It reminds me of SCO. You've got child porn on your site but we won't tell you where it is! You'd think it's fairly obvious that (if they believed what they said) the Swedish Police had two proper courses of action:
I don't know, they could look at their own top 100lists. I haven't downloaded any of it and I'm aware that on the internet "teen sluts" are often 25+ but those torrent titles are pretty unambiguous.
While there are few of these phones, they will be great. If they really get market penetration its own popularity will kill it or make it useless as it will be switching to GSM/3G all the time due to detected congestion on the WiFi. From there on there will be endless billing nightmares as consumers will insist that they called over WiFi while the call really was routed over cellular and so on and so fourth.
Read the article. It says the system just looks at how you started the call. I.e. if you use the WiFi to initiate the call in the coffee shop it will be free, even if the phone has to switch to GSM half-way through.
Well, from all I know, Starcraft is more or less a sport in Korea. So we probably have to look at gameplay changes the way we'd look at rule changes in football.
More glitz is okay, bigger stadiums and new cameras located in the players' pants, but the actual way the game is played is only changed very tentatively.
And the harder MS's PR department spins the figures to proclaim total success, the less people will believe Steve (Chair-throwing Steve, not Turtleneck Steve) when he calls for more DRM to stop the rampant piracy of MS intellectual property which threatens the very kind of revolutionary innovation we've seen in Vista (like a 3D accelerated Solitaire).
It started as a short reply and grew from there. My worst fear was that I'd get something like "yeah, fsck you too, asshole" =)
If you have any further questions feel free to ask (here or you can hijack another/. post by me once this thread's locked). But I'm not the most experienced player; it'd probably make more sense if you asked in one of the moo3 forums I linked to (i.e. moo3.at or atari's).
I'm not a member of either because I'm a passionate lurker, I'd have a five figure/.-id had I registered earlier. =(
And a mod. I recommend either tropical or strawberry (warning: I haven't played either in its latest incarnation, but I've only heard good things about them -- why do I recommend them? I'm playing a mod that's similiar to tropical but no longer available, and I've been to lazy to install tropical =). Another mod I haven't tried but you should try is the 1024x768 mod =P
IMPORTANT: Do not micromanage. Trying to micromanage MoO3 will make the game slow, tedious and very, very unfun. It's not meant to be played that way, and the fact that it is possible, if you want to, is perhaps the games biggest problem.
If you have played Europa Universalis II, play MoO like that game. If you haven't, do yourself a favor and buy it for $5 =). Both games aren't like Civ. I've heard Civ players new to EU2 complain, that there's much less to do in Eu2, but that's not the way you play it. If you're bored you simply increase the speed (it's a kind of turn-based/real-time hybrid). MoO3 OTOH doesn't stop you from playing it like Civ with the result that you're bogged down in micromanagement hell. =/
A few things:
Start building the cheapest kind of spy the very first turn and never stop building them. Spies that aren't assigned a mission work as defensive spies. Two are worth one step on the oppressometer.
the first game don't waste points at race creation on whether you're in the senate or not, just reload the game until you are. Unless you're a warmonger, being in the senate makes stuff easier. Also disable all victories but sole survivor. Even if you're not a warmonger, this gives you the ability to end the game when you want to, not when you have to win before somebody else does =)
In the early and mid game zone your best planets by hand. E.g. if you colonize a very mineral rich planet with many mountains, set 1 or 2 industry DEAs, and lots of mineral DEAs. Same for bioharvesting (in the mid game you'll have a bio+mineral problem. Both population and mineral use by industry DEAs grows faster in the beginning. Later on the tech for bio+mineral catches up). You can also build lots of research DEAs on crappy planets. A government and military DEA on bigger planets is also useful, and recreation on newly conquered planets. Leave a bunch of planets (and some regions on most planets) empty, so the viceroy can zone whatever is needed. Of course this all depends on whether you want to maximize production points+test tubes in the long run, or if you need them *now* (e.g. in a war)
Your viceroys are quite good. You'll never have to adjust planetary tax levels by hand, and with the exception of a few defensive buildings now and then, you won't have to touch the planetary build queue either
In the beginning micromanage the military build queue of your homeplanet. You'll want as many scouts as you need (depending on starlanes) and lots of colony ships. Only colonize green+yellow1 planets in the beginning. Worse planets later on, when your cash flow's better.
