no GTA game has outsold the Halo or Smash Bros franchises
Except for GTA:San Andreas (15.36M), GTA:Vice City (14.20M) and GTA:III (11.60M) of course, which ALL sold better than either Halo I (6.43M), Halo II(8.45M), Halo III (7.41M), Super Smash Brothers (5.55M) or Smash Brothers Melee (7.08M) Smash Brothers Brawl (1.50M so far). Unless you're comparing single GTA games to whole franchises in which case GTA:SA and GTA:VC beat every smash brothers game put together.
My references of course are here. I know a lot of people here like Nintendo at the moment and a lot of people like plugging the XBox as a covert way to rubbish Sony, but could people at least check the facts before hitting the mod button? The parent was just blatantly wrong and a little check on google could have fixed it. I mean, how many people even HAD a gamecube for Melee? And how many people would buy an XBox without GTA:San Andreas? I mean, the statement was just obviously wrong.
So, if I may digress from parent bashing and say something constructive about a game series I love. They sold better because they are simply better games. I've played a fair bit of SSB and Halo and they are both good fun, but in GTA you get to run, drive, shoot, jump, ride, fly, parachute, play game consoles, shop and play a huge variety of novel and challenging missions. Halo and SSB is pretty much the same the whole way through. Sure, you've got some vehicles in Halo and you've got different characters in SSB. But it doesn't just give you the world of potential adventures like GTA does. SSB you hurt players and then hit them off the edge, that's more or less the game. In Halo you shoot up bad guys, with GTA you might be racing ATVs through the country in one mission, shooting up a drug lords house the next. Maybe after that you can steal a flightless plane and drive it through a tunnel, then use some explosive scale models to sabotage some rival interests. How about a stealth mission, using a dagger to kill guards and go undetected through a Rapper's mansion. Maybe then you can go on a boat race over golf courses, race around town in a clunky van picking up "avant guard" literature then maybe you can sneak into a military base and steal a jetpack. GTA is always different, always fresh, always quirky, and THAT is why so many people love it.
Most people who pass on the opportunity to use Microsoft's software usually have an irrational hate for Microsoft itself and put that above what would be the best tool for the job.
I use Linux as a workstation both at home and professionally because I find it easier to use. This is because a) I'm probably slightly more familiar with Linux these days and b) Linux really IS easy to use.
Most Linux distros provide a tool to find what software you need and install it with a click of a button and it automatically keeps it up to date. Linux supports most hardware these days, which get their drivers installed automatically and they always seem work. Desktop distros comes with communications, office, graphics and media software. Linux also comes with a far more enforceable security model that allows a user to do very well without ever needing root access preventing users from breaking the system and saving them from those stupid Vista security prompts. Linux gives access to far more of the system using the shell, allowing knowledgeable users to get around the system very quickly and efficiently while still providing very good graphical file managers.
With Windows you get support for more software, some of it good, most of it bad. You get support for more hardware, mostly the cheap software controlled stuff. You get Visual Studio, which only helps you when you've decided you want to make Windows software. I don't see how it stacks up.
I don't see why some people keep assuming that the only reason anyone uses Linux on a workstation is because they are trying to prove a point. I'm currently a proprietary software developer ("the enemy") and I still love doing the primary development of multi platform software on Linux because it's just plain easier for me to do it. Linux is often the best tool for the job because it is just so nice (yes, OSX is at least as nice on the destkop). Windows may well edge out Linux in some desktop use cases, but if you're looking for a blanket solution for common or existing hardware (which most IT departments are looking for), you may as well go Linux as anything else.
Actually, leaving that out of the summary doesn't just make it sound more ridiculous, it's suspiciously xenophobic. It singles out Japan as doing wacky science. You know, unlike us Europeans or you Americans.
Yep. a lot of people do a lot of stupid stuff, the stuff we're reading about this time is stupid stuff done by Japanese people, rather than the stupid stuff done by European or American people. There isn't a nationalist conspiracy here, the stuff is just funny.
They'll shoot back anyway, all right, but none of what's aimed at them will get through.
When Palestinians kill 10 Israelis, the Israeli military kills 100 Palestinians. You don't have to be a card carrying Zionist to see why having less Israelis getting killed is good for everyone.
Firstly, these exceptions are narrow and not relevant to this discussion, bringing them up is immature pedantry. The politician's wives being discussed are not dead and their place on a board is not a natural defect. These exceptions are there because speaking ill of the dead and teasing physical defects achieves no purpose, the general spirit of the law remains that someone has the right to say the truth if it has a point.
Secondly, truth is actually narrower than legal-truth in defamation cases (as discussed in the wikipedia article) since in most cases the defendant must only show that they had a reasonable belief that it was true, rather than it actually being so. If you misunderstand reality you are not liable for speaking your mind unless it can be proven that you were negligent with your facts, i.e. published without checking them. As for real truth, well truth is truth, the courts aren't far enough up their own arse to start calling black white when it comes to facts outside the courtroom, they have enough to confuse inside.
Thirdly, for fuck's sake, if you're going to discuss law at least write "you", capitalise the first letter of sentences and stop using ellipsis as a comma. It makes it easier to read and makes people take you seriously. A little sloppy spelling and grammar is fine, but deliberately garbling a word just to save two letters from your sentence is just pathetic.
A hat trick is a term from cricket referring to the rare instance of a bowler getting out three consecutive batsmen out on three consecutive balls. From there it spread to other sports (cricket was still widely played in North America when the term came into use, which was also before ice hockey became common). Cricket players don't tend to be violent off the field, although bowling to the batsman's face is considered legal as long as it bounces first.
Well, in that situation they pay market price for tuition, which at government universities is far higher than domestic students pay. Western universities make billions of dollars from Chinese students. Of course there is a price to pay in communications difficulties since differences in language and academic culture make teaching them, working with them and hanging out with them harder but this is the ultimately the choice of the university involved rather than some imposition from the National People's Congress.
If China wants to send its next generation of leaders through English speaking, liberal and capitalist universities paying us money to teach them stuff they could have found out at home then I don't see how that disadvantages us. I guess they're gaining from this arrangement too but it's not a zero sum game, we're not at war with China or anything. If there are too many Chinese people going through we can build more and bigger Universities, that's what free market capitalism is all about anyway.
Bill Gates was always far more of a businessman than a programmer. Steve Wozniak never did much in Apple's management, Jobs did all of that stuff (since was the entrepreneurial type) before he was replaced by John Sculley.
it does appear...that they knew that the card system infringed on a patent, and yet went used it anyway.
Now the problem is that patents in some countries are just approved without proper review and then expected to be examined properly in court, there should not be any penalty for a company like Apple waiting it out before they have any idea whether the patent is valid because they haven't been sued.
