As of last month. They just added that back. A bit too late (plus I'm still unwilling to infect my system with Vista, AND buy their $200 glasses when my old ones were exactly the same hardware, just to get it working again).
It can also be used to play legal ports of games that have been open-sourced - for example, Doom and Quake have fabulous ports on the system (the Wiimote makes a very interesting interface for Quake).
But Nintendo doesn't want that, either. Nintendo has always had a bug up their ass about "piracy"; they claimed the "security" chip in the original NES (which was actually about stopping companies from Tengen from making cartridges and was the reason you got the "blinky blinky" power problem so often) was to ward off "piracy" (which back then meant "guys in brazil putting out copied cartridges in a little factory"). They stayed with cartridges rather than CD's for the N64 out of fear of "piracy" (and got absolutely stomped by the CD-using Playstation). They made the Gamecube drive spin backwards and use rinky-dinky discs with stupid little plastic blockers to stop insertion of normal sized discs, and didn't release the DVD-player combo unit anywhere but Japan, out of fear of "piracy."
Of course half the time "Piracy" is just a red herring; for instance, the "anti-piracy features" of the NES/SNES/N64 also ensured that companies had to use Big N's "licensed factories" to have the cartridges made, and Big N decided how many you got in each production run or if you could even publish in a given market at all (you had to meet their censor restrictions in the US, for instance). It got bad enough that a number of companies made fake-name shell corporations in the US just to get around the restrictions so they could get all their games published. Small wonder that they all jumped ship and Big N were pretty much left with just the Shovelware vendors for the N64/Gamecube days (and some of that still goes on today, seen the piles of "my god this crap just won't sell" marked for $10 per brand-new sealed copy in the Wii section of a Gamestop lately?) when Sony offered an alternative console, no content restrictions/censorship, and didn't care what production run they did as long as they used a black-colored plastic disc and paid their licensing fee.
They got lucky with the Wii when it actually sold, as opposed to the N64/Gamecube which were incredibly poor sellers, and they haven't realized yet that "piracy" is simply not a big deal. The number of people who do it are an incredibly small portion of the userbase, and you're never going to stop them: the best you can do is slow them down for a day or two. Meanwhile, my Wii isn't going to get updated through Nintendo, because I don't feel like losing the ability to back up my system, to back up the save files that they tried to block off (WHY, oh why, do they not want me to move my Super Mario Galaxy savefile to SD card?), and to play legitimately ported titles like Quake.
They didn't drop support for "CRT's". They decided that their stereographics driver would only work in the following configurations:
- anaglyph glasses with a "whatever" monitor (horrible color distortion and headache-inducing ghosting ensues).
- *THEIR* shutter glasses, with *THEIR* overpriced "partnered" LCD monitors.
Now, what is the difference (tech-wise) between their shutter glasses and mine? Only the fact that theirs send a specific "yes I'm nvidia" signal back to the card. What is the capability difference between their overpriced "partnered" LCD monitors and my 120Hz-capable CRT? Two things: Jack and Shit.
This is not about "dropping support for outdated technology." Prior to what they pulled, I could plug in an industry-standard shutter glasses set made by any of a number of manufacturers, combine them with any monitor capable of 120-Hz refresh (whether CRT, LCD, certain televisions, or even a few projector models), and enjoy stereoscopic gaming. After their "update" to the drivers and subsequent "update" to the stereoscopic drivers, the Nvidia cards would only recognize *THEIR* proprietary glasses (which again, hardware-wise are no different than the old type save for sending a "hi I'm from nvidia" signal to the card) and would only interoperate with a precious few "specially chosen" 120Hz LCD's.
This had nothing to do with "dropping support" for "obsolete equipment" (which wasn't in any way, shape, or form) and everything to do with trying to milk people for $500+ on a new rig by forcibly crippling industry-standard hardware.
I gave up on Nvidia when they screwed over my 3D glasses setup; I'd gone through all the trouble of maintaining my rig with an NVidia graphics card, because their occasional driver updates for the stereoscopic driver still made my old VRStandard rig (coupled with a 120Hz-capable CRT) run well.
