This doesn't have to be a huge freedom issue, as you don't have a fundamental right to speed.
It can be a freedom issue, and that's why I'm concerned with implementation. If it reports back that you were speeding, reports back your location, cuts the power to your car too quickly in order to be dangerous, then it's a freedom issue(particularly location tracking, which is sort of required for auto-ticketing). That's why implementation is important. Personally I think that having the speed limit available in my car would be quite nice since there's always places where speed limits aren't what you think they are and the signage is inadequate. I don't really feel like having my car do the police's job and give me a speeding fine every time I drift a couple of k's over the speed limit, which happens to most people fairly often.
What it will do is make it harder for you to react to the situations which do cause accidents(sudden stops, adverse road conditions, idiots swerving around lanes, etc), and make you hit whatever you hit a lot harder.
This means, among other things, that speed is a contributing factor to an awful lot of deaths, even if it isn't the cause of the accidents themselves.
Personally I don't have a huge problem with this in theory, I'm just not sure if the implementation will be any good. Speed cameras don't seem to stop people speeding, and with increasing computerization of cars and better and better gps location this sort of technology was pretty much inevitable.
It'll all come down to the implementation, if it works, and the speed drop isn't too sudden, and it doesn't start phoning home to the cops to right you a speeding ticket, it might be alright. Technically it doesn't even require notifying anyone where you actually are(having GPS and reporting those coordinates back to a central place are two different things).
I live in Australia, and I'm not thrilled, but this was something they were going to do eventually, and I'm more concerned with the implementation at this point.
Yep, it still floats, it'll continue to do so for a while yet.
The biggest question mark for the itanium is whether it will be superceded by a superior technology before 64 bit becomes mainstream. I'd say that pure 64 bit even with an emulator for older software for regular people is probably still at least 3-5 years off, but I also don't see anyone coming up with a serious competitor in that space(or right now in any space at all) before then.
The biggest threat at this point to the Itanium becoming a massively successful product is Intel changing the name of their 64 bit offering.
Disappointment isn't just about quality, it's about delivery, marketing and general success.
Vista isn't half as bad as they've said(technology wise) and a lot of it's problems were caused more by hardware companies(specifically creative labs), and the Itanium, while an incredibly stupid decision is actually a really good chip. Hell almost the entire list is made up of technologies that didn't, and of themselves suck(the two VR's not withstanding)
They aren't talking about technologies that suck, they're talking about technologies that were supposed to change the world and didn't. Whatever you say about Ubuntu, it has yet to change the world in any significant or measurable way. It, along with SuSe has come closer to having the potential to be a real contender against Windows, but it's not there.
Sadly it will probably remain that way because when you're competing with Windows you're not competing with the OS, you're competing with the software which can be installed on it, and Linux, even Ubuntu isn't even close to bridging that gap.
Where I live, it's.05 and people think the US is crazy to be at.08, you're a hell of a lot more impaired at.08 than you realize. You probably won't kill anyone, but ffs, as an adult male I can have at least two standard drinks without going over.05, if you're drinking enough to go over.08 make alternate arrangements. I know it's inconvenient to be without your car, but it's better than killing someone.
Actually, from what I was taught, the correct, though tedious form is "his or her" as there is no such thing as a singluar gender-neutral, third person, possessive(for a value of gender-neutral where gender doesn't matter as opposed to where gender doesn't exist).
They don't have that power, they also don't have any obligation to maintain highways(the legal argument they used to build them in the first place is a bit of a stretch).
Whether you like it or not, negotation is a part of life. The federal government was not given certain powers, those powers were given to the states. There's nothing in the constitution forbidding the states and the federal government making an agreement for the federal government to do something that it is allowed to do but the states can't or won't in exchange for the states doing something the federal government can't or won't do.
If you don't like it then run for office on that plaform or support someone else to run for you.
.08 isn't "drunk", but that's really not the point. The BAC limits aren't about being "drunk" which is a pretty wishy washy measurement, they're about impairment. Reasonable science indicates that alcohol impairs your ability to react as quickly and that not being able to react as quickly on the roads leads to an increase in accidents. BAC is already adjusted for build, weight and sex by the biological factors involved.
