Slavery based on race. Voting based on sex and income? Land belongs to those who take it, not those who had it?
You are talking about a country with the greatest human rights violations as its founding blocks. The greatest amount of slavery, the largest genocide and one of the latest to change things like forced sterilization of undesirables.
Gosh, why is the system failing. What could possible have happened to the US and democracy in general. Could there be some clue. Maybe something in your post. Geez, lets see.
Personally I forgot it happened
The powers that be thank you, dear consumer with the attention span of a kitten in a chicken plucking factory.
The conversation doesn't flow. At no point does the machine carry on a conversation, rather it answers and poses a possible counter question but it does not actually hold an on going conversation about a single topic.
The human in the top conversation does.
Subject: I work as an 'online internet advertising monitor', which is fancy language for electronic filing. What do you do?
KW: I interrogate humans and machines.
Subject: Which ones do you prefer, humans or machines?
KW: Which do you prefer?
Subject: Hmm. Depends on for what purpose you mean.
KW: To go to a restaurant, for example?
Subject: Then I would much prefer going with a human.
This shows several sentences linking up and not just linking up but continuening. The last subject answer refers to their earlier response about human and machines.
The other conversation lacks that.
KW: Are you happy being a human?
Subject: Judge, I'm a guy.
KW: Does that worry you?
Subject: Don't worry, we'll work everything through.
The last sentence shows no awareness of what the previous conversation was about, it is a shrink line but doesn't belong in the conversation as KW never expressed worry, so why "don't worry"? It killed the conversation for me, this was not a human being but a computer searching a database for keywords and scripted responses.
Lego has this of course with its most advanced sets that allow for simple programming of a control unit.
As introduction to programming there are 'games' that allow you to program a robot and you 'win' by using the fewest instructions to clear a maze the fastests.
The problem is however limits imposed by the game. A maze is only so complex, the sensors in Lego only so good. Pretty soon you hit the game limits, the solution has been found and the game is over.
It is not that you can't make a game out of it, but that you either need a LOT of ways to do things yet keep it simple or face the fact that your game is going to be finished pretty quick.
This type of object exists, we HAVE flying submaringes, they are called BIRDS. Diving birds are NOT constrained by their weight. Their problem is their lungs. Several spieces swim very well under water and can even go straight from flying to submerged.
If birds can do it, so can man.
The trick is to stop thinking of this object as an old fashioned submarine and accept that modern submarines FLY under water. They use their "wings" to control their movement, not their weight.
The biggest challence is re-configuring the wings. Birds can do this easily but swing-wing is out of fashion for a reason. A swing wing that can survive a dive is going to be a major piece of engineering.
Another challenge is getting from one method of propulsion to the other. Birds of course use the same engine and switch effortleslly between legs and wings for power, can humans do the same? Have a single engine that can power motion in air and underwater?
There is however one part of the requirement that might make it more difficult. I think this aircraft is intended for the insertion of seal units quickly without having to worry about air defences. For the seals to disbark from the aircraft underwater it would have to be going very slow or even be motionless. An aircraft that is light and uses negative lift to remain submerged would shoot up like a cork if it stopped.
Key problems:
Power source that can operate underwater.
Two modes of propulsion for air and water.
Switching quickly between modes and both modes not interfering with the other, for instance propellors would probabbly smash during a power dive.
Being able to remain motionless underwater and also submerged.
If it wasn't for the last requirement the trick would be fairly simple, "just" a plane that has positive lift in the air, negative lift under water, super-cavitation speeds to be able to shoot up out of the water with enough speed to remain airborne and a system to switch seamlessly between air and water propulsion.
Do-able. But remaining motionless underwater adds a whole new trick. Suddenly you can use your speed and re-use your wings to remain underwater, you need to alter your weight.
Mind you, I wonder if we at slashdot are not overcomplicating things. What DARPA is looking for is a way to insert seals with minimal detection.
What about an 'ordinary' sea plane that instead of sitting above its floaters can sink beneath them? Imagine an ordinary plane with floaters attacked sticking out the sides and below. It lands on the water as all seaplanes do but then the floaters rotate above the fuselage allowing to disappear beneath the waves. The fuselage opens, allowing sea-water inside removing most of its lift. The floaters act like miniature subs and can submerge to an extent. This aircraft is not about setting records, it has to operate near the coast anyway so can't go to deep in any case.
If you are not good enough to get the best work enviroment possible, then well, that sucks for you.
I doubt you are even a decent developer anyway, flatscreen monitors? Hello? Can you even buy CRT's anymore that are cheaper then totally flat LCD's.
