Oh, my bad! Sorry about the fire thing, I was just kidding. Oh, and you should probably see a doctor.
If people don't want to see my penis... they should tell me ahead of time.
It's not so much seeing it, but the blatant false advertising that it is "nice" and "clean" and "not pock-marked with oozing sores". Uh... wait... no, the false advertising has nothing to do with it.
Hey, don't feel bad, I hate that guy too. Next time I'm going to tell him that I just love things that are on fire. Should be good for a laugh.
I see what you mean... but I think your analogy stretches it a bit.;)
True, true. There's no problem with the PS3 that is fundamentally uncureable... So okay, say you love ice-cream but you hate gonorrhea-infected cock...:)
Slashdot appears to hate the PS3 and love Linux... yet which console runs Linux out of the box as a freaking menu option?
Why is that weird?
Let's say that you love ice cream but you hate herpes-sore covered cock. Some dude shows you his herpes-covered cock, but it's also smeared with delicious ice cream. "Hey man, I thought you loved ice cream, you weirdo!" he says as you run screaming.
Well if it does what is purported, then it still covers what is a roughly 2nd or 3rd year curriculum for a computer engineering degree program. Even given that it may not do as good a job of presenting the material as an actual course, that's not bad for a layman's book, and it's cheaper than Hennessy and Patterson.
Frankly I think it would do the quality of CPU discussion on/. some good if more people had some knowledge on these topics not derived from Tom's Hardware. And certainly it would do nothing to change the number of people pretending to be computer experts on/., since most of those do so without having ever read a computer book to begin with.
And, to go on a geeky utopianist side-track for a second, it would be fantastic if the resources available to amateurs regarding computer architecture was comparable to those available to amateur programmers. That's been one thing I always liked about programming, the ability to self-teach and test out what you've learned. Now if only FPGAs were cheaper and simpler to get so people could use this knowledge. I've looked an it's possible to get dev boards, I just mean something like you walk into Fry's and buy a Xylinx board with dev tools for your PC and a book on architecture, then go home and code yourself up an Alpha.
I think you're exactly right. This has been an issue for Nintendo consoles, where the strength of the 1st party titles can disuade 3rd party developers. If you develop an action/adventure game for a Nintendo console, you are at best going to be the action/adventure game someone buys after they buy Zelda. It's sort of like basketball in the 1992 Olympics -- everyone who wasn't the Dream Team was competing for 2nd place.
Your +5 Insightful proves, it seems, that Slashdot likes to forget that this can apply to any large company, and that includes IBM and Google.
No, it proves that sometimes even Slashdotters like to judge based on the actual circumstances and are capable of distinguishing grossly different situations.
Whereas the best some people can come up with is: "Yah, this is kinda like a different situation with completely different particulars that you were against, yet you are supportive here, therefore you're a hypocrite."
Yeah, only if you deliberately fail to distinguish.
Yeah, except she didn't have any First Law, and probably knew full well the mental anguish she was causing. I think that's a different First Law for relationships, sorta the inverse of the robotic one.:)
So the rudder is disabled, but the toilets are still working? I'm sure the sailors were very happy about that. They couldn't carry out their mission anymore, but they could shit to their heart's content.
I bet they were pretty happy that the guns still worked! I bet they would have been pretty fucking pissed to find out that someone thought it was okay to have rudder failure directly cause gun failure! In the end, the good design of the Bismark didn't save them, but in slightly different circumstances it could have. Again, I bet they were grateful for what they had.
Besides, that isn't the point. The problem we want to avoid is having the rudder disabled because the toilets stopped working.
Extra, unecessary failure modes are bad. Minor failures -- like toilets stopping, or an application dividing by zero -- cascading into major failures -- like the rudder being disabled, or the entire ship's computer system shutting down making it dead in the water -- is bad.
It's a simple concept. Let me repeat it: Minor failures cascading into major failures is bad. Major failures cascading into other major failures is bad.
