2) With Google buying a hardware company, Microsoft is well positioned to say "WP7 is the only OS you can use where the OS designer is not competing with you".
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
Note that these two points contradict one another.
Sounds like a classic case of wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
(This year's Hugo class of novels wasn't that strong, though - so don't start there).
Tastes differ and yada yadda, but i would disagree. "Feed" by "Mira Grant (actually a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire) is a great science fiction zombie book. "Cryoburn" is the the latest it Bujold's Vorkosigan series, and it's certainly not the best in the series but i at least thought it was still pretty good. "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" was an interesting fantasy book about gods being enslaved as weapons of war. I didn't think "The Dervish House" was great, but it was decent. Kinda nanotech-punk set in Istanbul, which was interesting at some points and distracting at others.
As for Blackout/All Clear, i haven't actually gotten around to All Clear yet, but Connie Willis did what she usually manages to do for me. Write a book that sucks you into it but that i don't feel any particular compulsion to go back and reread. Which means that like all her other books i found it somewhat disappointing compared to "To Say Nothing of the Dog" and "Bellwether."
Most farmers didn't get rich during the agricultural revolution. Most factory workers didn't get rich during the industrial revolution. Software developers are a little better off because we've got skills that are _relatively_ rare and hard to acquire. However that's just enough to guarantee that we'll get decent wages (assuming we can find a job in the first place of course) not enough to make all, or even most of us rich and powerful.
I would be pissed knowing I will never see Earth or even the destination, and rather be confined to a ship my entire life, since I grew up in say year 1000 of a 20000 year trip.
Well congratulations, you grew up in year 6000 of the 1,000,000,000 year trip called "recorded history," and most likely you're going to be confined to this ship called Earth for your entire life. (Yes, i'm being just a tad optimistic, but if we can survive long enough to spread to other stellar systems there's no reason our descendants can't keep going on for a good long time.)
Certainly you can travel a bit more than your theoretical alternate future spaceship self, but on the other hand most of our ancestors never traveled very far from their home village either. All of us are born under circumstances we can't control, and most of us aren't born in the best circumstances possible. The fact that you and i have the time and ability to post messages like this back and forth online means we're easily in the top 1% of luckiest people in history so far.
So yeah, his life on board a spaceship might not be as awesome as our lives now, but you're viewing it from a rather skewed perspective. Just having enough to eat and being free from back-breaking manual labor would make his life a lot better than a lot of other people put up with, limited vacation possibilities or not.
It's a study. Studies don't need "seed money" and they don't need 100 years. The article itself references Project Daedalus which did pretty much the same thing a couple decades ago, and they did it in five years.
That's how it _should_ work. You start a study, you _finish_ the study, and then you use the results of that study to determine goals/targets for research and engineering, assuming you're serious about it. Then five or ten years later or so you start another study to take into account what's happened with that research and development since the last study. One study that just keeps on going for a hundred years without ever finalizing the report is going to suffer from some serious problems due to moving goalposts.
The thing is, at least to my understanding, a study does not involve original scientific research. The research they do involves analyzing the data that is already known. Either someone has done behavioral research on what would happen to people stuck on a spaceship for 25 years which the study can use, or they haven't in which case the study gets to guess based on the best data they've got. It's not their job to start a research project on the subject.
So there's a lot of existing data to go through, but not any more than is involved with a lot of other large scale projects that have studies completed on them in much less then a hundred years. Once they've analyzed all that data it doesn't make sense for them to sit on their thumbs waiting for new discoveries before they make their report. This study ought to be done within ten years top (and even five years would be overdoing it i think.) Five or ten years after that study is done, when new discoveries have come to light, it would make sense to fund another study. A single study running on for 100 years doesn't make much sense.
Admittedly i can't access the original article from here and see what exactly is involved in their study. If this "study" is actually authorized to sponsor and fund new scientific research then either it's a very unusual study or my understanding of what the term means is flawed. However if they're supposed to be doing original research on the technology needed for interstellar flight then they're totally hosed if all they've got to do it with is $500,000.
a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.
Uh, no. The research and infrastructure buildup necessary to actually carry out such a mission could easily take over a hundred years. But if the _study_ on what would be necessary to do it takes a hundred years, or even ten, then you're doin it rong.
Also, if the study takes over 100 years, the grant works out to $5000 a year. Although perhaps the kind of organization that operates on $5000 a year would take awhile to get things done...
Of the 350 or so games I've played, I've finished maybe 60. It's not about the game being awesome or not. It's only about time.
I won't pay $60 for a shorter game though.
