If you want some tough questions, get some English interviewers over here to badger the candidates on the issues.
It is always interesting to listen to English journalists, even Canadian journalists seem to be more confrontational than Americans. And sometimes this is really satisfying, and sometimes it isn't. It gets a bit frustrating when they ask things a candidate can't reasonably explain in a short period of time, and it is even more frustrating when the journalist ends up grilling the person primarily as a result of some cultural thing that the journalist doesn't get. But over all, I think we could do with a British interviewer or two to keep the politicians on their toes.
The part of this that interests me the most is the SNES emulator - hopefully this might cause Nintendo to look at their pricing plan for the Virtual Console games. Seven quid for an unenhanced SNES game seems a bit pricey.
I could give a rat's ass about the price of the Virtual Console games. I bought a Wii so I could play the old games from my childhood, and I knew the price points when I bought in. What I didn't know was how pathetically slow the release of classic games would be. I really don't care about some obscure NeoGeo game, Nintendo, just hurry up and release all the best selling SNES and N64 games.
Now that there is an emulator on the Wii, maybe Nintendo will get the message that if they don't hurry up and release the games I want, I'll just pirate them.
Seriously, when will media copyright holders learn that if they want me to buy their products legally, they need to actually sell them when I want them? I mean, seriously, the least give release dates so I know that I'm not waiting in vain.
But probably they are just waiting for someone to publish a game titled 'Diplomacy' so they can sue them!
Rumor is that Avalon Hill will actually be re-publishing Diplomacy next month. And I think Wizards effectively is the adult games company you speak want Hasbro to spin off. They profitably publish games to that market.
Contractor paid to search for porn? What do you bet there may be a long list of people wanting that job?
As part of a job I used to have I had to sort through ads for prostitution on craigslist. It gets old extremely quickly. And I suspect these people would be looking for things on the same level of seaminess as that.
The idea that discourse on elite campuses is a nontrivial degree to the left of discourse in the nation as a whole is not born out of some study -- sound or not -- it is a pretty obvious fact about college campuses that anyone who had attends a prestigious university notices. It may not be as extreme as some think-tank neocons think, and it certainly isn't as alarming as the David Horowitzes of the world think, but there is a definite tilt. I don't think there's much to the old liberal media bias trope, but on campuses, there is definitely not a equal mix of liberal and conservative advocates.
And why would there be? People who can afford to compete for spots at the top schools are more likely to belong to a social class that is more liberal. Students at a campus are likely to be people of an age where many people are at their most liberal. The current crop of specialty academic departments are more likely to interest liberals. Beyond that, staying in school long enough to become a professor means you've thrived in a liberal environment for long enough.
But so what? That doesn't stop conservatives from getting a good education. And there is little evidence that liberal academia hurts the conservative movement or its ideas -- maybe even the opposite.
And who cares about an entire university faculty's party preferences, really? A lot of profs are scientists, whose ideology matters very little, and who usually average out to be center-left moderates, like many people in their social class. That the Woman's Studies department is overwhelmingly leftist doesn't matter that much to me. You know that going in and you avoid the department if that sort of thing bothers you.
All that really matters is that students learn how to think critically, do their own research, and write their ideas well. As long as you learn how to learn, you'll be okay even if what you learned wasn't ever so perfectly balanced.
What I'd like is the ability as a DM to decide for myself what the place of magic is in my world, say how it is culturally conceived, say what source it is that wizards believe gives them their powers, and define the relative rarity of different types of effects, then be able to have the game implement those ideas gracefully without imposing it's own ideas and content over and above my own and without an immense amount of work on my side. As it is, the D&D rules basically: decide what level of magic is required in the world to balance the characters, define how magic works metaphysically, and decide the relative availability of types of magical effects.