If your boss did a cost/benefit study he would quickly realize that a good chair and interface pays for itself. A good chair allows you to remain comfortably seated for longer. Same with a quiet office, more hours spend coding means more money made. Three screens isn't actually that expensive since they typically last several years. I personally only use dual screens and it saves me a lot of time, since I can have all windows I need open at once without switching and have all the info available at once. If I am on a laptop I notice a reduction in speed as I have to spend time tabbing between windows to get all the info I need.
The cost? About a 1000 euro more. Compared to my salery and general costs of employement, office space, parking space, insurance and everything else it is trivial. So a new decent computer for a developer costs say 4000 instead of a budget dell for 400. Big deal. Hiring a good developer costs FAR more. Loosing a good developer even more.
For fun I keep track of job offers, sadly most companies cannot even begin to afford me because they just don't value developers. We are NOT secretaries or accountants. We are skilled craftsmen and they expect the best and can get it if they got the balls.
You need other players to PvP, worse, you need other players to kill. Nobody wants to loose everytime.
If you play 'simpler' PvP games like FPS, you know that some people will only join the side with the biggest numbers/scores because they want to be on the winning side.
Guild Wars suffers from this to an extent, a LOT of people only fight in their own guilds so if you are not in a guild it is at times hard to find other people to fight with. But Guild Wars is small scale. Getting half a dozen people together is an entirely different challenge from getting two-three dozen people together.
In my current MMORPG poison, Lord of the Rings Online, that is the problem. PvP or rather PvMP is a bit of an afterthought in this game, to be fair its developer made it clear from the start PvE was its focus, and this shows. Their is little reward for fighting on either side except the fun of it and if both sides don't have the right numbers, then there is no fun to be had.
Sure, some people will happily wipe an enemy who is heavily outnumbered but that just reduces the numbers on the side that is loosing even further.
PvP is incredibly hard to get right and the more people you involve in a battle the harder it will get.
It is the main reason I didn't try war yet. I like PvP but only if it is at least reasonably fair and I fear that WAR when the initial novelty wears off might not be able to get the numbers balanced. Star Wars Galaxies PvP action was a joke because of the total imbalance between Rebels and Empire. I know that both sides in WoW complain the other side has more numbers, wonder what will happen in WAR.
As you said, WoW is gaining an expansion soon, so is Lotro. Will WAR survive this? Will people be able to resist to leave their developed characters? Remember, in WoW and Lotro you can play even if no-one else is online. Not so in WAR (yes there is PvE but that is not why you bought it is it?) so if there is a bad day and no good battles seem to be happening you just switch to your PvE game and that means anyone logging into WAR afterwards finds you not there, so they go PvE as well and voila an entire evening of nobody playing WAR.
This is what I see happening in Lotro right now. Because of the way the game works, creep side (the bad guys) can't see the PvE side of the game. So, if there is no action creep side, you switch to freep, perhaps get into a PvE raid and you are out of PvMP for the evening. This is what happened last weekend on my server, I had logged of because there wasn't anyone on for some food, others did the same and eventually we ended up with no creeps online at all for several hours. Turning what should have been a busy night into a PvE session.
PvP is fun when it works, but as a company you are betting on your players being online and the sides being balanced. Hard to pull off.
If the game is such a success then why was its designer fired? Oh, he left to pursue other options. Yeah right. He was canned.
AoC is Anarchy Online Continued. The first was a mess and so is the second.
However thanks the global reach of the internet, almost anything can find an audience and hang on for dear life. Dark&Light is still around even though Ati cards still can not run the game. Even Meridian 59, the granddaddy of them all is still being hosted.
AoC is so far one of the biggest failures in MMO history.
SWG was buggy as hell but launched in a different era when MMO's were still new and we were willing to be a lot more forgiving.
Dark&Light was perhaps the fastest 'paid to free' conversion in history, but AoC was the biggest title by an experienced company that should have known better to so completely fail to life up to anything.
The only people who like AoC are those who think that the "twitch" tacked onto the skill based game makes it into a bigger challenge then the EQ clones. That is it sellings point, twitch. That worked REALLY well for SWG NGE, Planetside and Tabula Rasa.
My prediction for AoC is that it will be another SWG or AC. Forever lingering on as an undead but never recovering. Its fans claiming that everyone else is missing out on a wonderful game and a lot of bitter old players left feeling ripped off and just a little bit more reluctant to give a new game a fair chance.
Aren't you the same who said that WoW was going to canabalize Everquest? That didn't happen did it, not only does Everquest still have enough subscribers to make a profit, WoW has gained more people then every played MMO's before.