You need a few system defense ships in all systems to stop piracy.
The budget sliders are extremely important. The three values you want to maximize in MoO3 in the long run are production points (to, well, produce stuff), test tubes (to invent the stuff you want to produce) and population (to gain a majority of the senate). In a war you want to maximize your military strength. Production points are money (from the slider or from the planets themselves) * industrial capacity. Test tubes = money * research capacity. And the money to the military is distributed over the different military build queues.
With current patches and mods MoO3 *is* fun. It just plays different from MoO2 which is why it never had a chance.
Even if it hadn't been a bugfest at release it still wouldn't have been MoO2 with prettier graphics. And even though everyone says they don't want Game X-1 with prettier graphics, what everyone wants is Game X-1 with prettier graphics.
In addition, Reiser alleged that Sturgeon wrote into a contract that Reiser must participate in Death Yoga, which he said has the purpose of slowing down ones heart to the point of death. I really thought Reiser'd lost it the first time I read that, but now it sounds like Sturgeon might actually be the crazier of the two.
Well, his solution solves the grid issue, but at the cost of introducing relevant Bremsstrahlung losses into the system. That's why I'm not really sold on his reactor either. Not the Bremsstrahlung per se but the fact that his design will stand or fall with the actual losses and efficiencies. What we're doing here is qualitative reasoning but we'd need quantitative answers =)
Nevertheless I think I'd be worth the 10 million to find out whether his design scales as well as he assumes.
1) You need high voltages both for coronal discharge ionization and for accelerating the ions toward the core. Yes, but those voltages should be orders of magnitude lower than the kinetic energy of the resulting particles.
Honestly, I could write a post in a similar tone from a 1943 POV on how Los Alamos will never produce anything useful.
That said, he really should have toned his money request down. =) But he does have a new way of solving some of the problems of existing Farnsworth-Hirsch fusors and we probably could determine whether he is on to something really useful or just delusional for less than $10e6. Compared to the costs for ITER that's low enough that we should at least try to recreate his last experiments.
How do you get the helium waste products out?
- We have a grid on the outside which lets the helium slowly come to a stop, we haven't tried this yet but it's an engineering problem. There are also serious problems with arcing due to the high voltages, but these are merely engineering problems not physics problems.
The charged particles that are the result of the fusion process have a vastly higher energy level than the fuel (that's the point of the device). Just about all of them should have more than enough kinetic energy to leave the potential well.
And is arcing really a problem in a device that's mostly vacuum where the coils aren't charged but carrying a current instead?
Imho, much more interesting is the question whether the device's good enough at keeping the fuel at discrete energy levels that it can actually break even instead of devolving in a far less efficient thermodynamic equilibrium.
Did you actually try ripping one under Linux or do you just say it because none is listed on wikipedia?
I ask because just about all DVD progs on Linux use libdvdread/libdvdcss to access the DVD. And if VLC supports those DVDs (according to wp) all others should - in theory (in theory there's no difference between etc. =)- do so, too (iirc the VLC project even originated those two libs).
Well, once upon a time there were lots of programs called X"description", e.g. Xchat, Xpaint, Xwhatever.
Then there came KDE and they saw that it made sense and they called their programs K"description".
Then there came lots of trolls making fun of that because they were stupid. And they were so persistant (there's still no KDE article on/. without at least one Khave Kyou Kseen Ktheir Kstupid Knames joKe) and so obnoxious, that nowadays you can't release a Linux program with a name that actually makes sense.
That's very misleading. mp3 is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, AAC is part of the MPEG-4 specification,.mp4 refers to the container format of the MPEG-4 specification that's based on.mov and can contain a large number of different video, audio and other streams in a number of different codecs.
So an overall better codec. at 128kbs it sounds roughly the same as an 196kbs mp3. Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.
This is also misleading, although AAC *is* better. With codecs like these, the only thing that is fixed is the actual bitstream, leaving a lot of leeway to the different encoders. An mp3 encoded with an excellent encoder will be superior to an AAC by a mediocre encoder (e.g. I don't know about Quicktime's aac encodes but its AVC is complete and utter shit, even though AVC is an excellent spec). Also cpu-time constraints can have a serious impact on encoding quality, although that's normally not an issue if you do the encoding on a PC.