The intellectual prowess around here never ceases to amaze. Perhaps you could blame "Batman" up there for (incorrectly) picking on the wrong analogy, but that's his problem, not mine.
The analogy is fine, you're just missing the extremely simple point which is a basic principle of sound design. That's not really a problem, per say, so long as you never actually try to design anything on which other peoples' lives depend. So please don't.
Seriously, go get a job in civil engineering, so I can cheer when you are inevitably incarcerated . "Well, I figured that the bridge would be destroyed by a magnitude 9 quake, so constructing it such that a single poorly machined bolt would result in the systematic collapse of the whole bridge was okay!"
"Robobuddy, go fetch me a beer. And could you pour it into one of the mugs in the freezer?" "I'm sorry Sir, the First Law forbids me from harming a human, and alcohol is known to destroy brain cells and cause liver damage." "Damn you, worthless piece of junk, can't even fetch a beer. Fine, I'll get it mysel--AAAGH! Holy hell! Why'd you punch me?!" "I'm sorry, Sir, the First Law forbids me to allow through inaction a human to be harmed, even if the harm is self-inflicted." "But you fucking punched me! That violates the First Law doesn't it!" "I'm sorry, Sir, but the long term harm of your life of alcohol consumption outweighed the short term harm of preventing you from reaching the fridge. My circuits register deep regret that the action was necessary." "Whatever, roboasshole. Can you at least grab me a Coke?" "I'm sorry, Sir, but the First Law forbids me from harming a human, and high fructose corn syrup is a known cause of diabetes." "I suppose that a meat lovers pizza with extra cheese is right out, then, too." "Yes Sir. Sorry Sir. Also don't think you can sneak out to the pub without me knowing, Sir." "Oh god, I'm in hell..."
Yeah, it does sound like pretty much what we've been hearing since the final vision for the Wii was made plain many months ago.
Unfortunately, saying fluffy feel-good but largely meaningless and regurgitated things is what being in Miyamoto's position is all about. If he was still just a designer, he would have probably been free to talk about more interesting things. It's too bad, since it means Nintendo's most widely recognized "personality" and of course phenomenal designer is not the best person to have speaking at an event like this.
Actually I was a die hard Nintendo guy. I dispised Sonic and played every FF/Dragon quest/megaman game I could get my hands on.
Same here (except I loved Sonic), but like you I was able to see Nintendo's maniacal behavior. Yet like Viewsonic said, they have changed. They were abused badly during the 90s, and being knocked from their pedestal resulted in them finding humility. They emerged a smarter, kinder, but of course still business-oriented company. A similar thing happened to IBM, turning them from Big Blue, the Evil Empire of computing long before anyone had heard of Bill Gates, into the open-source-loving free-patent-licensing company they are today.
I've often wondered what would happen if the MS monopoly really broke and the company went through a decade of hard times. They aren't complete idiots... without their "control at all costs" mentality they might actually be a pretty damn good software company.
Yet I think Sony is next up for a dose of humility. It does appear that a large part of their PS3 business plan was "people will buy it because we're Sony" and they're being proven wrong. Unless things get really bad I doubt this will cause some fundamental paradigm shift in Sony, but maybe at least their games division will get knocked down a peg and enter the next generation with vision unclouded by their own success.
Yeah, because Halo and Resistance are real ground-breakers having single-handedly created the shoot-at-aliens genre, while Pikmin is the same ol' raise-a-small-army-of-vegetable-creatures-and-hurl -them-at-giant-monsters rehash I've been playing since the SNES, and don't get me started on how many move-common-objects-with-gravity-beam-to-find-hidd en-creatures games I've played.