At base a D&D wizard is hard to mistake for anything but a D&D Wizard. You can try to hide it with twists and tweaks here and there, but basically every wizard looks like he stepped out of Greyhawk or Toril. They cast magic missile at first, then fireball later. They can fly at 5th level, they teleport 4 levels later. These spells often can't be used to specify generic powers. They are idiosyncratic enough that they all look unmistakably like D&D spells. And the mix of spells cast by an X-level character always look roughly the same. There's no logical connection between flying, breathing under water and casting your main damage spell -- if you want to theme magic a certain way this combination makes no sense -- but a D&D wizard learns them all around the same time.
Basically, I am required to have the PHB spell list exist as an in-game book that was developed by historic NPCs in my campaign world, even if the flavor and substance are all wrong for the world.
Sure, I can use some glosses to make magic missile look different, etc., but in the end what I get looks like a thinly disguised D&D wizard. I can change spell's levels, but often that just leads to even weirder and more broken results. It certainly adds no logic to why certain forms of arcane knowledge are related. Beyond this, the flavor of many magic users in D&D is essentially the game mechanics by which they operate, and things just get too meta when those game mechanics are rearing their ugly heads so often.
Often what I have to do is scrap the magic user classes altogether after 3rd or 4th level and then use custom prestige classes that entirely define the mage's powers, perhaps using sacrificed spell slots to piggyback on the built in experience system. But that basically involves scrapping the magic system entirely and building a new one from scratch for every character archetype in the world.
ne of the key issues I have had with previous editions of D&D is that even with all the customizing options, all the magic using characters are still very defined by the list of spells in the player's handbook. Since magic is such a defining part of a world, that means that the PHB spellbook is often a very intrusive influence on the character of the world.
Will 4th edition have a good system for customizing magic to the DM's world, or will DMs still essentially have to adapt their world to the magic system?
and it can be paused OR ALTERED at will, the VR simulation could self-correct for any flaw we discover by simply rewriting the memories of any experiences we had, or deleting and replaying that part of the simulation with different variables.
The idea that a VR simulation could or would rewrite our memories implicitly contains the assumption that we are what is being simulated. That's not a forgone conclusion. Perhaps we are merely the accidental by-product of the simulation. Perhaps the simulators do not even know that we exist. Even if they do, whose to say that they understand the way our brains function to the extent that can change our memories? Or would care to.
You can never rule out being in a simulation if you let a simulation mean anything, but you can rule out being in certain types of simulations.
I swear to god I remember watching a sesame street sketch when I was a kid that was called Empty-V and was a parody of MTV. It had a big empty V logo in the style of MTV's old logo, and lots of little pink monsters dancing around singing innocuous bubbly poppy music.
Who knew muppets were such prescient cultural critics?
While you are right that strictly speaking there are two meanings of the word, each with a different origin, the two meanings converge so substantially that they might as well be one.
In political jargon the term refers to an effort to torpedo a judicial nomination, but by analogy can really mean any concerted effort to ruin/stop/decimate something. In nerd jargon it basically means to break something, but I gather the strong connotation is to screw something up or really botch something. So basically we are back to ruining things.
About the only substantial difference is that one implies intent and the other implies an accident. But that might as well think of the two terms as one with context providing the information about intention.
I am reminded of how in every culture in the Hitchhiker's Guide universe there is always a drink whose name is something on the order of "Gin and Tonic."
There's a large difference between mass (that what makes a black hole) and relativistic mass (what you're describing). Relativistic mass is a misnomer, because you aren't actually changing the mass of the object
Ok, you're going to have to explain this a bit further for us non-physicists. If relativistic mass isn't the same as normal mass, then how does this fit with conservation of mass and energy?