So basically, you are predicting the same thing people claimed would happen when WoW launched. Prepare to be wrong again.
The two games are totally different in nature and will NOT canabalize each other. It would be like saying Unreal competes with Doom/Quake. There is room for both.
I got a very nice PC here. Did I buy it? No, it was surplus and going unused and gathering dust with old equipment. I had asked for the old equipment, a couple of xeon servers. They said, "sure, take it". I pointed out that this PC was in fact brand new, but it was surplus so if I just shut up about it it saved paperwork.
The servers were refurbished and donated to a charity as their office servers and the surplus PC has been my desktop for over a year.
If you never ask, the answer will always be no. On the whole, people are nice, if only you are nice to them. Would you deny someone a piece of old equipment if they asked nicely? Then why should someone deny it to you?
He argues against over-reacting to DRM, his reason, the idea that your game cannot be played once the drm servers are down is invalid because some hacker will risk jailtime so you can play your old game.
That makes Remo the fuckface of the minute (this is the internet, there are a lot of fuckfaces around) for me.
A counter to a bad situation is not hoping that years from now someone else will be willing to break the law for your sake.
That is like saying, well we can have mock trials and lynchings because decades later a civil right group will fight to have the victims pardoned post-humously.
DRM is bad now and must be removed NOW. Allow DRM to continue and sooner or later we won't have the hardware anymore to run cracks even if someone is willing to risk decades in jail for breaking it.
The application you are using to scan this product is a internet capable gadget with a full browser and a keyboard. If it comes up with an unidentified barcode you could simple GOOGLE the product by its description, then enter the new code at a comparison side. One person needs to do this and then everyone else can use it.
The internet, you might have heard about it. It allows millions of people to pool their resources into common works.
Come on, as a programmer/designer this pisses me off. Only a complete and UTTER idiot would include price info in the barcode.
What if you had a price change? You would have to change the barcode on all your products.
As the article explains and anyone on slashdot could expected to know, a barcode (the 1D kind we are talking about here) ONLY has enough information for 10 digits. It is a 'unique' indentifier. The cash register scans this unique code and then looks it up in the stores database to get the price and whatever other information you could require.
To think that you would put the price of a product in the barcode is silly. ONE of the reasons why the switch to barcodes has seen the removal of price-stickers on products is that with barcodes you can easily change the price.
The OP simply meant to point out that he got the PRICE from the INTERNET with the unique code and is arguing that the price retrieved by the cashregister from the stores database is in-accurate.
And this discussion already happens daily in stores whenever there is an mistake made with special offers or a new product incorrectly entered.
My own recent story is of a frozen fries, used to be 1kg packages but suddenly they had 2.5kg packages but no record of it in the database. In the end, I got it for the price of 1kg while they went and sorted it out:) Got to love lousy math skills, a fair price would have been 2x the price of 1kg, but I suppose that was to complex.
Samzenpus sends his regrets, he hit submit to early and forgot to add the fourth entry to his post. Lucky for us, he managed to repost the original in the form of the parent, the fourth and most deranged poster of disagree mail.
That is going to be the next trial. Does sharing it with the RIAA or people/entities employed by it count as copyright violation?
After all, say I rip a CD and upload it to you. That would be copyright violation right? But WHAT if you also have the CD? Does that count?
MediaSentry methods of detection are also in question. Worse yet, if I sell drugs, I do something. But say I got legal drugs in an open window in my own house. You then reach into that window and take them. Does that constitute the illegal distrubution of drugs?
Going to be an intresting case. I am a bit hopeful because the RIAA choose to go with this theory that has now been thrown out first. Did their own lawyers say that other theories were not going to work?
this is just the first part, sooner or later everone will have one, so your argument is null and void. As well as pretty stupid.
For now you can claim that you don't need a card. This will pass with time. That is the entire plan. Start small, then slowly get everyone to have to ID themselves.
Sometimes you wonder how the goverment can introduce such schemes without people protesting and then you see people like you and you know why. The voter is stupid.
As has already been pointed out, the linked to fireworks slashdot story was already piss poor sensationalism. The fireworks were announced around the world as being CGI. So the entire story basically said "some obviously fake fireworks that were said to be fake when shown were fake". No shit sherlock.
And now we got a story that a news agency accidently released a pre-written story. Not like we never heard of obituraries being printed ahead of time. Anyone who has ever worked in the news industry knows that you prepare AHEAD of time.
Hell, even advertising does this. Or do you think that during events like soccer championships the advertise executives sit glued to the tv screen then the moment the result is in start putting together the add in a matter of hours to be included in tomorrows newspaper celebrating/mourning the match? Hell no, you prepare the ad campaign in advance for all outcomes.
