The state(at least here in Germany) has to keep its citizens well informed. As a matter of fact, it made it into the Verfassung. That's how our founding fathers wanted it to be. The problem is, Joe Kraut doesn't want to be well informed. He wants to be entertained. But that's besides the point.
For informing the puny peaseants you need media. But it comes at a cost. Sometimes you have to pay. But this is something of the olden days. Nowadays we have the 'net and we don't have to rely on radio or TV anymore. The whole new situation calls for an overaul of the olden laws from the olden days. But you won't find one german politician who is willing to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it. It could lead to disbanding of the whole state provided TV and radio.
And you do ask for something like this by being a german citizen. Don't like it...bugger. You still have the opt-out option. All free countries handle it that way.
Germany doesn't have the Beeb. The quality of german broadcasting companies is less than stellar. Don't expect anything remotely useful from the ZDF. The BBC does offer some value, our TV stations don't.
News are better than Fox/CNN/whatever, tho. Watching CNN still cracks me up.
Germany, like the UK, has official broadcasting. Our BBC is ARD, ZDF and lots of radio stations. The rationale is along these lines:
If you own a TV or radio set, then you are benefiting from this service. If you benefit, you have to cough up some dough. They now added computers into the equation because you might visit the stations web pages or receive life broadcasts. Typical red tape thinking.
The networks owned by the public are heavily restricted when it comes to broadcasting commercials and they HAVE to fulfill educational duties. But they shove the same crap to your screen that you'd expect from Murdoch/Saban/Berlusconi owned companies. Quality leaves much to be desired for. The Beeb at least managed to provide true quality programmes like HHGTG, Red Dwarf, Monty Python and such. German broadcasting seems to fancy endless music shows for the elderly, romantic, yet shallow TV plays, game shows and so on. Nobody under the age of 50 would even remotely consider watching that utter crap. Only true benefit they offer are well balanced news broadcasts and quality investigational journalism.
Now comes the brilliant part. They will charge even companies for their internet PCs. Plain silly.
There is a dubious aspect of this fee for PeeCees. The official broadcasting system wanted a substantial raise for this fee. They did get a miniscule one with a net amount of 350.000.000. Been bitching ever since. The new computer tax won't give them much more cash from the households since nearly all of them already pay the fee(don't have to pay double). But the new rule gives them a way to extort cash from companies who weren't paying thru the nose, yet. Let's see. My company has to pay a fee for something I shouldn't do as per company policy. Love that one.
I haven't paid that silly fee in years since I don't own neither radio nor TV. Even if I did, I wouldn't have to let their investigators into my flat. Tho they are known to be real bullies.
My tip for any Germany resident is, if one of these bullies shows up at your door and won't go away, call the police. They haven't bothered me ever since. Still get their extortion letters, tho.
I for one am a Magnatune customer and find that this is all music I need. Creative Commons doesn't mean it does suck. The fine folks over at Blender chose one Magnatune artist for their SIGGRAPH demo reel. The rest ain't shabby either.
If you chose to buy, you set the price. Money is evenly divided between artist and label. Download options include wav, flac, vorbis and mp3.
Sure, I still buy the odd CD. But I only do this after a concert right out of the hands of the performers. Prefer my media handsigned and not watermarked, thank you.
I can't see how those two could possibly be confused. The ones company logo is a Macintosh that's been nibbled on and the other is that computer company.
War is no game. You don't count scores like in a football match. And a record will never be "perfect" if you count the body bags. That's the only outcome you can expect. You may expect a european/US war. I hope there won't be one. I couldn't see how any side could gain from it. A winner would only be that fraction that has lost less. There is no glory to be found in war.
Whole Europe is still carrying the scars of an all out war 80 years ago that was totally unnessessary. The trenches may be filled but the fallen are not forgotten. Damn, you can even still see dear old Napoleons cannon balls embedded into houses. The barbed wire that seperated Europe after WW2 is still fresh in our memories and some ruins have been preserved to remind us the gargantuan bloodshed that happened oh so reasonly.
