Weather-industry companies were promoting the idea that the government restrict special interests that have the ability to pay for the data -- like Major League Baseball teams or citrus growers -- from acquiring it for free, [Barry Myers, Exec VP of AccuWeather] said.
But isn't fair and equal access to information something the government *should be* supporting? Who cares if MLB or the citrus industry get weather info for free? If, as a side effect of providing weather info to the general public, MLB is able to improve their entertainment value and US citrus farmers are able to improve their crop, isn't that a bonus? It's virtually impossible to subsidize industry in this WTO day and age, so indirect (and free!) benefits like this are a good thing.
I've noticed this as well. I can play (maybe for an hour, depending on the game) a FPS, but if I watch a friend play, after five minutes I need to go lie down. It's especially like a swift kick to the semicircular canals anytime I expect him to turn, say, to the right, and he does a 180 to the left. HUUURK!
Not sure what it is - maybe that the rate of movement and therefore optic flow is much less - but in MMOGs with first-person perspective I almost never have issues with motion sickness.
and those based on drivers modelization (ie, x % of 'aggressive drivers', y % of 'sloppy drivers', z % of 'careful drivers' etc) become incresingly complex and demanding with the scale of the simulation...
What does this mean, "increasingly complex and demanding"? You mean computationally complex? There's so much computing power available now that it doesn't matter.
More likely, the reason that any particular traffic control system isn't adopted by a city is because traffic control systems cost money, and the cities where such systems would be effective are of such a large scale that the cost would be enormous.
a large number of sequences will be shot purely in "first-person" perspective of the leading character
In other news, sales of vomit bags jumped markedly as theater owners began placing large advance orders in preparation for an upcoming movie based on the Doom computer game franchise.
Well, it's the first time since the game went live that Blizzard has taken some action regarding cheaters, for one thing. As popular as WoW is (far more than EQ2, from what I understand), the stance Blizzard takes on cheaters is actually important to a significant portion of the game community. For another thing, the article indicates that speed hacks are already being used in WoW.
Now, six months down the road, if Blizzard is still banning people for cheating, then it's probably not worthy of another/. post.
Of course, considering that new developments don't actually have to occur for a story to be revisited on/.....
TNT does this with their back-to-back Law & Order reruns, but they do it even *more*. They compress the closing credits of one episode while the next episode is starting.
But what really pisses me off is this whole "we have to advertise our shows *during* your shows" crap. There are hardly any channels left that don't put some monstrously huge ad for their crappy shows you don't want to watch right over top of your show. And half of those have sound effects to boot, making it impossible to understand the interrupted dialogue in the actual show.
I'd much rather just see a can of Coke cleverly placed within a scene in a show instead of finding out that SEX AND THE CITY IS ON WHENEVER *beep beep moan gasp beep*.
Well, another possibility is that the people doing the exit polling have a political agenda (specifically, they wanted to see Kerry in and Bush out) and so they either cherry-picked the precincts for exit polling or managed to get at least some precinct exit polls slanted in their preferred direction through poor methodology.
I don't get why there's such a comparative reluctance to believe actual election results, which at least have some safeguards in place to reduce the inaccuracy of the result; and at the same time people are willing to accept exit polls as gospel truth despite the complete lack of accuracy safeguards. Occam's Razor and all that. Yes, great care must be taken in determining actual election results, but that care must be applied without reference to outside sources of bias (such as exit polls).
From this year's election exit poll results, there were suggestions that conservative-leaning people may be far less likely to share their votes with exit pollsters than liberal-leaning people. If this is in fact true, the various exit polls likely underrepresented many Republican candidates. Exit polls should never be used as a substitute for having a secure, monitored, verifiable election system, and politicizing the issue by making claims against one particular candidate only stands in the way of getting our political leaders to support the election system we need.
And if they can verify that a script kiddy A downloaded nmap in their window of interest, what are they going to do? Assume they're responsible for the wrong crime and charge him or her. It's stupid and its a witchhunt and it's a shot in the dark.
Hmm, kind of like asking an eyewitness to give a description of a perp. It doesn't give a unique identifier of the person, and the description may even be wrong. But any reasonable person agrees that eyewitness descriptions are a very useful investigative resource.
Believe it or not, the cops generally don't go around arresting and charging everybody they see who matches a description, regardless of what the police-hating tin-foil-hat-wearing contingent on/. will tell you. What they *will* do is use that information to try to turn up other leads - getting a composite sketch, canvassing the local area to see if anybody knows the person or if he frequents the area, etc.