Huh? I think you need some qualifiers to that statement or something, since the majority of the games you've played you don't even really know how long they actually are. If you put N hours into a game before quitting does it actually matter that much if it would have taken you N+1 or N+100 hours to finish it? And unless we're talking very small values of N, wouldn't it be better if the game had taken exactly N or N-1 hours to finish?
Whether there was one hour of game left that you didn't play or 100, you didn't play it, and assigning value to content you'll never play seems a little silly.
Now if you're saying something like on average you put 20 hours into every game you purchase so you don't want to pay $60 for a game that's significantly shorter than 20 hours, that makes sense. But a blanket statement that you won't buy shorter games when most games are currently longer than you're willing to spend on them doesn't make much sense.
SRSLY? You mean like the way IHOP has had to sue everyone who uses the word "House"? And how WallMart sued K-Mart into oblivion years ago? And who can forget the apocalypse of lawsuits between GameFaqs, GameStop, GameSpot, GamePro and GameSpy. Electronics Boutique was a nice place to shop before they were destroyed by that lawsuit from Electronic Arts.
If trademark law actually forced everyone to sue anyone who used even just a part of their name then there wouldn't be a single valid name left to use anymore!
Funny, i see plenty of activity in my Google+ page. I don't know what's wrong with you and your friends.
Of course i don't post much to Google+ myself since they currently don't allow me to use a pseudonym (at least not without the threat of having "something happen" to my account) but that's probably not the issue with your friends if they're migrants from Facebook.
this is why i need to train my cold blooded pet snack to enter my pin for me!
I would say something about the amount of time wasted by repeatedly training something that's going to be consumed in short order, but i'm more squicked out by the idea of keeping your snacks as pets.
Motorola has enough patents that the lawsuits are going both ways and the outcomes are far from certain. Compare that to other companies like Samsung and HTC that are currently getting trounced in court or have already rolled over.
Furthermore Motorola was threatening to open up the exact same kind of lawsuits against other Android manufacturers, so at least Google has nipped that one in the bud. Making a big point of that should help a lot with the alienation you think the other Android manufacturers should be feeling for some reason.
This may not be the best defense possible (maybe they should have spent a few more billion in the Nortel bidding, i dunno) but it's certainly better than sitting on their asses.
Okay, i certainly agree that staying calm during a debate/argument is a goal that should be striven for. I just don't think failure to reach/maintain that goal is necessarily an indicator either that the idea is wrong or that the person doesn't believe in the idea sufficiently.
There's an interesting quote to which I cannot recall attribution, along the lines of "If you get angry when you're defending your topic, that's probably a sign that you don't feel it can stand on its own merits." The lack of temperance in such discussions - from all viewpoints - is fairly damning.
That sounds like something said by someone who's good at keeping a cool head in an argument. And of _course_ he's always right, ergo...
Judging arguments by emotional content is stupid, whether you prejudice yourself towards the people who speak out passionately or towards the people who stay calm but are good at riling up the other side. Judge by what they say, not the tone in which they say it.
Just as there is no cause so just that you cannot find an easily provoked fool following it, there is rarely a cause so foolish that you can't find an otherwise calm and intelligent person bamboozled by it. (Or supporting it for hidden ulterior motives of course.)
Apparently we read stories entirely differently. Half the fun of reading a new book is trying to figure out what's going to happen before it does. It doesn't even have to involve a twist, silly or otherwise, as long as the entire story isn't 100% predictable after reading the first page. As soon as i start reading a book i start formulating a theory about what's really going on, a theory that gets continuously adapted as more information is revealed. That theory can take a sudden left turn if there's a big "twist" somewhere along the way, but even when there isn't the theory still undergoes at least slight changes throughout the story.
Actually i saw articles speculating about Google buying out Motorola at least a couple days before that, and they were theorizing that Motorola's threats to sue other Android developers was an attempt to "motivate" Google to make/finalize the offer. "If you don't buy us out we'll &#$% up your #$%^, just sayin."
As a happy T-Mobile customer let me just say, woohoo!!!!!
Even if T-Mobile ends up not being able to survive on their own, i'd be happier getting subsumed into Sprint or Verizon. They certainly couldn't be any worse than AT&T. Not to mention that aside from all the other issues i have with AT&T, as someone who is also an Android owner i'm very happy with what T-Mobile has been doing with the platform. AT&T seems to be the company least likely to carry on in that spirit after acquiring T-Mobile.
Slashdot Mirror
2) With Google buying a hardware company, Microsoft is well positioned to say "WP7 is the only OS you can use where the OS designer is not competing with you".
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
Note that these two points contradict one another.
Sounds like a classic case of wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
Coming soon to SyFylis: Googorola vs Sharktopus!
(This year's Hugo class of novels wasn't that strong, though - so don't start there).