Lo and behold, their latest set "only" works either with the Nvidia-branded "Geforce 3D Vision" glasses and a short-list of extra-expensive "approved" 120-Hz LCD's, or else red/blue anaglyph setups. No reason for them to cut off older shutter glasses setups except to force people to buy their new setup if they wanted to continue to have stereoscopic 3D.
So add the PhysX thing in and we can chalk up two strikes for Nvidia. My new card when I updated my computer this summer was an ATi (no point wasting the $$$ on a Nvidia). One more strike and I won't bother going back to them ever. Boy am I glad I didn't buy that second-hand PCI PhysX board the other day...
is that there had to be a case where the Police overstepped their authority, and did this without a warrant, before this question of law could be settled.
That's a definite flaw in our legal system: someone has to be abused (at least) once before the courts can rule.
The US believes that all political speech should be protected even if it is nasty and ugly.
We do?
Somebody needs to tell that to all those who keep screeching about taking various people off the air, or about all the things you "shouldn't be allowed to say" in America...
You don't cite any examples of the "massive bribery," of course.
You obviously have paid no attention to how government works, or of the fact that it got so bad during the various copyright extension maneuvers that the dishonorable Howard Berman was alternately referred to by "D-Disney" or "The Representative From Hollywood" rather than by his own district.
You may want to look up the definition of "literally" before abusing it. See above. You may want to go back to school and finish something further than the third grade.
Finally, you make the crazy claim that the characters have been "treated like shit for years," despite hugely successful film franchises like Spider-man, Ironman, the Hulk, and more as well as countless videogames and comic books spanning decades.
No sane system would throw beloved properties into the public domain and disallow the creators' estate to profit from the public's continued commercial interest in those properties.
Wrong. No sane system would make it so that those whose entire success is built on the pilfering, plundering, yes raping, pillaging, (insert other word of choice here) of the public domain, and then spending decades sending lawyers against anyone else who chooses to create something else based on the same public domain work on the basis of "copyright" or "trademark", can prevail.
The purpose of copyright is to, and I quote the constitution (which you no doubt have never read), "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The "limits" today are so long as to be meaningless. They do not allow for the required return of writings and discoveries and art into the public domain; instead, they serve as a brake and impediment to progress. It says nothing about passing these on to "heirs", nor handing them as perpetual goods-of-sale to corporations.
Once you're dead, your writings should be in the public domain. Your kids want to get paid for writing something? Let them go learn to write and come up with something new on their own that is worth buying.
What should worry you is the fact that, thanks to Disney and massive amounts of bribery to congress, "copyright" now means that works don't pass into the public domain for nearly a century.
Disney, and their friends, have quite literally raped the public domain dry and given nothing back.
I can't fault Kirby's heirs for trying to regain some form of control on characters who have been treated like shit for years, but realistically, the characters themselves would be public domain by now in any sane system.
That's how we got the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, how we got the "PATRIOT" Act, how we got several DRM acts and are looking at another one, and how we're likely to wind up with Obamacare.
It's not just that, though. Federal law is so crappily written and so laden with "based on a statute/commissioner to be named later" that it's impossible for anyone to figure out how many actual federal crimes there are these days, let alone state/local crimes as well. Most of the bills I refer to above (especially Obamacare, or at least the HR3200 version rather than the HR3400 Republican version) are the same way. We find out only long after the bill passes what it "really" said, when an unelected bureaucrat (FCC, EPA, "Health Choices Commissioner", FTC, or whatever the hell else pops up) decides what the "regulations" will be and gets to give them the force of law with no vote necessary.
Now, if you can find some clever libertarian solution to this problem, or can otherwise find an issue with my logic, please, show it to me. Because I just don't see it.
Simple.