The same principle applies here - finding out this access information is part of investigating a crime and building a case. It doesn't make the case by itself, and any cop (and especially any prosecutor) knows that.
One thing to keep in mind is that you never actually had to download the open beta client in order to create an account during open beta. I suspect that a whole lot of people have crappy connections that severely throttled their client download, and before they had a chance to download the entire thing, the open beta closed, and they never had a chance to log in.
What with installing from CDs now, everybody who buys the game is (obviously) able to create an account and log in within minutes of cracking open the box seal. So, rather than having 500k accounts and 100k people playing (strewn throughout the day), you have 250k accounts and 100k playing at any one time.
Much of the lag on Tuesday and Wednesday was caused by a database issue, where anytime an action occurred that caused a new slot in your inventory to become occupied, you'd lag out for up to several minutes waiting for the database to catch up. During OB, this seemed to be a "threshold" issue - that is, once the server had more than a certain threshold of people logged in, the problem quickly became bad. Wednesday night they brought down most of the servers, and after they came back up this problem seemed to be mostly solved (though this may be because the threshold wasn't met afterwards due to people going to bed).
Supposedly there was also an issue with insufficient bandwidth at the east coast data center. That'll learn AT&T not to underestimate the power of the nerd.
If I'm typing an e-mail and somebody has a keylogger on my machine, that's not wiretapping. Okay. What about:
Suppose I'm logging in via telnet to a machine outside my current state, on a shell that sends each character of my password as I type it. Somebody else is logging my keystrokes, and there's a one-to-one mapping between each key I press and each character that gets sent over the network to the remote host. Is that a wiretap?
Suppose I'm logging in via telnet to a machine outside my current state, on a shell that sends my password as one packet after I have typed the entire password in. Someone is running a keylogger, and there is a chance that I could switch to another application in the middle of typing my password and then switch back and finish my password. So, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between what I type and what gets sent over the network. Is this a wiretap?
Suppose I'm logging in via SSH to a machine outside my current state, and the SSH client sends my password both encrypted and all in one packet after I've finished typing it. Someone is running a keylogger. Explicit measures are taken to protect my password (the encryption of the SSH connection), and there is therefore not a one-to-one correspondence between what I type and what goes out over the network. Remember, the keylogger obtains the same information that is protected by the secure connection. Is this a wiretap?
Suppose my password is the length of an e-mail (and is of the same form as an e-mail, with possibly private textual information and everything). I even wait about an hour between typing in the password and hitting enter to send it, a bit like with an e-mail. Someone is running a keylogger on my machine - is this a wiretap?
I think what you're actually looking for is BAB +9, though including other modifiers it gets a to-hit bonus of +12 for the bite or gore with each head.
Per dollar GDP, China is by far the worst polluter in the world.
By the way -
0% of all species on the planet will be extinct in the next 50 years - all because of human impact. How the hell can we let that happen? The "mass extinction" of the dinosaurs was ONLY 19% of all species on the planet at that time.
This is a non-sequitur. If you're talking about deforestation and destruction of wetlands, fine, but we're talking about greenhouse gases here.
Not to mention that an article speaking out against burying nuclear waste far underground starts off by giving the reader the mental image of a nuclear disaster caused by a plane crashing into a surface-based storage facility.
I actually found that the quest system in DAoC, and now in WoW, added a lot of structure to my play. It provides goals other than just "kill a bazillion mobs until I ding", and even though the reward from completing a quest in WoW is nothing more than a few kills' worth of XP and maybe some cash or a decent item, the more frequent sense of satisfaction makes it far more enjoyable than attempting to quest in EQ.
The answer to the problem of profit-hungry publishers doing everything they can to keep developers under their thumbs is direct distribution, probably via Internet. It's the same answer as for underappreciated musicians, except even more-so: marketing for computer and video games tends to be far more word-of-mouth driven, since there's no equivalent of a Top 40 radio station for games. In fact, for a game like HL2 or Halo 2, the tremendous cost of marketing could practically be eliminated without affecting profit margin too badly - not necessarily a deal-breaker, since most developers prioritize "making a fun game" over "making metric assloads of cash".
Slashdot Mirror
The day that the person working the drive-thru at McDonalds says "kthxdrvthru" is the day I shoot myself.
Quoth the Wired article:
Weather-industry companies were promoting the idea that the government restrict special interests that have the ability to pay for the data -- like Major League Baseball teams or citrus growers -- from acquiring it for free, [Barry Myers, Exec VP of AccuWeather] said.