My understanding is that:
the energy of a particle is proportional to its velocity and its mass.
there are no circumstances under which by the laws of physics a particle cannot be accelerated
accelerating that particle costs energy, which diminishes the amount of energy contained in (the universe - that particle)
there is conservation of mass/energy for the union of the sets (the universe - the particle) and (the particle)
thus, accelerating the particle increases its energy
if you can keep accelerating the particle, which increases its energy, there is no upper bound on the energy the particle can have
from an outside reference frame there is an upper bound on the velocity a particle can have
if something without an upper bound is proportional to something with an upper bound (velocity) and something else (mass), that something else must not have an upper bound
since mass == energy, you can eventually get the huge amounts of mass required
How this was always explained to me was that from the particle's own reference frame, it can keep on accelerating indefinitely -- the time it experiences between destinations continues to shrink. From the outside reference from the particle has a speed limit. Each additional infusion of energy will add an increasingly small amount of velocity sort of like a hyperbola with an asymptote at c, and the rest of the energy will go to increasing the mass of the particle as perceived by the outside reference frame.
Now, my understanding was that the outside reference frame sees the same characteristics and behavior regardless of the origin of the mass.
In language a non-physicist can understand, where do I go wrong in my understanding?
This copyright [on performances] is generally held by the record company.
This is true for the radio single version of a song, but is not universally true. There will be some performances that are owned not by the record company but by the radio station. When an artist is on tour, drops by the local radio station to plug their album and performs an in-studio version of their song, that copyright can easily end up going to the radio station.
What passage of this bill might mean is that such recordings owned by the radio stations would become more important. You'd end up hearing more "exclusive tracks" and I can easily see radio stations deciding to play an artist or not based on their willingness to provide them with non-RIAA owned performances. And I can easily see radio stations in different markets setting up trade deals that would give them access to each other's in-studio performances.
At that point, I imagine the RIAA probably tries some sort of counter-shenanigans like stipulating in artists' contracts that they have to assign the copyright for all performances to their record company.
Some people also don't believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact.
Have you ever noticed how people who say that the Constitution is not a suicide pact always really mean "the Constitution is a suicide pact, so let's not follow it."
Well, I think that the Constitution really isn't a suicide pact. Following it won't be the end of the Western world. On the contrary, it is the great accomplishment of the Western world, and far from being a vulnerability, it contains the very values that allowed us to prosper, and which will deliver us from this current evil, just as it has delivered us from others.
Abondoning the most fundamental and tested rules of our society for the sake of expedience is the real suicide pact.
Upon clicking your link I just realized that one of my favorite artists put out a new CD last month. Supports the big names thing. Not sure what it says about the promotion part.
If I read grandparent's link correctly, it seems to be saying that Jupiter is the product of acretion in the planetary disc, a process which never produces a star; in order to be a star, or even a failed star, the body has to arise direclty from the cloud, not from the disc, as Jupiter is thought to have. So if the sun and jupiter had "both coalesce[d] from the same cloud, then Jupiter" would be "seen as an 'almost' star." That's my reading at least.
Well, 22 years ago who were some of the important players? Apple, IBM, Microsoft were some.
They are all still important, but in some pretty different ways. The companies have had to adapt, but they have thrived. It's not so implausible that another 22 years will see the same thing happen to Google and Facebook.
I am a Camino devotee and I don't know what you are talking about. All I know is that whenever I use safari, I find myself wondering why typing "/" and then letters doesn't automagically search the text of the page for me.
The "expand or die" mantra comes as a result of most stocks today being valued based on how much their share price will rise in the future, because for some reason paying dividends (which any steady-state business would do if it were sane, and which I believe most companies used to do) has become passe. That's not good for the company (and thus its employees and customers) in the long run because expansion is unsustainable and almost always leads to a loss of focus.
Absolutely. And I agree, focus on stock growth over dividends seems odd. The reason has to do with the tax code. Dividends are double-taxed, first as corporate profits, then as personal income, whereas re-investment and growth by a company is seen as avoiding that trap. Historically the tax code also favored capital gains over dividends, so that's another reason for Wall Street's mentality.
I don't disagree with your assertion. It sounds more like it would just be one more vulnerability, not a vulnerability of a greater magnitude. Still, it is a vulnerability that doesn't have much of an upside for Apple, which doesn't want _some_ DRM-free music, but wants _all_ DRM-free music.
