After some years of neglect, since the late 1990s some libraries, universities, and other cultural organizations have realized that videogames are an important cultural artifact, so are worth preserving just like films and other bits of culture are. There are now things like this at Stanford, and quite a few others. These are usually put together by buying used arcade cabinets, cartridges, CDs, etc., from anything from flea markets to eBay (in addition to donations from individuals and collectors).
Videogame makers seem to be doing whatever they possibly can to make this as difficult as possible, especially for organizations like libraries that need to follow the law. It seems like if videogames are actually documented/preserved as interesting cultural artifacts, it's going to be by less-official organizations that crack them.
My understanding is that if a contractor performs work according to spec and something bad happens, the company contracting with them is liable, but if they're negligent in performing the work, then they themselves are liable, and the company that contracted them isn't. Hence some of the lawsuits over the gulf oil spill; if it turns out that the contractors who cemented the well (such as Halliburton, in this case definitely not a small one) did so negligently, then the contractors who did the cementing, not BP, would be liable for the portion of damages judged to be caused by the faulty cementing.
They're also often smaller companies, because that effectively caps potential liability (or more accurately, shifts it onto the government/population). If a huge company fucks up and causes a $50 billion mess, they might be on the hook for $50 billion, but if a smaller contractor does, they declare bankruptcy, their $500 million in assets get seized, and someone else is responsible for sorting out the remaining $49.5 billion of the mess. Hence all the Superfund sites and state-run compensation programs.
I was under the impression that in the U.S., at least, radiation dosage was tracked on a lifetime basis via a Nuclear Regulatory Commission database, REIRS, and anyone working at a nuclear facility, even on a contract basis, has to have the numbers from their dosage monitoring submitted to it. I don't think you can get away with laying them off and then someone else rehiring them while pretending they're a new person, because their dosage will get filed under the same social-security number in REIRS.
1. First google hit for [anonymous proxy] 2. It's been around since forever and I remember its url (but when I don't, see #1)
Yeah, not that scientific.
The most venerable lineage in this space is probably The Anonymizer, which was once hosted by CMU researchers, but it seems to have been bought and turned into a commercial desktop application.
Well, the Canadian goal for a while has been to be sort-of-American-but-noticeably-different, so clearly to be influenced by American culture, but nonetheless maintain strong distinct cultural elements. The worry is that with the proximity, ease of travel & information travel, and huge population difference, Canadian culture will tend to converge to just being basically a regional American culture, mostly the same as the U.S. "national" culture, but with some regional variations, the way Texas and California have some regional flavor.
Even in the U.S. people are somewhat worried about that; e.g. Boston used to be more different than the rest of the U.S. culturally, down to people from Boston speaking noticeably differently, regional brands, cuisine, etc., but the differences are weaker today than they were 50 years ago.
That was also true in the U.S.; people didn't move to company towns and take up dangerous/unpleasant occupations like mining in 1885 because their previous lives were great and comfortable, but because they felt they had no other choice.
Most Chinese workers in Foxconn-like environments do not really see their current conditions as an improvement, either.
I agree that's true, but it's partly counterbalanced by a different attitude to business as well. In the US, taking on the industrialists in the late 19th century was controversial because it was seen as potentially intruding on free markets, etc. But in China there is no real deep-seated concern for the rights of industrialists, and the interests of stability, "harmonious development", etc. are considered higher. So I think it's comparatively much easier for the government to decide to throw a few industrialists under the bus, if the government feels it's convenient to do so in the interests of social harmony.
Hey man it's not that bad, looking at plane tickets you can get a one-way ticket for only $550, such an awesome deal that you'll break even after only 4 months of 7-day-a-week 12-hour shifts! That means by the 5th month you'll be able to start earning that full $3.72/day right into your pocket!
Notice that that's working in Brazil: Foxconn is building a manufacturing facility in Brazil to build Apple products for the Brazilian market locally, in order to avoid tariffs.
Only temporarily most likely. The U.S. had company towns and indentured-servitude working conditions as well, at the beginning of its large-scale industrialization in the 1880s. It also had dozens of riots, mass unionization drives, etc., in the same decade, for not coincidental reasons.
China may delay the backlash longer because its authoritarian state suppresses workers' dissent, but I doubt they can maintain those kinds of conditions for that long.