You'll never get vast majorities of European population to back ANY war because the cost is deeply embedded into the European cultural memory.
Having a military that's able to act on its own is IMHO simply not necessary. During the last 20 years or so each military effort of the western world has been a joint effort of multiple nations. That's what made the west what it is today.
And I also don't see how Europe is kow-towing to anybody. Neither the US, nor any extremists. In fact, Europe had its own share of homegrow terrorism. Each and every country. Hijacked airplanes, kidnapped leaders, robbed banks(to fund the terrorism), assassinations and your occasional drive-by shooting. Now look where that kind of terrorism has gone. The RAF/Red Brigades/whatnot have dissolved and the ETA/IRA situation has been settled at the negotiation table(turned out that some issues where quite reasonable even tho the means were not). The strongarming tactics have already been proven to settle nothing.
Now look at the most reason military attempts to put peace into troubled regions. Afghanistan is far from secure, Iraq turned from one hell-hole to another(tho I have to admit that I felt very good when the Hussein sons met their grizzly end) and we read horror stories about Israel/Palestine on a daily basis. That kind of terrorism is not fought on the battlefield but at the negotiation table. Tho you might have to use your snipers on the occasional crack pot. But be stealthy about it.
..done that.
I watched a LotR triple feature in december. First two movies where full length. I gotta admit that I was this close to fleeing the cinema before the Battle of Helms Deep. But I hadn't watched RotK before, so I dragged thru. No fun.
Here is another one from the document `(i) the manner in which the discs are displayed at retail, packaged, or marketed results in substantial consumer confusion about the playability and recordability of such discs;
Seems like they'd have to tell the masses the CD won't spin in their car stereo. Beautiful.
but the setup time of my regular tools that makes rebooting such a drag.
I usually have 10-12 telnet sessions open, monitoring log files, machine load and application layer protocol network traffic for a couple of servers.
This takes an awful lot of time to set up. Not to mention IDE boot times, finding the right documentation and whatnot. Thank god I wasn't vulnerable to the newest and brightest Windows worm that got my whole company. Anything forcing me to boot my Debian box would really tick me off.
YMMV.
Well, it is true that the Nazi regime was ended by WW3. But that was not my point. The hush-hush mentality of those who survived and had looked away lingered 'till 1968. That's quite a long time. If it hadn't been for those "stark raving mad commie students" nobody would have dealt with the past. The open discussion that was initiated then changed the whole nation. The war on itsself wouldn't have accomplished it.
It may be that radical change will cause bloodshed. But if you want the change to last, you will have to educate the new generations. This works of course both ways. Here we see how classical guerilla strategies are applied by a conglomerate of corporations. Corporations well know not to be bound to ethics.
Don't cry for angry men with guns, you might get it. You are bitter which is quite understandable. But the only way to change the world is not by brute force. It's by changing the way how people think. Since a people as such is a very slow learner you might have to wait for a generation or two. It took Germany one generation to clean out the mess the Nazis left. The Nuremberg trials didn't do it. It wasn't the GIs handing candy left and right either. It was the kids asking questions and demanding change. Have a little faith in common sense and try to spread it with words. Expect some personaö sacrifices down that long and laborous road. Instant karma is a myth.
Yet another great movie turned into another shallow game.
In other news EA has announced the Citizen Kane Expansion Pack for The Sims.
Hold your breath for Duke Nukem: Casablanca Revisited.
I hope not. This data wouldn't be too useful without the knowledge of some other parameters. Like age, gender, annual income...
Target groups never are a homogenous group. They'd need to gather so much more information apart from the pure search query and the number of performed searches. Even if this infos weren't personalized I'd feel rather uneasy about it.
Your question is valid, yet portrais a sad state of science nowadays. It is true that science needs funding. But not all of it promises immediate gain or material increase of the guy who cough up the dough(no pun intended since these guys seem to get money from a cookie manufacturer).
Yet funding comes your way when companies or the military see some merit in what they are paying for. These entities tend to only think VERY short term.