Do you realize what you're asking for by calling the clean water issue a "bureacratic and resource management challenge"? You're asking for fundamental changes in laws & enforcement in poor countries that are rife with government corruption, lax/nonexistent oversight, pollution, contamination of water supplies and tribal divisions.
Turning the clean water issue into an engineering challenge means you can bypass all that crap & distribute the solution directly to the villagers who need it.
If the engineering solution involves something that has any monetary, government corruption will make it infeasible. If it involves anything but extremely small scale and localised cooperation then lax/nonexistent oversight will make it infeasible. If the solution involves taking water in its current state from the environment in any way then pollution and contamination of water supplies will make it infeasible. If it involves anything that is possible to destroy to impoverish its users then tribal divisions will make it infeasible. I guarantee that any possible solution for any engineering problem is either stealable, destroyable, polluteable or can be distroyed by arguing.
Engineering HAS a solution for this problem, have a clean government to provide strong oversight, manage pollution and contamination and overcome divisions to retain the harmony that lead to this. We can build pipes, wells and treatment plants very effectively, even servicing huge countries like Canada and countries with massive populations like the United States. Development is easy, it's just a natural product of peace and desire to improve the lives of one's people. I have a strong feeling that India's growing middle class will lead the way for that country to become mostly clean and healthy in a few decades time, the Chinese government is somewhat working on fixing the problems with its basic services to poor rural areas and is furiously trying to clean up the worst of the pollution in time for the Olympic games. The poorer nations of South America seem to be creating public services like fresh water, unfortunately sometimes it's a little rocky like in Bolivia but they're getting there. Soon the only nations on earth without these services will be the nations (predominantly African) torn by civil and ethnic strife and that's the problem. That's the only problem since even if the water wasn't killing people, people would be. That's why people problems must be addressed first.
The best way to avoid that double transition is to assure that the Windows-based applications that large numbers of users rely on in their business run on Linux.
Why on earth would you want to switch to Linux to save a fractional amount of the cost of Photoshop if photoshop is going to run exactly the same? I wouldn't do it if it was my call. Windows comes out less frequently and costs far less than photoshop, nobody's going to bawk at the cost of Vista in a situation like that, unless there is a clear migration path to some sort of ultra Gimp there is no sense to it.
Linux/Apache/MySQL/* is worth switching to because it actually better than everything else out there and also free. If Linux wants to win the photo editing market it needs to provide a unique, better and free solution from the photo editor to the Kernel.
Gimp doesn't cost money and can be customised at home, you don't have to be one of the congregation to realise that these are nice merits. Gimp is an infinitely better tool for my $0 already, just imagine how much value for money it would have if it was as good as Photoshop in features and performance.
If it's all the same for Google, I'd much rather see work going in to something I can use without paying for it, proprietary software does nothing for me if I don't intend to buy it.
and are there really no people working for highly-funded terrorist networks who can't afford a decent telescope and take advantage of the dark, dark desert nights?
Of course there are quite a lot of smart terrorists, a large number of terrorists are engineers and scientists, Osama Bin Laden himself is a Civil Engineer and thus probably has an adequate grounding in the mathematics of all of that stuff. Terrorism's allure towards scientists, doctors and engineers goes beyond Islam, most of the Aum terrorists who gassed the Tokyo subway had degrees in physics.
But there is no such thing as a Colonel in Al Qaeda, nobody's going to commission this research program from Al Qaeda high command, pass it down to the research branch, evaluate the findings and see that it is used in the field. Bin Laden isn't running a huge network of terrorists from an underground fortress or anything, people just decide to blow stuff up because they're angry, they might train in hidden Pakistani camps or something but there's no conspiracy, young men just listen to a little too much hot headed rhetoric then do stupid stuff. How many volunteers join a Jihad to stare up into space for months on end, then compile a list of numbers? It's not that these people are stupid, or poor, it's that they simply don't have enough organisation to do this since they must use a loose structure lest the head be traced from the bottom and be decapitated. Ok, there are some exceptions, I wouldn't be surprised if Hezbollah could pull this off and maybe Hamas could now they seem to be organised. But most of these guys are fairly isolated and work in very small groups of other pissed of Muslims, it's far easier and more likely for them to just look this stuff up online.
"If Ted can track all these satellites," Pike said, "so can the Chinese."
Of course the Chinese can track these satellites, the Chinese have a multi-trillion dollar economy. With that you can afford the education, staff and equipment to track satellites with far more accuracy than these hobbyists since they can use things like Radar and large telescopes. The Chinese got these things by being a stable and peaceful (albeit repressive) state. The Chinese know where the satellites but they're not the ones who anyone's worried about. Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.
Despite their benign intentions, there are consequences for exposing any information of this nature. Information has always been one of the most important weapons in any human conflicts. Whether you believe you have a nationalistic duty to protect the secrets of your nation and its allies or not, one must consider that by publishing data of this nature, despite it just being numbers one can calculate in one's backyard can result in bad things happening to good people. One must consider that just because one is fairly safe from terrorism in most of the developed world, it is a way of life in Northern India, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq where it claims life on a steady basis, if public satellite data prevents the governments of these regions from suppressing those who attack civilians, then those deaths are a consequence of the publishing of the information. This isn't about protection of the revenue model of some fat record labels, this isn't about exposing government lies or software patents. This is information who's revelation could lead to death and it should be treated with serious discretion.
You know why Caldera/SCO has gone down hill so far? The name of the CEO.
I hear the name "Ransom Love" (Caldera's founder) and into my head comes a dude with a cravat, an ornate basket hilt rapier, a big black hat with a feather in it, possibly a lacy handkerchief in his pocket which was a favour of some Maiden in a past adventure.
I hear "Darl McBride" and I just think frilly pink dress and cowboy boots.
The Ransom Love look may look foppish today, but is still cool in a mid renaissance kind of way, but Darl McBride B-list Nashville crooner image is not what any public corporation wants.
The only way to save them would be to employ a CEO called "Max Power".
Other than the fact that delivering that amount of energy in that small an area is roughly equivalent to a small nuclear weapon.... that's an excellent plan.
Hint: This is what we call sarcasm. Your plan sucks and is based on utter and complete ignorance of science. You don't even have any common sense - you seem to not noticed that it takes a huge honkin' rocket to get it up there, which implies it takes a huge honkin' amount of energy to reverse that situation. You aren't even smart enough to know that you don't know - you state your ignorant opinion as though it was fact.