One big advantage of AAC are advanced features like 5.1 channels and such. There are hacks to tack on lots of features to mp3 but it lacks the (relatively) clean specs of MPEG-4 and it often lead to all kinds of problems.
the 256kbs mp4 that EMI wants to sell drm free is only good news.
yes, it is. (Good Apple; good EMI too btw, even though it took too long until they saw the light)
MP3's staying power is odd. one can add support for both easily, yet most players seem to think WMA is the only way to go. They could support MP4, MP3, and WMA.
It's not odd. Mp3 is the 800 pound gorilla of music formats and noone can do without it. Apple refused to share its DRM system with anyone (bad Apple), so for most competitors WMA was the easiest way to provide customers the capability to buy music (well, Big-4 music) online, thanks to MS's Played-for-Sure(TM) (until they got the URGE(TM) to squirt(TM) stuff all over the place =) and iirc it's the default spit out by WMP if you tell it to encode something for you. Few non-iPod owners use AAC, so there was no real reason to implement it (similar problem as Vorbis).
Well, from a legal POV the plausible deniability an unsecured WLAN offers is quite tempting.
As long as you secure your computers and data (and if you're not charged by the GB), it's really useful to be able to tell the judge that it was teH h4X0rZz when the RIAA rings at your door.
This is why Europpeans can shop around the EU looking for the cheapest prices for products - e.g. Italians buying Mercedes in Germany
Hahaha, that's a good one.
German car manufacturers probably paid more in fines than any other industry because they were (perhaps still are; I don't know, I'm currently not in the market for a new car) bleeding us dry. IIRC Volkswagen held the record for the highest fine before MS came along.
Lots of people got very rich by re-importing German cars from other European countries while still offering them for thousands less than the official dealerships.
Now what did I say? I did not say children should be treated exactly like adults, I said I think it is a bad idea to hold children to absolutely no liability. Children have limited rights but they still have rights. Going by your own reasoning, that means that they should have limited responsibility, which is exactly what was said.
The difference between what you said and treatment under German law (which is what we were talking about) is the philosophy behind the measures taken. A prison sentence generally serves retribution, deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation, a fine additionally can be used for reparation. Now when you want to prosecute children using criminal law you apply the philosophy of criminal justice to children and I agree with German law that there has to be a cutoff where that doesn't happen, but where rehabilitation as in "to restore to useful life, as through therapy and education" should be the only guideline.
As the ggp already mentioned the parents might be liable depending on the circumstances though.
Drinking, driving (which is not even a right but a priviledge), and sex are not the only rights in the world.
This were just a few examples not an exhaustive list and it was less about rights and more about interactions with other people (Because that's generally how you can harm someone. E.g. it's perfectly legal for a minor to drive around his parents' farm). A minor generally needs the consent of a legal guardian for just about all contracts.
I have to disagree, some children know exactly what they are doing at a young age (talking about malicious acts here). That there are little consequences for them does not improve matters.
I agree that children under 14 should and can be prosecuted for certain crimes - albeit with a lighter sentence with a nod to maturity, maliciousness and other factors. Now, I am talking about murder, arson, etcetera with direct harm to other people.
So you think there should be no age of consent and children should be allowed to drink alcohol and drive a car and vote? Or are children only able to "know exactly what they are doing" when it's malicious?
This reasoning is bullshit, you either give children full rights and full responsibility or you accept that a child often lacks the morality and foresight we expect of adults.
Even if there might be some children that are incurable at 14, for the vast majority it's more a matter of upbringing and education than innate maliciousness. They need good foster homes not prison. But good foster care is very expensive, prison is cheap in comparison and thanks to media scares, American knee-jerk revenge fantasies and lobbying by prison corps I don't see any change in attitude any time soon.
As a percentage of total population, the United States also has the largest imprisoned population, with 738 people per 100,000 serving time, awaiting trial or otherwise detained [6]. New Zealand has the second highest prison population per capita amongst developed countries, with 169 prisoners per 100,000.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, Sony's proven that the best way to sell consoles is to insult your potential buyers, haven't they?