Think of it this way. Who would have paid Newton to sit underneath an apple tree. This little anecdote(true or not) marks the beginning of research of gravity. Something that everybody took for granted. Yet ask the NASA what they would do without the outcome of this line of research. If you ask about the benefit of sending people to the moon, ask the folks who will live a couple of hundred years from now. Satelites should be a no-brainer.
True science resembles art. Not many understand why we need it, yet we would still be sitting in cold caves not wondering why round stones roll down the hill while others don't.
Silly as it may seem, I think that this cookie induced revelation will advance our civilisation and mankind in itsself.
DISCLAIMER: I spent a couple of years partaking in pure science robotics stuff nobody thinks will be usefull. Ever. We shall see. Hooray for BMBF!
Good point. But you can only plan for a test phase. The outcome of it is not plannable. Experienced programmers can estimate how much time they need for a task. Experienced project managers know how to put these estimates into a plan. And yet many release dates slip. Quite a few books have been written about this subject. Many of them are propably older than you.
In my experience a project plan is a sequence of things that are most unlikely to happen. One more MS Project plan exported to an Excel spreadsheet with my name on it and I'll go postal. Nobody likes release dates. Only marketing and management do. To us it means overtime. And you don't even remotely know about the quality of the plan in the first place. Any plan that involves people and how they work together is bound to fail from the beginning.
Hope I don't sound too bitter. Still got all of my annual leave. And part of my 2002 leave. And enough overtime. I could leave my desk now and not return till the end of january 2004.
Video game length is something you can't really measure. It's the addiction level that counts. Take for instance Diablo II. The game is very old, yet quite a few continue playing it. And it has a huge following in Korea.
Sure, there are short games. But IMHO it differs more from publisher to publisher than from region to region. Daggerfall was huge and published in the same year as D2. Yet I daresay that the people playing it never reached the numbers of D2. And it took a long time to play it properly.
Strategy games would be a different breed. What's the game length anyway? Follow the main path? Or play it ad nauseum? Your gaming experience may differ depending how you play it. You can also rush thru Zelda and FF if you choose to.
My employer and Sun currently have a cooperation up and running. Basically it's storing StarOffice XML data via WebDAV into our XML database. You can search structured documents in the DB and on the publishing side there ain't nothing a Coccoon framework couldn't do. I'm talking about an XML based document repository. No binary data means we're wide open to any kind of server side application.
Dunno why this solution isn't neither marketed by Sun nor us since all you need is our DB and Staroffice out of the box.
The idea for distributing the trial version of a game via P2P isn't that new. Actually ID did this with DOOM back in the old days. Then it was via the usual shareware channels but ultimately by swapping floppies. Only difference now is that we have an application layer protocoll for it. Way to go! It sure as hell worked in 1996!
Alcohol might only desinfect the phone. Problem ist that there is enough unpleasant stuff out there that will survive this treatment(obviously including you;). I doubt that the 'tronics(or even the plastic) would respond well to the process of actually getting it sterile.
Hospitals do everything to keep medical instruments not only desinfected but also sterile. But when it comes to furniture/floor/etc they do a really shoddy job. You stand a good chance to contract a fascinating disease whenever they put you there.
I once worked in a hospital and the first thing I learned was not to take personal stuff with me. They provided the stylish white clothing and everything else I'd need. I wouldn't want anything at home that I had with me when I pulled some old people out of their own poo. Stupidity is a disease that is wide spread in all professions.
I agree that this lawsuit is frivolous at best. GTA is in fact rated for 18+. These kids shouldn't have had this thing in the first place. Problem is, that this policy wasn't enforced in the first place. Neither by the retailer/rental/whatever nor by the parents. Let's leave aside the issue wether or not they'd have killed anybody without playing this game. Nobody will ever know this.
A couple of weeks ago my niece(9yrs) and nephew(11yrs) stayed at my mother's on vaccation. We watched some generic family movie on tv. It was past 8pm, but I thought that watching that movie'd be perfect. Y'know, vaccation and all. Wrongo. The TV channel advertised the usual 10pm sex, crime&drugs dreck during commercial breaks. Even the ads sported lots of nudity and stupidity I wouldn't want my kids to watch. I never was bothered about this, but having those kids next to me made me take another viewpoint. Face it, kids are exposed to stuff they won't be able to cope with. Without parental guidance god knows what will become of them. Society acts irresponible. I don't say that violent games, movies and so forth shouldn't be produced. But each and every one of us should try to keep it out of their hands.