The car company refuses outright to sell the decryption hardware / decryption codes to anyone but their authorized dealer repair service (because, a "libertarian" philosophy is government existing not just to enforce voluntary contracts between individuals, but also the right of anyone to refuse to enter into a transaction/contract with anyone else), making artificial scarcity of the service necessary to clear the light while programming the light to come on every 20,000 miles or so whether there's actually anything wrong with the car or not, and then charging 5-10x what a normal, "free" market would bear because customers have nowhere else to go but the dealership.
Lets see... Kia, Hyundai, Mitsubishi and GM all offer 10-year powertrain warranties (that's "engine parts, transmission, drive system") on new cars. Chrysler's powertrain is covered for "lifetime" as long as you keep a record of proper maintenance.
Yeah, that's not "bumper-to-bumper" coverage, but TCP/IP is pretty damn close to an "essential" part of the car.
Occasionally this culture of believing what suits you spills over into serious matters such as the right wing anti-environmental dogma getting in the way of rational discussions.
As opposed to left-wing anti-environmental dogma, which makes the perfect the enemy of the good in all senses.
The Left Wing says, for instance: We can't have Nuclear because it would "compete" with solar/geothermal/wind (which by themselves CANNOT supply our energy needs today), so instead we keep burning coal and oil and natural gas and polluting far more.
We can't have gasoline fuel-cell engines because we have to have "hydrogen" instead, nevermind the fact that the "hydrogen" production is merely a storage medium for energy and not a direct source and we will wind up having to get power to produce that hydrogen somewhere.
We can't implement sane recycling programs that make it easy for people to pass their recyclable material on - no, they have to pre-sort it into 14 different containers by weight, size, plastic type, metal type, paper type (is it cardboard? is it newspaper? What does this broken pinata count as?) and so on, making it so difficult that many people just toss their hands up and don't bother.
The "right wing" isn't against the environment. They just see the world rationally and realize that doing the best you can with what you have is a better method than sitting around whining and bitching about how your perfect utopia hasn't come around yet.
It seems to be a culturally acceptable thing in the US to ignore a mountain of data because you don't agree with the messenger's politics. No, it is HONEST to disregard the word of someone who's been caught altering data to suit his conclusions time and again. An honest scientist, when faced with data contrary to his expected conclusion, admits it. Hansen? He altered the data to fit his conclusion.
In the same vein, look at a major problem in the medical world today. Drug companies fund a dozen studies, ensure that the one or two that showed their product as being "better" get published in highly respected journals, and then pay off the doctors to bury those that showed either no benefit or worse (either publishing somewhere obscure, or not at all). James Hansen is no different and not even as scientific.
The fact that your idiotic, uninformed vitriol got modded "informative" is proof that Slashdot's mod system is failing.
A "first of its kind effort"? Given that it was proven later to be the result of "massaging" the data in order to get the conclusion he WANTED to see, rather than merely showing the data as it should be, it ought to have had him fired and sent off to work somewhere he couldn't do any more harm to the world.
Instead, he's managed to sneak by, popping his head up only when he has fellow-travelers and wide-eyed believers in the Cult of Climate Change (Hm, is it "thermal inversion", "global warming", "global climate change", or something else now? Are we headed direct into a sweltering age, or do we get the great iceball first?) and the Great Prophet Al Gore to protect him.
Hansen has changed his tune, and the data, so many times over the years that he has ZERO credibility left.
Translation: "Sales of Vista didn't go well due to Vista being crap, and Win7 isn't actually all that much better, so rather than offer a product people actually want we're going to exploit our monopoly and withhold necessary security fixes from others in order to force people to 'upgrade.'"
But since you're convinced Hansen is on the up-and-up (or simply preprogrammed to agree with him because of which political side you're on), I doubt the truth will change your mind.
After all, you're one of the same greenpeace retards who stops us from having a sane Nuclear power policy (and thus forces us to burn coal and oil).
Also, the James Hansons and Al Gores of the world are (and let's be brutally honest here) as far from "scientific" as you can get.
People are tired of being told that something is "scientific" or "scientifically proven" because those words have become synonymous with snake oil. Separating the things that are actually rigorously tested, from the ones that had a cherry-picked study that then massaged the numbers and employed lying with statistics for their sales pitch, has become an art in itself.
