And feel free to use your freedom of speech to argue against a policy you don't agree with, that you don't want to catch on more widely, and that you hope will be changed if enough outcry is raised.
While it's not statistically valid evidence, all 4 people in my office who owned an Xbox had to have theirs replaced. One of them had to do it twice. That's hard to reconcile with a 5% error rate.
Presumably the last Xbox people get actually works correctly. By that measure, my office had 5 occurences of the problem and ended up with 4 working consoles out of the 9 total. That's starting to sound like the 50% failure rate.
You could argue the failure rate of the console isn't the best measure for the situation; maybe a better measure would be how many times customers ran into the issue. My office averages 1.25 failures per Xbox owner, and 100% of the owners had the problem at least once. That's not good.
Sometimes you can make things much easier in a new language. Clojure uses STM for concurrency control, which is much easier due to Clojure's strong preference for immutable data. You'd have a lot more pain using STM in a language not designed for it.
I don't see this comparison made often, but I like to express the data transfer cap as a sustained bandwidth and relate it to the peak bandwidth they advertise. 5 GB cap in a 30 day month is 5 GB / (30 * 24 * 60 * 60) = about 2071 B/sec sustained rate over the month. That's right, if you average 2.1KB/sec for the month, you hit the cap. That's sure a lot lower than the advertised (peak) bandwidth.
forced deaths: Where you have die to advance the story. Especially when it's non-obious, so you replay the same peice over and over before you realize there's no way to win.
This is one of my pet peeves, but not because I replay the level thinking I can beat it (usually the story proceeds and it's clear I couldn't have won). What annoys me is that I've invariably used 95% of my items trying to stay alive and do some damage, and I have to reload to reclaim them.
I hope things will change and that we aren't doomed to repeat history, but I'm not very optimistic about it. When the Republicans got the presidency and Congress, they ended up going against their "small government" plans and voted in a ton of special-interest appropriations. It seems unlikely that in the same situation, the "larger government" party would do anything different.
I think Obama will try to curb excesses, but I have little doubt Congress will be pushing for them. Someone needs to tell them they were elected to make the best choices for the nation, not to get the most money for their state or the best boost for their reelection hopes.
Anyone else feel that their methods "for muting offensive words and replacing them with less offensive versions" could lead them into a clbuttic mistake?
I installed on OS X last night. The installation was a piece of cake, though it does ask for your root password to install (for the DRM, I'm sure). The only things I noticed with regard to DRM were a few small notes in the manual and readme file, usually along the lines of "you have to be connected online to play." Otherwise it seemed fairly transparent/hidden.
I'm not happy with the DRM but decided it wouldn't affect my usage patterns much. Should the time come where I do need to reinstall it more than the DRM wants, I'm sure I'll be able to find the "unofficial patch" to allow it.
As a longtime FFXI player (3 1/2 years now), I noticed a big change in how Square-Enix approached gilsellers/hunters/farmers. For a long time there was very little from SE on the issue, and the in-game consequences were very noticeable. Normal players would be killed by groups of gilsellers merely for being in the area of one of their camps, the economy was inflating crazily, and there was no competing with them in certain economic areas. People were becoming depressed and leaving, at least in part because of the bad environment.
And then SE decided to pull themselves together and really address the problem. Month postings detailing the number of banned players for various reasons were posted. We started seeing long-time gilselling groups disappear from their usual haunts and then from the game entirely. And most importantly, a sense of optimism started to creep in among the general population.
There are still issues with the economy of course. There has been a large deflation as billions of gil were removed by banning accounts. It's hard to make a living crafting, and people seems to be on much tighter budgets these days. But I don't think any of us would want to return to the time when gilsellers roamed free.
I'm very thankful SE took a stand and put in so much effort to crack down on this problem.
Note that this is a prospective discovery order - YOU WILL HAVE THE INFORMATION IN YOUR POSSESION, I REALIZE IT'S TRANSITORY AND YOU NORMALLY DON"T PRESERVE IT, BUT YOU CAN PRESERVE IT, AND I'M ORDERING YOU TO PRESERVE IT.
What's so hard about that?
What's hard is suddenly having to write the code to retrieve those, organize them, record them, and make them available for reporting later, without interfering with normal business. Hardware assets need reapportioning to accommodate the new data. What kind of timeframe is given to put this in place? It doesn't happen by itself or overnight.
Ebert is a smart guy, but even smart people can be wrong. What he labels "sport" is just the playing of the game. A movie is considered art, but the act of watching a movie is not. In the same way, a game could be considered art even if the act of playing it is not.
There are also games where the "result" could also be considered art (like Spore's creature creation, for example).
(either by being firstborn, or if an elder brother died)
"In other news, a wave of killings has swept the nation, mostly of firstborn male children by their younger siblings. When questioned, one of the perpetrators stated 'It seemed the smart thing to do.'"
You've summarized the technical aspects, but left out others. The biggest difference between these and barcodes is that RFID tags are imbedded in products instead of merely being visible on the product packaging.
