Can you give a little more information about the "chase rarity"? I assume it's a level above rare, and there aren't many cards in it. I remember the Star Trek CCG did that a loooong time ago, and people didn't like it. I haven't played Magic in many years, so I've lost track of this stuff.
Maybe its just me, but if someone rapes an 8 year old girl, kills her, and then puts her in a suitcase at the bottom of a pond, their death should be as painful as possible.
What does such mindless vengeance actually accomplish? Would you sleep better at night knowing that not only did the state put someone to death, they tortured him in the process?
And keep in mind that we can never be 100% sure of any conviction. Just this week Texas posthumously overturned a conviction based on DNA evidence (he wasn't put to death; he "only" died in prison, but as long as you're being sentenced for a crime you didn't commit, it could just as easily be a crime that does merit the death penalty). This is a good argument for why we shouldn't have the death penalty at all - it's irreversible. But so long as we still do have the death penalty, what about the chance that innocent people are being tortured to death? Don't they at least deserve to go peacefully?
I want to subscribe to the mentioned magazines, but since my attention is divided enough as it is already, I'll really only have the time to read one of them. So the question is - which one? Do current subscribers of these magazines have any opinions on if you're just going to get one, which one it should be?
Well, even if ET was popping an unusual number of SuperNovae for some reason, there's a "shell of space-time" about 400ly thick in which the human race would have even noticed. It's still a pretty small percentage of the Milky Way, even at its maximal intersection. And, if ET is being subtle in the least, that shell is more like 40ly thick.
You're still misunderstanding one aspect of it. The "shell of space-time" that you refer to would be any event where [How long ago it happened in years] - [How long it took to reach us (calculate using distance and speed of light)] 400. You're using the wrong units though. It isn't measured in light-years (a unit of distance); it's measured in years. Say that any event that happened such that its radiation reached us within the past 40 years would be noticed. That's a meaningful statement. But dividing it into the diameter of the Milky Way is not.
But, the diameter of the milky way is about 100,000 light years - so, if we assume that pre-Galileo civilization was oblivious to ET, we as a species are only aware of civilization signs within 400 light years or so.
That doesn't follow. There's no reason whatsoever that ETs would have waited until 400 years ago to start broadcasting their "I am here" messages. There's no reason why an alien civilization clear across the galaxy couldn't have broadcasted a message 100,000 years ago that we receive tomorrow. There's no linkage between our technological readiness to receive and their technological readiness to transmit. In other words, Drake's Paradox is a lot worse than you believe.
Also, [disinfectants] don't work on viri. Nothing works on viri. Only your own 'immune system'.
Just to clear up a potentially huge misunderstanding here: antimicrobials do not work on virii. But bleach or ethanol sure as hell do. Even washing your hands with soap and water is a very effective way of preventing catching the influenza virus. There's no disease that can't be killed in one way or another on a surface, be it through bleach, high temperature, UV radiation, etc. It's only a problem when it takes hold inside of you, rendering these methods useless.
Two more things I'd like to see: native support for vector graphics (in the form of SVG) and native support for video (in the form of the <video/> tag and a Free codec such as Ogg Theora). The latter is actually already written, but Mozilla isn't going live with it yet because of patent fears from certain large companies.
How nice it would be to have integrated video support directly in the browser, though. No need for all of the hackish solutions, such as anything Flash-based, that have grown up around this gaping capability hole in the original spec. Make embedding videos into a webpage as easy as embedding text. That would be an amazing feature for a future browser.
I know what I want: an upload progress bar. We've had download progress bars for nearly two decades now, so why not the same for uploading? In this age of YouTube and such, users are uploading files in their browsers more often than ever before, and the addition of an upload progress bar in the browser (not implemented as a hackish AJAX/Flash application) would be very much appreciated.
No where in the US Constitution is the federal government allowed to regulate communications. If the federal government wants to regulate communications they should've proposed an amendment to the States
And yes I am ham radio operator and the OP.
As a ham radio operator, you should be knowledgeable enough to realize that the entire radio spectrum would be unusable trash without regulation. Our hobby would be dead. Most of our equipment goes up to 50, 100, maybe 200 watts (if you have a really expensive rig) tops. How in the hell would you get your signal heard above all of the companies using huge swaths of the spectrum at high wattages simply because that's the only way they can be heard? Should all ham radio operators have to go out and spend thousands of dollars on many-kilowatt linear amplifiers just to penetrate the noise?