Tastes differ and yada yadda, but i would disagree. "Feed" by "Mira Grant (actually a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire) is a great science fiction zombie book. "Cryoburn" is the the latest it Bujold's Vorkosigan series, and it's certainly not the best in the series but i at least thought it was still pretty good. "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" was an interesting fantasy book about gods being enslaved as weapons of war. I didn't think "The Dervish House" was great, but it was decent. Kinda nanotech-punk set in Istanbul, which was interesting at some points and distracting at others.
As for Blackout/All Clear, i haven't actually gotten around to All Clear yet, but Connie Willis did what she usually manages to do for me. Write a book that sucks you into it but that i don't feel any particular compulsion to go back and reread. Which means that like all her other books i found it somewhat disappointing compared to "To Say Nothing of the Dog" and "Bellwether."
Most farmers didn't get rich during the agricultural revolution. Most factory workers didn't get rich during the industrial revolution. Software developers are a little better off because we've got skills that are _relatively_ rare and hard to acquire. However that's just enough to guarantee that we'll get decent wages (assuming we can find a job in the first place of course) not enough to make all, or even most of us rich and powerful.
I would be pissed knowing I will never see Earth or even the destination, and rather be confined to a ship my entire life, since I grew up in say year 1000 of a 20000 year trip.
Well congratulations, you grew up in year 6000 of the 1,000,000,000 year trip called "recorded history," and most likely you're going to be confined to this ship called Earth for your entire life. (Yes, i'm being just a tad optimistic, but if we can survive long enough to spread to other stellar systems there's no reason our descendants can't keep going on for a good long time.)
Certainly you can travel a bit more than your theoretical alternate future spaceship self, but on the other hand most of our ancestors never traveled very far from their home village either. All of us are born under circumstances we can't control, and most of us aren't born in the best circumstances possible. The fact that you and i have the time and ability to post messages like this back and forth online means we're easily in the top 1% of luckiest people in history so far.
So yeah, his life on board a spaceship might not be as awesome as our lives now, but you're viewing it from a rather skewed perspective. Just having enough to eat and being free from back-breaking manual labor would make his life a lot better than a lot of other people put up with, limited vacation possibilities or not.
It's a study. Studies don't need "seed money" and they don't need 100 years. The article itself references Project Daedalus which did pretty much the same thing a couple decades ago, and they did it in five years.
That's how it _should_ work. You start a study, you _finish_ the study, and then you use the results of that study to determine goals/targets for research and engineering, assuming you're serious about it. Then five or ten years later or so you start another study to take into account what's happened with that research and development since the last study. One study that just keeps on going for a hundred years without ever finalizing the report is going to suffer from some serious problems due to moving goalposts.
The thing is, at least to my understanding, a study does not involve original scientific research. The research they do involves analyzing the data that is already known. Either someone has done behavioral research on what would happen to people stuck on a spaceship for 25 years which the study can use, or they haven't in which case the study gets to guess based on the best data they've got. It's not their job to start a research project on the subject.
So there's a lot of existing data to go through, but not any more than is involved with a lot of other large scale projects that have studies completed on them in much less then a hundred years. Once they've analyzed all that data it doesn't make sense for them to sit on their thumbs waiting for new discoveries before they make their report. This study ought to be done within ten years top (and even five years would be overdoing it i think.) Five or ten years after that study is done, when new discoveries have come to light, it would make sense to fund another study. A single study running on for 100 years doesn't make much sense.
Admittedly i can't access the original article from here and see what exactly is involved in their study. If this "study" is actually authorized to sponsor and fund new scientific research then either it's a very unusual study or my understanding of what the term means is flawed. However if they're supposed to be doing original research on the technology needed for interstellar flight then they're totally hosed if all they've got to do it with is $500,000.
Yeah, ikr! It should be your doin it rong.
ur doin ur doin it rong rong!
(Begun, the ur/your war has)
O HAI! I herd ur new at teh internets.
a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.
Uh, no. The research and infrastructure buildup necessary to actually carry out such a mission could easily take over a hundred years. But if the _study_ on what would be necessary to do it takes a hundred years, or even ten, then you're doin it rong.
Also, if the study takes over 100 years, the grant works out to $5000 a year. Although perhaps the kind of organization that operates on $5000 a year would take awhile to get things done...
Of the 350 or so games I've played, I've finished maybe 60. It's not about the game being awesome or not. It's only about time.
I won't pay $60 for a shorter game though.
Huh? I think you need some qualifiers to that statement or something, since the majority of the games you've played you don't even really know how long they actually are. If you put N hours into a game before quitting does it actually matter that much if it would have taken you N+1 or N+100 hours to finish it? And unless we're talking very small values of N, wouldn't it be better if the game had taken exactly N or N-1 hours to finish?