It depends on "afford", I suppose. Many middle-class people could shell out $60k if it were absolutely necessary, but most financially prudent people making mid to high five figures wouldn't spend that much on a car.
I can imagine that if they were actually paying overtime, but I'd be more surprised about companies that fired or denied promotions to salaried staff for working unpaid overtime.
That's more true with some animals than others. Anything that uses primates is expensive as hell, but mice are cheap; laboratories go through literally millions of them per year (estimates are around 50 million/year for the U.S.), and spend less on them than on even the grad students.
Now a reusable sensor has the advantage that it can be cleaned and reused (depending on the design), so there may not need to be 50 million sensors to replace 50 million mice. But the per-unit cost they'll have to match to compete with the quite cheap/disposable mice is still a pretty daunting design/manufacturing challenge.
I agree it adds an extra headache for developers, but I like multiple platforms conceptually, because it's an acid-test way of keeping developers from accidentally drifting into platform assumptions that they aren't really supposed to be making, and which will complicate things later. Sometimes even helps find bugs; back when they were more active (and still to some extent), the Debian ports to non-x86 platforms frequently helped uncover latent bugs that were just infrequently triggered on x86 for various coincidental reasons.
They're also quite low as percentage of income for well-off people, especially in Indiana, so I don't get the angst. If you make $80k and own a $300k house, the maximum property tax is $3k, i.e. equivalent to a 3.75% income tax.
I don't think they ever claimed that the number of minutes on the Doomsday Clock was a scientifically calculated probability or anything. Even back in 1947, it was intended as a symbolic statement. The only thing that's arguably changed is that it's outlived its usefulness and is no longer an effective statement in the way it used to be.
I should add that, while I think that might lead to some dumb decisions, it's also not completely unreasonable as a general principle: Google is, quite rightly, trying to avoid becoming a Yahoo-style company that maintains a hodgepodge array of un-integrated services that don't do much to complement each other.
Slashdot Mirror
After some years of neglect, since the late 1990s some libraries, universities, and other cultural organizations have realized that videogames are an important cultural artifact, so are worth preserving just like films and other bits of culture are. There are now things like this at Stanford, and quite a few others. These are usually put together by buying used arcade cabinets, cartridges, CDs, etc., from anything from flea markets to eBay (in addition to donations from individuals and collectors).
Videogame makers seem to be doing whatever they possibly can to make this as difficult as possible, especially for organizations like libraries that need to follow the law. It seems like if videogames are actually documented/preserved as interesting cultural artifacts, it's going to be by less-official organizations that crack them.
Much as in Animal Crossing, however, you are still free to weed your garden to keep it looking tidy.
No, this is a multimedia experience.
My understanding is that if a contractor performs work according to spec and something bad happens, the company contracting with them is liable, but if they're negligent in performing the work, then they themselves are liable, and the company that contracted them isn't. Hence some of the lawsuits over the gulf oil spill; if it turns out that the contractors who cemented the well (such as Halliburton, in this case definitely not a small one) did so negligently, then the contractors who did the cementing, not BP, would be liable for the portion of damages judged to be caused by the faulty cementing.
They're also often smaller companies, because that effectively caps potential liability (or more accurately, shifts it onto the government/population). If a huge company fucks up and causes a $50 billion mess, they might be on the hook for $50 billion, but if a smaller contractor does, they declare bankruptcy, their $500 million in assets get seized, and someone else is responsible for sorting out the remaining $49.5 billion of the mess. Hence all the Superfund sites and state-run compensation programs.
I was under the impression that in the U.S., at least, radiation dosage was tracked on a lifetime basis via a Nuclear Regulatory Commission database, REIRS, and anyone working at a nuclear facility, even on a contract basis, has to have the numbers from their dosage monitoring submitted to it. I don't think you can get away with laying them off and then someone else rehiring them while pretending they're a new person, because their dosage will get filed under the same social-security number in REIRS.
I use this thing.
Selection criteria:
1. First google hit for [anonymous proxy]
2. It's been around since forever and I remember its url (but when I don't, see #1)
Yeah, not that scientific.
The most venerable lineage in this space is probably The Anonymizer, which was once hosted by CMU researchers, but it seems to have been bought and turned into a commercial desktop application.