But isn't fair and equal access to information something the government *should be* supporting? Who cares if MLB or the citrus industry get weather info for free? If, as a side effect of providing weather info to the general public, MLB is able to improve their entertainment value and US citrus farmers are able to improve their crop, isn't that a bonus? It's virtually impossible to subsidize industry in this WTO day and age, so indirect (and free!) benefits like this are a good thing.
I've noticed this as well. I can play (maybe for an hour, depending on the game) a FPS, but if I watch a friend play, after five minutes I need to go lie down. It's especially like a swift kick to the semicircular canals anytime I expect him to turn, say, to the right, and he does a 180 to the left. HUUURK!
Not sure what it is - maybe that the rate of movement and therefore optic flow is much less - but in MMOGs with first-person perspective I almost never have issues with motion sickness.
and those based on drivers modelization (ie, x % of 'aggressive drivers', y % of 'sloppy drivers', z % of 'careful drivers' etc) become incresingly complex and demanding with the scale of the simulation...
What does this mean, "increasingly complex and demanding"? You mean computationally complex? There's so much computing power available now that it doesn't matter.
More likely, the reason that any particular traffic control system isn't adopted by a city is because traffic control systems cost money, and the cities where such systems would be effective are of such a large scale that the cost would be enormous.
a large number of sequences will be shot purely in "first-person" perspective of the leading character
In other news, sales of vomit bags jumped markedly as theater owners began placing large advance orders in preparation for an upcoming movie based on the Doom computer game franchise.
The Bush regime is rapidly pushing the USA towards facism, and the American people are too wrapped up in their own jingoism to see or care about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi
Well, it's the first time since the game went live that Blizzard has taken some action regarding cheaters, for one thing. As popular as WoW is (far more than EQ2, from what I understand), the stance Blizzard takes on cheaters is actually important to a significant portion of the game community. For another thing, the article indicates that speed hacks are already being used in WoW.
/. post.
/. ....
Now, six months down the road, if Blizzard is still banning people for cheating, then it's probably not worthy of another
Of course, considering that new developments don't actually have to occur for a story to be revisited on
Just when you thought regular news was POV....
TNT does this with their back-to-back Law & Order reruns, but they do it even *more*. They compress the closing credits of one episode while the next episode is starting.
But what really pisses me off is this whole "we have to advertise our shows *during* your shows" crap. There are hardly any channels left that don't put some monstrously huge ad for their crappy shows you don't want to watch right over top of your show. And half of those have sound effects to boot, making it impossible to understand the interrupted dialogue in the actual show.
I'd much rather just see a can of Coke cleverly placed within a scene in a show instead of finding out that SEX AND THE CITY IS ON WHENEVER *beep beep moan gasp beep*.
Well, another possibility is that the people doing the exit polling have a political agenda (specifically, they wanted to see Kerry in and Bush out) and so they either cherry-picked the precincts for exit polling or managed to get at least some precinct exit polls slanted in their preferred direction through poor methodology.
I don't get why there's such a comparative reluctance to believe actual election results, which at least have some safeguards in place to reduce the inaccuracy of the result; and at the same time people are willing to accept exit polls as gospel truth despite the complete lack of accuracy safeguards. Occam's Razor and all that. Yes, great care must be taken in determining actual election results, but that care must be applied without reference to outside sources of bias (such as exit polls).
Why should we expect variances in voter response to exit polls based on the technology voters used to vote.
Probably for the same reasons that there are variances in voter response to the actual election based on the technology they use to vote.
From this year's election exit poll results, there were suggestions that conservative-leaning people may be far less likely to share their votes with exit pollsters than liberal-leaning people. If this is in fact true, the various exit polls likely underrepresented many Republican candidates. Exit polls should never be used as a substitute for having a secure, monitored, verifiable election system, and politicizing the issue by making claims against one particular candidate only stands in the way of getting our political leaders to support the election system we need.
Keep in mind that the Danish study covered wind farms that were out at sea. Are the results different for land-based wind farms?
"Okay, then. We hold the world ransom for.... two hundred... fifty-five... quadrillion lire!"
And if they can verify that a script kiddy A downloaded nmap in their window of interest, what are they going to do? Assume they're responsible for the wrong crime and charge him or her. It's stupid and its a witchhunt and it's a shot in the dark.
/. will tell you. What they *will* do is use that information to try to turn up other leads - getting a composite sketch, canvassing the local area to see if anybody knows the person or if he frequents the area, etc.
