I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft didn't view this as a great piece of PR. They've been trying to convince everyone that XP is old and busted and Vista is the hot newness. They want people switching to Vista, not sticking with XP. Now an Olympic official has gone on the record as saying that Vista wasn't good enough/stable enough for the opening ceremonies so they were going to use XP instead. They use XP, and they get a BSOD. Now Microsoft can just nod and sagely say "XP was a great OS for it's time, but as everyone knows it still has some bugs in it. If only they'd used the new and improved Vista OS then they could have avoided that unfortunate bit of unpleasantness."
It doesn't matter if using Vista would have cost twice as much, taken three times as long to set up and resulted in four times as many errors during the opening ceremony. What people saw fail was XP, and that's what Microsoft will stress.
Holmes: I'm reminded of the curious case of the Manchurian Mambo...
Watson: Holmes, could I have a word?
Holmes: Yes, what is it?
Watson: I believe that was the Manchurian Mamba.
Holmes: Mambo, mamba. What's the difference?
Watson: Well, very little, except that one is a deadly, poisonous snake, while the other is a rather festive Caribbean dance.
Holmes: It was a night like any other, when suddenly a knock came at the door. I opened it, and there were these Manchurians, doing a rather festive Caribbean dance...
On the one hand, you're in Australia, where that really needs to be said. On the other hand, you're in Australia, good luck getting the ratings board there to listen to you.
That would truly be a shame! We must do something preserve the Wild West-like status of the Internet! Therefore we should continue to let everyone do and say whatever the fuck they want, and the next time someone says something bad about you on the internet instead of whining about it or suing them for libel, just hunt them down and shoot them just like in the real Wild West!
Actually they're very sure that breathing causes cancer. So does eating. If you reduce the amount of oxygen you use and the amount of food you eat your chances of getting cancer will go down. And the effect scales! If you stop breathing and eating entirely your chances of getting cancer drop to zero!:)
Unfortunately this doesn't work out to a prescription to get zero exercise in order to reduce your breath rate and calorie count. The benefits you get from exercise outweigh the bad effects of the increased exposure to oxygen and glucose (at least i think it's glucose that's the stuff with the bad side effects from eating, i might be getting that wrong.)
You know what else isn't creative? Journalism. Documenting events as they happen may not be "creative" but it doesn't make doing it less important.
That's true, but also entirely beside the point. No one would complain if a magazine for creative writing refused to publish a straight up journalism article because it wasn't creative, and no one would complain if the Wall Street Journal refused to publish a piece of fiction because it wasn't journalism.
If Vimeo has the stated goal of inspiring creativity then they are entirely within their rights to refuse to publish things they don't feel are creative.
There's too many people complaining to target anyone in particular, but Vimeo has made three claims:
1: direct capture videos of games (that aren't Machinima) aren't particularly creative.
2: Hosting such videos constitutes a possible legal liability.
3: Such videos tend to be longer and take up more space than average.
#3 is almost certainly true. #2 is apparently true, i'm willing to take their word that they've had to deal with legal action already, and that regardless of how it would turn out in court they don't feel like dealing with the hassle. And you know what? In my experience #1 is true too. I've seen a lot of direct capture videos, and although there are some exceptions for the most part they are often interesting and often informative, but they are very rarely creative. "That's cool" does not automatically equate to "that's creative."
If you've taken a direct capture video but you've also added your own content on top to make some kind of social commentary or make a joke or tell a story, or used the engine in unusual ways to do the same, then congratulations, your video is creative and you can probably get it in as Machinima or a music video or some other category. But if all you've got is a capture of some people playing a game as it's meant to be played then that's not very creative at all.
Starbucks is not entertainment, it's just coffee. In fact it's not even just coffee, it's just _overpriced_ coffee. As previously stated, during past depressions and recessions entertainment has always been the least hard hit economy, because when the economy is good people have money and they spend it on entertainment, and when the economy is poor people want to be distracted from reality and will scrape money together to spend on entertainment anyways. I wouldn't be surprised if alcohol consumption follows a similar pattern, but i don't think very many people are going to get depressed about their economic situation and decide to go down to Starbucks for a $5 cup of coffee.
"If you had searched around at all [...] you'd know that you can easily get a decent Blu-Ray player for under $400. [...] "Best" is subjective, but the PS3 is far and away not the cheapest."