According to the article, music leaves iTunes' servers unencrypted, then iTunes encrypts the file locally, this means that there isn't one master encrypted version that Apple sends to everyone. Each file is unique, and in order to make that feasible, it is your computer that processes that encryption. Were Apple to impliment a no-DRM option for some music, they would have to have the iTMS send a message to iTunes telling whether it should encrypt each particular song it sends. This signal would then become a vulnerability that would be exploitable by hackers.
As the article explains, Apple's anti-DRM position is entirely self-serving: they believe that they would make less money if they could sell all their music DRM free. They don't believe they'd make more money by unDRMing a few selected tracks, so they haven't gone to the trouble of expending money, manpower, and liability exposure on it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is always interesting to listen to English journalists, even Canadian journalists seem to be more confrontational than Americans. And sometimes this is really satisfying, and sometimes it isn't. It gets a bit frustrating when they ask things a candidate can't reasonably explain in a short period of time, and it is even more frustrating when the journalist ends up grilling the person primarily as a result of some cultural thing that the journalist doesn't get. But over all, I think we could do with a British interviewer or two to keep the politicians on their toes.
I could give a rat's ass about the price of the Virtual Console games. I bought a Wii so I could play the old games from my childhood, and I knew the price points when I bought in. What I didn't know was how pathetically slow the release of classic games would be. I really don't care about some obscure NeoGeo game, Nintendo, just hurry up and release all the best selling SNES and N64 games.
Now that there is an emulator on the Wii, maybe Nintendo will get the message that if they don't hurry up and release the games I want, I'll just pirate them.
Seriously, when will media copyright holders learn that if they want me to buy their products legally, they need to actually sell them when I want them? I mean, seriously, the least give release dates so I know that I'm not waiting in vain.
As part of a job I used to have I had to sort through ads for prostitution on craigslist. It gets old extremely quickly. And I suspect these people would be looking for things on the same level of seaminess as that.
The idea that discourse on elite campuses is a nontrivial degree to the left of discourse in the nation as a whole is not born out of some study -- sound or not -- it is a pretty obvious fact about college campuses that anyone who had attends a prestigious university notices. It may not be as extreme as some think-tank neocons think, and it certainly isn't as alarming as the David Horowitzes of the world think, but there is a definite tilt. I don't think there's much to the old liberal media bias trope, but on campuses, there is definitely not a equal mix of liberal and conservative advocates.
And why would there be? People who can afford to compete for spots at the top schools are more likely to belong to a social class that is more liberal. Students at a campus are likely to be people of an age where many people are at their most liberal. The current crop of specialty academic departments are more likely to interest liberals. Beyond that, staying in school long enough to become a professor means you've thrived in a liberal environment for long enough.
But so what? That doesn't stop conservatives from getting a good education. And there is little evidence that liberal academia hurts the conservative movement or its ideas -- maybe even the opposite.
And who cares about an entire university faculty's party preferences, really? A lot of profs are scientists, whose ideology matters very little, and who usually average out to be center-left moderates, like many people in their social class. That the Woman's Studies department is overwhelmingly leftist doesn't matter that much to me. You know that going in and you avoid the department if that sort of thing bothers you.
All that really matters is that students learn how to think critically, do their own research, and write their ideas well. As long as you learn how to learn, you'll be okay even if what you learned wasn't ever so perfectly balanced.
I get a check every year that disagrees with you.
They may not be sugar-lobby powerful, but they still manage to farm the government well enough.
What I'd like is the ability as a DM to decide for myself what the place of magic is in my world, say how it is culturally conceived, say what source it is that wizards believe gives them their powers, and define the relative rarity of different types of effects, then be able to have the game implement those ideas gracefully without imposing it's own ideas and content over and above my own and without an immense amount of work on my side. As it is, the D&D rules basically: decide what level of magic is required in the world to balance the characters, define how magic works metaphysically, and decide the relative availability of types of magical effects.