For the uneducated editors of slashdot: Most christmas scenes/photo's etc etc are NOT shot during christmas. They are created in mid summer with FAKE snow.
Most christmas/newyears specials are recorded MONTHS in advance.
A lot of short tv programs with live audiences are recorded back to back on a single day to be aired on different days.
Star Wars was NOT a war documentary on a battle that happened in a galaxy far far away.
More and more reading the summary on slashdot is a joke, the actual story is not in the linked articles but in the comments. Slashdot would improve an awful lot of we could get rid of the editors and make it purely user contributed. Mmm, wait a moment, that is digg. Nevermind.
The word is CAN constitute, not DOES constitute. This is what the next trial will most likely be about.
Granted, most likely it will count because if you sell drugs to a cop you still go to jail. What might still win the case is that mediasentry is NOT a cop.
Even if mediasentry is allowed to perform the actions of a sworn in police officer, they would still have to proof there method of detection is accurate.
Further more, if it counts as distribution, so what? They got proof you uploaded it to one person. Big deal. 1 dollar per song, you need to have pretty big share going on to have to worry about that fine.
Because the really big thing in this judgement is the judge saying that the damages were excessive. That is going to hurt the RIAA the most. This judge EVEN if the case had been been proven would most likely still have lowered the damages. That could seriously hurt the RIAA. Why settle for a couple thousand when the fine is going to be little more? And if the settlement is going to be a couple hundred, how are they going to pay their lawyers?
Your post missed the boat on so many points that you might even ask if there is a boat.
There is an no google phone (yet), google has made a platform and OS if you like. Not a phone.
Reception is hardware and has nothing to do with the software. It is also largely tied into the service provider, not the phone itself. The best phone can't receive a signal were there isn't one.
Rates have nothing whatsoever to do with the phone but are totally dependent on your contract with your service provider.
Furthermore if all you are intrested is a good phone, you really don't need either as far simpler and cheaper phone that don't have to subsidised with high rates are easily available.
You say that if your parents spend time on these phones, it wouldn't improve their quality of life at all.
This is I think missing an essential point.
They do NOT spend time on these features of their phone, BECAUSE they don't see how it would improve the quality of their lives.
Or to put it simpler, if people have no need of the camera on their mobile phone, they won't bother to learn to use it.
If I only use my VCR for straight recording and playback, I never need to set the clock.
If I only cook in my microwave, I never need to learn how to use the defrost settings.
The original article seems to claim, people don't use the camera features because they don't understand them.
You say, they could understand them if they spend time on it, but would it make things better?
I say, they KNOW it won't make things better, so they don't. It has NOTHING to do with simplicity, people learn complex things all the time IF THEY HAVE A NEED/DESIRE too.
Ages ago, I had an old aunt, when the microwave came out EVERYONE wanted her to get used to one. NOBODY understood that she just didn't WANT to. She had learned to cook perfectly well with the tools of her time and had no need or desire for a new one. BUT I only learned that from her as a secret, she used her supposed inability to use it as an excuse not to have to use it. It always seemed odd to me that a woman who once operated on punch card systems as a clerk would have trouble with a microwave. Everyone else just seemed to assume, older woman == idiot forgetting her job before she got married and had kids.
An analysts opinion isn't worth the paper it is printed on, and this opinion ain't even printed.
Both phones are less then perfect and missing some "we don't think you need this, so you don't get it" features.
But the analyst is an idiot because he talks about the lack of iTunes. Yeah, because people care about that. Oh, they don't. First off, most music on digital players is ripped from CD's, or obtained through other means in mp3 format. iTunes is very small potatoes in the global music industry and even Apple knows that the iPod a far bigger player in the digital music player isn't always going to be used for iTunes content, which is why Apple gives you the tools needed to convert iTunes music to MP3 format or burn it to a CD.
The idea that a new platform needs to be compatible with iTunes is silly.
The bigger problem is lack of office compatibiltiy. While MS does offer you ways to export your documents in more general formats, that could be the real killer. The iPhone is bought by people who buy Apple and so accept that it is NOT going to be all that compatible with MS software. But android doesn't have the Apple logo, what is its excuse for not being MS compatible?
In a way, I don't think the iPhone and Android are even competitors. iPhone is a single product offered by a company that has no other phones. Android is a platform that any phone maker can use. It would be like saying the Smart Car competes with Honda Engines. Does the iPhone compete with Windows Mobile or Symbian? No, it competes with other phones, specific models, not OS/Platforms. if this google phone fails, there are plenty of others coming out soon, while Apple can hardly afford to start making dozens of phones and a new one every season to suit the tastes of the customer. Neither can google, but the phonemakers can.