Well, the Canadian goal for a while has been to be sort-of-American-but-noticeably-different, so clearly to be influenced by American culture, but nonetheless maintain strong distinct cultural elements. The worry is that with the proximity, ease of travel & information travel, and huge population difference, Canadian culture will tend to converge to just being basically a regional American culture, mostly the same as the U.S. "national" culture, but with some regional variations, the way Texas and California have some regional flavor.
Even in the U.S. people are somewhat worried about that; e.g. Boston used to be more different than the rest of the U.S. culturally, down to people from Boston speaking noticeably differently, regional brands, cuisine, etc., but the differences are weaker today than they were 50 years ago.
That was also true in the U.S.; people didn't move to company towns and take up dangerous/unpleasant occupations like mining in 1885 because their previous lives were great and comfortable, but because they felt they had no other choice.
Most Chinese workers in Foxconn-like environments do not really see their current conditions as an improvement, either.
I agree that's true, but it's partly counterbalanced by a different attitude to business as well. In the US, taking on the industrialists in the late 19th century was controversial because it was seen as potentially intruding on free markets, etc. But in China there is no real deep-seated concern for the rights of industrialists, and the interests of stability, "harmonious development", etc. are considered higher. So I think it's comparatively much easier for the government to decide to throw a few industrialists under the bus, if the government feels it's convenient to do so in the interests of social harmony.
Hey man it's not that bad, looking at plane tickets you can get a one-way ticket for only $550, such an awesome deal that you'll break even after only 4 months of 7-day-a-week 12-hour shifts! That means by the 5th month you'll be able to start earning that full $3.72/day right into your pocket!
Notice that that's working in Brazil: Foxconn is building a manufacturing facility in Brazil to build Apple products for the Brazilian market locally, in order to avoid tariffs.
Only temporarily most likely. The U.S. had company towns and indentured-servitude working conditions as well, at the beginning of its large-scale industrialization in the 1880s. It also had dozens of riots, mass unionization drives, etc., in the same decade, for not coincidental reasons.
China may delay the backlash longer because its authoritarian state suppresses workers' dissent, but I doubt they can maintain those kinds of conditions for that long.
It depends on "afford", I suppose. Many middle-class people could shell out $60k if it were absolutely necessary, but most financially prudent people making mid to high five figures wouldn't spend that much on a car.
Slashdot has reporters who do on-site video pieces now?
Insert quip about how they can do that but can't hire editors to make sure the summary blurb is accurate. ;-)
I can imagine that if they were actually paying overtime, but I'd be more surprised about companies that fired or denied promotions to salaried staff for working unpaid overtime.
It's not clear to me why the CD player should even be on the same network as the engine-related microcontrollers.
That's more true with some animals than others. Anything that uses primates is expensive as hell, but mice are cheap; laboratories go through literally millions of them per year (estimates are around 50 million/year for the U.S.), and spend less on them than on even the grad students.
Now a reusable sensor has the advantage that it can be cleaned and reused (depending on the design), so there may not need to be 50 million sensors to replace 50 million mice. But the per-unit cost they'll have to match to compete with the quite cheap/disposable mice is still a pretty daunting design/manufacturing challenge.
I agree it adds an extra headache for developers, but I like multiple platforms conceptually, because it's an acid-test way of keeping developers from accidentally drifting into platform assumptions that they aren't really supposed to be making, and which will complicate things later. Sometimes even helps find bugs; back when they were more active (and still to some extent), the Debian ports to non-x86 platforms frequently helped uncover latent bugs that were just infrequently triggered on x86 for various coincidental reasons.
Have they been able to get into power-draw ranges that'd make the battery life compatible with ARM-based devices?
They're also quite low as percentage of income for well-off people, especially in Indiana, so I don't get the angst. If you make $80k and own a $300k house, the maximum property tax is $3k, i.e. equivalent to a 3.75% income tax.
Lol, "even" 2 cans a week. What kind of trash factory do you operate?!
You must not live in Indiana then, because the maximum residential property-tax rate in the state is capped at 1%.
I don't think they ever claimed that the number of minutes on the Doomsday Clock was a scientifically calculated probability or anything. Even back in 1947, it was intended as a symbolic statement. The only thing that's arguably changed is that it's outlived its usefulness and is no longer an effective statement in the way it used to be.
I should add that, while I think that might lead to some dumb decisions, it's also not completely unreasonable as a general principle: Google is, quite rightly, trying to avoid becoming a Yahoo-style company that maintains a hodgepodge array of un-integrated services that don't do much to complement each other.