Yes, there are lots of mini-game collections for the Wii. Just like for the DS. And similarly to the DS, it's a new challenge for developers, so they go slowly at first. It isn't surprising that we see a lot of mini games as they try to figure out the controller and what works and what doesn't. When they try to jump off the deep end too quickly, we get Red Steel. Over time, you should see more creative and full-fledged games based on the early learning, just like we've seen for the DS. That doesn't help the current selection of Wii games, to be sure, but it does suggest that his fear that no creative, artistic games are going to come to the Wii is unfounded.
P.S. It isn't clear to me that you couldn't call Spore a mini game collection, but that doesn't lessen my interest in the game.
Re:Yeah, I've tried, but thats not the question.
on
NASA Fires Astronaut
·
· Score: 1
While she may be completely nuts, she should be very smart. They don't employ monkeys in space missions since the 50s.
Right, because the the obvious thing I forgot to mention that makes this kinda, you know, weird: She's an astronoaut!
Which ties in to the diaper thing. Again, weird.
Re:Yeah, I've tried, but thats not the question.
on
NASA Fires Astronaut
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Because any human with a heart can at least understand the jealous lover who decides to take out the competition even if we'd never actually do it. That's a story as ancient as mankind, something which outside of the immediacy is completely banal.
The diapers are what make it weird.
Of course the rest bothers lots of people, it just doesn't make you stop and go "huh?" like hearing she drove cross country wearing diapers does.
10 minutes to take a leak is ridiculous. 10 minutes overall for the entire stop is pretty much the bare minimum. From the time you pull onto the exit ramp, navigate the side roads to get to the gas station, park, get out, find the bathroom, wait for the key if necessary, wait for the room to be empty if necessary, do your business, get back to your car, drive back to the on-ramp, and get back up to highway speed, yeah, 10 minutes easy.
In completely ideal cases -- the gas station is immediately at the end of the ramp, no traffic or traffic lights, the bathroom doesn't require a key, and there's nobody using it -- then yeah getting out in less than ten minutes is possible. In my experience it rarely is ideal, and yes I measured the time of my stops because I was trying to determine my overall speed.
I will also bring up once again that this is a woman we are talking about, meaning a minimum 2x factor on required time in the rest room.
I've taken a few cross-country driving trips in the 2,000 mile range, taking a 2-3 days to do it. In my '87 Tercel with all my posessions in the back I got around 35 mpg, with my range being about 350 miles. That means about 5-6 hours of continuous driving.
Now I wouldn't stop except to refuel, except for once when it was simply too painful to keep driving. Women, in my experience, tend to need to go to the bathroom more often than once every 6 hours. Since every unecessary stop puts a severe ding in your average velocity, I could easily see wanting to do something to make the extra stops unecessary.
No, the arguments are not the same between laptops and desktops, because a laptop and desktop occupy fundamentally different form factors categories. A laptop is portable, a desktop isn't. Fundamental difference. This is more like laptop vs notebook.
There are basically 4 broad categories of form factor based around the effort involved in carrying them, which I will call Pocket, Portable, Luggable, and Immoveable.
Pocket is your cell phone, your pda, your blackberry. They fit in your pocket, so they're easy to take anywhere. Portable is too big to fit in your pocket, but small enough to fit easily in your carry-on bag or backpack. Luggable is like the old style "portable" computer, a big-ass destkop with a built in keyboard and a handle. Designed to be moved around, but not something you'll take on an airplane. For this reason you rarely see it anymore, though you could say that some of the bigger "desktop replacement" machines fall in this category. Immoveable is a system not designed to be moved, your PC with a separate keyboard, mouse, monitor, and a mess of cords connecting them.
This device falls squarely in the Portable category. It's too big to fit in your pocket, so you're going to have to have a bag to carry it in. If you're sticking it in your backpack or briefcase, then an ultrathin notebook is going to fit better than a taller but narrower device, and give you more screen/keyboard real estate.
That's what the argument is. Laptop vs desktop is something portable vs something not. This device is not a signficant change in portability over a notebook. Just like there are different form factors within the broad category of "portable", there may be room for this new form factor in the portable regime. But it doesn't appear to offer any advantage in portability over other ultra-portables, while making a screen and keyboard size sacrifice more similar to that made for Pocket devices. Thus this is an odd and ungainly choice of form factor, not suited well to either of the categories it straddles.