Your arguments show you to be an american supporting the american ideals. My ideals are different but that doesn't make it any less true that europeans and americans fundementally disagree on certain topics. Who is right or wrong on these topics is not the point of my post.
By disagreeing with me, you prove my point, americans and europeans see things differently. Thanks:)
Slashdot Mirror
Slavery based on race. Voting based on sex and income? Land belongs to those who take it, not those who had it?
You are talking about a country with the greatest human rights violations as its founding blocks. The greatest amount of slavery, the largest genocide and one of the latest to change things like forced sterilization of undesirables.
So return to what exactly?
Gosh, why is the system failing. What could possible have happened to the US and democracy in general. Could there be some clue. Maybe something in your post. Geez, lets see.
Personally I forgot it happened
The powers that be thank you, dear consumer with the attention span of a kitten in a chicken plucking factory.
The human in the top conversation does.
This shows several sentences linking up and not just linking up but continuening. The last subject answer refers to their earlier response about human and machines.
The other conversation lacks that.
The last sentence shows no awareness of what the previous conversation was about, it is a shrink line but doesn't belong in the conversation as KW never expressed worry, so why "don't worry"? It killed the conversation for me, this was not a human being but a computer searching a database for keywords and scripted responses.
Lego has this of course with its most advanced sets that allow for simple programming of a control unit.
As introduction to programming there are 'games' that allow you to program a robot and you 'win' by using the fewest instructions to clear a maze the fastests.
The problem is however limits imposed by the game. A maze is only so complex, the sensors in Lego only so good. Pretty soon you hit the game limits, the solution has been found and the game is over.
It is not that you can't make a game out of it, but that you either need a LOT of ways to do things yet keep it simple or face the fact that your game is going to be finished pretty quick.
The fate of the earth does NOT lie with the slashdot editors, it is tied to the accuracy of slashdot moderators.
I suggest investing in shotgun shells and water filters.
This type of object exists, we HAVE flying submaringes, they are called BIRDS. Diving birds are NOT constrained by their weight. Their problem is their lungs. Several spieces swim very well under water and can even go straight from flying to submerged.
If birds can do it, so can man.
The trick is to stop thinking of this object as an old fashioned submarine and accept that modern submarines FLY under water. They use their "wings" to control their movement, not their weight.
The biggest challence is re-configuring the wings. Birds can do this easily but swing-wing is out of fashion for a reason. A swing wing that can survive a dive is going to be a major piece of engineering.
Another challenge is getting from one method of propulsion to the other. Birds of course use the same engine and switch effortleslly between legs and wings for power, can humans do the same? Have a single engine that can power motion in air and underwater?
There is however one part of the requirement that might make it more difficult. I think this aircraft is intended for the insertion of seal units quickly without having to worry about air defences. For the seals to disbark from the aircraft underwater it would have to be going very slow or even be motionless. An aircraft that is light and uses negative lift to remain submerged would shoot up like a cork if it stopped.
Key problems:
Power source that can operate underwater.
Two modes of propulsion for air and water.
Switching quickly between modes and both modes not interfering with the other, for instance propellors would probabbly smash during a power dive.
Being able to remain motionless underwater and also submerged.
If it wasn't for the last requirement the trick would be fairly simple, "just" a plane that has positive lift in the air, negative lift under water, super-cavitation speeds to be able to shoot up out of the water with enough speed to remain airborne and a system to switch seamlessly between air and water propulsion.
Do-able. But remaining motionless underwater adds a whole new trick. Suddenly you can use your speed and re-use your wings to remain underwater, you need to alter your weight.
Mind you, I wonder if we at slashdot are not overcomplicating things. What DARPA is looking for is a way to insert seals with minimal detection.
What about an 'ordinary' sea plane that instead of sitting above its floaters can sink beneath them? Imagine an ordinary plane with floaters attacked sticking out the sides and below. It lands on the water as all seaplanes do but then the floaters rotate above the fuselage allowing to disappear beneath the waves. The fuselage opens, allowing sea-water inside removing most of its lift. The floaters act like miniature subs and can submerge to an extent. This aircraft is not about setting records, it has to operate near the coast anyway so can't go to deep in any case.
If you are not good enough to get the best work enviroment possible, then well, that sucks for you.
I doubt you are even a decent developer anyway, flatscreen monitors? Hello? Can you even buy CRT's anymore that are cheaper then totally flat LCD's.