At base a D&D wizard is hard to mistake for anything but a D&D Wizard. You can try to hide it with twists and tweaks here and there, but basically every wizard looks like he stepped out of Greyhawk or Toril. They cast magic missile at first, then fireball later. They can fly at 5th level, they teleport 4 levels later. These spells often can't be used to specify generic powers. They are idiosyncratic enough that they all look unmistakably like D&D spells. And the mix of spells cast by an X-level character always look roughly the same. There's no logical connection between flying, breathing under water and casting your main damage spell -- if you want to theme magic a certain way this combination makes no sense -- but a D&D wizard learns them all around the same time.
Basically, I am required to have the PHB spell list exist as an in-game book that was developed by historic NPCs in my campaign world, even if the flavor and substance are all wrong for the world.
Sure, I can use some glosses to make magic missile look different, etc., but in the end what I get looks like a thinly disguised D&D wizard. I can change spell's levels, but often that just leads to even weirder and more broken results. It certainly adds no logic to why certain forms of arcane knowledge are related. Beyond this, the flavor of many magic users in D&D is essentially the game mechanics by which they operate, and things just get too meta when those game mechanics are rearing their ugly heads so often.
Often what I have to do is scrap the magic user classes altogether after 3rd or 4th level and then use custom prestige classes that entirely define the mage's powers, perhaps using sacrificed spell slots to piggyback on the built in experience system. But that basically involves scrapping the magic system entirely and building a new one from scratch for every character archetype in the world.
ne of the key issues I have had with previous editions of D&D is that even with all the customizing options, all the magic using characters are still very defined by the list of spells in the player's handbook. Since magic is such a defining part of a world, that means that the PHB spellbook is often a very intrusive influence on the character of the world.
Will 4th edition have a good system for customizing magic to the DM's world, or will DMs still essentially have to adapt their world to the magic system?
The idea that a VR simulation could or would rewrite our memories implicitly contains the assumption that we are what is being simulated. That's not a forgone conclusion. Perhaps we are merely the accidental by-product of the simulation. Perhaps the simulators do not even know that we exist. Even if they do, whose to say that they understand the way our brains function to the extent that can change our memories? Or would care to.
You can never rule out being in a simulation if you let a simulation mean anything, but you can rule out being in certain types of simulations.
I swear to god I remember watching a sesame street sketch when I was a kid that was called Empty-V and was a parody of MTV. It had a big empty V logo in the style of MTV's old logo, and lots of little pink monsters dancing around singing innocuous bubbly poppy music.
Who knew muppets were such prescient cultural critics?
While you are right that strictly speaking there are two meanings of the word, each with a different origin, the two meanings converge so substantially that they might as well be one.
In political jargon the term refers to an effort to torpedo a judicial nomination, but by analogy can really mean any concerted effort to ruin/stop/decimate something. In nerd jargon it basically means to break something, but I gather the strong connotation is to screw something up or really botch something. So basically we are back to ruining things.
About the only substantial difference is that one implies intent and the other implies an accident. But that might as well think of the two terms as one with context providing the information about intention.
I am reminded of how in every culture in the Hitchhiker's Guide universe there is always a drink whose name is something on the order of "Gin and Tonic."
Ok, you're going to have to explain this a bit further for us non-physicists. If relativistic mass isn't the same as normal mass, then how does this fit with conservation of mass and energy?
My understanding is that:
How this was always explained to me was that from the particle's own reference frame, it can keep on accelerating indefinitely -- the time it experiences between destinations continues to shrink. From the outside reference from the particle has a speed limit. Each additional infusion of energy will add an increasingly small amount of velocity sort of like a hyperbola with an asymptote at c, and the rest of the energy will go to increasing the mass of the particle as perceived by the outside reference frame.