Firstly, the energy to deorbit a satellite is not the same as that required to put it up, returning space capsules and decommissioned satilites require very small burns with their thrusters to in effect transfer the satellite to an elliptic transfer orbit that intersects earth's atmosphere around the large ocean that it is to be put into. The Apollo service module weighed slightly less than the Delta-IV rocket's maximum load to LEO (24 tonnes) and was able to perform a trans-earth injection burn and was able to bring a multi tonne capsule home from THE FRIGGING MOON while also providing life support, electricity and communications systems. Earth from geosynchronous can be done by satellite thrusters when a parking orbit isn't acceptable. Earth from LEO requires nothing more than a computerised bottle rocket.
Secondly, even if deorbiting required the same energy as orbiting, 20 tons of solidified RDX/PETN mix (which can by easily lifted to the right orbit with a Titan IV or Atlas V rocket) can release far more energy than any rocket ever built, not quite what the GP was suggesting, but non-nuclear none the less.
Thirdly, even in the ludicrous hypothetical situation where it did require a nuclear weapon to provide the energy it wouldn't matter since the US government has plenty of them currently mounted on large and pinpoint accurate space vehicles that it would use if required to despite the space weapons treaty.
Fourthly, you've got to seriously think about posting anonymously next time you say someone is wrong in such as rude way while showing some serious misunderstandings of the physics yourself. And is Derek Lyons your real name? If so you really should think of some anonymity if you want to act like a jerk. Slashdot has always been a great place for semi-informed people to post their ideas just like the grandparent and parent did. There are probably people here involved in rocketry, astrophysics, guidance systems and such, but not enough to make this discussion good. I've done some physics in university and read up a bit about the subject and that's all we really expect from a person who is part of a slashdot discussion. If the USAF asked me to plan the mission in question, I'd tell them that I'm not qualified, but in slashdot I can give my 2 cents. If you don't like it then maybe you should start reading peer-reviewed journals or something.
As to the original device, maybe the little bastards will understand how I feel every time they drive by in their car or park outside, playing the latest example of what passes for music these days, with the bass level set at "stun small mammals".
Only they play shitty dance-pop and hip-hop specifically for their own enjoyment rather than to make you uncomfortable, this device can't even be heard by those it's supposed to work in favour of. This is a completely invalid comparison.
You can often get the same effect by playing "uncool" music.
Good idea, play either some classical/baroque/romantic orchestral music at a moderate volume, it's not offensive enough to make anyone irritated or uncomfortable but will chip away at the hang-out factor to the sorts of teens you don't want. It also would be I think lead to a more pleasant experience for those who like that music. Fossil rock is another good choice I think, some Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater, Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix or any other good 70s music you have in the cupboard would provide something that young people would be loathed to bee seen enjoying and thus would be extremely reluctant to be around it all day. This would be a far more dignified and humane way to deal with the problem than using a child version of a dog training whistle to give them headaches.
Oh, and another thing, how many supermarkets and other potential purchasers of this device are all staffed by over 20 year olds? I know in many countries employers have a legal obligation to not torture employees and can be royally bent over in court if they have created an environment that is needlessly distressing. Heads really could roll over this.
those little thumb-twiddlers are just operated with your thumbs in (in my experience) the most hand-cramping configuration you can imagine
I would conjecture that the one of the key reasons they are so popular (and why the D-pad used to be popular) is that the joints in your thumb and fingers are extremely durable and can be subjected to huge amounts of repetitive movements whereas wrist movements (such as in a joystick) cause the wrist to become very sore, very fast.
My PS3 causes me no pain nomatter how much I play it (cue jokes about PS3's game catalogue and price) whereas mice hurt my wrist after about 2-3 hours of FPSing and joysticks hurt almost right off the mark.
It does actually, because it shouldnt be a Race... it should be a team effort...
The cold war is over, while the USA and Russia are not strategic allies by any means they are in a very steady peace right now (mainly because terrorism has taken America's mind off it and the demise of communist identity has given Russia one less thing to prove). Russia and China have made up after the Sino Soviet split, the US has recognised the People's Republic of China as legitimate, Europe is on side with anyone who wants to be friends, India is chumming up to Russia and splitting the cost of their space program, every nation who has the technology to get into space have amiable diplomatic relationships and sometimes even mutual dependence.
And it is KILLING any hope of progress.
The US and Soviet Union were locked into the greatest war humanity has ever seen. It was a great war because for most of its forty years, the bulk of the combatants were creating, rather than destroying. Two immense industrial machines competing day and night to create the best technology, the best culture, the best athletes and yes, the best weapons who's developments lead to huge leaps in civilian rocketry, computer science, material science, aerospace engineering, nuclear power, theoretical physics, chemistry and biology and many other advances. Now they've all but stopped, the United State's industrial capability has become unneeded, the Soviet Union plunged into a collapse that lasted a decade and its successors have only partially recovered from.
What are people doing instead, now national pride is not a valued commodity people are producing goods with less useful byproducts. The resources had to go somewhere and I'd conjecture they've gone into services, people eat out more, people can afford more consumer gadgets with prices undreamed of in recent years (I can't really talk since I own and love my PS3). Until fairly recent tax cuts the government used to take that excess money from the people and shoot it off into space and explore new planets to piss off the Soviets, it used to dump craploads into domestic public infrastructure and foreign aid in order to impress potential allies, all the while ironically extolling the virtues of capitalism.
The cold war was a lie, after Stalin's death there was nothing all that evil about the Soviet Union, and nothing all that evil about the US but since they believed it, they were willing to pour billions into a gigantic pissing contest that put humans on the moon. It couldn't have happened any other way. Humans are by nature lazy and self interested, they only work hard when they are threatened and they only cooperate when you can separate "us" and "them" and they can see that their interests don't lie that far comparatively from those immediately around them as compared to those far away that they hopefully won't get a chance to squabble with. Nationalistic fervour creates as much peace and harmony as it does anger provided that the parties are being enemies but not being dicks about it (killing should be wholly avoided in any war to be considered awesome for humanity).
The only way a human will ever step out onto the surface of Mars is if two huge countries enter another pointless pissing competition (hopefully with less nuclear build up this time). How about USA verses China?
There is indeed a bare minimum hardware performance required to play but sadly many new games, especially Crysis, that bare minimum is scarily close to the market's maximum. Benchmarks are supposed to be a way to isolate this and objectively measure it so that a good purchasing decision can be made by the consumer and when the game is played hopefully the subjective experience of enjoyment will follow. A framerate above human perception is needed for fun (as jerky frames lead to nausia and frustration), high detail is needed for the beauty of a game which is probably just as important (it's been the basis for visual art, music and poetry for millennia).
The reason we've got so far and now can have computers, electricity, aeroplanes, cars, etc. is because of the willingness of scientifically inclined individuals to isolate, experiment and measure. Technology is one of the things in life that can be measured and I think it is a good idea to continue to do it, provided we can do it right. Experimentation and science is what got us out of caves no?