What you dismiss as paranoia is appropriate concern. RFID tags can be used to track objects and people for various (good or bad) purposes, and in situations where it would be impractical to use barcodes. Identifying abuses of the tags is the first step in controlling those abuses and, if they cannot be adequately controlled, in justifying the elimination of the tags.
I definitely have to second the recommendation for Vinge's books. The stories are wonderful, and there are some very cool ideas thrown around, ranging from a nightmarish surveillance system to a hilarious interstellar Usenet to the invention (as far as I know) of the term "software archaeology." I rate "A Deepness in the Sky" as the best, but I'm sure others can justify disagreeing with me. It and "A Fire Upon the Deep" won (deservedly) top awards in science fiction. Hey, even "Across Realtime" and "True Names" are well worth the time to read.
"The Mote in God's Eye" is pretty good too. I'll also plug some books people recommended in other comments: The Hyperion novels by Dan Simmons are highly cool, and definitely check out "Startide Rising" by David Brin.
Crud, now I'm going to have to dig through my bookshelves and reread some of those....
Actually, IGN covered it in their PS2 page too. That said, I hope they don't just do a conversion from one of the other consoles to the PS2. Max Payne was done that way, and the PS2 version was generally agreed to look the worst of all the versions (PC, Xbox). If they take the (admittedly large) time and effort to write it native for the PS2, there shouldn't be a large gap in quality between the various versions.
Actually, Sony had mentioned a few months ago that they would be announcing a price drop at E3. They may have moved it up a little for tactical reasons, but they have been planning the drop itself for a long time.
Actually, no, 'sente' in go generally refers to the ability to make a play that your opponent should respond to, thus leaving yourself in the position of making the next move. Its opposite is 'gote', which means a play that your opponent doesn't have to respond to. Sente lets you press your agenda and often makes your opponent play more passively. There's no "checkmate" in go because there's nothing of comparable value to a king in go. You can lose any number of stones (pieces) and still win. Lose your king in chess, you've lost the game by definition.
The problem with blaming atheism for anything is that it is difficult to see how the lack of a belief motivates anyone to do anything.
Atheism isn't a lack of belief in God; it's the belief that there is no God.
One can certainly argue that Communism has resulted in many atrocities, but it does not follow from that and the fact that Communists are atheists that atheists are responsible any more than it follows from the facts that Buddhists are generally nice people and that Buddhists are atheists that atheists are generally nice people.
Many (most? all?) Communist countries punished those who expressed belief in God and actively taught that God does not exist. This is why they were labeled atheistic.
While there is no right to force an opinion on another, Americans have the right to express these opinions. Sometimes force (legal, political, etc.) must be applied to ensure an opinion can be expressed. Be careful you don't confuse this with forcing people to act according to a set of beliefs.
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And feel free to use your freedom of speech to argue against a policy you don't agree with, that you don't want to catch on more widely, and that you hope will be changed if enough outcry is raised.
While it's not statistically valid evidence, all 4 people in my office who owned an Xbox had to have theirs replaced. One of them had to do it twice. That's hard to reconcile with a 5% error rate.
Presumably the last Xbox people get actually works correctly. By that measure, my office had 5 occurences of the problem and ended up with 4 working consoles out of the 9 total. That's starting to sound like the 50% failure rate.
You could argue the failure rate of the console isn't the best measure for the situation; maybe a better measure would be how many times customers ran into the issue. My office averages 1.25 failures per Xbox owner, and 100% of the owners had the problem at least once. That's not good.
Sometimes you can make things much easier in a new language. Clojure uses STM for concurrency control, which is much easier due to Clojure's strong preference for immutable data. You'd have a lot more pain using STM in a language not designed for it.
I don't see this comparison made often, but I like to express the data transfer cap as a sustained bandwidth and relate it to the peak bandwidth they advertise. 5 GB cap in a 30 day month is 5 GB / (30 * 24 * 60 * 60) = about 2071 B/sec sustained rate over the month. That's right, if you average 2.1KB/sec for the month, you hit the cap. That's sure a lot lower than the advertised (peak) bandwidth.
forced deaths: Where you have die to advance the story. Especially when it's non-obious, so you replay the same peice over and over before you realize there's no way to win.
This is one of my pet peeves, but not because I replay the level thinking I can beat it (usually the story proceeds and it's clear I couldn't have won). What annoys me is that I've invariably used 95% of my items trying to stay alive and do some damage, and I have to reload to reclaim them.
One of my favorites is an alias for easily grepping process lists:
alias psg 'ps -ef | grep'
Want all your processes? 'psg [username]'
Want to see all processes not owned by root? 'psg -n root'
I mostly use it searching for process names or usernames, but you could grep for pids and such too.
I hope things will change and that we aren't doomed to repeat history, but I'm not very optimistic about it. When the Republicans got the presidency and Congress, they ended up going against their "small government" plans and voted in a ton of special-interest appropriations. It seems unlikely that in the same situation, the "larger government" party would do anything different.