And if you think amateur radio would be bad off, cell phones wouldn't even exist. Cell phones put out a puny 5 watts at max; there's no way you'd ever get through the noise with that.
C'mon, think. The government is necessary for some purposes. Regulating and protecting a public resource like the radio spectrum is one of them.
Perhaps we should scrap those antiquated rules... after all, we don't provide hitching posts and water troughs outside public buildings anymore, do we?
Are you even aware of the multitude of amateur radio digital modes that are in use these days? Saying ham radio is "twentieth century" makes as much sense as saying that automobiles are "twentieth century" — both have evolved considerably over time.
Just be thankful for us ham radio operators. Someday your ass might be saved in an emergency by a ham who is capable of getting a signal through when the communications infrastructure goes down. The Internet is a great thing, I'll grant you, but when power goes out across an entire region (like it did with the Northeast blackouts a few years ago), you're not going to get any net connectivity and you're not going to get any cell connectivity either. The only people who will be able to relay vital emergency messages will be ham radio operators working off of battery backups or generators.
This was a good decision by the US Appeals Court. I'm an amateur radio operator myself (there's over 700,000 of us in the United States alone), and it wouldn't make any sense to severely degrade our performance for the benefit of only 5,000 people. Remember, amateur radio isn't merely a hobby: it's been proven useful time and time again in severe emergencies when the communications infrastructure goes down and no one else can get a signal through.
And even if you make the argument that the number of BPL customers will go above 700,000 at some point in the future, it's still not worth it. There's only one radio spectrum, but there's a large variety of ways to get data into households, the rest of which do not pollute the radio spectrum. There's simply no excuse for trying to send data along entirely unshielded power lines. They weren't designed for this purpose and they leak RF like mad. You want to get people access to broadband? Send the data through shielded cables — oh wait, that's what we already do for millions of people!
As long as a page remains compliant to its declared doctype, not using a given feature very much amounts to handicapping the author in favor of the reader.
I think you kind of miss the point about the World Wide Web. If the only consideration the author have is himself, he can save the page on a local hard drive. By putting the page on the World Wide Web, he's conceding that its primary audience is other people (i.e. those "readers" you despise so much), and he should adjust his page accordingly. What's the point in the web if authors are putting up masturbatory works of web design that handicap the readers in favor of the author?
I wrote about how idiotic this missile test was back when it first happened, and it looks like I was dead on. It's scary how myopic China is being in polluting space for everyone for some military propaganda of dubious value. I wonder how far we are from a run-away Kessler Syndrome (when the amount of space junk in orbit is so bad that the junk keeps hitting other junk in an exponentially growing manner until space is so polluted with tiny pieces of junk that we cannot even get off the Earth).
It's annoying how the word brick has lost all meaning recently. If this exploit actually allowed bricking that would be huge news. But it doesn't. A computer that merely needs its OS repaired/reinstalled is not bricked. Slashdot editors, please figure that out already.
Okay, you have a good point. I should have been more clear in my examples. In The Killing Star, the hostile aliens are relatively close (presumably they have spread out across the galaxy, or at least a good portion of it). So they hear our radio transmissions relatively quickly, early enough to obliterate us after hearing the first peep before we manage to spread beyond the solar system. They send enough weapons to sterilize every inhabited body in this solar system down to many kilometers deep.
If the aliens had only heard of us from across the galaxy, you're right, they would need to send far, far more weapons. But if you're a large alien civilization much older than humanity, imagine how many weapons one can make in a single year. They'd still be able to take us out, even if we spread to many, many planets during the round trip between our signals reaching them and their weapons finding us. So no, they wouldn't merely target one of our outposts. It'd be full on galactic war.
Space is very big and it takes lots and lots of energy and resources to build a craft--even just a weapons delivery system--to cross the vast distances between stars. It would have to actually be worth it to attack us. Our planet and Solar System contain no resources that aren't readily available and easier to obtain much closer to just about any other star system.
You really should read The Killing Star, linked in the original post. It's a great novel, and it addresses the issue you speak of. Yes, we're not worth attacking now. But seeing as how we're currently growing at an exponential rate, we could become threatening really soon. Around a hundred years ago humanity made its first breakthrough with powered flight. Fifty years ago we launched our first object off the world. Soon after that, we visited another celestial object. Now we regularly hear plans about sustained colonies on the Moon. In a hundred years, where do you think we will be? What about in thousands of years?