Now, my understanding was that the outside reference frame sees the same characteristics and behavior regardless of the origin of the mass.
In language a non-physicist can understand, where do I go wrong in my understanding?
This is true for the radio single version of a song, but is not universally true. There will be some performances that are owned not by the record company but by the radio station. When an artist is on tour, drops by the local radio station to plug their album and performs an in-studio version of their song, that copyright can easily end up going to the radio station.
What passage of this bill might mean is that such recordings owned by the radio stations would become more important. You'd end up hearing more "exclusive tracks" and I can easily see radio stations deciding to play an artist or not based on their willingness to provide them with non-RIAA owned performances. And I can easily see radio stations in different markets setting up trade deals that would give them access to each other's in-studio performances.
At that point, I imagine the RIAA probably tries some sort of counter-shenanigans like stipulating in artists' contracts that they have to assign the copyright for all performances to their record company.
Some people also don't believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact.
Have you ever noticed how people who say that the Constitution is not a suicide pact always really mean "the Constitution is a suicide pact, so let's not follow it."
Well, I think that the Constitution really isn't a suicide pact. Following it won't be the end of the Western world. On the contrary, it is the great accomplishment of the Western world, and far from being a vulnerability, it contains the very values that allowed us to prosper, and which will deliver us from this current evil, just as it has delivered us from others.
Abondoning the most fundamental and tested rules of our society for the sake of expedience is the real suicide pact.
Upon clicking your link I just realized that one of my favorite artists put out a new CD last month. Supports the big names thing. Not sure what it says about the promotion part.
If I read grandparent's link correctly, it seems to be saying that Jupiter is the product of acretion in the planetary disc, a process which never produces a star; in order to be a star, or even a failed star, the body has to arise direclty from the cloud, not from the disc, as Jupiter is thought to have. So if the sun and jupiter had "both coalesce[d] from the same cloud, then Jupiter" would be "seen as an 'almost' star." That's my reading at least.
When I first read your sig I thought it said "Cthulhu/Hastert." And I thought, Cthulhu is a Republican, how did we manage that?
Well, 22 years ago who were some of the important players? Apple, IBM, Microsoft were some.
They are all still important, but in some pretty different ways. The companies have had to adapt, but they have thrived. It's not so implausible that another 22 years will see the same thing happen to Google and Facebook.
I am a Camino devotee and I don't know what you are talking about. All I know is that whenever I use safari, I find myself wondering why typing "/" and then letters doesn't automagically search the text of the page for me.
All good points, but just to say: I know significantly more people who own John Deere tractors than people who own Zunes.
Absolutely. And I agree, focus on stock growth over dividends seems odd. The reason has to do with the tax code. Dividends are double-taxed, first as corporate profits, then as personal income, whereas re-investment and growth by a company is seen as avoiding that trap. Historically the tax code also favored capital gains over dividends, so that's another reason for Wall Street's mentality.
Mac is attempting to upgrade interface privileges. Cancel or Allow?
I don't disagree with your assertion. It sounds more like it would just be one more vulnerability, not a vulnerability of a greater magnitude. Still, it is a vulnerability that doesn't have much of an upside for Apple, which doesn't want _some_ DRM-free music, but wants _all_ DRM-free music.
According to the article, music leaves iTunes' servers unencrypted, then iTunes encrypts the file locally, this means that there isn't one master encrypted version that Apple sends to everyone. Each file is unique, and in order to make that feasible, it is your computer that processes that encryption. Were Apple to impliment a no-DRM option for some music, they would have to have the iTMS send a message to iTunes telling whether it should encrypt each particular song it sends. This signal would then become a vulnerability that would be exploitable by hackers. As the article explains, Apple's anti-DRM position is entirely self-serving: they believe that they would make less money if they could sell all their music DRM free. They don't believe they'd make more money by unDRMing a few selected tracks, so they haven't gone to the trouble of expending money, manpower, and liability exposure on it.