That may very well be true, but if you don't already own an XBox 360 and want both a Blu-Ray player and a console then you're either looking at $500 for the PS3 currently (with the MGS4 bundle) or, even with the best case scenario, $600 for the Xbox + standalone Blu-Ray player (and that's with searching for a bargain player and getting one of the outdated 20 GB 360s on firesale.) If you don't have the time or bargain hunting skillz and want a current model 360 then you're talking about $750. As someone who has a Wii but is still waiting on a second console purchase i have to agree with the grandparent that despite wishing HD-DVD had won the format war, at this point Blu-Ray has won and there's nothing i can do about it, so the PS3 does have some added value in that regard.
And to digress(?) back to the original subject, if FF13 is being developed in Japan for the PS3 only and ported to the 360 for the international market i'd still say getting the PS3 is the better option if the release of FF13 has been your deciding factor all along anyways. Why risk the 360 port not being quite as good as the PS3 original?
That is, when you play Doom, you don't directly see what makes you decide to use a particular weapon at a particular time. What you do directly sense is that this is a good thing to do, and you do it. Now, sometimes you can make explicit the underlying process - e.g., "I should go over there because it's safer, and a weapon should spawn nearby also" - but this elaboration was not fully present before.
Clearly you've played a _lot_ more Doom than i have if you think making those kinds of decisions normally happens automatically =P
"A related article over at SpaceFlightNow [spaceflightnow.com] indicates that the researchers were specifically looking for a scenario that wouldn't vaporize Mars."
Well lucky for them they weren't looking for evidence of a scenario that _did_ vaporize Mars!
First, you take his initial desire to key a car that displays bumper stickers they disagree with and contrast it to your desire to talk to the owner in the same situation. Except that the way you phrase it makes it sound like it would be a very confrontational discussion in your own mind, perhaps even a haranguing in which you preach to them the error of their ways. But let's let that be for the moment, perhaps i am misreading your post and you would indeed sit down with the "platitude-dealing pollyanna" and have a polite and reasonable discourse with them.
However you then take this initial feeling of anger by a particular liberal and use it to tar "much of the politics on the left" saying it's "Hot air. It's not about getting anything done, it's entirely about how much you don't like someone else." You're taking a single example of a "bad" person and using it to attack the entire group they belong to. Also please note that you're criticizing one liberal for having feelings of anger and wanting to be confrontational with the other side while simultaneously criticizing other liberals for not having feelings of anger and not wanting to be confrontational with the other side.
However just to pick out two prominent examples, how then do you justify Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? They're firmly on the right side of politics, and yet they not only have the impulse to abuse the other side, albeit verbally, but they give in to it with abandon. And if you read through the comments just in response to this article you will find other examples where (presumably) conservatives have in fact vandalized cars with liberal propaganda on them. Do those examples nicely illustrate the shrill, tantrum-like thought process that drives so much of the politics on the right? How about the people who bomb abortion clinics and snipe (literally) at doctors who perform abortions? How about people who torture and kill homosexuals and transvestites? I could go on quite some time listing the "fools" who follow the cause you feel is just. If you want to show the cause of the left is misguided then show it through reason, not by cherry picking examples of people who you feel exemplify your preconceptions.
Which brings us to one of the more fundamental flaws in your argument. The people i listed not only experience an impulse towards angry and violent behavior, either verbal or physical, but they act out on it. The grandparent poster felt those violent urges as well but resists them. You however claim that because you do not feel those urges you are better than he/she is. Certainly you could make a claim to being more pure and innocent, but there are many who believe that those who feel temptation but choose to resist it are more noble than those who never feel any temptation at all, just as they similarly believe that those who feel fear but go on in the face of it are braver than those who never feel any fear at all.
There is no perfect way for humans to control their emotions (not yet, anyways) but one of the hallmarks of being civilized is to overcome our emotions and do what we know is right even if it's not what we'd really like to do if we gave in to our feelings. Attempting to attack the grandparent poster for confessing to having emotions but being civilized despite them undermines your entire argument of being superior. Especially since you who claim to have purer emotions and a desire to discuss the issues have apparently chosen not to follow through on those feelings and instead chosen to slander the entire other camp. Have you ever followed through on your professed desire to talk to the people displaying the bumper stickers your dislike? If we were to call a person who feels the temptation for the base but chooses instead to do the good "noble," what would we call someone who felt the temptation to do good but instead chooses to be base?
but this is one of the few cases where I agree with Microsoft, assuming the facts they're presenting are correct at least. If you want to argue that information should be free and pirate music/games/software/whatever for yourself, that's up to you to decide. And the same applies if you want to give away copies of whatever you've pirated to others for free. However very few things disgust me as much as people pirating someone else's work and then selling it for a profit to others.