It certainly isn't perfect, impairment isn't even and likely depends on what your reaction times were to start with, however on average at.08(which is actually considered far too high in most of the world) you will have measurably increased reaction times, which will make it much less likely that you will be able to avoid an accident if you are exposed to circumstances which require quick reaction times.
There's also reasonable argument to be made as to whether the breathalyzers are perfect, however you can always ask for a blood test if you feel your result is innacurate.
I'm a wheel of time fan, and a fan of this series as well for that matter.
There's one major difference between them. Robert Jordan is dead, he cannot finish the book, and from what I read he was working fairly hard on finishing it when he was alive or at least ensuring that it could be finished.
The Wheel of Time is different, whatever faults his works have, Robert Jordan was trying to meet his obligations to his fans, the fact that an author might die before a series is finished is always a risk you take, just like you could hire a contractor to fix your bath, pay them a deposit and have them die halfway through the job.
George R.R. Martin is still alive, so the same doesn't apply to him.
I use noscript and actually don't use adblock,for a number of reasons.
It allows me to surf sites I don't trust. I need to do this both for work, and for personal use, sometimes the answer to a problem is on a forum on some obscure site, I'd rather not trust to run whatever javascript it likes.
It(along with flashblock) kills off 99% of the intrusive advertising and leaves the ads that don't for the most part bother me, allowing site owners who respect their customers to show me the ads they need to survive and site owners who don't to take a long walk off a short pier.
Generally speaking, not running badly written javascript(and a lot of javascript is badly written, I should know I write it) to run generally speeds up my web browsing experience.
In essence, noscript provides me protection from annoyance, security issues(which are actually a fairly big deal), and speeds up my browsing experience, with relatively little hassle.
It's called legal tender. In countries where it applies, you cannot be penalized for late payment of a debt if you offer to pay the debt using legal tender.
A lot of countries put a restriction on how much coinage actually counts as legal tender. From a quick google search the treasury claims that legal tender only actually applies to government debts in the US.
None of this applies to buying anything mind you as it only ever applies to debts(you can refuse to sell someone anything you damned well like for pretty much whatever reason isn't specifically prohibited by law), and generally where protections are in place notes of any denomination are not restricted.
It's not just about walmart though, it's about the fact that America will tolerate almost any level of violence, but almost zero sex. After the huge dramas this game would have caused even Steam probably wouldn't have carried it.
There's a fairly large portion of the western public who can't think of any kind of gaming without envisioning a 12 year old kid. Adult gaming is a huge market, adults should be able to buy whatever they want to buy, in reality however this isn't how things go. Almost no retailers will touch an AO title and as I said a few countries(mine specifically) don't have an AO rating and so can't legally sell anything that would warrant one.
Yes you've always got steam, if they'll carry it, but even Valve doesn't release their games steam only because that cuts out a huge portion of your market right away, which makes it all the harder to generate revenue.
Duke has been in development for more than a decade any it's fairly unlikely that any new investors are going to be getting any significant portion of the pie for their 5 million dollars(whoever stumped up the money for the last 12 years will be taking the lion's share). This means they have to count on a team who has been an abysmal failure for more than a decade, creating a product which will probably only be able to be sold through a very small number of distributors, and therefor, unless it takes off in a really huge way, to only a very small segment of the market, creating a game which will generate enough revenue that whatever portion they've been offered will be worth sufficiently more than 5 million dollars that they've got a reasonable ROI.
If you're realistic that's a hell of a lot of risk, especially in this economy. A company might find value in getting the whole Duke IP since as you've said, that name is still worth something, however a project that's been funded for this long with no returns is probably unlikely to break even under the best of circumstances, let alone with anything like puritanical hatred of exposed flesh holding it back.
If you read the judges decision, he hasn't actually decided anything. He looks at four allegations.
That attaching the device requires a warrant.
That tracking the guy on public roads requires a warrant.
That tracking the guy when he's not on public roads requires a warrant.
That any part of the tracking data being illegal means that the rest of it should be suppressed.
The judge essentially shows that attaching a tracking device in a public place to determine things that can be determined by visual observation has already been decided to not require a warrant, that police have the right to observe someone on a public road without a warrant(including by satellite), and that while information gathered while the defendant is not on public roads is illegal and must be suppressed there have already been decisions determining that just because some evidence is obtained illegally and must be suppressed does not mean that other evidence obtained legally has to be suppressed.
