Not that big a problem...
on
Region-free PS3
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· Score: 3, Informative
This announcement seems all flash and no substance -- Europe will STILL have to have a separate set of games because they use PAL instead of NTSC anyway.
I gather that a lot of modern TVs will work with either PAL or NTSC inputs, so they won't have any trouble with this; and since the PS3 is being designed with HDTV in mind, PAL vs NTSC is really kind of irrelevant. HDTV is the same everywhere.
I personally wonder if this is something to do with Australia. They've ruled down there that region coding on DVDs is actually illegal; I hear that all Aussie DVD players are now multiregion. Region-coding the PS3 will get Sony into legal trouble in Australia. Region-coding all non-Australian PS3s will be kind of pointless - people prepared to import foreign games will presumably also be happy to import an Aussie PS3. So they may as well drop the whole thing.
For instance, the grammar Nazis. On which note, we're otaku, not otakus. It's like with sheep - which is, come to think of it, really quite appropriate ^_^
I've said it before and I'll say it again: No, we do not trust the government not to abuse it. If the government didn't intend to abuse it, they wouldn't have left that loophole there. The fact that they haven't removed it implies that they fully intend to abuse it, and flagrantly so, as soon as it's passed.
She can refuse to sign this bill into law, even if Parliament passes it. Too bad she probably won't as that will trigger a constitutional crisis
When a law like this is being proposed, isn't there already a constitutional crisis? I mean, for fuck's sake: BLAIR WANTS THE POWER TO RULE WITHOUT CONSULTING PARLIAMENT. Last time someone tried that we had several years of extremely brutal warfare, and then we beheaded him.
If this law goes through then the Queen bloody well ought to refuse assent. If she doesn't, then the Beefeaters ought to start sharpening the old axes.
I just lost $300 in iTunes music that I had paid for when my hard drive crashed. Fortunately I had most of my music backed up. There's a chance Apple may let me download it again, but it's unlikely. Truly good DRM won't create this kind of problem or the ones you describe.
I see no reason why the content providers would want to avoid creating that kind of problem. As far as they're concerned, if you're forced to buy everything all over again, that's a GOOD thing.
If it was really Digital Rights Management, then it would indeed look out for your rights - for example, your right to a backup, in case of failure of the physical media on which the content resides. But it's not. It's really Digital Restrictions Management, and it's solely interested in restricting what you do with the content.
Does Fraud include counterfeiting? Because many people would consider pirated software exactly that.
I think that would only be the case if it's being represented to the customer as authentic. In a hypothetical sans-copyright world, if I make copies of, say, Windows Vista with a replica of the retail box and a pretty convincing Certificate of Authenticity, and a big price tag, and claim to you that it's the real thing that comes with the right to updates from Microsoft - then I'm committing fraud.
If, OTOH, I burn off a bunch of discs, write 'VISTA' on them with a marker pen and sell those for a fiver a shot, I'm not pretending that they're anything other than what they are: unauthorised copies. So I'm not defrauding anybody - the customer knows what they're getting.
The fraud would be in misrepresenting the product in order to obtain a higher price for it.
Foolish salesfolk assume that if you have a cluster you must be doing movie special effects for LOTR and that a 32 inch widescreen LCD monitor will be connected to each node. Even when you tell the salesfolk that it will never need to do more than text they don't believe you.
Of course they know. They also know that you have to argue with them, for the look of the thing, and that what you really want is the super-duper 3D card.
The reason? So that the BOFH can swap out the GeForce 64000 GTi 512MB Ultimate Edition cards that came with the servers, and drop in a 2MB Diamond Stealth 64 from 1995. The Boss will never notice the difference, because these are servers, and meanwhile the BOFH and PFY can invite some friends round for a Quake tournament on their incredibly l337, company-sponsored LAN.
Vendors and BOFHs are complicit in this business to defraud bosses. It's the way the game is played.