Keep in mind that space is large and vast, and the speed of light is actually pretty limiting. If the nearest intelligent alien species is on the other side of the galaxy, 50,000 years will have elapsed since they first notice our existence. How dangerous (to other intelligent species) do you think humanity will become in those tens of thousands of years? How many stars will we have managed to colonize in that time, expanding exponentially outwards as we leapfrog from system to system?
In The Killing Star, the aliens know exactly what they have to do. As soon as they hear even the slightest peep from an evolving intelligent species, they send weapons at it at nearly light speed to utterly obliterate it. It's the only way to keep the universe safe for them.
Have you quite finished? Geez, it's a wonder multimedia-based services like YouTube even work on... just about every browser on the planet.
YouTube works? Are you joking? Firefox crashes on me every time I view a YouTube video thanks to the wonderfully crappy proprietary, closed source Flash plugin for Firefox on GNU/Linux. It doesn't work at all. Using Ogg/Theora in a video tag, on the other hand, would work perfectly.
Closed source solutions like Flash aren't solutions at all. Flash isn't even a video format. It's an animated vector format that's been used as a hack to deliver raster video. It's far from the ideal solution; the only reason it was ever used is because it is relatively widespread. "Relatively." There's still a good number of us who are left out in the cold.
I'm sorry, but how is it a loss for the public to remove any reference to specific media formats from a specification that should by its nature be format independent? Ogg had no more business being in an HTML spec than WMV, RA, or some Flash-based video player.
Methinks you are being a bit myopic here. Where would we be today if the HTML spec didn't specify jpg, gif, and png as baseline standards for the image tag? Can you imagine a huge mishmash of competing proprietary image standards, many of which wouldn't even render in free software browsers like Firefox? That would be a nightmare, but unfortunately, that's what's currently happening with video. Much like the image standard in HTML means that any browser can display anything in an image tag, so too must the video standard in HTML guarantee that any browser can display anything in a video tag. That's what the proposed specification is about.
The web isn't just about static text. It's about images too (and thankfully, the HTML specification handles them well). And what with the increasing prevalence of broadband connections, it's becoming more about videos each and every day. We need a standard that actually works for videos. Because what we currently have is broken. HTML is a standard; it only works when it specifies exactly which formats are to be used, and thus, what must be implemented by browsers. Ogg/Theora must stay in the HTML5 specification, or there will be no end in sight for the web's video woes.
Its really not a giant conspiracy, Cyde. It's a pretty hamfisted bunch of tiny little ones, which makes it even worse. Especially as the scale of things they're willing to go to war over is pretty tiny and pathetic.
I'm not denying any of this. I'm simply amazed that anyone considers it worthy of reporting on the front page of Slashdot. We have all sorts of internal Wikipedia squabbles that are even a lot juicier than this one - can they be on the front page too? Every large group of people inevitably has internal squabbles. Especially open source projects, where everyone's a volunteer. The ridiculous part is treating this as if it is noteworthy and painting it with the conspiracy brush, which this story and the linked article do do.
Nice signature quote, by the way. Did you know they're gearing up for pre-production for a sequel? Last I read they're just buttoning down the funding.
No, I did not know that, but that's awesome. I can't wait!
Look, stories like this are seriously hurting The Register's credibility, and now Slashdot's as well for reposting this nonsense credulously. I can't believe anyone is even able to say "The Wikipedia Cabal" with a straight face. Wikipedia is fractured into many small groups and cliques just like the rest of human society (trust me, I know, I'm a Wikipedia administrator). All that's going on here is there is some dispute between a certain group of Wikipedians and some other people. I'm not going to say that either side is innocent because neither is. But to paint it as some gigantic conspiracy, with Wikipedia being ruled and dictated by some secret monolithic cabal, is hogwash.
Why would you want games that don't have reading?
on
DS Games for Pre-readers?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You've left me wondering why you want recommendations of games that don't involve reading. Six years old is hardly too young to be learning how to read. If anything, you want games that will help teach reading. So what you really want is a game that has reading in it, but can still be understood even by a gamer who isn't a good reader yet. There are many games that fit that bill. As a suggestion, check out Meteos. It's a really great puzzle game with five different levels of difficulty (so she'll be able to win it at least on the lowest level), and after completing the campaign mode, there are a multitude of all-text epilogues explaining how your victory (or lack thereof) in the final level affected events. That's a great way to practice reading. You can sit down with her and read it for her when she's playing; it'll be a good lesson, and she'll be interested because she'll want to know how the game ended up.