Everything this guy has decided is based on previous decisions, and from the referenced portions of the decisions it seems that he applied those decisions validly.
You could certainly argue that the existing decisions aren't valid, but since they're supreme court decisions this guy doesn't have the authority to overturn them.
There's also the plus that he's basically already decided that any evidence gathered about your location when you're not on or able to be seen from public roads is illegal and must be suppressed. It's good law for what he was given.
The basic point is that based on existing law, a police officer following someone around is not illegal. It's difficult, it's inconvenient, and if they try it somewhere that isn't fairly busy they're pretty likely to tip off the person their following, however, none of that has anything to do with the legal basis for it.
The law does not allow police to tail you simply because it's too inconvenient for police to do it very often, they allow it because for whatever reason some judge(s) at some point(s) felt it was a legitimate thing to do. The fact that the police can now do exactly the same thing without any of that inconvenience doesn't actually affect the law regardless of whether we think it should.
There's also the inconvenient fact that, based on the available evidence, the police departments ought to be training Blackwater and the US military, not the other way around.
While various and sundry police departments are generally able to maintain at least a semblance of law and order even in places where the general population is overtly hostile to them, Blackwater and the US Army can't seem to maintain the peace in a country we are theoretically supposed to have liberated.
Maybe it's not entirely fair to compare parts of LA to Iraq(I mean some people in Iraq actually like the people policing them), but I'd certainly say we'd all be better off with a bunch of cops, corrupt or otherwise, over there than we'd ever be with Blackwater and their ilk at home.
Duke Nukem belongs in another era, an era when parents didn't know what their kids were playing and the media ignored games.
The reason they can't get 5 mil to finish it is because it won't sell very well. It'll end up with an AO rating(because violence aside boobies are bad in the USA) and the vast majority of resellers won't touch if with a fifty foot pole. Countries that don't have an AO rating(like Australia where I live damned South Australian AG) won't even be able to legally sell it.
The game is about 10 years too late, and/or about 5-10 years too early. They'd have to cull everything that made it duke nukem and then you'd just end up with yet another outdated fps. I mean really what's the point. It'll be lucky if it makes 5 million dollars, let alone enough to actually have whatever stake in the product 3DR was offering to potential investors(probably a few percent) to provide reasonable ROI. The 30 million they were offered for the whole thing lock stock and barrel is the best offer they're ever going to get and they'll be out of business and DNF will be in the bin where, realistically, it belongs.
Hopefully someone will do a post-mortem on the bloated corpse and the industry can learn some important lessons and it can at least provide some sort of positive legacy.
It could also go under because the idea doesn't really work, or because the people running it aren't actually capable of running it in the long term, or because the owners or the staff got bored
That's the way the math goes, the little guy sells because he might fail and the big guy buys because the little guy might succeed. If the little guys technology was worth having then the big company often integrates it into their product. Consumers get the new features, little guy gets rich and can start working on another new idea which is what the little guy is good at, and the big guy gets what they want too. Generally everyone wins. True the consumer loses out a bit in price competition, but effective competition doesn't really work all that well in an OS environment because Operating Systems aren't equivalent. A bit like comparing cars to tractors. They've got a lot in common but you can't generally go out and buy one to replace the other.
Oh grow up, Microsoft buys out the competition the same way everyone else does, and the folks who sell to them, mostly sell for the same reason. Those reasons are simple and have been the same for time immemorial. Companies buy out small competitors sometimes to acquire new technologies, but mostly to avoid the risk that they'll become serious competitors later. Their owners sell them because there's a chance their company will fail and they'll go under, and if they sell they end up relatively rich.
Well social welfare aside, it could be being spent on things which will provide jobs to some of those people, or education to their children so that their children don't end up the same way.
Leaving aside any issues regarding unfair wages and the rich living off the sweat of the working poor, there are two primary reasons for sopcial welfare systems. The first is to keep poor people from starving to death because as human beings at least some of us feel bad about letting them starve to death. You can agree or disagree with this however you like, it's a purely moral issue and everyone has slightly different values.