As you've said, the price of an item is what the market will bear. And since there is a market, the price goes up. Another reason for the price of those rare items going up is simply that they can't be multiplied. There's one. If you have it, you have the only one in existance. And as long as the economy does not collapse, its value will at the worst stay the same, and given some luck it goes up. In other words, if nothing else, it's a good investment.
I agree with you that certain items, especially unique ones, have more value than you would consider just from the object itself. Sometimes extreme value. However, I don't think it's safe to say that this is a good investment.
The price here was determined by auction. That means that there was one person who thought it was worth $100k, and nobody thought it was worth any more than that. That's what it means to win an auction -- you were willing to pay more than anyone else. I of course don't know the bidding history, but imagine something like the price rises quickly to $20k with multiple bidders, but after that there's only two bidders engaged in a bidding war driving up the price. This would mean that there's only one other person who thought the item was valued even close to $100k, and that may have only been in the excitement of the auction. You can't count on them being around or still wanting the cloak in ten years, either.
My point is that you can't say that auction price == market price. The distinction is irrelevent if you're the seller since getting one guy to pay $100k is good enough, but if you're trying to determine what the ROI of buying the cloak would be then it is important. You can only get an idea of the 'market price' of an item from auctions if there are lots of auctions. Look at a few hundred Ebay auctions for PS3 and you will get an idea for what the market will bear. Look at a single Ebay auction, and you only get an idea of what one person will bear, and they might be an idiot who will be dead from drinking lead paint by the time you try to sell your "investment" for profit.
Personally I see the popularity of Star Wars as waning. Not dead (netcraft hasn't confirmed it) or anything like that, just that the peak was sometime in the past and in the future you're going to be more and more hard pressed to find people who think a Jedi's cloak is worth $100k, much less more than $100k. It will probably retain some value, but if it was purchased with the intent of it being an investment then I think it was an ill-conceived idea.
"Star. Star. Star. Damnit, star. Star. God this sucks. Star. Star. Space ship. Star. Star. Star. God nothing but fucking stars! Fuck hubble, useless piece of shit!"
I had never heard of it before, but based on the WP entry on the subject, I'm guessing that the term "happy slapping" is similar to "pretexting": A term invented by the perpetrators of the crime to make it seem less criminal. Then the idiot media picks up and happily repeats the terms until they become common parlance.
I always figured it was because there is an expectation by the person on the other end of the phone that they have your full attention, and thus you are more likely to give it to them. Whereas a person in the car with you is also aware of your driving situation, and thus isn't going to get upset and start going "Hello? Hello?!" if you don't respond for a few seconds because you're navigating some hazard on the road. Exactly the opposite -- the person in the car with you has just as much stake in your safe driving as you do, and is going to want you to pay attention to the road instead of your conversation.
Uh, the mass of an object determines the gravity experienced by other objects, not itself. Also as the other poster noted, while the force increases with mass, the acceleration remains the same. Thus the earth will accelerate two objects towards itself with the same acceleration, regardless of the mass of those two bodies.
However the object you are dropping will similarly have a gravitational pull on the earth and will pull the earth towards it. In theory, if you dropped two objects on opposite sides of the earth with a substantial mass difference, you would see the heavier one fall faster because it pulled the earth towards it more than its lighter counterpart.
So Galileo was completely correct in that two objects experience the same gravitational acceleration regardless of their mass. The thing he didn't know about -- that all matter has gravity and thus the dropped objects would affect the earth -- was something he didn't cover and which you would be hard pressed to ever demonstrate anyway.:)
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand... I AM that guy.
Oh, my bad! Sorry about the fire thing, I was just kidding. Oh, and you should probably see a doctor.