Incidentally, I first learned the word "Congratulations" when it popped up at the end of a particularly hard Game Boy game I had been playing for a long while (this was when I was really young). I asked my dad what it said. After that, I was more proud of being able to read such a long word than at having beaten the game.
I'm wondering how the WGA strike factors in. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are obviously two of the important writers on the show, and they stand to make residuals from DVD sales. But now, if all back episodes are available for free on the site, are they going to get a cut of the advertising that goes along with it?
From the networkhead's perspective, P2P is screwing them over because they aren't getting any money for it. But from a show creator's perspective, having the company put it up for free online (with advertising) is screwing them over.
It was for precisely this reason that I recently quit Facebook. I was a member of it mainly for contacting people in college, but I've since graduated, and have found myself spending less and less time using it. Meanwhile, its infringements on my privacy have grown more and more.
The first whiff of displeasure I got when using Facebook was when people could tag me in photos without my permission and have them display on my profile. Understandably, there's lots of pictures one would probably not want the world to see, especially during a job search. I did eventually find the option to disable this "feature", but it was many months afterwards. Similarly, I expect there's a way to disable this privacy-infringing commercial thing, but the simple fact is, it's turned on by default for users, and you have to actively figure out how to disable it.
That's not how this kind of stuff should work. It should be opt-in, not opt-out. Am I supposed to babysit my Facebook account into the indefinite future, disabling each new feature as it comes out, hopefully in time to prevent revealing information that I didn't want revealed? No thanks. I'll just quit Facebook. I did, and you should too. The more people who put up with this kind of crap, the more emboldened they will be to keep doing it.
Anyone know the motherboard specifications for this computer? It seems to be just the thing I need, if it has a full-size PCI slot (not PCI Express). I guess I'll wait until Wal-Mart either gets a clue and posts full specifications on the product, or someone else gets one and reports on it. Because I'm not buying one until I'm sure it will actually be able to handle the task I need it for.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you give a little more information about the "chase rarity"? I assume it's a level above rare, and there aren't many cards in it. I remember the Star Trek CCG did that a loooong time ago, and people didn't like it. I haven't played Magic in many years, so I've lost track of this stuff.
Maybe its just me, but if someone rapes an 8 year old girl, kills her, and then puts her in a suitcase at the bottom of a pond, their death should be as painful as possible.
What does such mindless vengeance actually accomplish? Would you sleep better at night knowing that not only did the state put someone to death, they tortured him in the process?
And keep in mind that we can never be 100% sure of any conviction. Just this week Texas posthumously overturned a conviction based on DNA evidence (he wasn't put to death; he "only" died in prison, but as long as you're being sentenced for a crime you didn't commit, it could just as easily be a crime that does merit the death penalty). This is a good argument for why we shouldn't have the death penalty at all - it's irreversible. But so long as we still do have the death penalty, what about the chance that innocent people are being tortured to death? Don't they at least deserve to go peacefully?
I want to subscribe to the mentioned magazines, but since my attention is divided enough as it is already, I'll really only have the time to read one of them. So the question is - which one? Do current subscribers of these magazines have any opinions on if you're just going to get one, which one it should be?
Well, even if ET was popping an unusual number of SuperNovae for some reason, there's a "shell of space-time" about 400ly thick in which the human race would have even noticed. It's still a pretty small percentage of the Milky Way, even at its maximal intersection. And, if ET is being subtle in the least, that shell is more like 40ly thick.
You're still misunderstanding one aspect of it. The "shell of space-time" that you refer to would be any event where [How long ago it happened in years] - [How long it took to reach us (calculate using distance and speed of light)] 400. You're using the wrong units though. It isn't measured in light-years (a unit of distance); it's measured in years. Say that any event that happened such that its radiation reached us within the past 40 years would be noticed. That's a meaningful statement. But dividing it into the diameter of the Milky Way is not.
But, the diameter of the milky way is about 100,000 light years - so, if we assume that pre-Galileo civilization was oblivious to ET, we as a species are only aware of civilization signs within 400 light years or so.