I think Obama will try to curb excesses, but I have little doubt Congress will be pushing for them. Someone needs to tell them they were elected to make the best choices for the nation, not to get the most money for their state or the best boost for their reelection hopes.
Anyone else feel that their methods "for muting offensive words and replacing them with less offensive versions" could lead them into a clbuttic mistake?
I installed on OS X last night. The installation was a piece of cake, though it does ask for your root password to install (for the DRM, I'm sure). The only things I noticed with regard to DRM were a few small notes in the manual and readme file, usually along the lines of "you have to be connected online to play." Otherwise it seemed fairly transparent/hidden.
I'm not happy with the DRM but decided it wouldn't affect my usage patterns much. Should the time come where I do need to reinstall it more than the DRM wants, I'm sure I'll be able to find the "unofficial patch" to allow it.
It seemed pretty random to me. I'm in the center of the US, and my two downloads were from machines in Japan and the Netherlands.
As a longtime FFXI player (3 1/2 years now), I noticed a big change in how Square-Enix approached gilsellers/hunters/farmers. For a long time there was very little from SE on the issue, and the in-game consequences were very noticeable. Normal players would be killed by groups of gilsellers merely for being in the area of one of their camps, the economy was inflating crazily, and there was no competing with them in certain economic areas. People were becoming depressed and leaving, at least in part because of the bad environment.
And then SE decided to pull themselves together and really address the problem. Month postings detailing the number of banned players for various reasons were posted. We started seeing long-time gilselling groups disappear from their usual haunts and then from the game entirely. And most importantly, a sense of optimism started to creep in among the general population.
There are still issues with the economy of course. There has been a large deflation as billions of gil were removed by banning accounts. It's hard to make a living crafting, and people seems to be on much tighter budgets these days. But I don't think any of us would want to return to the time when gilsellers roamed free.
I'm very thankful SE took a stand and put in so much effort to crack down on this problem.
Ebert is a smart guy, but even smart people can be wrong. What he labels "sport" is just the playing of the game. A movie is considered art, but the act of watching a movie is not. In the same way, a game could be considered art even if the act of playing it is not.
There are also games where the "result" could also be considered art (like Spore's creature creation, for example).
You've summarized the technical aspects, but left out others. The biggest difference between these and barcodes is that RFID tags are imbedded in products instead of merely being visible on the product packaging.
What you dismiss as paranoia is appropriate concern. RFID tags can be used to track objects and people for various (good or bad) purposes, and in situations where it would be impractical to use barcodes. Identifying abuses of the tags is the first step in controlling those abuses and, if they cannot be adequately controlled, in justifying the elimination of the tags.
I definitely have to second the recommendation for Vinge's books. The stories are wonderful, and there are some very cool ideas thrown around, ranging from a nightmarish surveillance system to a hilarious interstellar Usenet to the invention (as far as I know) of the term "software archaeology." I rate "A Deepness in the Sky" as the best, but I'm sure others can justify disagreeing with me. It and "A Fire Upon the Deep" won (deservedly) top awards in science fiction. Hey, even "Across Realtime" and "True Names" are well worth the time to read.
"The Mote in God's Eye" is pretty good too. I'll also plug some books people recommended in other comments: The Hyperion novels by Dan Simmons are highly cool, and definitely check out "Startide Rising" by David Brin.
Crud, now I'm going to have to dig through my bookshelves and reread some of those....
Actually, IGN covered it in their PS2 page too. That said, I hope they don't just do a conversion from one of the other consoles to the PS2. Max Payne was done that way, and the PS2 version was generally agreed to look the worst of all the versions (PC, Xbox). If they take the (admittedly large) time and effort to write it native for the PS2, there shouldn't be a large gap in quality between the various versions.
Actually, Sony had mentioned a few months ago that they would be announcing a price drop at E3. They may have moved it up a little for tactical reasons, but they have been planning the drop itself for a long time.
Actually, no, 'sente' in go generally refers to the ability to make a play that your opponent should respond to, thus leaving yourself in the position of making the next move. Its opposite is 'gote', which means a play that your opponent doesn't have to respond to. Sente lets you press your agenda and often makes your opponent play more passively. There's no "checkmate" in go because there's nothing of comparable value to a king in go. You can lose any number of stones (pieces) and still win. Lose your king in chess, you've lost the game by definition.
The problem with blaming atheism for anything is that it is difficult to see how the lack of a belief motivates anyone to do anything.
Atheism isn't a lack of belief in God; it's the belief that there is no God.
One can certainly argue that Communism has resulted in many atrocities, but it does not follow from that and the fact that Communists are atheists that atheists are responsible any more than it follows from the facts that Buddhists are generally nice people and that Buddhists are atheists that atheists are generally nice people.
Many (most? all?) Communist countries punished those who expressed belief in God and actively taught that God does not exist. This is why they were labeled atheistic.
While there is no right to force an opinion on another, Americans have the right to express these opinions. Sometimes force (legal, political, etc.) must be applied to ensure an opinion can be expressed. Be careful you don't confuse this with forcing people to act according to a set of beliefs.