If your boss did a cost/benefit study he would quickly realize that a good chair and interface pays for itself. A good chair allows you to remain comfortably seated for longer. Same with a quiet office, more hours spend coding means more money made. Three screens isn't actually that expensive since they typically last several years. I personally only use dual screens and it saves me a lot of time, since I can have all windows I need open at once without switching and have all the info available at once. If I am on a laptop I notice a reduction in speed as I have to spend time tabbing between windows to get all the info I need.
The cost? About a 1000 euro more. Compared to my salery and general costs of employement, office space, parking space, insurance and everything else it is trivial. So a new decent computer for a developer costs say 4000 instead of a budget dell for 400. Big deal. Hiring a good developer costs FAR more. Loosing a good developer even more.
For fun I keep track of job offers, sadly most companies cannot even begin to afford me because they just don't value developers. We are NOT secretaries or accountants. We are skilled craftsmen and they expect the best and can get it if they got the balls.
You need other players to PvP, worse, you need other players to kill. Nobody wants to loose everytime.
If you play 'simpler' PvP games like FPS, you know that some people will only join the side with the biggest numbers/scores because they want to be on the winning side.
Guild Wars suffers from this to an extent, a LOT of people only fight in their own guilds so if you are not in a guild it is at times hard to find other people to fight with. But Guild Wars is small scale. Getting half a dozen people together is an entirely different challenge from getting two-three dozen people together.
In my current MMORPG poison, Lord of the Rings Online, that is the problem. PvP or rather PvMP is a bit of an afterthought in this game, to be fair its developer made it clear from the start PvE was its focus, and this shows. Their is little reward for fighting on either side except the fun of it and if both sides don't have the right numbers, then there is no fun to be had.
Sure, some people will happily wipe an enemy who is heavily outnumbered but that just reduces the numbers on the side that is loosing even further.
PvP is incredibly hard to get right and the more people you involve in a battle the harder it will get.
It is the main reason I didn't try war yet. I like PvP but only if it is at least reasonably fair and I fear that WAR when the initial novelty wears off might not be able to get the numbers balanced. Star Wars Galaxies PvP action was a joke because of the total imbalance between Rebels and Empire. I know that both sides in WoW complain the other side has more numbers, wonder what will happen in WAR.
As you said, WoW is gaining an expansion soon, so is Lotro. Will WAR survive this? Will people be able to resist to leave their developed characters? Remember, in WoW and Lotro you can play even if no-one else is online. Not so in WAR (yes there is PvE but that is not why you bought it is it?) so if there is a bad day and no good battles seem to be happening you just switch to your PvE game and that means anyone logging into WAR afterwards finds you not there, so they go PvE as well and voila an entire evening of nobody playing WAR.
This is what I see happening in Lotro right now. Because of the way the game works, creep side (the bad guys) can't see the PvE side of the game. So, if there is no action creep side, you switch to freep, perhaps get into a PvE raid and you are out of PvMP for the evening. This is what happened last weekend on my server, I had logged of because there wasn't anyone on for some food, others did the same and eventually we ended up with no creeps online at all for several hours. Turning what should have been a busy night into a PvE session.
PvP is fun when it works, but as a company you are betting on your players being online and the sides being balanced. Hard to pull off.
If the game is such a success then why was its designer fired? Oh, he left to pursue other options. Yeah right. He was canned.
AoC is Anarchy Online Continued. The first was a mess and so is the second.
However thanks the global reach of the internet, almost anything can find an audience and hang on for dear life. Dark&Light is still around even though Ati cards still can not run the game. Even Meridian 59, the granddaddy of them all is still being hosted.
AoC is so far one of the biggest failures in MMO history.
SWG was buggy as hell but launched in a different era when MMO's were still new and we were willing to be a lot more forgiving.
Dark&Light was perhaps the fastest 'paid to free' conversion in history, but AoC was the biggest title by an experienced company that should have known better to so completely fail to life up to anything.
The only people who like AoC are those who think that the "twitch" tacked onto the skill based game makes it into a bigger challenge then the EQ clones. That is it sellings point, twitch. That worked REALLY well for SWG NGE, Planetside and Tabula Rasa.
My prediction for AoC is that it will be another SWG or AC. Forever lingering on as an undead but never recovering. Its fans claiming that everyone else is missing out on a wonderful game and a lot of bitter old players left feeling ripped off and just a little bit more reluctant to give a new game a fair chance.
So basically, you are predicting the same thing people claimed would happen when WoW launched. Prepare to be wrong again.