The second is to try and provide their children with the opportunity to not be like their parents. To provide them with education so that they might be healthy, good tax paying citizens in the future(or if they get enough education to be rich enough to get into the other end of the spectrum where no one pays any taxes either). You can't tell me that it's some six year old's fault that their parents are useless, uneducated, and unable to provide them with basic education or opportunities for a better life. You also can't tell me that society is better off if that six year old grows up exactly like his or her parents.
Apple is starting to design their own chips, more specifically it appears for their iPhone and iPod ranges(no news so far on they trying it for PCs and I don't expect any). They've hired some heavy hitters from AMD, and made some noise in the press about it. It's fairly recent and they haven't to the best of my knowledge released anything about it yet.
Presumably they're after technology which will provide them with a competetive advantage in the performance/battery life arenas.
For the same reasons, the idea of selling a database appliance is probably something that appeals to Oracle. Considering they just bought a company with heavy investment in hardware, operating systems as well as web and virtualization technologies. This is probably a rather appealing idea.
If they can make it work it's potentially a very profitable one, and they've got a better chance than Apple since they've just bought a company with all the bits they didn't have as opposed to trying to start designing and fabbing chips(something Apple has never done) even if it's only for the low power handheld market.
Windows 7 is competing with that people think Vista is like, not what it is actually like. It's competing with what the people who hated Vista when it first came out and they stuck it on hardware that has since failed and no longer exists.
Windows 7 will have no substantial increase over Vista's performance because Vista's performance isn't actually bad. In fact since SP1 for the most part it's quite good. When you sit down a user(or a reviewer) in front of Windows 7 they'll say it's much faster than Vista because they think that Vista is much slower than it is, or they'll have experienced Vista on much slower hardware.
How Windows 7 performs on modern hardware isn't even really an issue as Vista has no problems on that hardware either. How it performs on netbooks and/or much older hardware might be interesting though.
The herald on-line is better than the on-line version of The Australian and despite being localized for the Sydney market has more real news in it.
That's not even taking into account the Age, the Times, or the on-line only WAToday, which are, at least in my experience better than their newscorp equivalents.
That's not even taking into account the abc's news site, or any of a number of other quality news sources. The Australian and it's subsidiaries may be better than most of Murdoch's papers(it's actually quite fair and balanced unlike all his US properties), and it's always a shame to lose another news source, but he's been commercializing and removing content of value from it for a long time.
The basic problem with this is what's the alternative? Papers were having circulation problems long before on-line newspapers started any real pull, and there will always be news on the web that is free, regardless of how many papers stop offering their content.
There's no question that the current business model isn't working, but is charging people for content going to work? If no one buys your dead tree paper, and no one pays your on-line subscription fees, and since no one can get into your site without a subscription no one even sees your advertisements, then where's your revenue going to come from?
Personally I think the fundamental problem for on-line newspapers(and for an awful lot of on-line sites for that matter) lies in on-line advertising. Most newspaper and magazine subscriptions basically cover the cost of printing and delivery(getting the magazine to you and paying all the people in that supply chain). The vast majority of revenue comes from advertising, this has been the case for a lot longer than the internet has been around.
Under this model, there's no reason why on-line newspapers giving their content away for free shouldn't work, the business model is exactly the same as it used to be since the cost of publishing something on-line is practically nothing compared to actually delivering a printed paper, and those costs aren't even all that high.
This raises some interesting questions both about how effective generating advertising revenue on-line can really be and about the structure of newspapers as a whole(one thing that on-line newspapers do is reduce the number of newspapers that can exist since people can browse to appropriate local content within a single newspaper rather than printing 15 of the things where 80% of the content is the same.
As I said, there's no question that print journalism is in trouble, the question is what can the industry actually do about it?
Toner is some nasty shit, it's not biodegradable, it's toxic to ingest and/or inhale, and it's a fine powder which gets into absolutely everything and can potentially do serious amounts of damage.
Getting biodegradable toner for a large office with lots of printers will probably do a hell of a lot more for the environment than everyone in the US switching to CFL's.
I don't know if soy toner works, my experience with recycled toner cartridges in the past has been that they're not worth the bother as about 1 in 3 doesn't print properly and they all leak at least a little bit. If however, this actually works, it's not the cherry on your sundae it's a huge blob of pig fat.