As for Hardocp, what have they proven? Apparently traditional time demos run a fairly linear amount faster than realtime demos, even though it has been acknowledged that realtime demos render more including weapons, characters and effects that the canned demo does not. This would be interesting if the question was "how fast can Crysis run on different cards" but that's not what people want to know. What I'd want to know is which card should I buy to allow me to continue to play cutting edge games for as long as possible while enjoying their whole beauty but not getting a framerate low enough to make me uncomfortable. It just so happens that the card with the best timedemo benchmark has the best actual playthrough benchmark and by roughly the same factor. The only difference is that the traditional timedemo depends on only the graphics hardware whereas the playthrough benchmark depends on efficiency elsewhere in the engine (AI physics), where the player spent most time and if reviewing subjectively, the reviewers current mindset and biases.
but games like this make the PS3 look like a worthy investment.
Try playing Mobile Suit Gundam: Target In Sight (called Crossfire in North America) on the PS3 and you'll see why it's not a good investment. The graphics are abysmal, the animation is clunky (and not in the good robot way), the controls are unresponsive and the missions are repetitive, boring and frustrating. Combat is fairly arbitrary, you can't move fast enough to dodge so you end up just hoping that the bad dudes don't hit you (they usually don't). Tactically the game is uninteresting, there is no cover, the AI allies can't be controlled properly and the bad dudes don't do anything cleverer than walk up to you while firing. Basically you hold down the fire button and circle strafe round and round in a single direction or jetpack up to them and chop them. Nothing interesting at all. As for the jetpack, I had never imagined that the ability to fly would be so boring. There is nowhere to fly to, you just skip along the ground for a little while then land.
My sister seems incapable of knowing how pathetic it is, bought and seems to actually enjoy playing it, but I assure you all that she is wrong about that one. Anyhow, that pod game actually looks quite good, it's fast, dynamic and possibly tactical, all of the things that Target in Sight lacked. I generally like my PS3 a lot, but if you want gundam, keep to the arcades, it costs the same to play that game 150 times, and you'd never play TiS that much.
Bioshock is a great game, but there's nothing really that new in there gameplay wise, the setting's pretty original but that's about it.
I mean, what's new about it? The plasmids are fun, but no better than previous games that have allowed spell casting, like the Elder Scrolls series (where you can actually make your own). The tonics are interesting, but compared to the delicate balances and quirks of S.T.A,L.K.E.R.'s artefacts which have down sides and need to be balanced between tasks, rather than just having different slots for different types and the decision pretty much made for you. The combat wasn't particularly interesting, it's more in the old school with large amounts of health on both sides, close range and no cover, pretty much just aiming practice really, the AI is pretty dumb too. Combat these days tends to be moving towards the more tactical, cover driven battles of F.E.A.R. Gears of War, S.T.A,L.K.E.R. or Call of Duty which I find more exciting and mentally involved, Bioshock reminds me of Quake (not bad, just pretty retro). Hacking royally blows of course, some dumb pipes game which is smashing fun for the first 10 times, but as I'm as compulsive hacker who cannot stop, it gets irritating. If you want fun hacking, check out the latest Ratchet and Clank game, shorting circuits with a rolling ball. U-Invent and Power to the People are the stupidest excuses for customisation I've ever seen, either make regular items out of crap you can pick up or add two improvements to the weapons that you have to carry. That's right, in the days where every game seems to let the players pick which weapons to carry, 2 guns in halo, 2 rifles and 1 pistol in GoW, 3 guns in fear, space/weight based in Deus Ex, stalker or Elder scrolls. Bioshock you have 1 of each weapon and an independent max ammo for each. People say it has roleplaying elements but it has no inventory! The only thing you can change is your plasmids, but they all just use the same EVE source so you only end up using 2 or 3 of them or so anyway since they never run out of ammo, I just used telekinesis for everything because flying corpses make new corpses.
The story also, I did like it because it was easy enough to follow and since I'm often too lazy to pay attention it helped me, but it was obvious that it was the sort of story that was going to have a "twist" and there was only really one possible since near the beginning, it didn't really take me by surprise. Oh and what's the whole thing about morality in it? You kill the girl and take all the adam or you save the girl, get half the adam then get most of the rest in a teddy bear along with some unique plasmids and some ammo. Basically the only difference is whether you think it is funny to kill the girl or not, there's no complex moral reasoning in it, just H or L. I really liked the backstory though, the whole story of Ryan founding a colony away from the government in the name of freedom then ending up oppressing them even worse. It appeals to me as an authoritarian in that if a democratic government doesn't have the power to control the people, then other people will instead.
Anyway, despite me discussing its failings, I did really like the game, I liked the atmosphere, I liked the world they created, I liked the graphics and I particularly thought that the research camera was a very great addition. I have just played many cutting edge, genre redefining games in my time and I really don't see Bioshock's place in there.
The reasons studies showing differences between sex, race or whatever, especially in mental areas should be swept under the carpet is not that the studies are false. Sex is determined by hormones and race by genes, both OBVIOUSLY have hypothetical causality with human brain's function that you would have to be an idiot to simply discount without some serious research to disprove. The brain is part of the body and is shaped by the same factors as it, thus as our brain is different to other species because of our genes and hormones it is going to differ from other humans, I'm personally amazed about just how few differences there tend to be in cognitive capacity between sexes (who have very differently structured brains) and races (who often have very different genes and environments). The reason we should sweep this stuff under the carpet is not because the data is wrong, or the conclusions are evil, it is because of the potential for abuse greatly outweighs the potential benefits.
Take the controversial race-IQ correlation thing that is being hailed by some as the ultimate in suppressed wisdom and derided by others as pure racist hate and bigotry. It is neither. It is just some data which may be probably true, but to the general public it has less potential to enlighten them than be used as rationalisation of an existing view that has only the ability to be divisive. That data says that the average IQ for Africans is significantly lower than that of Caucasians, does that mean George Bush is smarter than his former secretary of state Colin Powell? (or his new SoS Rice or possible successor Obama for that matter) Of course it doesn't, Powell is a smart black guy and Bush is a dumb white guy and since this is always a possibility we're back to where we started where you need to judge someone on their own, not by their race. It however doesn't mean that someone who already doesn't like blacks won't be able to use it to win over some supporters with their misused statistics.
This study isn't really harmful at all in my opinion but I think if the misandric minority of women were in the habit of using such studies on quite trivial male weaknesses then in that hypothetical situation it might be in the best interest for those in possession of the results to show an amount of discretion as to who was made aware of them and how it was phrased to prevent certain members of the community from being victimised using these studies as an excuse.