Slashdot Mirror
The state(at least here in Germany) has to keep its citizens well informed. As a matter of fact, it made it into the Verfassung. That's how our founding fathers wanted it to be. The problem is, Joe Kraut doesn't want to be well informed. He wants to be entertained. But that's besides the point.
For informing the puny peaseants you need media. But it comes at a cost. Sometimes you have to pay. But this is something of the olden days. Nowadays we have the 'net and we don't have to rely on radio or TV anymore. The whole new situation calls for an overaul of the olden laws from the olden days. But you won't find one german politician who is willing to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it. It could lead to disbanding of the whole state provided TV and radio.
And you do ask for something like this by being a german citizen. Don't like it...bugger. You still have the opt-out option. All free countries handle it that way.
News are better than Fox/CNN/whatever, tho. Watching CNN still cracks me up.
If you own a TV or radio set, then you are benefiting from this service. If you benefit, you have to cough up some dough. They now added computers into the equation because you might visit the stations web pages or receive life broadcasts. Typical red tape thinking.
The networks owned by the public are heavily restricted when it comes to broadcasting commercials and they HAVE to fulfill educational duties. But they shove the same crap to your screen that you'd expect from Murdoch/Saban/Berlusconi owned companies. Quality leaves much to be desired for. The Beeb at least managed to provide true quality programmes like HHGTG, Red Dwarf, Monty Python and such. German broadcasting seems to fancy endless music shows for the elderly, romantic, yet shallow TV plays, game shows and so on. Nobody under the age of 50 would even remotely consider watching that utter crap. Only true benefit they offer are well balanced news broadcasts and quality investigational journalism.
Now comes the brilliant part. They will charge even companies for their internet PCs. Plain silly.
There is a dubious aspect of this fee for PeeCees. The official broadcasting system wanted a substantial raise for this fee. They did get a miniscule one with a net amount of 350.000.000. Been bitching ever since. The new computer tax won't give them much more cash from the households since nearly all of them already pay the fee(don't have to pay double). But the new rule gives them a way to extort cash from companies who weren't paying thru the nose, yet. Let's see. My company has to pay a fee for something I shouldn't do as per company policy. Love that one.
I haven't paid that silly fee in years since I don't own neither radio nor TV. Even if I did, I wouldn't have to let their investigators into my flat. Tho they are known to be real bullies.
My tip for any Germany resident is, if one of these bullies shows up at your door and won't go away, call the police. They haven't bothered me ever since. Still get their extortion letters, tho.
I for one am a Magnatune customer and find that this is all music I need. Creative Commons doesn't mean it does suck. The fine folks over at Blender chose one Magnatune artist for their SIGGRAPH demo reel. The rest ain't shabby either.
Try Cargo Cult, Curl, Brad Sucks or their shoutcasts for starters.
If you chose to buy, you set the price. Money is evenly divided between artist and label. Download options include wav, flac, vorbis and mp3.
Sure, I still buy the odd CD. But I only do this after a concert right out of the hands of the performers. Prefer my media handsigned and not watermarked, thank you.
I haven't listened to the radio in years.
Whole Europe is still carrying the scars of an all out war 80 years ago that was totally unnessessary. The trenches may be filled but the fallen are not forgotten. Damn, you can even still see dear old Napoleons cannon balls embedded into houses. The barbed wire that seperated Europe after WW2 is still fresh in our memories and some ruins have been preserved to remind us the gargantuan bloodshed that happened oh so reasonly.
You'll never get vast majorities of European population to back ANY war because the cost is deeply embedded into the European cultural memory. Having a military that's able to act on its own is IMHO simply not necessary. During the last 20 years or so each military effort of the western world has been a joint effort of multiple nations. That's what made the west what it is today.
