ie a popular board game). So people who don't know what that is have a hard time understanding anything. Furthermore, this happens quite often on Slashdot. The editors, of course, could just write two sentences to explain it everytime it seems necessary, but they don't.
I agree the way grandparent said this was a tad confusing.
Yeah, you can argue that way. The way I meant it, that's just another model, basing your predictions on the evidence available from the past. There certainly can be more than one model (I guess I did let that one slip) and which one of those models is the most accurate is up for scientific discussion. That said, I'm neither qualified to participate in a scientific discussion on that topic, nor would I want to have one on Slashdot. :)
Let's not get all philosophical here, but really the best guess is all you can do in nearly all situations. And that's really the purpose of natural science; it's a process to improve the best guess of how our surroundings work.
Finally, here is article that that argues that rises in atmospheric CO2 are not a cause for alarm: PortlandTribune.com | Rise in CO2 levels is no cause for alarm
For what it's worth: The article - it's really just a brief op-ed piece - is fairly old (Fri, Jun 20, 2003), does not deal with the "leap" dealt with in the original article, and is written by the "environmental policy director at Cascade Policy Institute, a free-market think tank in Portland".
It's most certainly flawed, and I'm sure the people working on those models are very aware of that. Perhaps it's a natural phenomenon, perhaps not, probably it's a combination, but what do I know. You get a better idea as to what is the case by working with and improving on the existing models. And at any point in time, the respective existing model is all you've got to base a sound argument on.
The fee is not per household (or per Internet connection), but per device.
:)
While the part you quote is quite insightful, saying it's per device is still incorrect or to the very least extremely easy to misunderstand. Per device would entail that even a one person household would have to pay n times the base fee if there are n devices in that household. That is not the case.
What is the case that households are fairly irrelevant to the GEZ - if you have access to a device in your home, and you have a certain monthly income, you have to pay. As far as I understand it.
Man, *that* is some _FUCKED_UP_ mark up[s] and some propositus spelling ${pronoun/title} are USING THERE! /* makes it FAIRLY hard to ${read/comprehend} and you *LOOK* like AN IDIOT[S] */
SCNR. HAND.
You also pay for schools although you might not have any children, you also pay for health care you might not need, you pay for infrastructure you'll never use. That said, I agree with the GP that the GEZ should be abolished and replaced by a tax-financed system. Doesn't make sense to have two parallel systems in place.
You needed IE6 to use eBay? Odd. eBay recommends IE 5.5 or above, or the "latest" version of Netscape, which I guess means any recent Gecko version. Neither Netscape or Opera are guaranteed to work, though, although personally it has always worked fine for me with both - must've been a fairly obscure feature. :)
Ah. Opera offers access to the background image via the context menu, including saving it. It also can be set to ignore right-click prevention. Still a nice idea, though. Good enough to deter casual users, which is probably all they can hope for.
Don't fear convergence, embrace it.
Well, it does get 2mm thicker for embracing convergence. 2mm might not seem like much, but it's at least visible for a device as small as an iPod. And to quote today's Penny Arcade on the GameBoy DS: "gadgets like this are supposed to get smaller not bigger".
That said, I guess the iPod already got smaller - it's called the iPod mini. With that available, it might be all right for the iPod to go a slightly different direction: away from the pure MP3 player to, well, whatever they have in mind. Maybe a standard iPod will play videos eventually, although Jobs previously said he doesn't like that. Personally, I think the iPod mini is a cooler device anyway, smaller with still plenty of music for a day or two. But I know others don't think so.
Google really does a lot of things now. And many of them have the chance of becoming as essential as their web searching feature and perhaps their ad business already is.
Google does web searching, advertising, usenet portal, web boards, webmail, price listings, news aggregation, searching within books, within white pages, within maps, and various other sources, paid web searching, blogging, a dictionary and a calculator and now SMS access to some of their services - I'm sure that if this takes off, access to many more will follow. It also does the whole thing in multiple countries, ie. I just got the mapping service that used to be exclusive to Canada and the US (I think) here in Germany, along with train schedule information.
And the weird thing is, as far as I can see they are as good or better at every single of those services as any other service provider specialising on it. One of the reasons for that is the fact that they're smart about it: apart from some core services, they don't try to replace existing services but rather sticks to being a portal easing access to the information.
So when looking for maps of an area, you get multiple links to prominent mapping services showing just that area. And instead of creating a whole new train schedule for Germany, they just translate your query to one for the (very good) official service of the train company. The key difference being that I already have quick access to Google, and that I can use a written query to get the information instead of using a form. In a way, Google is the renaisance of the CLI over GUIs.
While this is a fun analogy, there's a difference: using someone's AP is not a passive activity. Looking at the airwaves in search for active APs is not an issue, it just becomes one when you try to use the AP to connect to its owner's network. The light analogy doesn't fit, you'd have to cast light back into the house and interact with the lamp, but that doesn't make a lot of sense. :) Or look at it that way, it's like using a IR remote to turn on the light on the front porch so that you can read by it.
Note that I'm not opposed to using open APs - for the moment, I've set mine up as open because I don't mind people using it - just saying the analogy doesn't really apply.
Judging by the FAQ, publishers send books to Google to get them scanned and indexed. I assume that when they send their books, they also agree to give Google a license to use the materials in the way described.