It's fashionable on Slashdot to hate anyone who isn't a libertarian on Slashdot. If you're updating your group think just put this rule in, if the politician believes in any sort of taxation at all for any purpose then you should hate them.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly.
This doesn't have to be a huge freedom issue, as you don't have a fundamental right to speed.
It can be a freedom issue, and that's why I'm concerned with implementation. If it reports back that you were speeding, reports back your location, cuts the power to your car too quickly in order to be dangerous, then it's a freedom issue(particularly location tracking, which is sort of required for auto-ticketing). That's why implementation is important. Personally I think that having the speed limit available in my car would be quite nice since there's always places where speed limits aren't what you think they are and the signage is inadequate. I don't really feel like having my car do the police's job and give me a speeding fine every time I drift a couple of k's over the speed limit, which happens to most people fairly often.
Speed is the cause of very few accidents at all.
What it will do is make it harder for you to react to the situations which do cause accidents(sudden stops, adverse road conditions, idiots swerving around lanes, etc), and make you hit whatever you hit a lot harder.
This means, among other things, that speed is a contributing factor to an awful lot of deaths, even if it isn't the cause of the accidents themselves.
Personally I don't have a huge problem with this in theory, I'm just not sure if the implementation will be any good. Speed cameras don't seem to stop people speeding, and with increasing computerization of cars and better and better gps location this sort of technology was pretty much inevitable.
It'll all come down to the implementation, if it works, and the speed drop isn't too sudden, and it doesn't start phoning home to the cops to right you a speeding ticket, it might be alright. Technically it doesn't even require notifying anyone where you actually are(having GPS and reporting those coordinates back to a central place are two different things).
I live in Australia, and I'm not thrilled, but this was something they were going to do eventually, and I'm more concerned with the implementation at this point.
Yep, it still floats, it'll continue to do so for a while yet.
The biggest question mark for the itanium is whether it will be superceded by a superior technology before 64 bit becomes mainstream. I'd say that pure 64 bit even with an emulator for older software for regular people is probably still at least 3-5 years off, but I also don't see anyone coming up with a serious competitor in that space(or right now in any space at all) before then.
The biggest threat at this point to the Itanium becoming a massively successful product is Intel changing the name of their 64 bit offering.
Disappointment isn't just about quality, it's about delivery, marketing and general success.
Vista isn't half as bad as they've said(technology wise) and a lot of it's problems were caused more by hardware companies(specifically creative labs), and the Itanium, while an incredibly stupid decision is actually a really good chip. Hell almost the entire list is made up of technologies that didn't, and of themselves suck(the two VR's not withstanding)
They aren't talking about technologies that suck, they're talking about technologies that were supposed to change the world and didn't. Whatever you say about Ubuntu, it has yet to change the world in any significant or measurable way. It, along with SuSe has come closer to having the potential to be a real contender against Windows, but it's not there.
Sadly it will probably remain that way because when you're competing with Windows you're not competing with the OS, you're competing with the software which can be installed on it, and Linux, even Ubuntu isn't even close to bridging that gap.
This is true, however I encounter the occasional site that has javascript I require, but awful flash ads that I don't, so I keep flashblock as well.
Where I live, it's .05 and people think the US is crazy to be at .08, you're a hell of a lot more impaired at .08 than you realize. You probably won't kill anyone, but ffs, as an adult male I can have at least two standard drinks without going over .05, if you're drinking enough to go over .08 make alternate arrangements. I know it's inconvenient to be without your car, but it's better than killing someone.
Actually, from what I was taught, the correct, though tedious form is "his or her" as there is no such thing as a singluar gender-neutral, third person, possessive(for a value of gender-neutral where gender doesn't matter as opposed to where gender doesn't exist).
They don't have that power, they also don't have any obligation to maintain highways(the legal argument they used to build them in the first place is a bit of a stretch).
Whether you like it or not, negotation is a part of life. The federal government was not given certain powers, those powers were given to the states. There's nothing in the constitution forbidding the states and the federal government making an agreement for the federal government to do something that it is allowed to do but the states can't or won't in exchange for the states doing something the federal government can't or won't do.