The company i worked at about 8 years ago bought new Aeron chairs for everyone in the company, and i couldn't stand them. The metal frame with webbing felt rather harsh and unnatural, and that was before i tried crossing one of my legs under the other (right ankle under left thigh or vice versa) which was actually painful in the Aeron. I felt uncomfortable sitting in my chair for the entire rest of my time at that company. The only benefit was that they let us take our old chairs home if we wanted them, and i've still got the older and actually comfortable chair i had before. (Which probably cost several hundred less than the Aeron chair that i didn't like sitting in.)
Of course i don't suffer from back problems, so perhaps being forced to sit in the "proper" position works better for some people than others. So in response to the original question, if you want to get a chair as a gift you really need to find out some more about the habits and desires of the person you're buying it for. Do they have back problems? Do they like to sit straight and still for hours on end or do they prefer to shift around? Do they like to cross one or both legs under then? Or sit in a kneeling position? Do they want a chair that tilts/rocks? Do they like fabric or leather/pleather? Whatever you do you certainly don't want to get them an expensive chair that they'll feel obligated to use but won't actually enjoy. After all, if everyone liked the same kind of chair there wouldn't be so many options out there.
It clearly seems like LG was in the wrong here, but this was a case where both parties actually produce and sell goods using the patents they own. Has the US Supreme Court had anything to say about the numerous cases involving patent squatters/submarine patents? That seems like it ought to be a more serious issue.
"But, I suspect that maybe we should focus on things like electrcity generation and total life cycle polution from automobiles before we worry about jumping up and down on top of the Wii."
Are you sure? Do we have to? I was looking forward to picking up Wii Fit this afternoon, but if we're not supposed to be jumping up and down on top of the Wii anymore...:(
So how exactly does that cause any kind of problem for you? I have GalCiv GalCiv2 and Sins, with CDs for the first two and all digital for the third. I can install them on any computer i want, i don't need a CD in the drive to play them, they just work. If i lose track of my CD Keys Stardock is happy to email them to me whenever i want and after plugging them in i can update the games online whenever i want. The system has never caused any problems for me.
So what exactly are you upset about? That they're not bending over backwards to provide free updates to people who pirated the game? "Ignoring pirates" certainly doesn't mean going out of your way to make things easy for them, it means not going out of your way to inconvenience them and doing whatever works best for your customers instead, and as a customer i think they've done a pretty good job of that. And anyways i'm sure an enterprising and halfway competent pirate could get ahold of an already updated copy and run it just fine since there's still no actual DRM on it.
What i'd like to know is, if one of the astronauts really likes lasagna and doesn't like creamed spinach, then why doesn't NASA give them more lasagna and less creamed spinach?? These flights cost millions(?) of dollars and require the planning of thousands(?) of people. Is giving the astronauts a choice of which freeze dried tv dinner trays they take with them somehow too difficult or expensive?
Geez, relax dude. I've never read an astronomy journal in my life. Like i said, i was just as ignorant until very recently when someone brought it up on, *gasp!* slashdot! Also the basic theory isn't incorrect, they're just disagreeing over the exact numbers and times involved. Despite what you claim a quick google search shows that the sun will lose about 33% of its mass and earth's new stable orbit will be at 1.5 AU, but the orbit won't expand quite quickly enough and the sun will catch it before it gets there.
So let's take a look at the response of various groups to the article. Some of us saw the article and said "i'd heard about that theory, it's interesting to see that there's been a conclusion about it," some of us said "i didn't know it was even a matter of question, but it's interesting to read about the reasons why it was being investigated and to see what the results were," and some said "i didn't know about that and/or i'm not interested in it, so i'm not going to pay any attention to it." But one small group of people decided to jump in and say "i wasn't aware of the possibility but since the final result is the same as what my grade school textbook said a couple decades ago i'm going to declare that this research by real astronomers isn't actually news!" I certainly know which of those groups i find to be elitist and arrogant. So if they suddenly found out tomorrow that global warming didn't actually exist would you say that that wasn't news since no one had heard of global warming 30 years ago so nothing had changed? Or 300 years ago would you have declared that Newton's theory of gravity wasn't news because all it proved is that things fall when you drop them, and everyone already knew that anyways?