Before I finish though, I'd like to discuss something I don't like, pinning the blame on a more traditionally powerful group to appease general harmony. Problems in Africa MUST be blamed on European imperialism even though violence, corruption and even slavery existed in Africa long before a white man went south of Alexandria. Women not doing well in an area? The top hypothesis on this list is usually males excluding them, regardless of whether large numbers of talented women actually want to go into the area or not. As a white male born in the '80, being constantly blamed for ongoing problems that I could not possibly have had the power to create, often in aggressive and personally directed ways really hurts sometimes. I assume people who fit into this category makes up a lot of slashdot, anyone feel the same way?
It worked when Microsoft bought DOS, it worked when Microsoft bought Hotmail, it's current biggest web service. Microsoft does try to innovate, but most often that stuff just falls flat on its face, when Microsoft buys other people's products though, that's when they hit a winner. Saying that the most wealthy, successful software company in the world is doomed to failure for going against silicon valley reasoning is futile when that's what they've always done and made more than anyone else while doing.
No money need change hands, but presumably the IT department wanted the ability to modify the code, if they sent anything useful they do back upstream it would be even better. Further still, from what I can gather the French government likes investing tax dollars into simply hiring large numbers of French people; there are plenty of French people hacking on open source, how 'bought they hire a few of those already involved to work on the products the Gendarmes (and hopefully others in the future) use that are rough around the edges. That way the government looks like it investing in France and reducing unemployment, French hackers get awesome jobs, the cops get better software and so does everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for GTA:San Andreas (15.36M), GTA:Vice City (14.20M) and GTA:III (11.60M) of course, which ALL sold better than either Halo I (6.43M), Halo II(8.45M), Halo III (7.41M), Super Smash Brothers (5.55M) or Smash Brothers Melee (7.08M) Smash Brothers Brawl (1.50M so far). Unless you're comparing single GTA games to whole franchises in which case GTA:SA and GTA:VC beat every smash brothers game put together.
My references of course are here. I know a lot of people here like Nintendo at the moment and a lot of people like plugging the XBox as a covert way to rubbish Sony, but could people at least check the facts before hitting the mod button? The parent was just blatantly wrong and a little check on google could have fixed it. I mean, how many people even HAD a gamecube for Melee? And how many people would buy an XBox without GTA:San Andreas? I mean, the statement was just obviously wrong.
So, if I may digress from parent bashing and say something constructive about a game series I love. They sold better because they are simply better games. I've played a fair bit of SSB and Halo and they are both good fun, but in GTA you get to run, drive, shoot, jump, ride, fly, parachute, play game consoles, shop and play a huge variety of novel and challenging missions. Halo and SSB is pretty much the same the whole way through. Sure, you've got some vehicles in Halo and you've got different characters in SSB. But it doesn't just give you the world of potential adventures like GTA does. SSB you hurt players and then hit them off the edge, that's more or less the game. In Halo you shoot up bad guys, with GTA you might be racing ATVs through the country in one mission, shooting up a drug lords house the next. Maybe after that you can steal a flightless plane and drive it through a tunnel, then use some explosive scale models to sabotage some rival interests. How about a stealth mission, using a dagger to kill guards and go undetected through a Rapper's mansion. Maybe then you can go on a boat race over golf courses, race around town in a clunky van picking up "avant guard" literature then maybe you can sneak into a military base and steal a jetpack. GTA is always different, always fresh, always quirky, and THAT is why so many people love it.
I use Linux as a workstation both at home and professionally because I find it easier to use. This is because a) I'm probably slightly more familiar with Linux these days and b) Linux really IS easy to use.
Most Linux distros provide a tool to find what software you need and install it with a click of a button and it automatically keeps it up to date. Linux supports most hardware these days, which get their drivers installed automatically and they always seem work. Desktop distros comes with communications, office, graphics and media software. Linux also comes with a far more enforceable security model that allows a user to do very well without ever needing root access preventing users from breaking the system and saving them from those stupid Vista security prompts. Linux gives access to far more of the system using the shell, allowing knowledgeable users to get around the system very quickly and efficiently while still providing very good graphical file managers.
With Windows you get support for more software, some of it good, most of it bad. You get support for more hardware, mostly the cheap software controlled stuff. You get Visual Studio, which only helps you when you've decided you want to make Windows software. I don't see how it stacks up.
I don't see why some people keep assuming that the only reason anyone uses Linux on a workstation is because they are trying to prove a point. I'm currently a proprietary software developer ("the enemy") and I still love doing the primary development of multi platform software on Linux because it's just plain easier for me to do it. Linux is often the best tool for the job because it is just so nice (yes, OSX is at least as nice on the destkop). Windows may well edge out Linux in some desktop use cases, but if you're looking for a blanket solution for common or existing hardware (which most IT departments are looking for), you may as well go Linux as anything else.
When Palestinians kill 10 Israelis, the Israeli military kills 100 Palestinians. You don't have to be a card carrying Zionist to see why having less Israelis getting killed is good for everyone.
Firstly, these exceptions are narrow and not relevant to this discussion, bringing them up is immature pedantry. The politician's wives being discussed are not dead and their place on a board is not a natural defect. These exceptions are there because speaking ill of the dead and teasing physical defects achieves no purpose, the general spirit of the law remains that someone has the right to say the truth if it has a point.
Secondly, truth is actually narrower than legal-truth in defamation cases (as discussed in the wikipedia article) since in most cases the defendant must only show that they had a reasonable belief that it was true, rather than it actually being so. If you misunderstand reality you are not liable for speaking your mind unless it can be proven that you were negligent with your facts, i.e. published without checking them. As for real truth, well truth is truth, the courts aren't far enough up their own arse to start calling black white when it comes to facts outside the courtroom, they have enough to confuse inside.
Thirdly, for fuck's sake, if you're going to discuss law at least write "you", capitalise the first letter of sentences and stop using ellipsis as a comma. It makes it easier to read and makes people take you seriously. A little sloppy spelling and grammar is fine, but deliberately garbling a word just to save two letters from your sentence is just pathetic.
A hat trick is a term from cricket referring to the rare instance of a bowler getting out three consecutive batsmen out on three consecutive balls. From there it spread to other sports (cricket was still widely played in North America when the term came into use, which was also before ice hockey became common). Cricket players don't tend to be violent off the field, although bowling to the batsman's face is considered legal as long as it bounces first.
Well, in that situation they pay market price for tuition, which at government universities is far higher than domestic students pay. Western universities make billions of dollars from Chinese students. Of course there is a price to pay in communications difficulties since differences in language and academic culture make teaching them, working with them and hanging out with them harder but this is the ultimately the choice of the university involved rather than some imposition from the National People's Congress.
If China wants to send its next generation of leaders through English speaking, liberal and capitalist universities paying us money to teach them stuff they could have found out at home then I don't see how that disadvantages us. I guess they're gaining from this arrangement too but it's not a zero sum game, we're not at war with China or anything. If there are too many Chinese people going through we can build more and bigger Universities, that's what free market capitalism is all about anyway.