That doesn't follow. There's no reason whatsoever that ETs would have waited until 400 years ago to start broadcasting their "I am here" messages. There's no reason why an alien civilization clear across the galaxy couldn't have broadcasted a message 100,000 years ago that we receive tomorrow. There's no linkage between our technological readiness to receive and their technological readiness to transmit. In other words, Drake's Paradox is a lot worse than you believe.
Also, [disinfectants] don't work on viri. Nothing works on viri. Only your own 'immune system'.
Just to clear up a potentially huge misunderstanding here: antimicrobials do not work on virii. But bleach or ethanol sure as hell do. Even washing your hands with soap and water is a very effective way of preventing catching the influenza virus. There's no disease that can't be killed in one way or another on a surface, be it through bleach, high temperature, UV radiation, etc. It's only a problem when it takes hold inside of you, rendering these methods useless.
Two more things I'd like to see: native support for vector graphics (in the form of SVG) and native support for video (in the form of the <video/> tag and a Free codec such as Ogg Theora). The latter is actually already written, but Mozilla isn't going live with it yet because of patent fears from certain large companies.
How nice it would be to have integrated video support directly in the browser, though. No need for all of the hackish solutions, such as anything Flash-based, that have grown up around this gaping capability hole in the original spec. Make embedding videos into a webpage as easy as embedding text. That would be an amazing feature for a future browser.
I know what I want: an upload progress bar. We've had download progress bars for nearly two decades now, so why not the same for uploading? In this age of YouTube and such, users are uploading files in their browsers more often than ever before, and the addition of an upload progress bar in the browser (not implemented as a hackish AJAX/Flash application) would be very much appreciated.
No where in the US Constitution is the federal government allowed to regulate communications. If the federal government wants to regulate communications they should've proposed an amendment to the States
And yes I am ham radio operator and the OP.
As a ham radio operator, you should be knowledgeable enough to realize that the entire radio spectrum would be unusable trash without regulation. Our hobby would be dead. Most of our equipment goes up to 50, 100, maybe 200 watts (if you have a really expensive rig) tops. How in the hell would you get your signal heard above all of the companies using huge swaths of the spectrum at high wattages simply because that's the only way they can be heard? Should all ham radio operators have to go out and spend thousands of dollars on many-kilowatt linear amplifiers just to penetrate the noise?And if you think amateur radio would be bad off, cell phones wouldn't even exist. Cell phones put out a puny 5 watts at max; there's no way you'd ever get through the noise with that.
C'mon, think. The government is necessary for some purposes. Regulating and protecting a public resource like the radio spectrum is one of them.
Perhaps we should scrap those antiquated rules...
Are you even aware of the multitude of amateur radio digital modes that are in use these days? Saying ham radio is "twentieth century" makes as much sense as saying that automobiles are "twentieth century" — both have evolved considerably over time.after all, we don't provide hitching posts and water troughs outside public buildings anymore, do we?
Just be thankful for us ham radio operators. Someday your ass might be saved in an emergency by a ham who is capable of getting a signal through when the communications infrastructure goes down. The Internet is a great thing, I'll grant you, but when power goes out across an entire region (like it did with the Northeast blackouts a few years ago), you're not going to get any net connectivity and you're not going to get any cell connectivity either. The only people who will be able to relay vital emergency messages will be ham radio operators working off of battery backups or generators.
This was a good decision by the US Appeals Court. I'm an amateur radio operator myself (there's over 700,000 of us in the United States alone), and it wouldn't make any sense to severely degrade our performance for the benefit of only 5,000 people. Remember, amateur radio isn't merely a hobby: it's been proven useful time and time again in severe emergencies when the communications infrastructure goes down and no one else can get a signal through.
And even if you make the argument that the number of BPL customers will go above 700,000 at some point in the future, it's still not worth it. There's only one radio spectrum, but there's a large variety of ways to get data into households, the rest of which do not pollute the radio spectrum. There's simply no excuse for trying to send data along entirely unshielded power lines. They weren't designed for this purpose and they leak RF like mad. You want to get people access to broadband? Send the data through shielded cables — oh wait, that's what we already do for millions of people!
As long as a page remains compliant to its declared doctype, not using a given feature very much amounts to handicapping the author in favor of the reader.
I think you kind of miss the point about the World Wide Web. If the only consideration the author have is himself, he can save the page on a local hard drive. By putting the page on the World Wide Web, he's conceding that its primary audience is other people (i.e. those "readers" you despise so much), and he should adjust his page accordingly. What's the point in the web if authors are putting up masturbatory works of web design that handicap the readers in favor of the author?