4. The message coming from (1-3) is pretty clear: "controlled nuclear winter" to offset "greenhouse summer". Blow up some of them Russian nukes in the stratosphere above both poles and see what happens.
Um... nothing, except that an awful lot of polar bears get cancer.
Nuclear winter would happen because of all the dust thrown up by the explosions in a war. It's like the global cooling you see after a really large volcanic event, only on a rather larger scale. Setting off the bombs in the stratosphere wouldn't do that.
it depends what "Pissy World" was doing to the PC. IF scanning for viruses then its feasible the files would be opened. If just being nosey...
IIRC, Mr Gadd brought his laptop in for repair for something mechanical (battery issue or something), and specifically told the technician not to look at the contents of the hard disk.
Third-rate glam rockers clearly do not make great study of basic human psychology, it seems. The technician proceeded to think 'hmm, I wonder why he's so worried about people looking at the OH MY GOD OH NOES AAARRRGH MY EYES MY EYES THE GOOGLES THEY DO NOTHING!'
Begging the question a bit, aren't we? The answer is 'yes, provided the apes in question are other humans'. Of course we can't breed with other apes if those apes are of different species.
If 'apes' is a broad enough definition to include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, then it has to include us too. Otherwise we could equally say 'Can chimps breed with apes?' And since they certainly can't interbreed with gorillas or orangutans, the answer would be no...
we are proud to support those US companies that provide for us.
Like Nokia and Motorola and Sony and Siemens...
Re:Loved the show, not happy about this.
on
Futurama Returns
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· Score: 2, Funny
Going back to shows (or films series) has never worked, yes I love Futurama, but once something has stopped, dont try necromancy... Star Wars EPI-III anyone? The last two Red Dwarf series (bringing back Rimmer) were horrible. Niles and Daphne getting together was at the point when Frasier turned bad
You're right that keeping a series going too long is usually a bad idea - to my mind, though, that's a reason to kill off The Simpsons; Futurama still had some life in it.
As for resurrections of old shows: well, Star Trek managed it pretty well, I've been hearing good things about Battlestar Galactica, and the good Doctor is back and making sure that a new generation of small children get thoroughly terrified - this time with special effects that are both special and effective. You don't always get The Phantom Menace.
I seriously doubt that anyone involved in the original research, or even anyone engineering TCP/IP networks in the 70s and 80s, imagined what would happen after 1990.
Certainly they imagined nothing of the sort. If they had, they would have paid a lot more attention to security issues, rather than assuming that users are in any way trustworthy...
... is that it's a completely different game, depending on how much firepower you make available at startup.
Ever played it with everything on infinite supply and double damage? It's a terrifying experience. Given half a chance, any opponent will immediately launch the unstoppable Concrete Donkey... so you have to make sure that your worms are spread out and positioned such that nobody can attack them with a Donkey (or similar weapon of mass destruction) without also obliterating members of their own team. And suddenly you have a tense, nervous game of positional play, in which worms attempt to isolate some, and use others as annelid shields, and in which any slip is immediately punished by massive firepower from above.
Alternatively, play Worms with low-power weapons. Play with unlimited Ninja ropes, one jetpack, martial arts, grenades, and the shotgun only. Things get vicious.
They used to sleep in the same bed and as a kid, I thought nothing of it. Then some people started screaming "ZOMG teh h0m05!!11eleven"
Bert and Ernie... see, I never, ever thought of them as gay. My guess is they're probably brothers. They certainly bicker enough for it...
And at any rate, they're a comedy duo, straight from the Morecambe and Wise mould. And Morecambe and Wise shared a bed, and were the guaranteed biggest thing on TV in the UK for decades, even back when being gay was considered weird. Nobody seemed all that bothered.
Roulette, yes, but slot machines have nothing at all to do with luck. Modern slot machines are computer-controlled and thoroughly rigged.
Suppose for instance that you are playing the 'higher / lower' feature that is common on slot machines. Numbers are selected in a range of 1 to 12 and you must guess whether the next one will be higher or lower than the current one. Very well... up comes a 4.