And I also don't see how Europe is kow-towing to anybody. Neither the US, nor any extremists. In fact, Europe had its own share of homegrow terrorism. Each and every country. Hijacked airplanes, kidnapped leaders, robbed banks(to fund the terrorism), assassinations and your occasional drive-by shooting. Now look where that kind of terrorism has gone. The RAF/Red Brigades/whatnot have dissolved and the ETA/IRA situation has been settled at the negotiation table(turned out that some issues where quite reasonable even tho the means were not). The strongarming tactics have already been proven to settle nothing.
Now look at the most reason military attempts to put peace into troubled regions. Afghanistan is far from secure, Iraq turned from one hell-hole to another(tho I have to admit that I felt very good when the Hussein sons met their grizzly end) and we read horror stories about Israel/Palestine on a daily basis. That kind of terrorism is not fought on the battlefield but at the negotiation table. Tho you might have to use your snipers on the occasional crack pot. But be stealthy about it.
..done that. I watched a LotR triple feature in december. First two movies where full length. I gotta admit that I was this close to fleeing the cinema before the Battle of Helms Deep. But I hadn't watched RotK before, so I dragged thru. No fun.
...he should consider applying for a job in IT.
Here is another one from the document
`(i) the manner in which the discs are displayed at retail, packaged, or marketed results in substantial consumer confusion about the playability and recordability of such discs;
Seems like they'd have to tell the masses the CD won't spin in their car stereo. Beautiful.
but the setup time of my regular tools that makes rebooting such a drag.
I usually have 10-12 telnet sessions open, monitoring log files, machine load and application layer protocol network traffic for a couple of servers.
This takes an awful lot of time to set up. Not to mention IDE boot times, finding the right documentation and whatnot. Thank god I wasn't vulnerable to the newest and brightest Windows worm that got my whole company. Anything forcing me to boot my Debian box would really tick me off. YMMV.
Well, it is true that the Nazi regime was ended by WW3. But that was not my point. The hush-hush mentality of those who survived and had looked away lingered 'till 1968. That's quite a long time. If it hadn't been for those "stark raving mad commie students" nobody would have dealt with the past. The open discussion that was initiated then changed the whole nation. The war on itsself wouldn't have accomplished it. It may be that radical change will cause bloodshed. But if you want the change to last, you will have to educate the new generations. This works of course both ways. Here we see how classical guerilla strategies are applied by a conglomerate of corporations. Corporations well know not to be bound to ethics.
Don't cry for angry men with guns, you might get it. You are bitter which is quite understandable. But the only way to change the world is not by brute force. It's by changing the way how people think. Since a people as such is a very slow learner you might have to wait for a generation or two. It took Germany one generation to clean out the mess the Nazis left. The Nuremberg trials didn't do it. It wasn't the GIs handing candy left and right either. It was the kids asking questions and demanding change. Have a little faith in common sense and try to spread it with words. Expect some personaö sacrifices down that long and laborous road. Instant karma is a myth.
Now that you mention it... Who shall I sue?
Yet another great movie turned into another shallow game.
In other news EA has announced the Citizen Kane Expansion Pack for The Sims.
Hold your breath for Duke Nukem: Casablanca Revisited.
I hope not. This data wouldn't be too useful without the knowledge of some other parameters. Like age, gender, annual income... Target groups never are a homogenous group. They'd need to gather so much more information apart from the pure search query and the number of performed searches. Even if this infos weren't personalized I'd feel rather uneasy about it.
Your question is valid, yet portrais a sad state of science nowadays. It is true that science needs funding. But not all of it promises immediate gain or material increase of the guy who cough up the dough(no pun intended since these guys seem to get money from a cookie manufacturer).
Yet funding comes your way when companies or the military see some merit in what they are paying for. These entities tend to only think VERY short term.
Think of it this way. Who would have paid Newton to sit underneath an apple tree. This little anecdote(true or not) marks the beginning of research of gravity. Something that everybody took for granted. Yet ask the NASA what they would do without the outcome of this line of research. If you ask about the benefit of sending people to the moon, ask the folks who will live a couple of hundred years from now. Satelites should be a no-brainer.
True science resembles art. Not many understand why we need it, yet we would still be sitting in cold caves not wondering why round stones roll down the hill while others don't.
Silly as it may seem, I think that this cookie induced revelation will advance our civilisation and mankind in itsself.
DISCLAIMER: I spent a couple of years partaking in pure science robotics stuff nobody thinks will be usefull. Ever. We shall see. Hooray for BMBF!
Good point. But you can only plan for a test phase. The outcome of it is not plannable. Experienced programmers can estimate how much time they need for a task. Experienced project managers know how to put these estimates into a plan. And yet many release dates slip. Quite a few books have been written about this subject. Many of them are propably older than you.
In my experience a project plan is a sequence of things that are most unlikely to happen. One more MS Project plan exported to an Excel spreadsheet with my name on it and I'll go postal. Nobody likes release dates. Only marketing and management do. To us it means overtime. And you don't even remotely know about the quality of the plan in the first place. Any plan that involves people and how they work together is bound to fail from the beginning.
Hope I don't sound too bitter. Still got all of my annual leave. And part of my 2002 leave. And enough overtime. I could leave my desk now and not return till the end of january 2004.
The techies and artists at valve have my smpathy.
Video game length is something you can't really measure. It's the addiction level that counts. Take for instance Diablo II. The game is very old, yet quite a few continue playing it. And it has a huge following in Korea.
Sure, there are short games. But IMHO it differs more from publisher to publisher than from region to region. Daggerfall was huge and published in the same year as D2. Yet I daresay that the people playing it never reached the numbers of D2. And it took a long time to play it properly. Strategy games would be a different breed. What's the game length anyway? Follow the main path? Or play it ad nauseum? Your gaming experience may differ depending how you play it. You can also rush thru Zelda and FF if you choose to.
My employer and Sun currently have a cooperation up and running. Basically it's storing StarOffice XML data via WebDAV into our XML database. You can search structured documents in the DB and on the publishing side there ain't nothing a Coccoon framework couldn't do. I'm talking about an XML based document repository. No binary data means we're wide open to any kind of server side application.
Dunno why this solution isn't neither marketed by Sun nor us since all you need is our DB and Staroffice out of the box.
The idea for distributing the trial version of a game via P2P isn't that new. Actually ID did this with DOOM back in the old days. Then it was via the usual shareware channels but ultimately by swapping floppies. Only difference now is that we have an application layer protocoll for it. Way to go! It sure as hell worked in 1996!
Alcohol might only desinfect the phone. Problem ist that there is enough unpleasant stuff out there that will survive this treatment(obviously including you ;). I doubt that the 'tronics(or even the plastic) would respond well to the process of actually getting it sterile.
...and even in mine. Sorry for not previewing. *stupid* *stupid* *stupid*
Hospitals do everything to keep medical instruments not only desinfected but also sterile. But when it comes to furniture/floor/etc they do a really shoddy job. You stand a good chance to contract a fascinating disease whenever they put you there. I once worked in a hospital and the first thing I learned was not to take personal stuff with me. They provided the stylish white clothing and everything else I'd need. I wouldn't want anything at home that I had with me when I pulled some old people out of their own poo. Stupidity is a disease that is wide spread in all professions.
A couple of weeks ago my niece(9yrs) and nephew(11yrs) stayed at my mother's on vaccation. We watched some generic family movie on tv. It was past 8pm, but I thought that watching that movie'd be perfect. Y'know, vaccation and all. Wrongo. The TV channel advertised the usual 10pm sex, crime&drugs dreck during commercial breaks. Even the ads sported lots of nudity and stupidity I wouldn't want my kids to watch. I never was bothered about this, but having those kids next to me made me take another viewpoint. Face it, kids are exposed to stuff they won't be able to cope with. Without parental guidance god knows what will become of them. Society acts irresponible. I don't say that violent games, movies and so forth shouldn't be produced. But each and every one of us should try to keep it out of their hands.