If science is unpopular today, it's not because of "arrogant, dogmatic and privileged folks" standing at the door. Rather it's unpopular because for every honest scientist out there, there's a hundred James Hanson or Al Gore types shouting about the end of the world, or a new way to "cure" male pattern baldness, or herbally make erections larger or breasts bigger, or a thousand other things that turn out later to be absolute bullshit.
Good, solid, well-done SINGLE PLAYER games are still well sought-after. The problem is that "multiplayer" and other buzzword-based crap have gotten pushed in recent years.
Batman:Arkham Asylum is fantastic and it's a single-player game. Sure, there are "leaderboards", but they're a joke, only put in there for the jerkoff factor of people who get their thrills from seeking out every little "achievement" to a given title to boost their gamerscore before tossing the game in the trash bin and hunting down a new game to hunt achievements down in.
75% of the games I have held on to, to this day, are single-player (or at least primarily-single-player) titles. That ratio hasn't changed in recent years. The rest are party-game type games.
The only reason this "study" found those elements "essential" is that that's what the big-name companies have been hyping. Put that level of advertising hype behind any other game and you'd get the same result. Hell, Brute Farce managed to make "Xbox Platinum" despite the fact that it was selling for $5 in the used bin within a month of its initial release.
Precisely. You can come to an agreement not to deal with someone face-to-face if their demeanor rubs you the wrong way. You can put a "buffer" person between yourselves, even. On the other hand, when your organization has some dumbass who is not only failing to do their job but requiring other people to come behind and fix the mistakes or clean up the messes, you have a major problem.
If not for people like Carter (who put into place the first US prohibition on nuclear fuel recycling, which would be the RESPONSIBLE thing to do with our so-called "nuclear waste"), Obama, and the left-wing environmental wack-jobs who made it impossible to set up a new nuclear plant anywhere, we'd have a lot less reliance on oil/coal today. Probably not total (there are things, like cars, that work best off oil fuel, to say nothing of the plastics industry) but we'd have a heck of a lot less coal or oil electric generation at the very least.
And why did Carter put that in? On the idea that it would serve as an "example" to other nations who would then not refine nuclear fuel for things like weapons. Let's see - how did that work for North Korea? Iran? Pakistan? India? I see that it did almost nothing.
The question of Solar is whether you can get it ubiquitous. Up until recently, putting it on roofs on homes was cost-prohibitive for most people (the "running cost" of maintaining them and keeping them clean, the initial roof modifications to handle the added weight, proper mooring for the old rotator-types in case there were a major windstorm, and the initial production costs of the solar panels themselves). Most other "renewable" sources are at best, unreliable; windfarms continually take damage if the wind's not "just right" (not to mention the occasional mechanical malfunction) and generate "peak power" only at very specific conditions. Solar farms work only so well without direct, unimpeded light; a few days of overcast skies can have you shipping in power from other areas.
And of course there's the initial battery costs and the running cost of maintaining batteries to provide power during "non-producing" times, plus the toxic chemicals associated with those batteries.
Going after foreign oil isn't going to do a whole lot. On the other hand, get us enough nuclear plants and we can wean off almost everything else while we work out the battery/fuel-cell tech necessary for an alternative to oil.
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As of last month. They just added that back. A bit too late (plus I'm still unwilling to infect my system with Vista, AND buy their $200 glasses when my old ones were exactly the same hardware, just to get it working again).
It can also be used to play legal ports of games that have been open-sourced - for example, Doom and Quake have fabulous ports on the system (the Wiimote makes a very interesting interface for Quake).