If this was about luck, you'd be wise to bet HIGHER. There are eight numbers higher, and only four lower. The odds favour you, right? But... no. The chip inside the machine has already decided whether you will win or lose, before you press the button. If the chip says you lose, then if you press HIGHER then up will come a 2. If you press LOWER then you'll get an 8.
Slot machines these days are computers, programmed to exploit the gambler's psychology. They're programmed to produce a lot of 'oh, so close...' results, where if that last reel had turned one place more you'd have won the jackpot. They're programmed to pay out a certain percentage of what goes in - and, at least in the UK, they're always labelled with a sticker near the slot, telling you what that percentage is. Typically something like 70 - 75%.
The way to win at a slot machine is to watch for a while. Look for someone who's putting in coin after coin, for a long time, and winning nothing. They leave in disgust having run out of change. Then you step in, and have very good odds of collecting 70% of the money that the previous gambler put in, when the computer inside decides it's time for someone to win something...
Needless to say, this sort of behaviour is likely to get you thrown out of the casino:-)
Could someone who actually knows mathemathics calculate this ? I tried, but it's beyond my abilities:(...
We have no way of knowing the density of this planet, only its mass - in fact, if you read the paper on arxiv, they're not even sure whether it's a giant terrestrial world (a 'failed Jupiter') or a Neptune-like small gas giant, but they're betting on the rocky option since there's likely to be a shortage of gas in the solar system of a red dwarf.
However. We have here a planet of 13 Earth masses. Assume it's rocky. Since we have nothing really to go on to say otherwise, assume it has the same density as the Earth.
In that case, to have 13 times Earth's mass it must have 13 times Earth's volume, and thus (13)^(1/3) times Earth's radius. Since surface gravity equals GM / r^2, this means that in Earth units, the new planet's gravity is equal to 13 / (13^(2/3)) = 13^(1/3) = 2.35g.
I only hope that one of them really was raised here on Earth to save us all...
We've conducted an extensive search of the world and come up with nothing; if there is such a person, he must live way out in the woods somewhere. Unfortunate, because without training there's no way he'd be able to take on professional alien warriors.
We do have a prospect we're quite hopeful of; a farmboy from the US corn belt, apparently of extraterrestrial origin, whose physiology has recently displayed some interesting reactions to the spectrum of Earth's sunlight. Debate continues on whether he would be up to the job...
But because the US is a very big country, there are always plenty of stories to tell about people being incompetent. You could put any 10 European countries together and get a similar picture.
Or the 25 countries..
Hell yeah. Brussels' ineffectiveness at spending money is legendary. The regional development funds are, on the whole, pretty well used to improve infrastructure in poorer countries (for example, the current Irish economic boom has a lot to thank Brussels for), but God help anyone who tries to makes sense of the Common Agricultural Policy. That thing's an incredible black hole for money.
And that's quite apart from the notorious corruption in Brussels itself. MEPs and Brussels bureaucrats have generous expense accounts and perks, which have been... creatively used from time to time.
Part of the problem, I think, is that Brussels isn't a real government. It doesn't raise money by taxation, but by contributions from the 25 governments which do; thus it doesn't feel so directly accountable for what it does with the money. And turnouts for elections to the European parliament are generally far lower than those for the national elections, so MEPs get the (correct) impression that their constituents don't really give a damn what they do...
... None of the voodoo remedies worked at all, while the placebo was highly effective. Evidence, perhaps, that homeopathy works entirely on a placebo effect, and so doesn't work at all on people like the Mythbusters who don't believe in homeopathy?
...I'd like to see what kind of muscles developed on organisms that lived on a planet with 13 times the mass of the earth.
I'm not sure I would. Something tells me we'll have to be really, *really* nice to them.
I have a mental image here of guys with ridiculous musculature, big hair, monkey tails, various impressive ki-based techniques, and a very bad attitude. I for one am hoping like hell for the sake of the rest of the galaxy that the place gets, er... hit by a comet, yeah, a comet...