If people don't want to see my penis... they should tell me ahead of time.
It's not so much seeing it, but the blatant false advertising that it is "nice" and "clean" and "not pock-marked with oozing sores". Uh... wait... no, the false advertising has nothing to do with it.
Look you leave my persona life out of this!
;)
:)
Hey, don't feel bad, I hate that guy too. Next time I'm going to tell him that I just love things that are on fire. Should be good for a laugh.
I see what you mean... but I think your analogy stretches it a bit.
True, true. There's no problem with the PS3 that is fundamentally uncureable... So okay, say you love ice-cream but you hate gonorrhea-infected cock...
That's what I've always found weird.
Slashdot appears to hate the PS3 and love Linux... yet which console runs Linux out of the box as a freaking menu option?
Why is that weird?
Let's say that you love ice cream but you hate herpes-sore covered cock. Some dude shows you his herpes-covered cock, but it's also smeared with delicious ice cream. "Hey man, I thought you loved ice cream, you weirdo!" he says as you run screaming.
Well if it does what is purported, then it still covers what is a roughly 2nd or 3rd year curriculum for a computer engineering degree program. Even given that it may not do as good a job of presenting the material as an actual course, that's not bad for a layman's book, and it's cheaper than Hennessy and Patterson.
/. some good if more people had some knowledge on these topics not derived from Tom's Hardware. And certainly it would do nothing to change the number of people pretending to be computer experts on /., since most of those do so without having ever read a computer book to begin with.
Frankly I think it would do the quality of CPU discussion on
And, to go on a geeky utopianist side-track for a second, it would be fantastic if the resources available to amateurs regarding computer architecture was comparable to those available to amateur programmers. That's been one thing I always liked about programming, the ability to self-teach and test out what you've learned. Now if only FPGAs were cheaper and simpler to get so people could use this knowledge. I've looked an it's possible to get dev boards, I just mean something like you walk into Fry's and buy a Xylinx board with dev tools for your PC and a book on architecture, then go home and code yourself up an Alpha.
I think you're exactly right. This has been an issue for Nintendo consoles, where the strength of the 1st party titles can disuade 3rd party developers. If you develop an action/adventure game for a Nintendo console, you are at best going to be the action/adventure game someone buys after they buy Zelda. It's sort of like basketball in the 1992 Olympics -- everyone who wasn't the Dream Team was competing for 2nd place.
Your +5 Insightful proves, it seems, that Slashdot likes to forget that this can apply to any large company, and that includes IBM and Google.
No, it proves that sometimes even Slashdotters like to judge based on the actual circumstances and are capable of distinguishing grossly different situations.
Whereas the best some people can come up with is: "Yah, this is kinda like a different situation with completely different particulars that you were against, yet you are supportive here, therefore you're a hypocrite."
Yeah, only if you deliberately fail to distinguish.
Yeah, except she didn't have any First Law, and probably knew full well the mental anguish she was causing. I think that's a different First Law for relationships, sorta the inverse of the robotic one. :)
So the rudder is disabled, but the toilets are still working? I'm sure the sailors were very happy about that. They couldn't carry out their mission anymore, but they could shit to their heart's content.
I bet they were pretty happy that the guns still worked! I bet they would have been pretty fucking pissed to find out that someone thought it was okay to have rudder failure directly cause gun failure! In the end, the good design of the Bismark didn't save them, but in slightly different circumstances it could have. Again, I bet they were grateful for what they had.
Besides, that isn't the point. The problem we want to avoid is having the rudder disabled because the toilets stopped working.
Extra, unecessary failure modes are bad. Minor failures -- like toilets stopping, or an application dividing by zero -- cascading into major failures -- like the rudder being disabled, or the entire ship's computer system shutting down making it dead in the water -- is bad.
It's a simple concept. Let me repeat it: Minor failures cascading into major failures is bad. Major failures cascading into other major failures is bad.