But Nintendo doesn't want that, either. Nintendo has always had a bug up their ass about "piracy"; they claimed the "security" chip in the original NES (which was actually about stopping companies from Tengen from making cartridges and was the reason you got the "blinky blinky" power problem so often) was to ward off "piracy" (which back then meant "guys in brazil putting out copied cartridges in a little factory"). They stayed with cartridges rather than CD's for the N64 out of fear of "piracy" (and got absolutely stomped by the CD-using Playstation). They made the Gamecube drive spin backwards and use rinky-dinky discs with stupid little plastic blockers to stop insertion of normal sized discs, and didn't release the DVD-player combo unit anywhere but Japan, out of fear of "piracy."
Of course half the time "Piracy" is just a red herring; for instance, the "anti-piracy features" of the NES/SNES/N64 also ensured that companies had to use Big N's "licensed factories" to have the cartridges made, and Big N decided how many you got in each production run or if you could even publish in a given market at all (you had to meet their censor restrictions in the US, for instance). It got bad enough that a number of companies made fake-name shell corporations in the US just to get around the restrictions so they could get all their games published. Small wonder that they all jumped ship and Big N were pretty much left with just the Shovelware vendors for the N64/Gamecube days (and some of that still goes on today, seen the piles of "my god this crap just won't sell" marked for $10 per brand-new sealed copy in the Wii section of a Gamestop lately?) when Sony offered an alternative console, no content restrictions/censorship, and didn't care what production run they did as long as they used a black-colored plastic disc and paid their licensing fee.
They got lucky with the Wii when it actually sold, as opposed to the N64/Gamecube which were incredibly poor sellers, and they haven't realized yet that "piracy" is simply not a big deal. The number of people who do it are an incredibly small portion of the userbase, and you're never going to stop them: the best you can do is slow them down for a day or two. Meanwhile, my Wii isn't going to get updated through Nintendo, because I don't feel like losing the ability to back up my system, to back up the save files that they tried to block off (WHY, oh why, do they not want me to move my Super Mario Galaxy savefile to SD card?), and to play legitimately ported titles like Quake.
They didn't drop support for "CRT's". They decided that their stereographics driver would only work in the following configurations:
- anaglyph glasses with a "whatever" monitor (horrible color distortion and headache-inducing ghosting ensues).
- *THEIR* shutter glasses, with *THEIR* overpriced "partnered" LCD monitors.
Now, what is the difference (tech-wise) between their shutter glasses and mine? Only the fact that theirs send a specific "yes I'm nvidia" signal back to the card. What is the capability difference between their overpriced "partnered" LCD monitors and my 120Hz-capable CRT? Two things: Jack and Shit.
This is not about "dropping support for outdated technology." Prior to what they pulled, I could plug in an industry-standard shutter glasses set made by any of a number of manufacturers, combine them with any monitor capable of 120-Hz refresh (whether CRT, LCD, certain televisions, or even a few projector models), and enjoy stereoscopic gaming. After their "update" to the drivers and subsequent "update" to the stereoscopic drivers, the Nvidia cards would only recognize *THEIR* proprietary glasses (which again, hardware-wise are no different than the old type save for sending a "hi I'm from nvidia" signal to the card) and would only interoperate with a precious few "specially chosen" 120Hz LCD's.
This had nothing to do with "dropping support" for "obsolete equipment" (which wasn't in any way, shape, or form) and everything to do with trying to milk people for $500+ on a new rig by forcibly crippling industry-standard hardware.
I gave up on Nvidia when they screwed over my 3D glasses setup; I'd gone through all the trouble of maintaining my rig with an NVidia graphics card, because their occasional driver updates for the stereoscopic driver still made my old VRStandard rig (coupled with a 120Hz-capable CRT) run well.
Lo and behold, their latest set "only" works either with the Nvidia-branded "Geforce 3D Vision" glasses and a short-list of extra-expensive "approved" 120-Hz LCD's, or else red/blue anaglyph setups. No reason for them to cut off older shutter glasses setups except to force people to buy their new setup if they wanted to continue to have stereoscopic 3D.
So add the PhysX thing in and we can chalk up two strikes for Nvidia. My new card when I updated my computer this summer was an ATi (no point wasting the $$$ on a Nvidia). One more strike and I won't bother going back to them ever. Boy am I glad I didn't buy that second-hand PCI PhysX board the other day...
is that there had to be a case where the Police overstepped their authority, and did this without a warrant, before this question of law could be settled.