I wrote about how idiotic this missile test was back when it first happened, and it looks like I was dead on. It's scary how myopic China is being in polluting space for everyone for some military propaganda of dubious value. I wonder how far we are from a run-away Kessler Syndrome (when the amount of space junk in orbit is so bad that the junk keeps hitting other junk in an exponentially growing manner until space is so polluted with tiny pieces of junk that we cannot even get off the Earth).
It's annoying how the word brick has lost all meaning recently. If this exploit actually allowed bricking that would be huge news. But it doesn't. A computer that merely needs its OS repaired/reinstalled is not bricked. Slashdot editors, please figure that out already.
Okay, you have a good point. I should have been more clear in my examples. In The Killing Star, the hostile aliens are relatively close (presumably they have spread out across the galaxy, or at least a good portion of it). So they hear our radio transmissions relatively quickly, early enough to obliterate us after hearing the first peep before we manage to spread beyond the solar system. They send enough weapons to sterilize every inhabited body in this solar system down to many kilometers deep.
If the aliens had only heard of us from across the galaxy, you're right, they would need to send far, far more weapons. But if you're a large alien civilization much older than humanity, imagine how many weapons one can make in a single year. They'd still be able to take us out, even if we spread to many, many planets during the round trip between our signals reaching them and their weapons finding us. So no, they wouldn't merely target one of our outposts. It'd be full on galactic war.
Space is very big and it takes lots and lots of energy and resources to build a craft--even just a weapons delivery system--to cross the vast distances between stars. It would have to actually be worth it to attack us. Our planet and Solar System contain no resources that aren't readily available and easier to obtain much closer to just about any other star system.
You really should read The Killing Star, linked in the original post. It's a great novel, and it addresses the issue you speak of. Yes, we're not worth attacking now. But seeing as how we're currently growing at an exponential rate, we could become threatening really soon. Around a hundred years ago humanity made its first breakthrough with powered flight. Fifty years ago we launched our first object off the world. Soon after that, we visited another celestial object. Now we regularly hear plans about sustained colonies on the Moon. In a hundred years, where do you think we will be? What about in thousands of years?
Keep in mind that space is large and vast, and the speed of light is actually pretty limiting. If the nearest intelligent alien species is on the other side of the galaxy, 50,000 years will have elapsed since they first notice our existence. How dangerous (to other intelligent species) do you think humanity will become in those tens of thousands of years? How many stars will we have managed to colonize in that time, expanding exponentially outwards as we leapfrog from system to system?
In The Killing Star, the aliens know exactly what they have to do. As soon as they hear even the slightest peep from an evolving intelligent species, they send weapons at it at nearly light speed to utterly obliterate it. It's the only way to keep the universe safe for them.
Have you quite finished? Geez, it's a wonder multimedia-based services like YouTube even work on... just about every browser on the planet.
YouTube works? Are you joking? Firefox crashes on me every time I view a YouTube video thanks to the wonderfully crappy proprietary, closed source Flash plugin for Firefox on GNU/Linux. It doesn't work at all. Using Ogg/Theora in a video tag, on the other hand, would work perfectly.
Closed source solutions like Flash aren't solutions at all. Flash isn't even a video format. It's an animated vector format that's been used as a hack to deliver raster video. It's far from the ideal solution; the only reason it was ever used is because it is relatively widespread. "Relatively." There's still a good number of us who are left out in the cold.
I'm sorry, but how is it a loss for the public to remove any reference to specific media formats from a specification that should by its nature be format independent? Ogg had no more business being in an HTML spec than WMV, RA, or some Flash-based video player.
Methinks you are being a bit myopic here. Where would we be today if the HTML spec didn't specify jpg, gif, and png as baseline standards for the image tag? Can you imagine a huge mishmash of competing proprietary image standards, many of which wouldn't even render in free software browsers like Firefox? That would be a nightmare, but unfortunately, that's what's currently happening with video. Much like the image standard in HTML means that any browser can display anything in an image tag, so too must the video standard in HTML guarantee that any browser can display anything in a video tag. That's what the proposed specification is about.
The web isn't just about static text. It's about images too (and thankfully, the HTML specification handles them well). And what with the increasing prevalence of broadband connections, it's becoming more about videos each and every day. We need a standard that actually works for videos. Because what we currently have is broken. HTML is a standard; it only works when it specifies exactly which formats are to be used, and thus, what must be implemented by browsers. Ogg/Theora must stay in the HTML5 specification, or there will be no end in sight for the web's video woes.