Sorry, you're wrong. Astronomers haven't known this for decades. People who get their astronomy knowledge out of grade school textbooks and the popular media have "known" this inaccurate fact for decades. What's happened is that astronomers have finally proven that for reasons you never considered the end result will be the same as what you and many others were assuming with insufficient evidence. See this comment, or any of the half dozen others explaining in even more detail why exactly this is news.
Do you really mean to be advertising your ignorance like that? You do know that they teach a lot of things in grade school that are either very distorted or just outright wrong, right? Not to mention that as time progresses we learn new things, especially in the sciences. If you check the reliable sources what you'll find is that they said was that the sun would enlarge and engulf the earth's _orbit_, without clarifying that they actually mean the earth's current orbit and not where the earth will be at the time. Of course many of the unreliable sources just said "the sun will get bigger and eat the earth." However actual astronomers, you know, people who aren't basing their beliefs on what they learned in grade school a few decades ago, thought the earth's orbit might expand enough to save it. So your assumption might have turned out to be correct but the foundation it was based on was faulty. And i say this as someone who just found out about the distinction a few months ago myself, so until very recently i was just as confused as you. For most of us we're either interested to find out that the debate has been settled (or so this group claims anyways) or interested to find out there was a debate that we didn't know about. If neither case applies to you, why are you reading science articles on slashdot?
>> When that "thinks" in words, your voicebox moves. It's just speech with the volume turned down
>> as far as possible, and it's possible to detect it...
>Interesting theory. I've never seen anyone make this claim before. While I think it's possible that the
>larynx undergoes some change when we think of vocalizations, I doubt that it is a relaiable reproduction
>of the movements associated with the potential verbalization. Here's why I have my doubts:
The description of the GP is a little off, but what they're talking about is called subvocalization, and it's been a staple of control systems for high tech personal computers in SF novels for quite some time.
You're right that it doesn't happen all the time though. It's particularly evident when you're focused on reading something or trying to sound a word out in your head.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft didn't view this as a great piece of PR. They've been trying to convince everyone that XP is old and busted and Vista is the hot newness. They want people switching to Vista, not sticking with XP. Now an Olympic official has gone on the record as saying that Vista wasn't good enough/stable enough for the opening ceremonies so they were going to use XP instead. They use XP, and they get a BSOD. Now Microsoft can just nod and sagely say "XP was a great OS for it's time, but as everyone knows it still has some bugs in it. If only they'd used the new and improved Vista OS then they could have avoided that unfortunate bit of unpleasantness."
It doesn't matter if using Vista would have cost twice as much, taken three times as long to set up and resulted in four times as many errors during the opening ceremony. What people saw fail was XP, and that's what Microsoft will stress.
Holmes: I'm reminded of the curious case of the Manchurian Mambo...
Watson: Holmes, could I have a word?
Holmes: Yes, what is it?
Watson: I believe that was the Manchurian Mamba.
Holmes: Mambo, mamba. What's the difference?
Watson: Well, very little, except that one is a deadly, poisonous snake, while the other is a rather festive Caribbean dance.
Holmes: It was a night like any other, when suddenly a knock came at the door. I opened it, and there were these Manchurians, doing a rather festive Caribbean dance...
On the one hand, you're in Australia, where that really needs to be said. On the other hand, you're in Australia, good luck getting the ratings board there to listen to you.
That would truly be a shame! We must do something preserve the Wild West-like status of the Internet! Therefore we should continue to let everyone do and say whatever the fuck they want, and the next time someone says something bad about you on the internet instead of whining about it or suing them for libel, just hunt them down and shoot them just like in the real Wild West!
Actually they're very sure that breathing causes cancer. So does eating. If you reduce the amount of oxygen you use and the amount of food you eat your chances of getting cancer will go down. And the effect scales! If you stop breathing and eating entirely your chances of getting cancer drop to zero! :)
Unfortunately this doesn't work out to a prescription to get zero exercise in order to reduce your breath rate and calorie count. The benefits you get from exercise outweigh the bad effects of the increased exposure to oxygen and glucose (at least i think it's glucose that's the stuff with the bad side effects from eating, i might be getting that wrong.)