If you don't like it then run for office on that plaform or support someone else to run for you.
.08 isn't "drunk", but that's really not the point. The BAC limits aren't about being "drunk" which is a pretty wishy washy measurement, they're about impairment. Reasonable science indicates that alcohol impairs your ability to react as quickly and that not being able to react as quickly on the roads leads to an increase in accidents. BAC is already adjusted for build, weight and sex by the biological factors involved.
It certainly isn't perfect, impairment isn't even and likely depends on what your reaction times were to start with, however on average at .08(which is actually considered far too high in most of the world) you will have measurably increased reaction times, which will make it much less likely that you will be able to avoid an accident if you are exposed to circumstances which require quick reaction times.
There's also reasonable argument to be made as to whether the breathalyzers are perfect, however you can always ask for a blood test if you feel your result is innacurate.
I'm a wheel of time fan, and a fan of this series as well for that matter.
There's one major difference between them. Robert Jordan is dead, he cannot finish the book, and from what I read he was working fairly hard on finishing it when he was alive or at least ensuring that it could be finished.
The Wheel of Time is different, whatever faults his works have, Robert Jordan was trying to meet his obligations to his fans, the fact that an author might die before a series is finished is always a risk you take, just like you could hire a contractor to fix your bath, pay them a deposit and have them die halfway through the job.
George R.R. Martin is still alive, so the same doesn't apply to him.
I use noscript and actually don't use adblock,for a number of reasons.
In essence, noscript provides me protection from annoyance, security issues(which are actually a fairly big deal), and speeds up my browsing experience, with relatively little hassle.
It's called legal tender. In countries where it applies, you cannot be penalized for late payment of a debt if you offer to pay the debt using legal tender.
A lot of countries put a restriction on how much coinage actually counts as legal tender. From a quick google search the treasury claims that legal tender only actually applies to government debts in the US.
None of this applies to buying anything mind you as it only ever applies to debts(you can refuse to sell someone anything you damned well like for pretty much whatever reason isn't specifically prohibited by law), and generally where protections are in place notes of any denomination are not restricted.
It's not just about walmart though, it's about the fact that America will tolerate almost any level of violence, but almost zero sex. After the huge dramas this game would have caused even Steam probably wouldn't have carried it.
There's a fairly large portion of the western public who can't think of any kind of gaming without envisioning a 12 year old kid. Adult gaming is a huge market, adults should be able to buy whatever they want to buy, in reality however this isn't how things go. Almost no retailers will touch an AO title and as I said a few countries(mine specifically) don't have an AO rating and so can't legally sell anything that would warrant one.
Yes you've always got steam, if they'll carry it, but even Valve doesn't release their games steam only because that cuts out a huge portion of your market right away, which makes it all the harder to generate revenue.
Duke has been in development for more than a decade any it's fairly unlikely that any new investors are going to be getting any significant portion of the pie for their 5 million dollars(whoever stumped up the money for the last 12 years will be taking the lion's share). This means they have to count on a team who has been an abysmal failure for more than a decade, creating a product which will probably only be able to be sold through a very small number of distributors, and therefor, unless it takes off in a really huge way, to only a very small segment of the market, creating a game which will generate enough revenue that whatever portion they've been offered will be worth sufficiently more than 5 million dollars that they've got a reasonable ROI.
If you're realistic that's a hell of a lot of risk, especially in this economy. A company might find value in getting the whole Duke IP since as you've said, that name is still worth something, however a project that's been funded for this long with no returns is probably unlikely to break even under the best of circumstances, let alone with anything like puritanical hatred of exposed flesh holding it back.
If you read the judges decision, he hasn't actually decided anything. He looks at four allegations.
The judge essentially shows that attaching a tracking device in a public place to determine things that can be determined by visual observation has already been decided to not require a warrant, that police have the right to observe someone on a public road without a warrant(including by satellite), and that while information gathered while the defendant is not on public roads is illegal and must be suppressed there have already been decisions determining that just because some evidence is obtained illegally and must be suppressed does not mean that other evidence obtained legally has to be suppressed.
Everything this guy has decided is based on previous decisions, and from the referenced portions of the decisions it seems that he applied those decisions validly.