Yes, that was my reply to four words.
Bill Gates was always far more of a businessman than a programmer. Steve Wozniak never did much in Apple's management, Jobs did all of that stuff (since was the entrepreneurial type) before he was replaced by John Sculley.
If the engineering solution involves something that has any monetary, government corruption will make it infeasible. If it involves anything but extremely small scale and localised cooperation then lax/nonexistent oversight will make it infeasible. If the solution involves taking water in its current state from the environment in any way then pollution and contamination of water supplies will make it infeasible. If it involves anything that is possible to destroy to impoverish its users then tribal divisions will make it infeasible. I guarantee that any possible solution for any engineering problem is either stealable, destroyable, polluteable or can be distroyed by arguing.
Engineering HAS a solution for this problem, have a clean government to provide strong oversight, manage pollution and contamination and overcome divisions to retain the harmony that lead to this. We can build pipes, wells and treatment plants very effectively, even servicing huge countries like Canada and countries with massive populations like the United States. Development is easy, it's just a natural product of peace and desire to improve the lives of one's people. I have a strong feeling that India's growing middle class will lead the way for that country to become mostly clean and healthy in a few decades time, the Chinese government is somewhat working on fixing the problems with its basic services to poor rural areas and is furiously trying to clean up the worst of the pollution in time for the Olympic games. The poorer nations of South America seem to be creating public services like fresh water, unfortunately sometimes it's a little rocky like in Bolivia but they're getting there. Soon the only nations on earth without these services will be the nations (predominantly African) torn by civil and ethnic strife and that's the problem. That's the only problem since even if the water wasn't killing people, people would be. That's why people problems must be addressed first.
Why on earth would you want to switch to Linux to save a fractional amount of the cost of Photoshop if photoshop is going to run exactly the same? I wouldn't do it if it was my call. Windows comes out less frequently and costs far less than photoshop, nobody's going to bawk at the cost of Vista in a situation like that, unless there is a clear migration path to some sort of ultra Gimp there is no sense to it.
Linux/Apache/MySQL/* is worth switching to because it actually better than everything else out there and also free. If Linux wants to win the photo editing market it needs to provide a unique, better and free solution from the photo editor to the Kernel.
Gimp doesn't cost money and can be customised at home, you don't have to be one of the congregation to realise that these are nice merits. Gimp is an infinitely better tool for my $0 already, just imagine how much value for money it would have if it was as good as Photoshop in features and performance.
If it's all the same for Google, I'd much rather see work going in to something I can use without paying for it, proprietary software does nothing for me if I don't intend to buy it.
Of course there are quite a lot of smart terrorists, a large number of terrorists are engineers and scientists, Osama Bin Laden himself is a Civil Engineer and thus probably has an adequate grounding in the mathematics of all of that stuff. Terrorism's allure towards scientists, doctors and engineers goes beyond Islam, most of the Aum terrorists who gassed the Tokyo subway had degrees in physics.
But there is no such thing as a Colonel in Al Qaeda, nobody's going to commission this research program from Al Qaeda high command, pass it down to the research branch, evaluate the findings and see that it is used in the field. Bin Laden isn't running a huge network of terrorists from an underground fortress or anything, people just decide to blow stuff up because they're angry, they might train in hidden Pakistani camps or something but there's no conspiracy, young men just listen to a little too much hot headed rhetoric then do stupid stuff. How many volunteers join a Jihad to stare up into space for months on end, then compile a list of numbers? It's not that these people are stupid, or poor, it's that they simply don't have enough organisation to do this since they must use a loose structure lest the head be traced from the bottom and be decapitated. Ok, there are some exceptions, I wouldn't be surprised if Hezbollah could pull this off and maybe Hamas could now they seem to be organised. But most of these guys are fairly isolated and work in very small groups of other pissed of Muslims, it's far easier and more likely for them to just look this stuff up online.
Of course the Chinese can track these satellites, the Chinese have a multi-trillion dollar economy. With that you can afford the education, staff and equipment to track satellites with far more accuracy than these hobbyists since they can use things like Radar and large telescopes. The Chinese got these things by being a stable and peaceful (albeit repressive) state. The Chinese know where the satellites but they're not the ones who anyone's worried about. Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.
Despite their benign intentions, there are consequences for exposing any information of this nature. Information has always been one of the most important weapons in any human conflicts. Whether you believe you have a nationalistic duty to protect the secrets of your nation and its allies or not, one must consider that by publishing data of this nature, despite it just being numbers one can calculate in one's backyard can result in bad things happening to good people. One must consider that just because one is fairly safe from terrorism in most of the developed world, it is a way of life in Northern India, Pakistan, Israel, Iraq where it claims life on a steady basis, if public satellite data prevents the governments of these regions from suppressing those who attack civilians, then those deaths are a consequence of the publishing of the information. This isn't about protection of the revenue model of some fat record labels, this isn't about exposing government lies or software patents. This is information who's revelation could lead to death and it should be treated with serious discretion.
You know why Caldera/SCO has gone down hill so far? The name of the CEO.
I hear the name "Ransom Love" (Caldera's founder) and into my head comes a dude with a cravat, an ornate basket hilt rapier, a big black hat with a feather in it, possibly a lacy handkerchief in his pocket which was a favour of some Maiden in a past adventure.
I hear "Darl McBride" and I just think frilly pink dress and cowboy boots.
The Ransom Love look may look foppish today, but is still cool in a mid renaissance kind of way, but Darl McBride B-list Nashville crooner image is not what any public corporation wants.
The only way to save them would be to employ a CEO called "Max Power".
Firstly, the energy to deorbit a satellite is not the same as that required to put it up, returning space capsules and decommissioned satilites require very small burns with their thrusters to in effect transfer the satellite to an elliptic transfer orbit that intersects earth's atmosphere around the large ocean that it is to be put into. The Apollo service module weighed slightly less than the Delta-IV rocket's maximum load to LEO (24 tonnes) and was able to perform a trans-earth injection burn and was able to bring a multi tonne capsule home from THE FRIGGING MOON while also providing life support, electricity and communications systems. Earth from geosynchronous can be done by satellite thrusters when a parking orbit isn't acceptable. Earth from LEO requires nothing more than a computerised bottle rocket.
Secondly, even if deorbiting required the same energy as orbiting, 20 tons of solidified RDX/PETN mix (which can by easily lifted to the right orbit with a Titan IV or Atlas V rocket) can release far more energy than any rocket ever built, not quite what the GP was suggesting, but non-nuclear none the less.
Thirdly, even in the ludicrous hypothetical situation where it did require a nuclear weapon to provide the energy it wouldn't matter since the US government has plenty of them currently mounted on large and pinpoint accurate space vehicles that it would use if required to despite the space weapons treaty.