I don't know, they could look at their own top 100 lists. I haven't downloaded any of it and I'm aware that on the internet "teen sluts" are often 25+ but those torrent titles are pretty unambiguous.
Read the article. It says the system just looks at how you started the call. I.e. if you use the WiFi to initiate the call in the coffee shop it will be free, even if the phone has to switch to GSM half-way through.
So jailbait should be prisonbait?
Robert Kubica crashed into a wall at 280km/h and walked away (well, "was cut out of the car") with a sprained ankle and a mild concussion.
Yeah, noone was interested in diamonds before De Beers. I mean they used them as landfill and for other unimportant stuff.
I don't like De Beers either but please don't use hyperbole to ruin a perfectly valid argument.
More glitz is okay, bigger stadiums and new cameras located in the players' pants, but the actual way the game is played is only changed very tentatively.
And the harder MS's PR department spins the figures to proclaim total success, the less people will believe Steve (Chair-throwing Steve, not Turtleneck Steve) when he calls for more DRM to stop the rampant piracy of MS intellectual property which threatens the very kind of revolutionary innovation we've seen in Vista (like a 3D accelerated Solitaire).
If you have any further questions feel free to ask (here or you can hijack another /. post by me once this thread's locked). But I'm not the most experienced player; it'd probably make more sense if you asked in one of the moo3 forums I linked to (i.e. moo3.at or atari's).
I'm not a member of either because I'm a passionate lurker, I'd have a five figure /.-id had I registered earlier. =(
If you have played Europa Universalis II, play MoO like that game. If you haven't, do yourself a favor and buy it for $5 =). Both games aren't like Civ. I've heard Civ players new to EU2 complain, that there's much less to do in Eu2, but that's not the way you play it. If you're bored you simply increase the speed (it's a kind of turn-based/real-time hybrid). MoO3 OTOH doesn't stop you from playing it like Civ with the result that you're bogged down in micromanagement hell. =/
Even if it hadn't been a bugfest at release it still wouldn't have been MoO2 with prettier graphics. And even though everyone says they don't want Game X-1 with prettier graphics, what everyone wants is Game X-1 with prettier graphics.
...the 200 sorority whores I dormed with freshmen year. We feel your pain; really, we do.Nevertheless I think I'd be worth the 10 million to find out whether his design scales as well as he assumes.
1) You need high voltages both for coronal discharge ionization and for accelerating the ions toward the core. Yes, but those voltages should be orders of magnitude lower than the kinetic energy of the resulting particles.That said, he really should have toned his money request down. =) But he does have a new way of solving some of the problems of existing Farnsworth-Hirsch fusors and we probably could determine whether he is on to something really useful or just delusional for less than $10e6. Compared to the costs for ITER that's low enough that we should at least try to recreate his last experiments.
How do you get the helium waste products out?- We have a grid on the outside which lets the helium slowly come to a stop, we haven't tried this yet but it's an engineering problem. There are also serious problems with arcing due to the high voltages, but these are merely engineering problems not physics problems.
The charged particles that are the result of the fusion process have a vastly higher energy level than the fuel (that's the point of the device). Just about all of them should have more than enough kinetic energy to leave the potential well.And is arcing really a problem in a device that's mostly vacuum where the coils aren't charged but carrying a current instead?
Imho, much more interesting is the question whether the device's good enough at keeping the fuel at discrete energy levels that it can actually break even instead of devolving in a far less efficient thermodynamic equilibrium.
I ask because just about all DVD progs on Linux use libdvdread/libdvdcss to access the DVD. And if VLC supports those DVDs (according to wp) all others should - in theory (in theory there's no difference between etc. =)- do so, too (iirc the VLC project even originated those two libs).
Then there came KDE and they saw that it made sense and they called their programs K"description".
Then there came lots of trolls making fun of that because they were stupid. And they were so persistant (there's still no KDE article on /. without at least one Khave Kyou Kseen Ktheir Kstupid Knames joKe) and so obnoxious, that nowadays you can't release a Linux program with a name that actually makes sense.
Kcuf
That's very misleading. mp3 is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, AAC is part of the MPEG-4 specification, .mp4 refers to the container format of the MPEG-4 specification that's based on .mov and can contain a large number of different video, audio and other streams in a number of different codecs.