The intellectual prowess around here never ceases to amaze. Perhaps you could blame "Batman" up there for (incorrectly) picking on the wrong analogy, but that's his problem, not mine.
The analogy is fine, you're just missing the extremely simple point which is a basic principle of sound design. That's not really a problem, per say, so long as you never actually try to design anything on which other peoples' lives depend. So please don't.
Seriously, go get a job in civil engineering, so I can cheer when you are inevitably incarcerated . "Well, I figured that the bridge would be destroyed by a magnitude 9 quake, so constructing it such that a single poorly machined bolt would result in the systematic collapse of the whole bridge was okay!"
Hey, it's a *much* more convincing reason for Will Smith to mistrust robots.
"Robobuddy, go fetch me a beer. And could you pour it into one of the mugs in the freezer?"
"I'm sorry Sir, the First Law forbids me from harming a human, and alcohol is known to destroy brain cells and cause liver damage."
"Damn you, worthless piece of junk, can't even fetch a beer. Fine, I'll get it mysel--AAAGH! Holy hell! Why'd you punch me?!"
"I'm sorry, Sir, the First Law forbids me to allow through inaction a human to be harmed, even if the harm is self-inflicted."
"But you fucking punched me! That violates the First Law doesn't it!"
"I'm sorry, Sir, but the long term harm of your life of alcohol consumption outweighed the short term harm of preventing you from reaching the fridge. My circuits register deep regret that the action was necessary."
"Whatever, roboasshole. Can you at least grab me a Coke?"
"I'm sorry, Sir, but the First Law forbids me from harming a human, and high fructose corn syrup is a known cause of diabetes."
"I suppose that a meat lovers pizza with extra cheese is right out, then, too."
"Yes Sir. Sorry Sir. Also don't think you can sneak out to the pub without me knowing, Sir."
"Oh god, I'm in hell..."
Open your eyes then dude,
You should have told him to put the crack down! Geddit?
Yeah, it does sound like pretty much what we've been hearing since the final vision for the Wii was made plain many months ago.
Unfortunately, saying fluffy feel-good but largely meaningless and regurgitated things is what being in Miyamoto's position is all about. If he was still just a designer, he would have probably been free to talk about more interesting things. It's too bad, since it means Nintendo's most widely recognized "personality" and of course phenomenal designer is not the best person to have speaking at an event like this.
Oh well. Nothing to see here, move along.
Actually I was a die hard Nintendo guy. I dispised Sonic and played every FF/Dragon quest/megaman game I could get my hands on.
Same here (except I loved Sonic), but like you I was able to see Nintendo's maniacal behavior. Yet like Viewsonic said, they have changed. They were abused badly during the 90s, and being knocked from their pedestal resulted in them finding humility. They emerged a smarter, kinder, but of course still business-oriented company. A similar thing happened to IBM, turning them from Big Blue, the Evil Empire of computing long before anyone had heard of Bill Gates, into the open-source-loving free-patent-licensing company they are today.
I've often wondered what would happen if the MS monopoly really broke and the company went through a decade of hard times. They aren't complete idiots... without their "control at all costs" mentality they might actually be a pretty damn good software company.
Yet I think Sony is next up for a dose of humility. It does appear that a large part of their PS3 business plan was "people will buy it because we're Sony" and they're being proven wrong. Unless things get really bad I doubt this will cause some fundamental paradigm shift in Sony, but maybe at least their games division will get knocked down a peg and enter the next generation with vision unclouded by their own success.
Yeah, because Halo and Resistance are real ground-breakers having single-handedly created the shoot-at-aliens genre, while Pikmin is the same ol' raise-a-small-army-of-vegetable-creatures-and-hurl -them-at-giant-monsters rehash I've been playing since the SNES, and don't get me started on how many move-common-objects-with-gravity-beam-to-find-hidd en-creatures games I've played.