I feel that they shouldn't be censored, but I always feel a sort of queasy moral indefensibility about that stance when defending the truly repugnant speech.
Certainly it's uncomfortable to have to do. Think about it this way: nobody needs a right to free speech to say nice things. Nobody ever went to jail for saying 'Dear me, Fotherington-Thomas, isn't the sky such a lovely blue today?' A right to free speech is only worth having at all if you want to say something that somebody, somewhere, doesn't want you to say; and a right to free speech is only really needed if you want to say something that most people don't want you to say.
Rotten.com is our metaphorical canary. It'll be the first thing to die if we wander into a cloud of poison. Then we'll know we've gone wrong somewhere and had better back up.
There might be a tiny niche market for people who have money to burn and absolutely positivly must be in Europe or the US ASAP.
It would be about the same market as there is for a suborbital spaceflight, I imagine. In fact, this might even add to the attraction: you take off in a rocket, go ballistic over the ocean, leave the atmosphere, see the stars, experience weightlessness - and as a bonus, you come down in Europe. You've got to admit it would be a hell of a way to begin your holiday.
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I gather that a lot of modern TVs will work with either PAL or NTSC inputs, so they won't have any trouble with this; and since the PS3 is being designed with HDTV in mind, PAL vs NTSC is really kind of irrelevant. HDTV is the same everywhere.
I personally wonder if this is something to do with Australia. They've ruled down there that region coding on DVDs is actually illegal; I hear that all Aussie DVD players are now multiregion. Region-coding the PS3 will get Sony into legal trouble in Australia. Region-coding all non-Australian PS3s will be kind of pointless - people prepared to import foreign games will presumably also be happy to import an Aussie PS3. So they may as well drop the whole thing.
For instance, the grammar Nazis. On which note, we're otaku, not otakus. It's like with sheep - which is, come to think of it, really quite appropriate ^_^
Ha ha fucking ha.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: No, we do not trust the government not to abuse it. If the government didn't intend to abuse it, they wouldn't have left that loophole there. The fact that they haven't removed it implies that they fully intend to abuse it, and flagrantly so, as soon as it's passed.
When a law like this is being proposed, isn't there already a constitutional crisis? I mean, for fuck's sake: BLAIR WANTS THE POWER TO RULE WITHOUT CONSULTING PARLIAMENT. Last time someone tried that we had several years of extremely brutal warfare, and then we beheaded him.
If this law goes through then the Queen bloody well ought to refuse assent. If she doesn't, then the Beefeaters ought to start sharpening the old axes.
I see no reason why the content providers would want to avoid creating that kind of problem. As far as they're concerned, if you're forced to buy everything all over again, that's a GOOD thing.
If it was really Digital Rights Management, then it would indeed look out for your rights - for example, your right to a backup, in case of failure of the physical media on which the content resides. But it's not. It's really Digital Restrictions Management, and it's solely interested in restricting what you do with the content.
I think that would only be the case if it's being represented to the customer as authentic. In a hypothetical sans-copyright world, if I make copies of, say, Windows Vista with a replica of the retail box and a pretty convincing Certificate of Authenticity, and a big price tag, and claim to you that it's the real thing that comes with the right to updates from Microsoft - then I'm committing fraud.
If, OTOH, I burn off a bunch of discs, write 'VISTA' on them with a marker pen and sell those for a fiver a shot, I'm not pretending that they're anything other than what they are: unauthorised copies. So I'm not defrauding anybody - the customer knows what they're getting.
The fraud would be in misrepresenting the product in order to obtain a higher price for it.
Of course they know. They also know that you have to argue with them, for the look of the thing, and that what you really want is the super-duper 3D card.
The reason? So that the BOFH can swap out the GeForce 64000 GTi 512MB Ultimate Edition cards that came with the servers, and drop in a 2MB Diamond Stealth 64 from 1995. The Boss will never notice the difference, because these are servers, and meanwhile the BOFH and PFY can invite some friends round for a Quake tournament on their incredibly l337, company-sponsored LAN.