That said, I'm still curious how this will work out. There are many issues. For one, it will have to gain a critical mass of books to be more than a novelty. And if it really works as described above, they rely on others to bring books to them. With anyone else, I'd be very sceptical, but Google does have the sheer brand power to actually get publishers to send in books. On the other hand, maybe sent in books are just part of it and they also index books out of their own volition, which as you said brings up copyright concerns.
If that works out, I'm curious to see how they will enforce the viewing limitations. It says that you'll be able to view the two pages before and after the one you found. It also says it records data to track which books you've already seen, assumingly to prevent you from seeing more than those 5 or another number of pages of any book, ever. It does not say whether or not you're required to log in an account, but that would seem to be the only way to prevent people from simply refusing a cookie or clearing them to see another 5 pages. Of course, Google is using accounts for most of it's add-on services, at least as an option, but I think it'd be a first for an account required to gain access to a certain search engine feature.
And of course even with accounts, they wouldn't be very safe at all from malignent users, who could run multiple accounts, or groups of users who pool their pages to get the whole thing. Granted, it would take many users and more importantly a lot of time to get a 300 page novel, but groups working together to violate copyrights using an enormous amount of technical know-how are hardly new to the Internet. It's probably simpler to just scan and OCR the whole thing yourself, though.
Frames? IFrames? Changing an (I)Frames location refreshes it's contents but not the entire page. That's the only thing I can think of, it's not exactly the same though.
I do remember, but getting some Windows games to run - especially the retarded copy protection schemes - can be equally ... instructional.
In response to the signature: Want a more mature forum than Slashdot? Try Technocrat.net
Okay, so I did, and it doesn't work. I figured it's some obscure joke I don't get, but the WHOIS record says it's registered for Bruce Perens so I guess it should be valid.
Yeah, I'm off topic, mod me down if you want to be a meanie, but I'm telling mom!
According to US military, some European countries spend nearly the same amount of GDP on defense as the USA. On the average, EU would have to spend additional 2.5% of GDP on defense, to match the USA. Now, according to Goethe Institut, EU spent on average in 1999 around 28% of GDP on welfare. Moving 2.5% from welfare to defense would be a noticeable, but not drastic policy shift.
;)
Since the US data is fairly old, I just checked those numbers, here's what I got for Germany: defense spending for 2001 (still fairly outdated, I know) was at 23 billion Euros, overall government spending in that year was at 960 billion. Of those, a whopping 513 billion were paid for social security, however all other departments spent amounts in the same order of magnitude as defense, e.g. 22 billion for infrastructure and 30 billion for law enforcement.
The GDP in 2002 was at 2,108 billion. So defense spending was at 1.09% of the GDP. The US spends more then thrice that amount. And while a 2% increase might not seem large compared to the amount paid for social security, it is when you keep in mind that this is nearly as much as the budget of infrastructure and law enforcement combined. So yes, this is an extremely drastic policy shift.
All numbers are from the sites of the Statistische Bundesamt (German federal bureau of statistics), specifically here and here. Note that I might have gotten something terribly wrong, I'm not really good at this.
Yeah, that was the ever-occuring thought I had when I read many of the posts.
They lied to us! -- And you believed them!!
And many still do, too many.
For all I care the Slashdot editors could come up with furries.slashdot.org or whatever subtopics they want, as long as I can turn them off. That said, I doubt the number of furries is anywhere close to the number of politically interested: the top 3 stories, and a total of seven out of the top 10 are political stories, with this story coming in close on the top 10 in post numbers. Slashdot is not just tech, apparently.
Keep in mind that a nation must dow aht is in its best interest, not the interest of the world.
Why the hell would that be so? Why can't nations act in a way that's in the interest of the world? That's a worst case assumption, some nations might act in that way - many do, I guess - but it's not a "must". The same goes for individuals; just because some people are jackasses and only look out for themselves, that doesn't have to apply for everybody.
You dont see the world get into a big tissy whenever some nation decides to buck the UN and do their own thing. Why should the US be looked at differently?
A country "bucking" the UN is more or less of an issue depending on the countries importance. Isn't that freaking obvious?! Of course it's not front page material if Trinidad decides to ignore some contract it agreed within the UN, and of course it is front page material if France, Japan, Russia do it - or if the US does.
Why must all other nations depend so heavily on the US?
Where the hell does that come from? I mean, it's true, and also quite trivial - today, all nations depends quite heavily on nearly all others (that's globalisation) - but it certainly wasn't the conclusion of your little argument there. The UN, in a way, depends on the US to play along, more so than it required Trinidad to do so, in the same way I outlined above. It needs the msot important countries to stick to the rules they themselves agreed to, anything else reduces it's importance. Not to zero, of course, even a UN without the US is still an important group.
Bah. You already know the answer. China might be the "most poluting[sic] economy" (I'm not sure, you didn't provide any numbers), but it's far from the most polluting per capita. Reduce the average per capita CO2 generation, and your way of reasoning might be considered fair. Eventually, China will need to stop increasing the CO2 generation, as well.
On the one hand people whine that reducing CO2 emissions will hurt the highly developed economies of the rich countries, on the other hand the same people argue that poor, developing countries hurt their economies that still are on a significantly lower level.
If he had so much as hinted at joking about any of those things I'm sure there'd have been a hundred posts whining because of it. ("How can he except to be a president with that attitude" blah blah) Not that I necessarily disagree with you - I'm just saying. :)
Because they often "look odd", because they usually take like a second to light up, because they're not available in the "right sizes", because the initial investment is bigger even though it easily pays off; ie. because people tend to be morons.