You know what else isn't creative? Journalism. Documenting events as they happen may not be "creative" but it doesn't make doing it less important.
That's true, but also entirely beside the point. No one would complain if a magazine for creative writing refused to publish a straight up journalism article because it wasn't creative, and no one would complain if the Wall Street Journal refused to publish a piece of fiction because it wasn't journalism.
If Vimeo has the stated goal of inspiring creativity then they are entirely within their rights to refuse to publish things they don't feel are creative.
There's too many people complaining to target anyone in particular, but Vimeo has made three claims:
1: direct capture videos of games (that aren't Machinima) aren't particularly creative.
2: Hosting such videos constitutes a possible legal liability.
3: Such videos tend to be longer and take up more space than average.
#3 is almost certainly true. #2 is apparently true, i'm willing to take their word that they've had to deal with legal action already, and that regardless of how it would turn out in court they don't feel like dealing with the hassle. And you know what? In my experience #1 is true too. I've seen a lot of direct capture videos, and although there are some exceptions for the most part they are often interesting and often informative, but they are very rarely creative. "That's cool" does not automatically equate to "that's creative."
If you've taken a direct capture video but you've also added your own content on top to make some kind of social commentary or make a joke or tell a story, or used the engine in unusual ways to do the same, then congratulations, your video is creative and you can probably get it in as Machinima or a music video or some other category. But if all you've got is a capture of some people playing a game as it's meant to be played then that's not very creative at all.
Starbucks is not entertainment, it's just coffee. In fact it's not even just coffee, it's just _overpriced_ coffee. As previously stated, during past depressions and recessions entertainment has always been the least hard hit economy, because when the economy is good people have money and they spend it on entertainment, and when the economy is poor people want to be distracted from reality and will scrape money together to spend on entertainment anyways. I wouldn't be surprised if alcohol consumption follows a similar pattern, but i don't think very many people are going to get depressed about their economic situation and decide to go down to Starbucks for a $5 cup of coffee.
"If you had searched around at all [...] you'd know that you can easily get a decent Blu-Ray player for under $400. [...] "Best" is subjective, but the PS3 is far and away not the cheapest."
That may very well be true, but if you don't already own an XBox 360 and want both a Blu-Ray player and a console then you're either looking at $500 for the PS3 currently (with the MGS4 bundle) or, even with the best case scenario, $600 for the Xbox + standalone Blu-Ray player (and that's with searching for a bargain player and getting one of the outdated 20 GB 360s on firesale.) If you don't have the time or bargain hunting skillz and want a current model 360 then you're talking about $750. As someone who has a Wii but is still waiting on a second console purchase i have to agree with the grandparent that despite wishing HD-DVD had won the format war, at this point Blu-Ray has won and there's nothing i can do about it, so the PS3 does have some added value in that regard.
And to digress(?) back to the original subject, if FF13 is being developed in Japan for the PS3 only and ported to the 360 for the international market i'd still say getting the PS3 is the better option if the release of FF13 has been your deciding factor all along anyways. Why risk the 360 port not being quite as good as the PS3 original?
That is, when you play Doom, you don't directly see what makes you decide to use a particular weapon at a particular time. What you do directly sense is that this is a good thing to do, and you do it. Now, sometimes you can make explicit the underlying process - e.g., "I should go over there because it's safer, and a weapon should spawn nearby also" - but this elaboration was not fully present before.
Clearly you've played a _lot_ more Doom than i have if you think making those kinds of decisions normally happens automatically =P
"A related article over at SpaceFlightNow [spaceflightnow.com] indicates that the researchers were specifically looking for a scenario that wouldn't vaporize Mars."
Well lucky for them they weren't looking for evidence of a scenario that _did_ vaporize Mars!
"As for 'dead-beat customers that cost them more than they make', that does not make someone a dead beat. That makes them thrifty."
This is America! We believe in Capitalism! That means that corporations should be thrify and people should be good (ie profligate) consumers!
Suggesting consumers should be thrifty, pshaw! What are you, some kind of Commie?
Wow, what a lot of contradiction and illogic.