Hmm, kind of like asking an eyewitness to give a description of a perp. It doesn't give a unique identifier of the person, and the description may even be wrong. But any reasonable person agrees that eyewitness descriptions are a very useful investigative resource.
Believe it or not, the cops generally don't go around arresting and charging everybody they see who matches a description, regardless of what the police-hating tin-foil-hat-wearing contingent on
The same principle applies here - finding out this access information is part of investigating a crime and building a case. It doesn't make the case by itself, and any cop (and especially any prosecutor) knows that.
One thing to keep in mind is that you never actually had to download the open beta client in order to create an account during open beta. I suspect that a whole lot of people have crappy connections that severely throttled their client download, and before they had a chance to download the entire thing, the open beta closed, and they never had a chance to log in.
What with installing from CDs now, everybody who buys the game is (obviously) able to create an account and log in within minutes of cracking open the box seal. So, rather than having 500k accounts and 100k people playing (strewn throughout the day), you have 250k accounts and 100k playing at any one time.
Much of the lag on Tuesday and Wednesday was caused by a database issue, where anytime an action occurred that caused a new slot in your inventory to become occupied, you'd lag out for up to several minutes waiting for the database to catch up. During OB, this seemed to be a "threshold" issue - that is, once the server had more than a certain threshold of people logged in, the problem quickly became bad. Wednesday night they brought down most of the servers, and after they came back up this problem seemed to be mostly solved (though this may be because the threshold wasn't met afterwards due to people going to bed).
Supposedly there was also an issue with insufficient bandwidth at the east coast data center. That'll learn AT&T not to underestimate the power of the nerd.
If I'm typing an e-mail and somebody has a keylogger on my machine, that's not wiretapping. Okay. What about:
Suppose I'm logging in via telnet to a machine outside my current state, on a shell that sends each character of my password as I type it. Somebody else is logging my keystrokes, and there's a one-to-one mapping between each key I press and each character that gets sent over the network to the remote host. Is that a wiretap?
Suppose I'm logging in via telnet to a machine outside my current state, on a shell that sends my password as one packet after I have typed the entire password in. Someone is running a keylogger, and there is a chance that I could switch to another application in the middle of typing my password and then switch back and finish my password. So, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between what I type and what gets sent over the network. Is this a wiretap?
Suppose I'm logging in via SSH to a machine outside my current state, and the SSH client sends my password both encrypted and all in one packet after I've finished typing it. Someone is running a keylogger. Explicit measures are taken to protect my password (the encryption of the SSH connection), and there is therefore not a one-to-one correspondence between what I type and what goes out over the network. Remember, the keylogger obtains the same information that is protected by the secure connection. Is this a wiretap?
Suppose my password is the length of an e-mail (and is of the same form as an e-mail, with possibly private textual information and everything). I even wait about an hour between typing in the password and hitting enter to send it, a bit like with an e-mail. Someone is running a keylogger on my machine - is this a wiretap?
I think what you're actually looking for is BAB +9, though including other modifiers it gets a to-hit bonus of +12 for the bite or gore with each head.
Per dollar GDP, China is by far the worst polluter in the world.
By the way -
0% of all species on the planet will be extinct in the next 50 years - all because of human impact. How the hell can we let that happen? The "mass extinction" of the dinosaurs was ONLY 19% of all species on the planet at that time.
This is a non-sequitur. If you're talking about deforestation and destruction of wetlands, fine, but we're talking about greenhouse gases here.
You should probably also mention that the WVU PRT first began carrying people in 1975.
Not to mention that an article speaking out against burying nuclear waste far underground starts off by giving the reader the mental image of a nuclear disaster caused by a plane crashing into a surface-based storage facility.
I actually found that the quest system in DAoC, and now in WoW, added a lot of structure to my play. It provides goals other than just "kill a bazillion mobs until I ding", and even though the reward from completing a quest in WoW is nothing more than a few kills' worth of XP and maybe some cash or a decent item, the more frequent sense of satisfaction makes it far more enjoyable than attempting to quest in EQ.
The answer to the problem of profit-hungry publishers doing everything they can to keep developers under their thumbs is direct distribution, probably via Internet. It's the same answer as for underappreciated musicians, except even more-so: marketing for computer and video games tends to be far more word-of-mouth driven, since there's no equivalent of a Top 40 radio station for games. In fact, for a game like HL2 or Halo 2, the tremendous cost of marketing could practically be eliminated without affecting profit margin too badly - not necessarily a deal-breaker, since most developers prioritize "making a fun game" over "making metric assloads of cash".
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0569295/
...And there's revisionist history on some of them as well.