That's a definite flaw in our legal system: someone has to be abused (at least) once before the courts can rule.
When we find God, maybe we can get him to stop the Slashdot editors from posting so many dupes?
I mean honestly. I logged in, looked down the page, and had to check the date thinking I'd somehow slipped back into last week.
The US believes that all political speech should be protected even if it is nasty and ugly.
We do?
Somebody needs to tell that to all those who keep screeching about taking various people off the air, or about all the things you "shouldn't be allowed to say" in America...
Given the state of the housing market in California, isn't it equally possible that he simply doesn't have a title to the place at all?
How clueless are you exactly?
Definition of Rape. Educate yourself.
You don't cite any examples of the "massive bribery," of course.
You obviously have paid no attention to how government works, or of the fact that it got so bad during the various copyright extension maneuvers that the dishonorable Howard Berman was alternately referred to by "D-Disney" or "The Representative From Hollywood" rather than by his own district.
You may want to look up the definition of "literally" before abusing it.
See above. You may want to go back to school and finish something further than the third grade.
Finally, you make the crazy claim that the characters have been "treated like shit for years," despite hugely successful film franchises like Spider-man, Ironman, the Hulk, and more as well as countless videogames and comic books spanning decades.
The ability for various places/entities to spin out garbage after garbage after garbage after shovelware does not indicate "success." In fact, Marvel recently admitted they had made incredibly choices in a press conference where Ira Rubenstein spoke the words "Actually, wait ... we are not doing crappy movie-based games anymore. You can quote me on that."
No sane system would throw beloved properties into the public domain and disallow the creators' estate to profit from the public's continued commercial interest in those properties.
Wrong. No sane system would make it so that those whose entire success is built on the pilfering, plundering, yes raping, pillaging, (insert other word of choice here) of the public domain, and then spending decades sending lawyers against anyone else who chooses to create something else based on the same public domain work on the basis of "copyright" or "trademark", can prevail.
The purpose of copyright is to, and I quote the constitution (which you no doubt have never read), "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The "limits" today are so long as to be meaningless. They do not allow for the required return of writings and discoveries and art into the public domain; instead, they serve as a brake and impediment to progress. It says nothing about passing these on to "heirs", nor handing them as perpetual goods-of-sale to corporations.
Once you're dead, your writings should be in the public domain. Your kids want to get paid for writing something? Let them go learn to write and come up with something new on their own that is worth buying.
What should worry you is the fact that, thanks to Disney and massive amounts of bribery to congress, "copyright" now means that works don't pass into the public domain for nearly a century.
Disney, and their friends, have quite literally raped the public domain dry and given nothing back.
I can't fault Kirby's heirs for trying to regain some form of control on characters who have been treated like shit for years, but realistically, the characters themselves would be public domain by now in any sane system.
Yep.
That's how we got the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, how we got the "PATRIOT" Act, how we got several DRM acts and are looking at another one, and how we're likely to wind up with Obamacare.
It's not just that, though. Federal law is so crappily written and so laden with "based on a statute/commissioner to be named later" that it's impossible for anyone to figure out how many actual federal crimes there are these days, let alone state/local crimes as well. Most of the bills I refer to above (especially Obamacare, or at least the HR3200 version rather than the HR3400 Republican version) are the same way. We find out only long after the bill passes what it "really" said, when an unelected bureaucrat (FCC, EPA, "Health Choices Commissioner", FTC, or whatever the hell else pops up) decides what the "regulations" will be and gets to give them the force of law with no vote necessary.
Now, if you can find some clever libertarian solution to this problem, or can otherwise find an issue with my logic, please, show it to me. Because I just don't see it.
Simple.