You could certainly argue that the existing decisions aren't valid, but since they're supreme court decisions this guy doesn't have the authority to overturn them.
There's also the plus that he's basically already decided that any evidence gathered about your location when you're not on or able to be seen from public roads is illegal and must be suppressed. It's good law for what he was given.
The basic point is that based on existing law, a police officer following someone around is not illegal. It's difficult, it's inconvenient, and if they try it somewhere that isn't fairly busy they're pretty likely to tip off the person their following, however, none of that has anything to do with the legal basis for it.
The law does not allow police to tail you simply because it's too inconvenient for police to do it very often, they allow it because for whatever reason some judge(s) at some point(s) felt it was a legitimate thing to do. The fact that the police can now do exactly the same thing without any of that inconvenience doesn't actually affect the law regardless of whether we think it should.
There's also the inconvenient fact that, based on the available evidence, the police departments ought to be training Blackwater and the US military, not the other way around.
While various and sundry police departments are generally able to maintain at least a semblance of law and order even in places where the general population is overtly hostile to them, Blackwater and the US Army can't seem to maintain the peace in a country we are theoretically supposed to have liberated.
Maybe it's not entirely fair to compare parts of LA to Iraq(I mean some people in Iraq actually like the people policing them), but I'd certainly say we'd all be better off with a bunch of cops, corrupt or otherwise, over there than we'd ever be with Blackwater and their ilk at home.
Duke Nukem belongs in another era, an era when parents didn't know what their kids were playing and the media ignored games.
The reason they can't get 5 mil to finish it is because it won't sell very well. It'll end up with an AO rating(because violence aside boobies are bad in the USA) and the vast majority of resellers won't touch if with a fifty foot pole. Countries that don't have an AO rating(like Australia where I live damned South Australian AG) won't even be able to legally sell it.
The game is about 10 years too late, and/or about 5-10 years too early. They'd have to cull everything that made it duke nukem and then you'd just end up with yet another outdated fps. I mean really what's the point. It'll be lucky if it makes 5 million dollars, let alone enough to actually have whatever stake in the product 3DR was offering to potential investors(probably a few percent) to provide reasonable ROI. The 30 million they were offered for the whole thing lock stock and barrel is the best offer they're ever going to get and they'll be out of business and DNF will be in the bin where, realistically, it belongs.
Hopefully someone will do a post-mortem on the bloated corpse and the industry can learn some important lessons and it can at least provide some sort of positive legacy.
It could also go under because the idea doesn't really work, or because the people running it aren't actually capable of running it in the long term, or because the owners or the staff got bored
That's the way the math goes, the little guy sells because he might fail and the big guy buys because the little guy might succeed. If the little guys technology was worth having then the big company often integrates it into their product. Consumers get the new features, little guy gets rich and can start working on another new idea which is what the little guy is good at, and the big guy gets what they want too. Generally everyone wins. True the consumer loses out a bit in price competition, but effective competition doesn't really work all that well in an OS environment because Operating Systems aren't equivalent. A bit like comparing cars to tractors. They've got a lot in common but you can't generally go out and buy one to replace the other.
Oh grow up, Microsoft buys out the competition the same way everyone else does, and the folks who sell to them, mostly sell for the same reason. Those reasons are simple and have been the same for time immemorial. Companies buy out small competitors sometimes to acquire new technologies, but mostly to avoid the risk that they'll become serious competitors later. Their owners sell them because there's a chance their company will fail and they'll go under, and if they sell they end up relatively rich.
Well social welfare aside, it could be being spent on things which will provide jobs to some of those people, or education to their children so that their children don't end up the same way.
Leaving aside any issues regarding unfair wages and the rich living off the sweat of the working poor, there are two primary reasons for sopcial welfare systems. The first is to keep poor people from starving to death because as human beings at least some of us feel bad about letting them starve to death. You can agree or disagree with this however you like, it's a purely moral issue and everyone has slightly different values.
The second is to try and provide their children with the opportunity to not be like their parents. To provide them with education so that they might be healthy, good tax paying citizens in the future(or if they get enough education to be rich enough to get into the other end of the spectrum where no one pays any taxes either). You can't tell me that it's some six year old's fault that their parents are useless, uneducated, and unable to provide them with basic education or opportunities for a better life. You also can't tell me that society is better off if that six year old grows up exactly like his or her parents.