The two games are totally different in nature and will NOT canabalize each other. It would be like saying Unreal competes with Doom/Quake. There is room for both.
The servers were refurbished and donated to a charity as their office servers and the surplus PC has been my desktop for over a year.
If you never ask, the answer will always be no. On the whole, people are nice, if only you are nice to them. Would you deny someone a piece of old equipment if they asked nicely? Then why should someone deny it to you?
He argues against over-reacting to DRM, his reason, the idea that your game cannot be played once the drm servers are down is invalid because some hacker will risk jailtime so you can play your old game.
That makes Remo the fuckface of the minute (this is the internet, there are a lot of fuckfaces around) for me.
A counter to a bad situation is not hoping that years from now someone else will be willing to break the law for your sake.
That is like saying, well we can have mock trials and lynchings because decades later a civil right group will fight to have the victims pardoned post-humously.
DRM is bad now and must be removed NOW. Allow DRM to continue and sooner or later we won't have the hardware anymore to run cracks even if someone is willing to risk decades in jail for breaking it.
The application you are using to scan this product is a internet capable gadget with a full browser and a keyboard. If it comes up with an unidentified barcode you could simple GOOGLE the product by its description, then enter the new code at a comparison side. One person needs to do this and then everyone else can use it.
The internet, you might have heard about it. It allows millions of people to pool their resources into common works.
Those are 2D codes, this is about 1D codes. So you are not intresting, you are lazy and redundant. Have a nice day.
Come on, as a programmer/designer this pisses me off. Only a complete and UTTER idiot would include price info in the barcode.
What if you had a price change? You would have to change the barcode on all your products.
As the article explains and anyone on slashdot could expected to know, a barcode (the 1D kind we are talking about here) ONLY has enough information for 10 digits. It is a 'unique' indentifier. The cash register scans this unique code and then looks it up in the stores database to get the price and whatever other information you could require.
To think that you would put the price of a product in the barcode is silly. ONE of the reasons why the switch to barcodes has seen the removal of price-stickers on products is that with barcodes you can easily change the price.
The OP simply meant to point out that he got the PRICE from the INTERNET with the unique code and is arguing that the price retrieved by the cashregister from the stores database is in-accurate.
And this discussion already happens daily in stores whenever there is an mistake made with special offers or a new product incorrectly entered.
My own recent story is of a frozen fries, used to be 1kg packages but suddenly they had 2.5kg packages but no record of it in the database. In the end, I got it for the price of 1kg while they went and sorted it out :) Got to love lousy math skills, a fair price would have been 2x the price of 1kg, but I suppose that was to complex.
Samzenpus sends his regrets, he hit submit to early and forgot to add the fourth entry to his post. Lucky for us, he managed to repost the original in the form of the parent, the fourth and most deranged poster of disagree mail.
That is going to be the next trial. Does sharing it with the RIAA or people/entities employed by it count as copyright violation?
After all, say I rip a CD and upload it to you. That would be copyright violation right? But WHAT if you also have the CD? Does that count?
MediaSentry methods of detection are also in question. Worse yet, if I sell drugs, I do something. But say I got legal drugs in an open window in my own house. You then reach into that window and take them. Does that constitute the illegal distrubution of drugs?
Going to be an intresting case. I am a bit hopeful because the RIAA choose to go with this theory that has now been thrown out first. Did their own lawyers say that other theories were not going to work?
this is just the first part, sooner or later everone will have one, so your argument is null and void. As well as pretty stupid.
For now you can claim that you don't need a card. This will pass with time. That is the entire plan. Start small, then slowly get everyone to have to ID themselves.
Sometimes you wonder how the goverment can introduce such schemes without people protesting and then you see people like you and you know why. The voter is stupid.
As has already been pointed out, the linked to fireworks slashdot story was already piss poor sensationalism. The fireworks were announced around the world as being CGI. So the entire story basically said "some obviously fake fireworks that were said to be fake when shown were fake". No shit sherlock.
And now we got a story that a news agency accidently released a pre-written story. Not like we never heard of obituraries being printed ahead of time. Anyone who has ever worked in the news industry knows that you prepare AHEAD of time.
Hell, even advertising does this. Or do you think that during events like soccer championships the advertise executives sit glued to the tv screen then the moment the result is in start putting together the add in a matter of hours to be included in tomorrows newspaper celebrating/mourning the match? Hell no, you prepare the ad campaign in advance for all outcomes.
For the uneducated editors of slashdot: Most christmas scenes/photo's etc etc are NOT shot during christmas. They are created in mid summer with FAKE snow.
Most christmas/newyears specials are recorded MONTHS in advance.