Vendors and BOFHs are complicit in this business to defraud bosses. It's the way the game is played.
Um... nothing, except that an awful lot of polar bears get cancer.
Nuclear winter would happen because of all the dust thrown up by the explosions in a war. It's like the global cooling you see after a really large volcanic event, only on a rather larger scale. Setting off the bombs in the stratosphere wouldn't do that.
IIRC, Mr Gadd brought his laptop in for repair for something mechanical (battery issue or something), and specifically told the technician not to look at the contents of the hard disk.
Third-rate glam rockers clearly do not make great study of basic human psychology, it seems. The technician proceeded to think 'hmm, I wonder why he's so worried about people looking at the OH MY GOD OH NOES AAARRRGH MY EYES MY EYES THE GOOGLES THEY DO NOTHING!'
* glances at shelf full of Neal Stephenson novels *
Yeah, OK. KOTOR2 is a great game :-)
> Can humans breed with apes?
Begging the question a bit, aren't we? The answer is 'yes, provided the apes in question are other humans'. Of course we can't breed with other apes if those apes are of different species.
If 'apes' is a broad enough definition to include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, then it has to include us too. Otherwise we could equally say 'Can chimps breed with apes?' And since they certainly can't interbreed with gorillas or orangutans, the answer would be no...
Like Nokia and Motorola and Sony and Siemens...
You're right that keeping a series going too long is usually a bad idea - to my mind, though, that's a reason to kill off The Simpsons; Futurama still had some life in it.
As for resurrections of old shows: well, Star Trek managed it pretty well, I've been hearing good things about Battlestar Galactica, and the good Doctor is back and making sure that a new generation of small children get thoroughly terrified - this time with special effects that are both special and effective. You don't always get The Phantom Menace.
Certainly they imagined nothing of the sort. If they had, they would have paid a lot more attention to security issues, rather than assuming that users are in any way trustworthy...
Ever played it with everything on infinite supply and double damage? It's a terrifying experience. Given half a chance, any opponent will immediately launch the unstoppable Concrete Donkey... so you have to make sure that your worms are spread out and positioned such that nobody can attack them with a Donkey (or similar weapon of mass destruction) without also obliterating members of their own team. And suddenly you have a tense, nervous game of positional play, in which worms attempt to isolate some, and use others as annelid shields, and in which any slip is immediately punished by massive firepower from above.
Alternatively, play Worms with low-power weapons. Play with unlimited Ninja ropes, one jetpack, martial arts, grenades, and the shotgun only. Things get vicious.
Bert and Ernie... see, I never, ever thought of them as gay. My guess is they're probably brothers. They certainly bicker enough for it...
And at any rate, they're a comedy duo, straight from the Morecambe and Wise mould. And Morecambe and Wise shared a bed, and were the guaranteed biggest thing on TV in the UK for decades, even back when being gay was considered weird. Nobody seemed all that bothered.
Roulette, yes, but slot machines have nothing at all to do with luck. Modern slot machines are computer-controlled and thoroughly rigged.
Suppose for instance that you are playing the 'higher / lower' feature that is common on slot machines. Numbers are selected in a range of 1 to 12 and you must guess whether the next one will be higher or lower than the current one. Very well... up comes a 4.
If this was about luck, you'd be wise to bet HIGHER. There are eight numbers higher, and only four lower. The odds favour you, right? But... no. The chip inside the machine has already decided whether you will win or lose, before you press the button. If the chip says you lose, then if you press HIGHER then up will come a 2. If you press LOWER then you'll get an 8.
Slot machines these days are computers, programmed to exploit the gambler's psychology. They're programmed to produce a lot of 'oh, so close...' results, where if that last reel had turned one place more you'd have won the jackpot. They're programmed to pay out a certain percentage of what goes in - and, at least in the UK, they're always labelled with a sticker near the slot, telling you what that percentage is. Typically something like 70 - 75%.
The way to win at a slot machine is to watch for a while. Look for someone who's putting in coin after coin, for a long time, and winning nothing. They leave in disgust having run out of change. Then you step in, and have very good odds of collecting 70% of the money that the previous gambler put in, when the computer inside decides it's time for someone to win something...
Needless to say, this sort of behaviour is likely to get you thrown out of the casino :-)
We have no way of knowing the density of this planet, only its mass - in fact, if you read the paper on arxiv, they're not even sure whether it's a giant terrestrial world (a 'failed Jupiter') or a Neptune-like small gas giant, but they're betting on the rocky option since there's likely to be a shortage of gas in the solar system of a red dwarf.
However. We have here a planet of 13 Earth masses. Assume it's rocky. Since we have nothing really to go on to say otherwise, assume it has the same density as the Earth.
In that case, to have 13 times Earth's mass it must have 13 times Earth's volume, and thus (13)^(1/3) times Earth's radius. Since surface gravity equals GM / r^2, this means that in Earth units, the new planet's gravity is equal to 13 / (13^(2/3)) = 13^(1/3) = 2.35g.
2.35g is heavy, but it's not Planet Vegeta.
We've conducted an extensive search of the world and come up with nothing; if there is such a person, he must live way out in the woods somewhere. Unfortunate, because without training there's no way he'd be able to take on professional alien warriors.
We do have a prospect we're quite hopeful of; a farmboy from the US corn belt, apparently of extraterrestrial origin, whose physiology has recently displayed some interesting reactions to the spectrum of Earth's sunlight. Debate continues on whether he would be up to the job...
Or the 25 countries..
Hell yeah. Brussels' ineffectiveness at spending money is legendary. The regional development funds are, on the whole, pretty well used to improve infrastructure in poorer countries (for example, the current Irish economic boom has a lot to thank Brussels for), but God help anyone who tries to makes sense of the Common Agricultural Policy. That thing's an incredible black hole for money.
And that's quite apart from the notorious corruption in Brussels itself. MEPs and Brussels bureaucrats have generous expense accounts and perks, which have been... creatively used from time to time.
Part of the problem, I think, is that Brussels isn't a real government. It doesn't raise money by taxation, but by contributions from the 25 governments which do; thus it doesn't feel so directly accountable for what it does with the money. And turnouts for elections to the European parliament are generally far lower than those for the national elections, so MEPs get the (correct) impression that their constituents don't really give a damn what they do...
... None of the voodoo remedies worked at all, while the placebo was highly effective. Evidence, perhaps, that homeopathy works entirely on a placebo effect, and so doesn't work at all on people like the Mythbusters who don't believe in homeopathy?
I'm not sure I would. Something tells me we'll have to be really, *really* nice to them.
I have a mental image here of guys with ridiculous musculature, big hair, monkey tails, various impressive ki-based techniques, and a very bad attitude. I for one am hoping like hell for the sake of the rest of the galaxy that the place gets, er... hit by a comet, yeah, a comet...
I thought that was an abbreviation for 'politicians'. As in 'Tony Blair and George Bush are lyrs.'
Certainly it's uncomfortable to have to do. Think about it this way: nobody needs a right to free speech to say nice things. Nobody ever went to jail for saying 'Dear me, Fotherington-Thomas, isn't the sky such a lovely blue today?' A right to free speech is only worth having at all if you want to say something that somebody, somewhere, doesn't want you to say; and a right to free speech is only really needed if you want to say something that most people don't want you to say.
Rotten.com is our metaphorical canary. It'll be the first thing to die if we wander into a cloud of poison. Then we'll know we've gone wrong somewhere and had better back up.
It would be about the same market as there is for a suborbital spaceflight, I imagine. In fact, this might even add to the attraction: you take off in a rocket, go ballistic over the ocean, leave the atmosphere, see the stars, experience weightlessness - and as a bonus, you come down in Europe. You've got to admit it would be a hell of a way to begin your holiday.