Fourthly, you've got to seriously think about posting anonymously next time you say someone is wrong in such as rude way while showing some serious misunderstandings of the physics yourself. And is Derek Lyons your real name? If so you really should think of some anonymity if you want to act like a jerk. Slashdot has always been a great place for semi-informed people to post their ideas just like the grandparent and parent did. There are probably people here involved in rocketry, astrophysics, guidance systems and such, but not enough to make this discussion good. I've done some physics in university and read up a bit about the subject and that's all we really expect from a person who is part of a slashdot discussion. If the USAF asked me to plan the mission in question, I'd tell them that I'm not qualified, but in slashdot I can give my 2 cents. If you don't like it then maybe you should start reading peer-reviewed journals or something.
Only they play shitty dance-pop and hip-hop specifically for their own enjoyment rather than to make you uncomfortable, this device can't even be heard by those it's supposed to work in favour of. This is a completely invalid comparison.
Good idea, play either some classical/baroque/romantic orchestral music at a moderate volume, it's not offensive enough to make anyone irritated or uncomfortable but will chip away at the hang-out factor to the sorts of teens you don't want. It also would be I think lead to a more pleasant experience for those who like that music. Fossil rock is another good choice I think, some Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater, Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix or any other good 70s music you have in the cupboard would provide something that young people would be loathed to bee seen enjoying and thus would be extremely reluctant to be around it all day. This would be a far more dignified and humane way to deal with the problem than using a child version of a dog training whistle to give them headaches.
Oh, and another thing, how many supermarkets and other potential purchasers of this device are all staffed by over 20 year olds? I know in many countries employers have a legal obligation to not torture employees and can be royally bent over in court if they have created an environment that is needlessly distressing. Heads really could roll over this.
I would conjecture that the one of the key reasons they are so popular (and why the D-pad used to be popular) is that the joints in your thumb and fingers are extremely durable and can be subjected to huge amounts of repetitive movements whereas wrist movements (such as in a joystick) cause the wrist to become very sore, very fast.
My PS3 causes me no pain nomatter how much I play it (cue jokes about PS3's game catalogue and price) whereas mice hurt my wrist after about 2-3 hours of FPSing and joysticks hurt almost right off the mark.
The cold war is over, while the USA and Russia are not strategic allies by any means they are in a very steady peace right now (mainly because terrorism has taken America's mind off it and the demise of communist identity has given Russia one less thing to prove). Russia and China have made up after the Sino Soviet split, the US has recognised the People's Republic of China as legitimate, Europe is on side with anyone who wants to be friends, India is chumming up to Russia and splitting the cost of their space program, every nation who has the technology to get into space have amiable diplomatic relationships and sometimes even mutual dependence.
And it is KILLING any hope of progress.
The US and Soviet Union were locked into the greatest war humanity has ever seen. It was a great war because for most of its forty years, the bulk of the combatants were creating, rather than destroying. Two immense industrial machines competing day and night to create the best technology, the best culture, the best athletes and yes, the best weapons who's developments lead to huge leaps in civilian rocketry, computer science, material science, aerospace engineering, nuclear power, theoretical physics, chemistry and biology and many other advances. Now they've all but stopped, the United State's industrial capability has become unneeded, the Soviet Union plunged into a collapse that lasted a decade and its successors have only partially recovered from.
What are people doing instead, now national pride is not a valued commodity people are producing goods with less useful byproducts. The resources had to go somewhere and I'd conjecture they've gone into services, people eat out more, people can afford more consumer gadgets with prices undreamed of in recent years (I can't really talk since I own and love my PS3). Until fairly recent tax cuts the government used to take that excess money from the people and shoot it off into space and explore new planets to piss off the Soviets, it used to dump craploads into domestic public infrastructure and foreign aid in order to impress potential allies, all the while ironically extolling the virtues of capitalism.
The cold war was a lie, after Stalin's death there was nothing all that evil about the Soviet Union, and nothing all that evil about the US but since they believed it, they were willing to pour billions into a gigantic pissing contest that put humans on the moon. It couldn't have happened any other way. Humans are by nature lazy and self interested, they only work hard when they are threatened and they only cooperate when you can separate "us" and "them" and they can see that their interests don't lie that far comparatively from those immediately around them as compared to those far away that they hopefully won't get a chance to squabble with. Nationalistic fervour creates as much peace and harmony as it does anger provided that the parties are being enemies but not being dicks about it (killing should be wholly avoided in any war to be considered awesome for humanity).
The only way a human will ever step out onto the surface of Mars is if two huge countries enter another pointless pissing competition (hopefully with less nuclear build up this time). How about USA verses China?
There is indeed a bare minimum hardware performance required to play but sadly many new games, especially Crysis, that bare minimum is scarily close to the market's maximum. Benchmarks are supposed to be a way to isolate this and objectively measure it so that a good purchasing decision can be made by the consumer and when the game is played hopefully the subjective experience of enjoyment will follow. A framerate above human perception is needed for fun (as jerky frames lead to nausia and frustration), high detail is needed for the beauty of a game which is probably just as important (it's been the basis for visual art, music and poetry for millennia).
The reason we've got so far and now can have computers, electricity, aeroplanes, cars, etc. is because of the willingness of scientifically inclined individuals to isolate, experiment and measure. Technology is one of the things in life that can be measured and I think it is a good idea to continue to do it, provided we can do it right. Experimentation and science is what got us out of caves no?
As for Hardocp, what have they proven? Apparently traditional time demos run a fairly linear amount faster than realtime demos, even though it has been acknowledged that realtime demos render more including weapons, characters and effects that the canned demo does not. This would be interesting if the question was "how fast can Crysis run on different cards" but that's not what people want to know. What I'd want to know is which card should I buy to allow me to continue to play cutting edge games for as long as possible while enjoying their whole beauty but not getting a framerate low enough to make me uncomfortable. It just so happens that the card with the best timedemo benchmark has the best actual playthrough benchmark and by roughly the same factor. The only difference is that the traditional timedemo depends on only the graphics hardware whereas the playthrough benchmark depends on efficiency elsewhere in the engine (AI physics), where the player spent most time and if reviewing subjectively, the reviewers current mindset and biases.
Somebody please think of the science!
Try playing Mobile Suit Gundam: Target In Sight (called Crossfire in North America) on the PS3 and you'll see why it's not a good investment. The graphics are abysmal, the animation is clunky (and not in the good robot way), the controls are unresponsive and the missions are repetitive, boring and frustrating. Combat is fairly arbitrary, you can't move fast enough to dodge so you end up just hoping that the bad dudes don't hit you (they usually don't). Tactically the game is uninteresting, there is no cover, the AI allies can't be controlled properly and the bad dudes don't do anything cleverer than walk up to you while firing. Basically you hold down the fire button and circle strafe round and round in a single direction or jetpack up to them and chop them. Nothing interesting at all. As for the jetpack, I had never imagined that the ability to fly would be so boring. There is nowhere to fly to, you just skip along the ground for a little while then land.