Yes, there are lots of mini-game collections for the Wii. Just like for the DS. And similarly to the DS, it's a new challenge for developers, so they go slowly at first. It isn't surprising that we see a lot of mini games as they try to figure out the controller and what works and what doesn't. When they try to jump off the deep end too quickly, we get Red Steel. Over time, you should see more creative and full-fledged games based on the early learning, just like we've seen for the DS. That doesn't help the current selection of Wii games, to be sure, but it does suggest that his fear that no creative, artistic games are going to come to the Wii is unfounded.
P.S. It isn't clear to me that you couldn't call Spore a mini game collection, but that doesn't lessen my interest in the game.
While she may be completely nuts, she should be very smart. They don't employ monkeys in space missions since the 50s.
Right, because the the obvious thing I forgot to mention that makes this kinda, you know, weird: She's an astronoaut!
Which ties in to the diaper thing. Again, weird.
Because any human with a heart can at least understand the jealous lover who decides to take out the competition even if we'd never actually do it. That's a story as ancient as mankind, something which outside of the immediacy is completely banal.
The diapers are what make it weird.
Of course the rest bothers lots of people, it just doesn't make you stop and go "huh?" like hearing she drove cross country wearing diapers does.
10 minutes to take a leak is ridiculous. 10 minutes overall for the entire stop is pretty much the bare minimum. From the time you pull onto the exit ramp, navigate the side roads to get to the gas station, park, get out, find the bathroom, wait for the key if necessary, wait for the room to be empty if necessary, do your business, get back to your car, drive back to the on-ramp, and get back up to highway speed, yeah, 10 minutes easy.
In completely ideal cases -- the gas station is immediately at the end of the ramp, no traffic or traffic lights, the bathroom doesn't require a key, and there's nobody using it -- then yeah getting out in less than ten minutes is possible. In my experience it rarely is ideal, and yes I measured the time of my stops because I was trying to determine my overall speed.
I will also bring up once again that this is a woman we are talking about, meaning a minimum 2x factor on required time in the rest room.
I've taken a few cross-country driving trips in the 2,000 mile range, taking a 2-3 days to do it. In my '87 Tercel with all my posessions in the back I got around 35 mpg, with my range being about 350 miles. That means about 5-6 hours of continuous driving.
Now I wouldn't stop except to refuel, except for once when it was simply too painful to keep driving. Women, in my experience, tend to need to go to the bathroom more often than once every 6 hours. Since every unecessary stop puts a severe ding in your average velocity, I could easily see wanting to do something to make the extra stops unecessary.
Actually doing it is kinda nuts, though.
Yeah, and I thought of the iMac too after I posted. They don't really advertise this aspect of the products, but they do exist and have their place.
No, the arguments are not the same between laptops and desktops, because a laptop and desktop occupy fundamentally different form factors categories. A laptop is portable, a desktop isn't. Fundamental difference. This is more like laptop vs notebook.
There are basically 4 broad categories of form factor based around the effort involved in carrying them, which I will call Pocket, Portable, Luggable, and Immoveable.
Pocket is your cell phone, your pda, your blackberry. They fit in your pocket, so they're easy to take anywhere.
Portable is too big to fit in your pocket, but small enough to fit easily in your carry-on bag or backpack.
Luggable is like the old style "portable" computer, a big-ass destkop with a built in keyboard and a handle. Designed to be moved around, but not something you'll take on an airplane. For this reason you rarely see it anymore, though you could say that some of the bigger "desktop replacement" machines fall in this category.
Immoveable is a system not designed to be moved, your PC with a separate keyboard, mouse, monitor, and a mess of cords connecting them.
This device falls squarely in the Portable category. It's too big to fit in your pocket, so you're going to have to have a bag to carry it in. If you're sticking it in your backpack or briefcase, then an ultrathin notebook is going to fit better than a taller but narrower device, and give you more screen/keyboard real estate.