So an overall better codec. at 128kbs it sounds roughly the same as an 196kbs mp3. Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.
This is also misleading, although AAC *is* better. With codecs like these, the only thing that is fixed is the actual bitstream, leaving a lot of leeway to the different encoders. An mp3 encoded with an excellent encoder will be superior to an AAC by a mediocre encoder (e.g. I don't know about Quicktime's aac encodes but its AVC is complete and utter shit, even though AVC is an excellent spec). Also cpu-time constraints can have a serious impact on encoding quality, although that's normally not an issue if you do the encoding on a PC.
One big advantage of AAC are advanced features like 5.1 channels and such. There are hacks to tack on lots of features to mp3 but it lacks the (relatively) clean specs of MPEG-4 and it often lead to all kinds of problems.
the 256kbs mp4 that EMI wants to sell drm free is only good news.
yes, it is. (Good Apple; good EMI too btw, even though it took too long until they saw the light)
MP3's staying power is odd. one can add support for both easily, yet most players seem to think WMA is the only way to go. They could support MP4, MP3, and WMA.
It's not odd. Mp3 is the 800 pound gorilla of music formats and noone can do without it. Apple refused to share its DRM system with anyone (bad Apple), so for most competitors WMA was the easiest way to provide customers the capability to buy music (well, Big-4 music) online, thanks to MS's Played-for-Sure(TM) (until they got the URGE(TM) to squirt(TM) stuff all over the place =) and iirc it's the default spit out by WMP if you tell it to encode something for you. Few non-iPod owners use AAC, so there was no real reason to implement it (similar problem as Vorbis).
As long as you secure your computers and data (and if you're not charged by the GB), it's really useful to be able to tell the judge that it was teH h4X0rZz when the RIAA rings at your door.
Hahaha, that's a good one.
German car manufacturers probably paid more in fines than any other industry because they were (perhaps still are; I don't know, I'm currently not in the market for a new car) bleeding us dry. IIRC Volkswagen held the record for the highest fine before MS came along.
Lots of people got very rich by re-importing German cars from other European countries while still offering them for thousands less than the official dealerships.
And that was when I wasn't using my IPOD. I have movies which I've watched already, and a few games that suck.
Lucky you! I have ten of them lying around. Never even booted them up, they just look so shitty!
I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person who buys stuff he doesn't want and then keeps it just so he can troll about it on /.
I'm all for progress; it's change I can't stand. -- Mark Twain
IOW, what you're saying is that your college anecdotes are useless for predicting the winner of the console wars?
The difference between what you said and treatment under German law (which is what we were talking about) is the philosophy behind the measures taken. A prison sentence generally serves retribution, deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation, a fine additionally can be used for reparation. Now when you want to prosecute children using criminal law you apply the philosophy of criminal justice to children and I agree with German law that there has to be a cutoff where that doesn't happen, but where rehabilitation as in "to restore to useful life, as through therapy and education" should be the only guideline.
As the ggp already mentioned the parents might be liable depending on the circumstances though.
Drinking, driving (which is not even a right but a priviledge), and sex are not the only rights in the world.
This were just a few examples not an exhaustive list and it was less about rights and more about interactions with other people (Because that's generally how you can harm someone. E.g. it's perfectly legal for a minor to drive around his parents' farm). A minor generally needs the consent of a legal guardian for just about all contracts.
I agree that children under 14 should and can be prosecuted for certain crimes - albeit with a lighter sentence with a nod to maturity, maliciousness and other factors. Now, I am talking about murder, arson, etcetera with direct harm to other people.
So you think there should be no age of consent and children should be allowed to drink alcohol and drive a car and vote? Or are children only able to "know exactly what they are doing" when it's malicious?
This reasoning is bullshit, you either give children full rights and full responsibility or you accept that a child often lacks the morality and foresight we expect of adults.
Even if there might be some children that are incurable at 14, for the vast majority it's more a matter of upbringing and education than innate maliciousness. They need good foster homes not prison. But good foster care is very expensive, prison is cheap in comparison and thanks to media scares, American knee-jerk revenge fantasies and lobbying by prison corps I don't see any change in attitude any time soon.
Wikipedia accuracy warning applies, nevertheless: