That's why the rich try to diversify their businesses in other countries. When they finally succeed in gutting the middle class in this country and the economy collapses, not only will their business still be profitable in other parts of the world but they themselves can safely move to a more economically stable country. Meanwhile their (literally) poor former workers are stuck in the country they ruined.
Well, the more logical reason to only allow companies from your own country to sell to the government is so that, should something happen, those companies are in the government's jurisdiction.
If, say, China discovered that Microsoft products did have a back door in them, what could China do to Microsoft other than stop buying their products? If something similar happened to the U.S. government, would it be better to have the company responsible on U.S. soil and thus punishable by U.S. authorities, or to have to cajole some other government into cooperating (and what if they won't)?
Nintendo certainly has a nicely spotted history of anti-competitive practices. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but now I have a whole new respect for my non-Nintendo-approved copy of Gauntlet.
But Nintendo has never shown any interest in dominating anything other than games. Sure, they'd love to be the Evil Overlords of Gaming again, but that's the limit of their ambition and that really isn't terribly threatening to me. Whereas both Sony and Microsoft want every single thing in your life that involves electronics or entertainment to go through them. Superiority in game consoles to them is just a means to an end. For Nintendo, that is the end.
So to me, we're talking completely different types of Evil.
I know it's a matter of taste, but I actually think the GC controller is its weak point. I do not like the button configuration. And I say that even ignoring the horrible Z button. Four equal-sized buttons would be easier to hit. As it is hitting anything but the A button is a chore. The Y button is far too difficult to reach over the giant A button for. And the button layout makes playing Soul Calibur with any proficiency extremely difficult.
I hope that for the Revolution they actually decide to go retro and steal ideas from the N64 controller... Or hell, just go with a Dual Shock like design, beceause It Works(tm).
Yeah, I agree with you, Nintendo isn't really in any trouble (if they continue executing well).
But the fact is that current hardware is nowhere close to the physiological limits of our eyes. First, nothing shown at 320x200 resolution is going to threaten the limits of our vision. Even if it was Uber-Hi-Def, we are still a long way from running into physical barriers. The FF Movie wasn't there by any stretch, and the only reason it looked as good as it did was that there was a director and animators making sure that every frame looked right.
Don't get me wrong; I'm one of the first guys to say that better graphics do not make a better game. I still play Nethack, for goodness sake. Pretty graphics are fine, but gameplay is king. We don't need better graphics. But to say we don't need better graphics because our eyes wouldn't be able to perceive it is wrong.
The Revolution doesn't need to be 100x better than the GC, but it should be better, and I hope it is. Graphics aren't everything, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Doubtful. Microcode patches are mostly useful for fixing bugs in the way instructions work. It could also turn on/off feature flags in the reset microcode. The problem here is shared data in the cache, which I don't think microcode could fix.
So there are many examples of corporations exploiting an unregulated market, and many examples of governments using regulation to exploit on behalf of corporations.
The best answer, then, is neither completely free markets or tight regulation. Regulation must exist to prevent what is essentially an imbalance of power from being abused. That regulation should be limited and considered. This is why things like conflict of interest are bad.
Unfortunately not enough rigor is given to finding that middle ground, because it is too easy for people to gravitate toward one extreme.
Off topic, but tangentially related: Austin, TX recently passed a city-wide smoking ban. On the news a couple nights later, the anchorwoman said: "With Austin's voter-approved smoking ban coming into effect soon, people are asking how it will be enforced."
Oh, I'm so glad they thought to ask about that tiny, niggling issue of enforcement after voting for it.
And you're right, enforcement is going to be a big issue here. How many spywhores are operating in Washington? How many are operating in the U.S.? When enforcement gets difficult, then enforcement gets selective. The question always is: who is going to do the selecting? That becomes the deciding factor in what the impact of the law will actually be. If it is Microsoft, woe be unto us.
Nope, never saw it. The camera man running the boom kept screwing up and we had to keep retaking. I was so sick of the damn thing by the time we were finished filming it that the last thing I wanted to do was watch it.
How would they feel if I came into their front room and took over the remote control?
The same way a Mafia racketeer would feel if you threatened to burn their house down if they didn't pay for your "fire insurance".
They aren't children; they know people hate what they do. As long as the annoying thing is happening to you for the profit of them, then they don't care, whether "they" are the Mafia or Gator or whoever.
And more importantly, tell the difference between man-made and mined diamonds. So far DeBeers has been able to do this with expensive equipment. Don't hold your breath that this can continue though.
The last I heard on this issue was that DeBeers wanted to mark each and every diamond they produced with a tiny laser etching of a unique ID so that any jewler could verify that the diamond was produced by an abusive cartel and their cruel labor practices.
I absolutely hope that they do this. As you might have guessed by the end of the last paragraph, I would very much like to make sure that I never, even by accident, purchase a diamond from DeBeers.
I'm imagining holding that thing, and it doesn't seem comfortable.
I miss the N64 controller. That was a joy to hold. Maybe it could have used a larger/better analog stick. But one of its best features was that the digital pad was a first-class input method, which you could use with equal comfort as the analog stick, instead of having to move your thumb away from its most comfortable position. Plus it was nicely balanced. I have fond memories of playing Waverace with the N64 controller in one hand and a beer in the other.
After that, the Dual Shock was a nice design, a standard for years to come. Xbox is a monstrosity, though the smaller version is an okay Dual Shock-patterned controller. The Gamecube controller is fine on the left side, but the poor second analog stick and the giant A button which makes the other buttons hard to hit make the right side a step backward -- N64 had six buttons in the same space, and they were easier to hit. The Dreamcast controller is pain in console-interface form, and should never be mentioned again.
Ah well. I guess if there is a point to this, it's that controller design is neither simple nor monotonically increasing in quality/ergonomics. Oh, and I want a bluetooth N64 controller.:)
If such people went into a company like Enron, they will not only cover up whatever seems wrong to them, they will lay the blame on the employee who reported the fraud when the company collapses and they lose their job.
How do you think Enron happened in the first place?
We like to think that ignoring dangerous/irresponsible/negligent/illegal activity is wrong and abnormal. But, as we can see, we teach our kids to do exactly that.
It's an unfortunate fact that kids are intelligent, and don't only learn what you want them to learn but instead learn what you actually teach them. In this case we're teaching them that sticking their necks out to fix a problem with the system will just get their heads chopped off.
Yeah you read it right, they'll discover that there is a gene that controls weather.
They've already discovered that gene. Turns out it is present in puppies, but gets disabled in adult dogs. So next time rain ruins your picnic, remember this and kick a puppy. Make sure to tell everyone that the rain is the puppy's fault, so they don't think you're kicking puppies for no reason. That'd be mean.
you can prove anything if you start out with a combination of ideal and resonable values, caluculate the answer, then say you just need one of your initial values to be 10 times bigger.
Except it doesn't, because you'd never have a laptop that burned 150W (talk about your burned crotch!). 15W, however, is quite reasonable for a thin-and-light laptop, particularly after however many years before tritium batteries become practical. There are plenty of devices today that use well under 15W, and being able to use these devices for ten years without a recharge looks pretty appealing.
Early Athlon 32 bit processors were low end 4 years ago.
It's true. I don't know what these idiots are thinking. It's one thing to disadvantage a product for market differentiation. XP Home vs Pro makes sense, even if the actual difference is arbitrary, because Home users aren't going to need server features. It's similar to the Athlon/Duron split. But this is as bad (or worse) than the original cacheless Celeron. Do they think their customers aren't going to realize that this product is crippled? Processors this (P.)O.S. won't run on can be had for about the same amount they're asking. I wouldn't be surprised if they raised the maximum specs due to lack of interest.
In the article, though, I heard this echo of Microsoft's worst nightmare: "In India, for instance, professor Jitendra Shah has translated a version of Linux and a number of applications into the regional languages of India to help villagers learn computing."
It's all about getting people to learn one thing -- your thing -- so they'll feel they can't go anywhere else. The brand loyalty of a huge learning population is at stake into the future. Microsoft still insists on being one of if not the most expensive components of a PC, of course. Which may also be something that doesn't last.
How do you know they're usability experts? Who's doing the vetting?
Simple. Usability Expert Experts, of course. They in turn are vetted by Expert Expert Experts, who are vetted by me in exchange for cash money or beer. The system is perfect.
Maybe they have standing orders to never actually shoot to kill, just in case a higher-up decides to let the perpetrator escape so they can be tracked back to their base?
According to Obi-Wan anyway. I wonder if Jedi get senile.
I think they just get sarcastic.
The shots he was pointing out were all up and down the side of that jawa crawler thing. By "accurate" he meant "can barely hit the side of a jawa crawler thing", and as usual was just jerking Luke's chain by making the Storm Troopers sound threatening.
Clearly, what is needed is spare parts for self-assembling robots which are capable of producing more spare parts from simpler materials, e.g. a robot leg that can make more robot legs for the robots to assemble into more robots. Those simpler materials also need self-replicating ability. Just keep recursing until you've got extremely simple parts making more of themselves from dirt. Bonus points for self-replicating dirt!
Although they are suppose to only use this for the one purpose, I would bet good money that they will go beyond just that purpose.
Good money? Yeah, and I would bet good money that the sun will rise tomorrow.
PATRIOT was only supposed to be used for terrorism, and a year after it was enacted we discovered that virtually all of the invocations of the Act had nothing to do with terrorism at all.
There is absolutely no speculation needed: law enforcement will go beyond the initial intent of a law granting them additional powers because they have whenever they could.
What I am saying is that they will abuse this. I cannot belive anyone in their right mind would ever even consider amending this to a bill.
Yes, it's absolutely nuts. How could anyone of any political stripe read "unlimited super-lawful powers for an appointed official" as a good thing?
Slashdot Mirror
That's why the rich try to diversify their businesses in other countries. When they finally succeed in gutting the middle class in this country and the economy collapses, not only will their business still be profitable in other parts of the world but they themselves can safely move to a more economically stable country. Meanwhile their (literally) poor former workers are stuck in the country they ruined.
Well, the more logical reason to only allow companies from your own country to sell to the government is so that, should something happen, those companies are in the government's jurisdiction.
If, say, China discovered that Microsoft products did have a back door in them, what could China do to Microsoft other than stop buying their products? If something similar happened to the U.S. government, would it be better to have the company responsible on U.S. soil and thus punishable by U.S. authorities, or to have to cajole some other government into cooperating (and what if they won't)?
Anti-competitive strategies? Yes. Market penetration? No.
Nintendo certainly has a nicely spotted history of anti-competitive practices. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but now I have a whole new respect for my non-Nintendo-approved copy of Gauntlet.
But Nintendo has never shown any interest in dominating anything other than games. Sure, they'd love to be the Evil Overlords of Gaming again, but that's the limit of their ambition and that really isn't terribly threatening to me. Whereas both Sony and Microsoft want every single thing in your life that involves electronics or entertainment to go through them. Superiority in game consoles to them is just a means to an end. For Nintendo, that is the end.
So to me, we're talking completely different types of Evil.
I know it's a matter of taste, but I actually think the GC controller is its weak point. I do not like the button configuration. And I say that even ignoring the horrible Z button. Four equal-sized buttons would be easier to hit. As it is hitting anything but the A button is a chore. The Y button is far too difficult to reach over the giant A button for. And the button layout makes playing Soul Calibur with any proficiency extremely difficult.
I hope that for the Revolution they actually decide to go retro and steal ideas from the N64 controller... Or hell, just go with a Dual Shock like design, beceause It Works(tm).
Yeah, I agree with you, Nintendo isn't really in any trouble (if they continue executing well).
But the fact is that current hardware is nowhere close to the physiological limits of our eyes. First, nothing shown at 320x200 resolution is going to threaten the limits of our vision. Even if it was Uber-Hi-Def, we are still a long way from running into physical barriers. The FF Movie wasn't there by any stretch, and the only reason it looked as good as it did was that there was a director and animators making sure that every frame looked right.
Don't get me wrong; I'm one of the first guys to say that better graphics do not make a better game. I still play Nethack, for goodness sake. Pretty graphics are fine, but gameplay is king. We don't need better graphics. But to say we don't need better graphics because our eyes wouldn't be able to perceive it is wrong.
The Revolution doesn't need to be 100x better than the GC, but it should be better, and I hope it is. Graphics aren't everything, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Most dictators have tweaked the kernels to suit their needs anyway, nothing stops them from implementing this in their own kernel version.
:)
Well my first question is did you agree with the phrasing wholeheartedly as you read it. The followup question is: are you a sysadmin?
Doubtful. Microcode patches are mostly useful for fixing bugs in the way instructions work. It could also turn on/off feature flags in the reset microcode. The problem here is shared data in the cache, which I don't think microcode could fix.
You're right, enforcing a smoking ban isn't as thorny an issue as enforcing this law will be. Mostly the line from the news just amused me.
So there are many examples of corporations exploiting an unregulated market, and many examples of governments using regulation to exploit on behalf of corporations.
The best answer, then, is neither completely free markets or tight regulation. Regulation must exist to prevent what is essentially an imbalance of power from being abused. That regulation should be limited and considered. This is why things like conflict of interest are bad.
Unfortunately not enough rigor is given to finding that middle ground, because it is too easy for people to gravitate toward one extreme.
Off topic, but tangentially related: Austin, TX recently passed a city-wide smoking ban. On the news a couple nights later, the anchorwoman said: "With Austin's voter-approved smoking ban coming into effect soon, people are asking how it will be enforced."
Oh, I'm so glad they thought to ask about that tiny, niggling issue of enforcement after voting for it.
And you're right, enforcement is going to be a big issue here. How many spywhores are operating in Washington? How many are operating in the U.S.? When enforcement gets difficult, then enforcement gets selective. The question always is: who is going to do the selecting? That becomes the deciding factor in what the impact of the law will actually be. If it is Microsoft, woe be unto us.
Nope, never saw it. The camera man running the boom kept screwing up and we had to keep retaking. I was so sick of the damn thing by the time we were finished filming it that the last thing I wanted to do was watch it.
How would they feel if I came into their front room and took over the remote control?
The same way a Mafia racketeer would feel if you threatened to burn their house down if they didn't pay for your "fire insurance".
They aren't children; they know people hate what they do. As long as the annoying thing is happening to you for the profit of them, then they don't care, whether "they" are the Mafia or Gator or whoever.
And more importantly, tell the difference between man-made and mined diamonds. So far DeBeers has been able to do this with expensive equipment. Don't hold your breath that this can continue though.
The last I heard on this issue was that DeBeers wanted to mark each and every diamond they produced with a tiny laser etching of a unique ID so that any jewler could verify that the diamond was produced by an abusive cartel and their cruel labor practices.
I absolutely hope that they do this. As you might have guessed by the end of the last paragraph, I would very much like to make sure that I never, even by accident, purchase a diamond from DeBeers.
So was South Park.
I'm imagining holding that thing, and it doesn't seem comfortable.
:)
I miss the N64 controller. That was a joy to hold. Maybe it could have used a larger/better analog stick. But one of its best features was that the digital pad was a first-class input method, which you could use with equal comfort as the analog stick, instead of having to move your thumb away from its most comfortable position. Plus it was nicely balanced. I have fond memories of playing Waverace with the N64 controller in one hand and a beer in the other.
After that, the Dual Shock was a nice design, a standard for years to come. Xbox is a monstrosity, though the smaller version is an okay Dual Shock-patterned controller. The Gamecube controller is fine on the left side, but the poor second analog stick and the giant A button which makes the other buttons hard to hit make the right side a step backward -- N64 had six buttons in the same space, and they were easier to hit. The Dreamcast controller is pain in console-interface form, and should never be mentioned again.
Ah well. I guess if there is a point to this, it's that controller design is neither simple nor monotonically increasing in quality/ergonomics. Oh, and I want a bluetooth N64 controller.
If such people went into a company like Enron, they will not only cover up whatever seems wrong to them, they will lay the blame on the employee who reported the fraud when the company collapses and they lose their job.
How do you think Enron happened in the first place?
We like to think that ignoring dangerous/irresponsible/negligent/illegal activity is wrong and abnormal. But, as we can see, we teach our kids to do exactly that.
It's an unfortunate fact that kids are intelligent, and don't only learn what you want them to learn but instead learn what you actually teach them. In this case we're teaching them that sticking their necks out to fix a problem with the system will just get their heads chopped off.
I wonder if these kids learned their lesson?
Yeah you read it right, they'll discover that there is a gene that controls weather.
They've already discovered that gene. Turns out it is present in puppies, but gets disabled in adult dogs. So next time rain ruins your picnic, remember this and kick a puppy. Make sure to tell everyone that the rain is the puppy's fault, so they don't think you're kicking puppies for no reason. That'd be mean.
you can prove anything if you start out with a combination of ideal and resonable values, caluculate the answer, then say you just need one of your initial values to be 10 times bigger.
Except it doesn't, because you'd never have a laptop that burned 150W (talk about your burned crotch!). 15W, however, is quite reasonable for a thin-and-light laptop, particularly after however many years before tritium batteries become practical. There are plenty of devices today that use well under 15W, and being able to use these devices for ten years without a recharge looks pretty appealing.
Early Athlon 32 bit processors were low end 4 years ago.
It's true. I don't know what these idiots are thinking. It's one thing to disadvantage a product for market differentiation. XP Home vs Pro makes sense, even if the actual difference is arbitrary, because Home users aren't going to need server features. It's similar to the Athlon/Duron split. But this is as bad (or worse) than the original cacheless Celeron. Do they think their customers aren't going to realize that this product is crippled? Processors this (P.)O.S. won't run on can be had for about the same amount they're asking. I wouldn't be surprised if they raised the maximum specs due to lack of interest.
In the article, though, I heard this echo of Microsoft's worst nightmare: "In India, for instance, professor Jitendra Shah has translated a version of Linux and a number of applications into the regional languages of India to help villagers learn computing."
It's all about getting people to learn one thing -- your thing -- so they'll feel they can't go anywhere else. The brand loyalty of a huge learning population is at stake into the future. Microsoft still insists on being one of if not the most expensive components of a PC, of course. Which may also be something that doesn't last.
How do you know they're usability experts? Who's doing the vetting?
Simple. Usability Expert Experts, of course. They in turn are vetted by Expert Expert Experts, who are vetted by me in exchange for cash money or beer. The system is perfect.
Maybe they have standing orders to never actually shoot to kill, just in case a higher-up decides to let the perpetrator escape so they can be tracked back to their base?
According to Obi-Wan anyway. I wonder if Jedi get senile.
I think they just get sarcastic.
The shots he was pointing out were all up and down the side of that jawa crawler thing. By "accurate" he meant "can barely hit the side of a jawa crawler thing", and as usual was just jerking Luke's chain by making the Storm Troopers sound threatening.
Clearly, what is needed is spare parts for self-assembling robots which are capable of producing more spare parts from simpler materials, e.g. a robot leg that can make more robot legs for the robots to assemble into more robots. Those simpler materials also need self-replicating ability. Just keep recursing until you've got extremely simple parts making more of themselves from dirt. Bonus points for self-replicating dirt!
See? I'm so upset over the whole thing I couldn't even remember to hit Preview!
Although they are suppose to only use this for the one purpose, I would bet good money that they will go beyond just that purpose.
Good money? Yeah, and I would bet good money that the sun will rise tomorrow.
PATRIOT was only supposed to be used for terrorism, and a year after it was enacted we discovered that virtually all of the invocations of the Act had nothing to do with terrorism at all.
There is absolutely no speculation needed: law enforcement will go beyond the initial intent of a law granting them additional powers because they have whenever they could.
What I am saying is that they will abuse this. I cannot belive anyone in their right mind would ever even consider amending this to a bill.
Yes, it's absolutely nuts. How could anyone of any political stripe read "unlimited super-lawful powers for an appointed official" as a good thing?