That's what the argument is. Laptop vs desktop is something portable vs something not. This device is not a signficant change in portability over a notebook. Just like there are different form factors within the broad category of "portable", there may be room for this new form factor in the portable regime. But it doesn't appear to offer any advantage in portability over other ultra-portables, while making a screen and keyboard size sacrifice more similar to that made for Pocket devices. Thus this is an odd and ungainly choice of form factor, not suited well to either of the categories it straddles.
As you've said, the price of an item is what the market will bear. And since there is a market, the price goes up. Another reason for the price of those rare items going up is simply that they can't be multiplied. There's one. If you have it, you have the only one in existance. And as long as the economy does not collapse, its value will at the worst stay the same, and given some luck it goes up. In other words, if nothing else, it's a good investment.
I agree with you that certain items, especially unique ones, have more value than you would consider just from the object itself. Sometimes extreme value. However, I don't think it's safe to say that this is a good investment.
The price here was determined by auction. That means that there was one person who thought it was worth $100k, and nobody thought it was worth any more than that. That's what it means to win an auction -- you were willing to pay more than anyone else. I of course don't know the bidding history, but imagine something like the price rises quickly to $20k with multiple bidders, but after that there's only two bidders engaged in a bidding war driving up the price. This would mean that there's only one other person who thought the item was valued even close to $100k, and that may have only been in the excitement of the auction. You can't count on them being around or still wanting the cloak in ten years, either.
My point is that you can't say that auction price == market price. The distinction is irrelevent if you're the seller since getting one guy to pay $100k is good enough, but if you're trying to determine what the ROI of buying the cloak would be then it is important. You can only get an idea of the 'market price' of an item from auctions if there are lots of auctions. Look at a few hundred Ebay auctions for PS3 and you will get an idea for what the market will bear. Look at a single Ebay auction, and you only get an idea of what one person will bear, and they might be an idiot who will be dead from drinking lead paint by the time you try to sell your "investment" for profit.
Personally I see the popularity of Star Wars as waning. Not dead (netcraft hasn't confirmed it) or anything like that, just that the peak was sometime in the past and in the future you're going to be more and more hard pressed to find people who think a Jedi's cloak is worth $100k, much less more than $100k. It will probably retain some value, but if it was purchased with the intent of it being an investment then I think it was an ill-conceived idea.
Don't get too complacent...
"Star. Star. Star. Damnit, star. Star. God this sucks. Star. Star. Space ship. Star. Star. Star. God nothing but fucking stars! Fuck hubble, useless piece of shit!"
I had never heard of it before, but based on the WP entry on the subject, I'm guessing that the term "happy slapping" is similar to "pretexting": A term invented by the perpetrators of the crime to make it seem less criminal. Then the idiot media picks up and happily repeats the terms until they become common parlance.
I always figured it was because there is an expectation by the person on the other end of the phone that they have your full attention, and thus you are more likely to give it to them. Whereas a person in the car with you is also aware of your driving situation, and thus isn't going to get upset and start going "Hello? Hello?!" if you don't respond for a few seconds because you're navigating some hazard on the road. Exactly the opposite -- the person in the car with you has just as much stake in your safe driving as you do, and is going to want you to pay attention to the road instead of your conversation.
Uh, the mass of an object determines the gravity experienced by other objects, not itself. Also as the other poster noted, while the force increases with mass, the acceleration remains the same. Thus the earth will accelerate two objects towards itself with the same acceleration, regardless of the mass of those two bodies.
:)
However the object you are dropping will similarly have a gravitational pull on the earth and will pull the earth towards it. In theory, if you dropped two objects on opposite sides of the earth with a substantial mass difference, you would see the heavier one fall faster because it pulled the earth towards it more than its lighter counterpart.
So Galileo was completely correct in that two objects experience the same gravitational acceleration regardless of their mass. The thing he didn't know about -- that all matter has gravity and thus the dropped objects would affect the earth -- was something he didn't cover and which you would be hard pressed to ever demonstrate anyway.