First, you take his initial desire to key a car that displays bumper stickers they disagree with and contrast it to your desire to talk to the owner in the same situation. Except that the way you phrase it makes it sound like it would be a very confrontational discussion in your own mind, perhaps even a haranguing in which you preach to them the error of their ways. But let's let that be for the moment, perhaps i am misreading your post and you would indeed sit down with the "platitude-dealing pollyanna" and have a polite and reasonable discourse with them.
However you then take this initial feeling of anger by a particular liberal and use it to tar "much of the politics on the left" saying it's "Hot air. It's not about getting anything done, it's entirely about how much you don't like someone else." You're taking a single example of a "bad" person and using it to attack the entire group they belong to. Also please note that you're criticizing one liberal for having feelings of anger and wanting to be confrontational with the other side while simultaneously criticizing other liberals for not having feelings of anger and not wanting to be confrontational with the other side.
However just to pick out two prominent examples, how then do you justify Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? They're firmly on the right side of politics, and yet they not only have the impulse to abuse the other side, albeit verbally, but they give in to it with abandon. And if you read through the comments just in response to this article you will find other examples where (presumably) conservatives have in fact vandalized cars with liberal propaganda on them. Do those examples nicely illustrate the shrill, tantrum-like thought process that drives so much of the politics on the right? How about the people who bomb abortion clinics and snipe (literally) at doctors who perform abortions? How about people who torture and kill homosexuals and transvestites? I could go on quite some time listing the "fools" who follow the cause you feel is just. If you want to show the cause of the left is misguided then show it through reason, not by cherry picking examples of people who you feel exemplify your preconceptions.
Which brings us to one of the more fundamental flaws in your argument. The people i listed not only experience an impulse towards angry and violent behavior, either verbal or physical, but they act out on it. The grandparent poster felt those violent urges as well but resists them. You however claim that because you do not feel those urges you are better than he/she is. Certainly you could make a claim to being more pure and innocent, but there are many who believe that those who feel temptation but choose to resist it are more noble than those who never feel any temptation at all, just as they similarly believe that those who feel fear but go on in the face of it are braver than those who never feel any fear at all.
There is no perfect way for humans to control their emotions (not yet, anyways) but one of the hallmarks of being civilized is to overcome our emotions and do what we know is right even if it's not what we'd really like to do if we gave in to our feelings. Attempting to attack the grandparent poster for confessing to having emotions but being civilized despite them undermines your entire argument of being superior. Especially since you who claim to have purer emotions and a desire to discuss the issues have apparently chosen not to follow through on those feelings and instead chosen to slander the entire other camp. Have you ever followed through on your professed desire to talk to the people displaying the bumper stickers your dislike? If we were to call a person who feels the temptation for the base but chooses instead to do the good "noble," what would we call someone who felt the temptation to do good but instead chooses to be base?
but this is one of the few cases where I agree with Microsoft, assuming the facts they're presenting are correct at least. If you want to argue that information should be free and pirate music/games/software/whatever for yourself, that's up to you to decide. And the same applies if you want to give away copies of whatever you've pirated to others for free. However very few things disgust me as much as people pirating someone else's work and then selling it for a profit to others.
The company i worked at about 8 years ago bought new Aeron chairs for everyone in the company, and i couldn't stand them. The metal frame with webbing felt rather harsh and unnatural, and that was before i tried crossing one of my legs under the other (right ankle under left thigh or vice versa) which was actually painful in the Aeron. I felt uncomfortable sitting in my chair for the entire rest of my time at that company. The only benefit was that they let us take our old chairs home if we wanted them, and i've still got the older and actually comfortable chair i had before. (Which probably cost several hundred less than the Aeron chair that i didn't like sitting in.)
Of course i don't suffer from back problems, so perhaps being forced to sit in the "proper" position works better for some people than others. So in response to the original question, if you want to get a chair as a gift you really need to find out some more about the habits and desires of the person you're buying it for. Do they have back problems? Do they like to sit straight and still for hours on end or do they prefer to shift around? Do they like to cross one or both legs under then? Or sit in a kneeling position? Do they want a chair that tilts/rocks? Do they like fabric or leather/pleather? Whatever you do you certainly don't want to get them an expensive chair that they'll feel obligated to use but won't actually enjoy. After all, if everyone liked the same kind of chair there wouldn't be so many options out there.