The car company refuses outright to sell the decryption hardware / decryption codes to anyone but their authorized dealer repair service (because, a "libertarian" philosophy is government existing not just to enforce voluntary contracts between individuals, but also the right of anyone to refuse to enter into a transaction/contract with anyone else), making artificial scarcity of the service necessary to clear the light while programming the light to come on every 20,000 miles or so whether there's actually anything wrong with the car or not, and then charging 5-10x what a normal, "free" market would bear because customers have nowhere else to go but the dealership.
That's what happens now, by the way.
15-25? Try 5. On many laptops you could get to a good access point right under the easily-removable keyboard.
Lets see... Kia, Hyundai, Mitsubishi and GM all offer 10-year powertrain warranties (that's "engine parts, transmission, drive system") on new cars. Chrysler's powertrain is covered for "lifetime" as long as you keep a record of proper maintenance.
Yeah, that's not "bumper-to-bumper" coverage, but TCP/IP is pretty damn close to an "essential" part of the car.
Occasionally this culture of believing what suits you spills over into serious matters such as the right wing anti-environmental dogma getting in the way of rational discussions.
As opposed to left-wing anti-environmental dogma, which makes the perfect the enemy of the good in all senses.
The Left Wing says, for instance:
We can't have Nuclear because it would "compete" with solar/geothermal/wind (which by themselves CANNOT supply our energy needs today), so instead we keep burning coal and oil and natural gas and polluting far more.
We can't have gasoline fuel-cell engines because we have to have "hydrogen" instead, nevermind the fact that the "hydrogen" production is merely a storage medium for energy and not a direct source and we will wind up having to get power to produce that hydrogen somewhere.
We can't implement sane recycling programs that make it easy for people to pass their recyclable material on - no, they have to pre-sort it into 14 different containers by weight, size, plastic type, metal type, paper type (is it cardboard? is it newspaper? What does this broken pinata count as?) and so on, making it so difficult that many people just toss their hands up and don't bother.
The "right wing" isn't against the environment. They just see the world rationally and realize that doing the best you can with what you have is a better method than sitting around whining and bitching about how your perfect utopia hasn't come around yet.
It seems to be a culturally acceptable thing in the US to ignore a mountain of data because you don't agree with the messenger's politics.
No, it is HONEST to disregard the word of someone who's been caught altering data to suit his conclusions time and again. An honest scientist, when faced with data contrary to his expected conclusion, admits it. Hansen? He altered the data to fit his conclusion.
In the same vein, look at a major problem in the medical world today. Drug companies fund a dozen studies, ensure that the one or two that showed their product as being "better" get published in highly respected journals, and then pay off the doctors to bury those that showed either no benefit or worse (either publishing somewhere obscure, or not at all). James Hansen is no different and not even as scientific.
The fact that your idiotic, uninformed vitriol got modded "informative" is proof that Slashdot's mod system is failing.
A "first of its kind effort"? Given that it was proven later to be the result of "massaging" the data in order to get the conclusion he WANTED to see, rather than merely showing the data as it should be, it ought to have had him fired and sent off to work somewhere he couldn't do any more harm to the world.
Instead, he's managed to sneak by, popping his head up only when he has fellow-travelers and wide-eyed believers in the Cult of Climate Change (Hm, is it "thermal inversion", "global warming", "global climate change", or something else now? Are we headed direct into a sweltering age, or do we get the great iceball first?) and the Great Prophet Al Gore to protect him.
Hansen has changed his tune, and the data, so many times over the years that he has ZERO credibility left.
Translation: "Sales of Vista didn't go well due to Vista being crap, and Win7 isn't actually all that much better, so rather than offer a product people actually want we're going to exploit our monopoly and withhold necessary security fixes from others in order to force people to 'upgrade.'"
Grow up.
http://www.physorg.com/news162795064.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/06/james_hansen_abusing_the_publi.html
http://www.geotimes.org/aug07/article.html?id=WebExtra081607_2.html
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/09/hansen_frees_the_code.html
But since you're convinced Hansen is on the up-and-up (or simply preprogrammed to agree with him because of which political side you're on), I doubt the truth will change your mind.