Whether there was one hour of game left that you didn't play or 100, you didn't play it, and assigning value to content you'll never play seems a little silly.
Now if you're saying something like on average you put 20 hours into every game you purchase so you don't want to pay $60 for a game that's significantly shorter than 20 hours, that makes sense. But a blanket statement that you won't buy shorter games when most games are currently longer than you're willing to spend on them doesn't make much sense.
No, he should call it "Roll of Parchment." Or maybe Super Cool Really Original... er, something Simulator. Quick! I need a word that starts with "L"!
Bethesda has no choice but to defend a trademark.
SRSLY? You mean like the way IHOP has had to sue everyone who uses the word "House"? And how WallMart sued K-Mart into oblivion years ago? And who can forget the apocalypse of lawsuits between GameFaqs, GameStop, GameSpot, GamePro and GameSpy. Electronics Boutique was a nice place to shop before they were destroyed by that lawsuit from Electronic Arts.
If trademark law actually forced everyone to sue anyone who used even just a part of their name then there wouldn't be a single valid name left to use anymore!
If he actually gets them to agree to this then even if he loses it ought to generate enough publicity to make up for having to change the name.
Funny, i see plenty of activity in my Google+ page. I don't know what's wrong with you and your friends.
Of course i don't post much to Google+ myself since they currently don't allow me to use a pseudonym (at least not without the threat of having "something happen" to my account) but that's probably not the issue with your friends if they're migrants from Facebook.
this is why i need to train my cold blooded pet snack to enter my pin for me!
I would say something about the amount of time wasted by repeatedly training something that's going to be consumed in short order, but i'm more squicked out by the idea of keeping your snacks as pets.
Motorola has enough patents that the lawsuits are going both ways and the outcomes are far from certain. Compare that to other companies like Samsung and HTC that are currently getting trounced in court or have already rolled over.
Furthermore Motorola was threatening to open up the exact same kind of lawsuits against other Android manufacturers, so at least Google has nipped that one in the bud. Making a big point of that should help a lot with the alienation you think the other Android manufacturers should be feeling for some reason.
This may not be the best defense possible (maybe they should have spent a few more billion in the Nortel bidding, i dunno) but it's certainly better than sitting on their asses.
Okay, i certainly agree that staying calm during a debate/argument is a goal that should be striven for. I just don't think failure to reach/maintain that goal is necessarily an indicator either that the idea is wrong or that the person doesn't believe in the idea sufficiently.
There's an interesting quote to which I cannot recall attribution, along the lines of "If you get angry when you're defending your topic, that's probably a sign that you don't feel it can stand on its own merits." The lack of temperance in such discussions - from all viewpoints - is fairly damning.
That sounds like something said by someone who's good at keeping a cool head in an argument. And of _course_ he's always right, ergo...
Judging arguments by emotional content is stupid, whether you prejudice yourself towards the people who speak out passionately or towards the people who stay calm but are good at riling up the other side. Judge by what they say, not the tone in which they say it.
Just as there is no cause so just that you cannot find an easily provoked fool following it, there is rarely a cause so foolish that you can't find an otherwise calm and intelligent person bamboozled by it. (Or supporting it for hidden ulterior motives of course.)
But next time, i'll be deadly serious next time!
Apparently we read stories entirely differently. Half the fun of reading a new book is trying to figure out what's going to happen before it does. It doesn't even have to involve a twist, silly or otherwise, as long as the entire story isn't 100% predictable after reading the first page. As soon as i start reading a book i start formulating a theory about what's really going on, a theory that gets continuously adapted as more information is revealed. That theory can take a sudden left turn if there's a big "twist" somewhere along the way, but even when there isn't the theory still undergoes at least slight changes throughout the story.
I've heard that joke before, and it was better the last time.
Rectangular screen, bezeled edges, rounded corners.... wait a second...
Actually i saw articles speculating about Google buying out Motorola at least a couple days before that, and they were theorizing that Motorola's threats to sue other Android developers was an attempt to "motivate" Google to make/finalize the offer. "If you don't buy us out we'll &#$% up your #$%^, just sayin."
As a happy T-Mobile customer let me just say, woohoo!!!!!
Even if T-Mobile ends up not being able to survive on their own, i'd be happier getting subsumed into Sprint or Verizon. They certainly couldn't be any worse than AT&T. Not to mention that aside from all the other issues i have with AT&T, as someone who is also an Android owner i'm very happy with what T-Mobile has been doing with the platform. AT&T seems to be the company least likely to carry on in that spirit after acquiring T-Mobile.