They may say it's stronger than cast iron, but i bet it isn't as good at repelling elves and faeries!
It clearly seems like LG was in the wrong here, but this was a case where both parties actually produce and sell goods using the patents they own. Has the US Supreme Court had anything to say about the numerous cases involving patent squatters/submarine patents? That seems like it ought to be a more serious issue.
Are you sure? Do we have to? I was looking forward to picking up Wii Fit this afternoon, but if we're not supposed to be jumping up and down on top of the Wii anymore... :(
So what exactly are you upset about? That they're not bending over backwards to provide free updates to people who pirated the game? "Ignoring pirates" certainly doesn't mean going out of your way to make things easy for them, it means not going out of your way to inconvenience them and doing whatever works best for your customers instead, and as a customer i think they've done a pretty good job of that. And anyways i'm sure an enterprising and halfway competent pirate could get ahold of an already updated copy and run it just fine since there's still no actual DRM on it.
What i'd like to know is, if one of the astronauts really likes lasagna and doesn't like creamed spinach, then why doesn't NASA give them more lasagna and less creamed spinach?? These flights cost millions(?) of dollars and require the planning of thousands(?) of people. Is giving the astronauts a choice of which freeze dried tv dinner trays they take with them somehow too difficult or expensive?
But given the alternative of dying in a plane crash you'd "rather be inconvenienced slightly rather than deal with vomit in an enclosed space."
Dude, you've got a pretty hardcore idea of what it means to be "inconvenienced slightly"!!! :)
So let's take a look at the response of various groups to the article. Some of us saw the article and said "i'd heard about that theory, it's interesting to see that there's been a conclusion about it," some of us said "i didn't know it was even a matter of question, but it's interesting to read about the reasons why it was being investigated and to see what the results were," and some said "i didn't know about that and/or i'm not interested in it, so i'm not going to pay any attention to it." But one small group of people decided to jump in and say "i wasn't aware of the possibility but since the final result is the same as what my grade school textbook said a couple decades ago i'm going to declare that this research by real astronomers isn't actually news!" I certainly know which of those groups i find to be elitist and arrogant. So if they suddenly found out tomorrow that global warming didn't actually exist would you say that that wasn't news since no one had heard of global warming 30 years ago so nothing had changed? Or 300 years ago would you have declared that Newton's theory of gravity wasn't news because all it proved is that things fall when you drop them, and everyone already knew that anyways?
Sorry, you're wrong. Astronomers haven't known this for decades. People who get their astronomy knowledge out of grade school textbooks and the popular media have "known" this inaccurate fact for decades. What's happened is that astronomers have finally proven that for reasons you never considered the end result will be the same as what you and many others were assuming with insufficient evidence. See this comment, or any of the half dozen others explaining in even more detail why exactly this is news.
Do you really mean to be advertising your ignorance like that? You do know that they teach a lot of things in grade school that are either very distorted or just outright wrong, right? Not to mention that as time progresses we learn new things, especially in the sciences. If you check the reliable sources what you'll find is that they said was that the sun would enlarge and engulf the earth's _orbit_, without clarifying that they actually mean the earth's current orbit and not where the earth will be at the time. Of course many of the unreliable sources just said "the sun will get bigger and eat the earth." However actual astronomers, you know, people who aren't basing their beliefs on what they learned in grade school a few decades ago, thought the earth's orbit might expand enough to save it. So your assumption might have turned out to be correct but the foundation it was based on was faulty. And i say this as someone who just found out about the distinction a few months ago myself, so until very recently i was just as confused as you. For most of us we're either interested to find out that the debate has been settled (or so this group claims anyways) or interested to find out there was a debate that we didn't know about. If neither case applies to you, why are you reading science articles on slashdot?
>> as far as possible, and it's possible to detect it
>Interesting theory. I've never seen anyone make this claim before. While I think it's possible that the
>larynx undergoes some change when we think of vocalizations, I doubt that it is a relaiable reproduction
>of the movements associated with the potential verbalization. Here's why I have my doubts:
The description of the GP is a little off, but what they're talking about is called subvocalization, and it's been a staple of control systems for high tech personal computers in SF novels for quite some time.
You're right that it doesn't happen all the time though. It's particularly evident when you're focused on reading something or trying to sound a word out in your head.