Apple is starting to design their own chips, more specifically it appears for their iPhone and iPod ranges(no news so far on they trying it for PCs and I don't expect any). They've hired some heavy hitters from AMD, and made some noise in the press about it. It's fairly recent and they haven't to the best of my knowledge released anything about it yet.
Presumably they're after technology which will provide them with a competetive advantage in the performance/battery life arenas.
For the same reasons, the idea of selling a database appliance is probably something that appeals to Oracle. Considering they just bought a company with heavy investment in hardware, operating systems as well as web and virtualization technologies. This is probably a rather appealing idea.
If they can make it work it's potentially a very profitable one, and they've got a better chance than Apple since they've just bought a company with all the bits they didn't have as opposed to trying to start designing and fabbing chips(something Apple has never done) even if it's only for the low power handheld market.
Windows 7 is competing with that people think Vista is like, not what it is actually like. It's competing with what the people who hated Vista when it first came out and they stuck it on hardware that has since failed and no longer exists.
Windows 7 will have no substantial increase over Vista's performance because Vista's performance isn't actually bad. In fact since SP1 for the most part it's quite good. When you sit down a user(or a reviewer) in front of Windows 7 they'll say it's much faster than Vista because they think that Vista is much slower than it is, or they'll have experienced Vista on much slower hardware.
How Windows 7 performs on modern hardware isn't even really an issue as Vista has no problems on that hardware either. How it performs on netbooks and/or much older hardware might be interesting though.
The herald on-line is better than the on-line version of The Australian and despite being localized for the Sydney market has more real news in it.
That's not even taking into account the Age, the Times, or the on-line only WAToday, which are, at least in my experience better than their newscorp equivalents.
That's not even taking into account the abc's news site, or any of a number of other quality news sources. The Australian and it's subsidiaries may be better than most of Murdoch's papers(it's actually quite fair and balanced unlike all his US properties), and it's always a shame to lose another news source, but he's been commercializing and removing content of value from it for a long time.
The basic problem with this is what's the alternative? Papers were having circulation problems long before on-line newspapers started any real pull, and there will always be news on the web that is free, regardless of how many papers stop offering their content.
There's no question that the current business model isn't working, but is charging people for content going to work? If no one buys your dead tree paper, and no one pays your on-line subscription fees, and since no one can get into your site without a subscription no one even sees your advertisements, then where's your revenue going to come from?
Personally I think the fundamental problem for on-line newspapers(and for an awful lot of on-line sites for that matter) lies in on-line advertising. Most newspaper and magazine subscriptions basically cover the cost of printing and delivery(getting the magazine to you and paying all the people in that supply chain). The vast majority of revenue comes from advertising, this has been the case for a lot longer than the internet has been around.
Under this model, there's no reason why on-line newspapers giving their content away for free shouldn't work, the business model is exactly the same as it used to be since the cost of publishing something on-line is practically nothing compared to actually delivering a printed paper, and those costs aren't even all that high.
This raises some interesting questions both about how effective generating advertising revenue on-line can really be and about the structure of newspapers as a whole(one thing that on-line newspapers do is reduce the number of newspapers that can exist since people can browse to appropriate local content within a single newspaper rather than printing 15 of the things where 80% of the content is the same.
As I said, there's no question that print journalism is in trouble, the question is what can the industry actually do about it?
Toner is some nasty shit, it's not biodegradable, it's toxic to ingest and/or inhale, and it's a fine powder which gets into absolutely everything and can potentially do serious amounts of damage.
Getting biodegradable toner for a large office with lots of printers will probably do a hell of a lot more for the environment than everyone in the US switching to CFL's.
I don't know if soy toner works, my experience with recycled toner cartridges in the past has been that they're not worth the bother as about 1 in 3 doesn't print properly and they all leak at least a little bit. If however, this actually works, it's not the cherry on your sundae it's a huge blob of pig fat.
It's fashionable on Slashdot to hate anyone who isn't a libertarian on Slashdot. If you're updating your group think just put this rule in, if the politician believes in any sort of taxation at all for any purpose then you should hate them.