After all, you're one of the same greenpeace retards who stops us from having a sane Nuclear power policy (and thus forces us to burn coal and oil).
Right up until the points when he was caught altering his data to suit his conclusion.
Also, the James Hansons and Al Gores of the world are (and let's be brutally honest here) as far from "scientific" as you can get.
People are tired of being told that something is "scientific" or "scientifically proven" because those words have become synonymous with snake oil. Separating the things that are actually rigorously tested, from the ones that had a cherry-picked study that then massaged the numbers and employed lying with statistics for their sales pitch, has become an art in itself.
If science is unpopular today, it's not because of "arrogant, dogmatic and privileged folks" standing at the door. Rather it's unpopular because for every honest scientist out there, there's a hundred James Hanson or Al Gore types shouting about the end of the world, or a new way to "cure" male pattern baldness, or herbally make erections larger or breasts bigger, or a thousand other things that turn out later to be absolute bullshit.
Good, solid, well-done SINGLE PLAYER games are still well sought-after. The problem is that "multiplayer" and other buzzword-based crap have gotten pushed in recent years.
Batman:Arkham Asylum is fantastic and it's a single-player game. Sure, there are "leaderboards", but they're a joke, only put in there for the jerkoff factor of people who get their thrills from seeking out every little "achievement" to a given title to boost their gamerscore before tossing the game in the trash bin and hunting down a new game to hunt achievements down in.
75% of the games I have held on to, to this day, are single-player (or at least primarily-single-player) titles. That ratio hasn't changed in recent years. The rest are party-game type games.
The only reason this "study" found those elements "essential" is that that's what the big-name companies have been hyping. Put that level of advertising hype behind any other game and you'd get the same result. Hell, Brute Farce managed to make "Xbox Platinum" despite the fact that it was selling for $5 in the used bin within a month of its initial release.
Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity.
Truer words were never spoken.
Precisely. You can come to an agreement not to deal with someone face-to-face if their demeanor rubs you the wrong way. You can put a "buffer" person between yourselves, even. On the other hand, when your organization has some dumbass who is not only failing to do their job but requiring other people to come behind and fix the mistakes or clean up the messes, you have a major problem.
Actually, in a modern nuclear plant (pebble-bed designs), when it "goes down" all it does is stop generating power, nothing more.
Your uninformed, hysterical type is the reason we still rely on coal or oil (or even natural gas) for electrical generation at all today.
Look a little further.
If not for people like Carter (who put into place the first US prohibition on nuclear fuel recycling, which would be the RESPONSIBLE thing to do with our so-called "nuclear waste"), Obama, and the left-wing environmental wack-jobs who made it impossible to set up a new nuclear plant anywhere, we'd have a lot less reliance on oil/coal today. Probably not total (there are things, like cars, that work best off oil fuel, to say nothing of the plastics industry) but we'd have a heck of a lot less coal or oil electric generation at the very least.
And why did Carter put that in? On the idea that it would serve as an "example" to other nations who would then not refine nuclear fuel for things like weapons. Let's see - how did that work for North Korea? Iran? Pakistan? India? I see that it did almost nothing.
The question of Solar is whether you can get it ubiquitous. Up until recently, putting it on roofs on homes was cost-prohibitive for most people (the "running cost" of maintaining them and keeping them clean, the initial roof modifications to handle the added weight, proper mooring for the old rotator-types in case there were a major windstorm, and the initial production costs of the solar panels themselves). Most other "renewable" sources are at best, unreliable; windfarms continually take damage if the wind's not "just right" (not to mention the occasional mechanical malfunction) and generate "peak power" only at very specific conditions. Solar farms work only so well without direct, unimpeded light; a few days of overcast skies can have you shipping in power from other areas.
And of course there's the initial battery costs and the running cost of maintaining batteries to provide power during "non-producing" times, plus the toxic chemicals associated with those batteries.
Going after foreign oil isn't going to do a whole lot. On the other hand, get us enough nuclear plants and we can wean off almost everything else while we work out the battery/fuel-cell tech necessary for an alternative to oil.