A lot of short tv programs with live audiences are recorded back to back on a single day to be aired on different days.
Star Wars was NOT a war documentary on a battle that happened in a galaxy far far away.
More and more reading the summary on slashdot is a joke, the actual story is not in the linked articles but in the comments. Slashdot would improve an awful lot of we could get rid of the editors and make it purely user contributed. Mmm, wait a moment, that is digg. Nevermind.
The word is CAN constitute, not DOES constitute. This is what the next trial will most likely be about.
Granted, most likely it will count because if you sell drugs to a cop you still go to jail. What might still win the case is that mediasentry is NOT a cop.
Even if mediasentry is allowed to perform the actions of a sworn in police officer, they would still have to proof there method of detection is accurate.
Further more, if it counts as distribution, so what? They got proof you uploaded it to one person. Big deal. 1 dollar per song, you need to have pretty big share going on to have to worry about that fine.
Because the really big thing in this judgement is the judge saying that the damages were excessive. That is going to hurt the RIAA the most. This judge EVEN if the case had been been proven would most likely still have lowered the damages. That could seriously hurt the RIAA. Why settle for a couple thousand when the fine is going to be little more? And if the settlement is going to be a couple hundred, how are they going to pay their lawyers?
Your post missed the boat on so many points that you might even ask if there is a boat.
There is an no google phone (yet), google has made a platform and OS if you like. Not a phone.
Reception is hardware and has nothing to do with the software. It is also largely tied into the service provider, not the phone itself. The best phone can't receive a signal were there isn't one.
Rates have nothing whatsoever to do with the phone but are totally dependent on your contract with your service provider.
Furthermore if all you are intrested is a good phone, you really don't need either as far simpler and cheaper phone that don't have to subsidised with high rates are easily available.
It works, it finally WORKS! The label: Discontinued.
You say that if your parents spend time on these phones, it wouldn't improve their quality of life at all.
This is I think missing an essential point.
They do NOT spend time on these features of their phone, BECAUSE they don't see how it would improve the quality of their lives.
Or to put it simpler, if people have no need of the camera on their mobile phone, they won't bother to learn to use it.
If I only use my VCR for straight recording and playback, I never need to set the clock.
If I only cook in my microwave, I never need to learn how to use the defrost settings.
The original article seems to claim, people don't use the camera features because they don't understand them.
You say, they could understand them if they spend time on it, but would it make things better?
I say, they KNOW it won't make things better, so they don't. It has NOTHING to do with simplicity, people learn complex things all the time IF THEY HAVE A NEED/DESIRE too.
Ages ago, I had an old aunt, when the microwave came out EVERYONE wanted her to get used to one. NOBODY understood that she just didn't WANT to. She had learned to cook perfectly well with the tools of her time and had no need or desire for a new one. BUT I only learned that from her as a secret, she used her supposed inability to use it as an excuse not to have to use it. It always seemed odd to me that a woman who once operated on punch card systems as a clerk would have trouble with a microwave. Everyone else just seemed to assume, older woman == idiot forgetting her job before she got married and had kids.
An analysts opinion isn't worth the paper it is printed on, and this opinion ain't even printed.
Both phones are less then perfect and missing some "we don't think you need this, so you don't get it" features.
But the analyst is an idiot because he talks about the lack of iTunes. Yeah, because people care about that. Oh, they don't. First off, most music on digital players is ripped from CD's, or obtained through other means in mp3 format. iTunes is very small potatoes in the global music industry and even Apple knows that the iPod a far bigger player in the digital music player isn't always going to be used for iTunes content, which is why Apple gives you the tools needed to convert iTunes music to MP3 format or burn it to a CD.
The idea that a new platform needs to be compatible with iTunes is silly.
The bigger problem is lack of office compatibiltiy. While MS does offer you ways to export your documents in more general formats, that could be the real killer. The iPhone is bought by people who buy Apple and so accept that it is NOT going to be all that compatible with MS software. But android doesn't have the Apple logo, what is its excuse for not being MS compatible?
In a way, I don't think the iPhone and Android are even competitors. iPhone is a single product offered by a company that has no other phones. Android is a platform that any phone maker can use. It would be like saying the Smart Car competes with Honda Engines. Does the iPhone compete with Windows Mobile or Symbian? No, it competes with other phones, specific models, not OS/Platforms. if this google phone fails, there are plenty of others coming out soon, while Apple can hardly afford to start making dozens of phones and a new one every season to suit the tastes of the customer. Neither can google, but the phonemakers can.
By disagreeing with me, you prove my point, americans and europeans see things differently. Thanks :)