Its really not a giant conspiracy, Cyde. It's a pretty hamfisted bunch of tiny little ones, which makes it even worse. Especially as the scale of things they're willing to go to war over is pretty tiny and pathetic.
I'm not denying any of this. I'm simply amazed that anyone considers it worthy of reporting on the front page of Slashdot. We have all sorts of internal Wikipedia squabbles that are even a lot juicier than this one - can they be on the front page too? Every large group of people inevitably has internal squabbles. Especially open source projects, where everyone's a volunteer. The ridiculous part is treating this as if it is noteworthy and painting it with the conspiracy brush, which this story and the linked article do do.
Nice signature quote, by the way. Did you know they're gearing up for pre-production for a sequel? Last I read they're just buttoning down the funding.
No, I did not know that, but that's awesome. I can't wait!
Look, stories like this are seriously hurting The Register's credibility, and now Slashdot's as well for reposting this nonsense credulously. I can't believe anyone is even able to say "The Wikipedia Cabal" with a straight face. Wikipedia is fractured into many small groups and cliques just like the rest of human society (trust me, I know, I'm a Wikipedia administrator). All that's going on here is there is some dispute between a certain group of Wikipedians and some other people. I'm not going to say that either side is innocent because neither is. But to paint it as some gigantic conspiracy, with Wikipedia being ruled and dictated by some secret monolithic cabal, is hogwash.
You've left me wondering why you want recommendations of games that don't involve reading. Six years old is hardly too young to be learning how to read. If anything, you want games that will help teach reading. So what you really want is a game that has reading in it, but can still be understood even by a gamer who isn't a good reader yet. There are many games that fit that bill. As a suggestion, check out Meteos. It's a really great puzzle game with five different levels of difficulty (so she'll be able to win it at least on the lowest level), and after completing the campaign mode, there are a multitude of all-text epilogues explaining how your victory (or lack thereof) in the final level affected events. That's a great way to practice reading. You can sit down with her and read it for her when she's playing; it'll be a good lesson, and she'll be interested because she'll want to know how the game ended up.
Incidentally, I first learned the word "Congratulations" when it popped up at the end of a particularly hard Game Boy game I had been playing for a long while (this was when I was really young). I asked my dad what it said. After that, I was more proud of being able to read such a long word than at having beaten the game.
I'm wondering how the WGA strike factors in. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are obviously two of the important writers on the show, and they stand to make residuals from DVD sales. But now, if all back episodes are available for free on the site, are they going to get a cut of the advertising that goes along with it?
From the networkhead's perspective, P2P is screwing them over because they aren't getting any money for it. But from a show creator's perspective, having the company put it up for free online (with advertising) is screwing them over.
It was for precisely this reason that I recently quit Facebook. I was a member of it mainly for contacting people in college, but I've since graduated, and have found myself spending less and less time using it. Meanwhile, its infringements on my privacy have grown more and more.
The first whiff of displeasure I got when using Facebook was when people could tag me in photos without my permission and have them display on my profile. Understandably, there's lots of pictures one would probably not want the world to see, especially during a job search. I did eventually find the option to disable this "feature", but it was many months afterwards. Similarly, I expect there's a way to disable this privacy-infringing commercial thing, but the simple fact is, it's turned on by default for users, and you have to actively figure out how to disable it.
That's not how this kind of stuff should work. It should be opt-in, not opt-out. Am I supposed to babysit my Facebook account into the indefinite future, disabling each new feature as it comes out, hopefully in time to prevent revealing information that I didn't want revealed? No thanks. I'll just quit Facebook. I did, and you should too. The more people who put up with this kind of crap, the more emboldened they will be to keep doing it.
Anyone know the motherboard specifications for this computer? It seems to be just the thing I need, if it has a full-size PCI slot (not PCI Express). I guess I'll wait until Wal-Mart either gets a clue and posts full specifications on the product, or someone else gets one and reports on it. Because I'm not buying one until I'm sure it will actually be able to handle the task I need it for.
only if people were paid for their inclusion in the revenue model would Veropidia be ethical
I think you may need to brush up on the GFDL. In no way is the commercial use of GFDL content illegal or unethical. It's explicitly encouraged.