My sister seems incapable of knowing how pathetic it is, bought and seems to actually enjoy playing it, but I assure you all that she is wrong about that one. Anyhow, that pod game actually looks quite good, it's fast, dynamic and possibly tactical, all of the things that Target in Sight lacked. I generally like my PS3 a lot, but if you want gundam, keep to the arcades, it costs the same to play that game 150 times, and you'd never play TiS that much.
Bioshock is a great game, but there's nothing really that new in there gameplay wise, the setting's pretty original but that's about it.
I mean, what's new about it? The plasmids are fun, but no better than previous games that have allowed spell casting, like the Elder Scrolls series (where you can actually make your own). The tonics are interesting, but compared to the delicate balances and quirks of S.T.A,L.K.E.R.'s artefacts which have down sides and need to be balanced between tasks, rather than just having different slots for different types and the decision pretty much made for you. The combat wasn't particularly interesting, it's more in the old school with large amounts of health on both sides, close range and no cover, pretty much just aiming practice really, the AI is pretty dumb too. Combat these days tends to be moving towards the more tactical, cover driven battles of F.E.A.R. Gears of War, S.T.A,L.K.E.R. or Call of Duty which I find more exciting and mentally involved, Bioshock reminds me of Quake (not bad, just pretty retro). Hacking royally blows of course, some dumb pipes game which is smashing fun for the first 10 times, but as I'm as compulsive hacker who cannot stop, it gets irritating. If you want fun hacking, check out the latest Ratchet and Clank game, shorting circuits with a rolling ball. U-Invent and Power to the People are the stupidest excuses for customisation I've ever seen, either make regular items out of crap you can pick up or add two improvements to the weapons that you have to carry. That's right, in the days where every game seems to let the players pick which weapons to carry, 2 guns in halo, 2 rifles and 1 pistol in GoW, 3 guns in fear, space/weight based in Deus Ex, stalker or Elder scrolls. Bioshock you have 1 of each weapon and an independent max ammo for each. People say it has roleplaying elements but it has no inventory! The only thing you can change is your plasmids, but they all just use the same EVE source so you only end up using 2 or 3 of them or so anyway since they never run out of ammo, I just used telekinesis for everything because flying corpses make new corpses.
The story also, I did like it because it was easy enough to follow and since I'm often too lazy to pay attention it helped me, but it was obvious that it was the sort of story that was going to have a "twist" and there was only really one possible since near the beginning, it didn't really take me by surprise. Oh and what's the whole thing about morality in it? You kill the girl and take all the adam or you save the girl, get half the adam then get most of the rest in a teddy bear along with some unique plasmids and some ammo. Basically the only difference is whether you think it is funny to kill the girl or not, there's no complex moral reasoning in it, just H or L. I really liked the backstory though, the whole story of Ryan founding a colony away from the government in the name of freedom then ending up oppressing them even worse. It appeals to me as an authoritarian in that if a democratic government doesn't have the power to control the people, then other people will instead.
Anyway, despite me discussing its failings, I did really like the game, I liked the atmosphere, I liked the world they created, I liked the graphics and I particularly thought that the research camera was a very great addition. I have just played many cutting edge, genre redefining games in my time and I really don't see Bioshock's place in there.
The reasons studies showing differences between sex, race or whatever, especially in mental areas should be swept under the carpet is not that the studies are false. Sex is determined by hormones and race by genes, both OBVIOUSLY have hypothetical causality with human brain's function that you would have to be an idiot to simply discount without some serious research to disprove. The brain is part of the body and is shaped by the same factors as it, thus as our brain is different to other species because of our genes and hormones it is going to differ from other humans, I'm personally amazed about just how few differences there tend to be in cognitive capacity between sexes (who have very differently structured brains) and races (who often have very different genes and environments). The reason we should sweep this stuff under the carpet is not because the data is wrong, or the conclusions are evil, it is because of the potential for abuse greatly outweighs the potential benefits.
Take the controversial race-IQ correlation thing that is being hailed by some as the ultimate in suppressed wisdom and derided by others as pure racist hate and bigotry. It is neither. It is just some data which may be probably true, but to the general public it has less potential to enlighten them than be used as rationalisation of an existing view that has only the ability to be divisive. That data says that the average IQ for Africans is significantly lower than that of Caucasians, does that mean George Bush is smarter than his former secretary of state Colin Powell? (or his new SoS Rice or possible successor Obama for that matter) Of course it doesn't, Powell is a smart black guy and Bush is a dumb white guy and since this is always a possibility we're back to where we started where you need to judge someone on their own, not by their race. It however doesn't mean that someone who already doesn't like blacks won't be able to use it to win over some supporters with their misused statistics.
This study isn't really harmful at all in my opinion but I think if the misandric minority of women were in the habit of using such studies on quite trivial male weaknesses then in that hypothetical situation it might be in the best interest for those in possession of the results to show an amount of discretion as to who was made aware of them and how it was phrased to prevent certain members of the community from being victimised using these studies as an excuse.
Before I finish though, I'd like to discuss something I don't like, pinning the blame on a more traditionally powerful group to appease general harmony. Problems in Africa MUST be blamed on European imperialism even though violence, corruption and even slavery existed in Africa long before a white man went south of Alexandria. Women not doing well in an area? The top hypothesis on this list is usually males excluding them, regardless of whether large numbers of talented women actually want to go into the area or not. As a white male born in the '80, being constantly blamed for ongoing problems that I could not possibly have had the power to create, often in aggressive and personally directed ways really hurts sometimes. I assume people who fit into this category makes up a lot of slashdot, anyone feel the same way?
It worked when Microsoft bought DOS, it worked when Microsoft bought Hotmail, it's current biggest web service. Microsoft does try to innovate, but most often that stuff just falls flat on its face, when Microsoft buys other people's products though, that's when they hit a winner. Saying that the most wealthy, successful software company in the world is doomed to failure for going against silicon valley reasoning is futile when that's what they've always done and made more than anyone else while doing.
No money need change hands, but presumably the IT department wanted the ability to modify the code, if they sent anything useful they do back upstream it would be even better. Further still, from what I can gather the French government likes investing tax dollars into simply hiring large numbers of French people; there are plenty of French people hacking on open source, how 'bought they hire a few of those already involved to work on the products the Gendarmes (and hopefully others in the future) use that are rough around the edges. That way the government looks like it investing in France and reducing unemployment, French hackers get awesome jobs, the cops get better software and so does everyone else.