The article doesn't make sense. If the gaming industrie suffers from having to ask for 50$ for the boxed game, a ka charge 50$ for the first month of subscription, why don't they just give 3 months free subscription along with it (or whatever would be the equivalent of 50$ playtime)?
That's what the rental costs. And I think it would also make it not worthwhile to copy the movie from a friend, because burning a CD and giving it to him would be more hassle than the equivalent of $3.
I also think they shouldn't bother with DRM or worry about erasing the movie from my HD or whatever. If I get a DVD as a rental I can also copy it - nevertheless the system works and people are still renting DVDs. Weird, huh? I think the price has to be low enough to make breaking the law, wasting a raw DVD, wasting time with ripping are not worth it. And that's 3$. About those people for whom 3$ makes it still worthwhile to copy it - they must be very poor, so why not give it to them. There is not much money to be made from them anyway.
Too bad for those DVDs they sell for 20$ these days. I have no idea how to justify those, but then again, no idea who buys those, either. Except I also bought a few, but only because they are really, really my all-time favourite movies. I suspect people would continue to buy their favourite music, just to say thanks.
First off, a small company, or a startup, has a hell of lot better things to do with its money than build offices for its employees. If it's not demonstrably benefiting the customer, it's not worth the investment.
Isn't that just what is implied by "it's not a sucessful company"? I wonder how far a company will get that doesn't deem it necessary to treat it's employees well. What incentive is there to work at such a company?
But the root cause is usually not the absence of a door and ceiling: it's the lack of self-discipline that causes some folks to holler back and forth over cube walls, and it's the lack of an ability to focus that causes some folks to be distracted by any conversation in earshot.
Funny line of argumentation. Employees are people, so they have some human traits. To assume they would not chat, be self-disciplined etc. is just stupid. What is your proposed remedy, have a boss standing on the cubicle-crossroads, 'bossing' people into silent behaviour? I am sure that would be great for morale...
Did you ever worry that your games might give players a false impression about the workings of reality? Did you work your own political convictions into the game, or did you try to be as objective as possible? Do you even bother at all about the realism of the game?
they don't keep getting destroyed, they are being destroyed by human influence. I am not sure if US media conveyed that knowledge to the US citizens, though. But all experts seem to agree that all the causes for the strong impact were human made (ie destruction of the buffering marshes).
I am surprised how few people seem to use XSLT. For static pages, I use the ant style task to generate my web page via XSLT and XML. So no 'bringing down the server' at all.
You forget that said company can also shell out enough money to bankrupt you and keep the case from reaching an unfavourable conclusion.
But then they could probably just do that anyway, with or without the 'patent'. I don't like it, but what can we do? In the future, I can't imagine living without breaking patent and copyright laws all the time. The only alternative seems to be a consumer drone:-(
The patent is for a handheld emulator that can dynamically chose which platform to emulate based on the input file it was asked to load.
How serious does one need to take a patent like that? Just because some company shells out money to 'patent' something, doesn't mean it would hold up in court. I can't imagine that thing to hold up, given that OS like Windows have been choosing Applications based on file types for years.
Isolating children from peers and reality is not a good way to impart social skills.
Why should I be forced to be peer to everyone who just happens to be around? Nothing against social skills, but maybe sometimes people are simply not in the right environment - better to move on than to try too hard.
It's forcing kids into an environment where they don't belong that makes for a traumatzied youth. You sure as hell don't build social skills from being bullied and laughed about.
I guess you are priding yourself for having stood against all the ass kicking that was dealt to you, and now you think everybody should have to endure the same things. But imho, running away sometimes is the smart thing. Why waste your time with dumb people?
Not with me - I tested iTunes, but it seems to install permanent background processes that consume cpu time and memory (Why, only why???). Don't like that:-(
Maybe it's still too early in the morning for me, but I didn't understand much of what that article said. OK, Kiddies organize in gangs and they hang out on IRC. What else is going on?? What does the 'war' consist of, who controls more machines on the internet? And it's being fought by copy & pasting the lastet Viri, Trojan Horses etc. and spreadng them around? Why can't IRC be secured, after all those years?
Some understandable explanations would be much appreciated...
But I would like to point out that doubting the safety of nuclear power in general because of a single accident, while simultaneously not understanding how nuclear power works from an engineering and physics standpoint, is foolish.
There simply is a big difference: coal power plant blows up (if it can), maybe a city is polluted for a few months or years. Nuclear power plant blows up, whole continent might be polluted (or whatever), perhaps for hundreds or thousands of years. I believe you that as long as nothing bad happens, nuclear power is better for the environment. But I don't believe that taking into consideration the risk*damage equation, nuclear power is still so good. I think most people in favour of nuclear power just forget to multiply by 'damage' in the above equation. The odds of winning in the lottery are also neglectible, but people are becoming millionaires because of the lottery every week.
I don't think it's just that people don't understand it enough. Would you go out and fertilize your vegetables with Plutonium? Why not? I think there goes your strange nitrate-analogy (which to me seems completely unrelated - as long as we don't blow up the whole planet, you can find an infinite list of things that have killed more people than nuclear weapons).
The bottom line is: nuclear power is NOT a harmless thing, and the only mistake is not that people don't know it's harmless. You have to admit that you have to handle it in the right way. Think about coal - people have been storing coal in their cellars for ages, carrying it to the ovens by hand. Would you recommend the same with nuclear power? I think that shows that there is a fundamental difference that people are aware of. Sure, maybe burning those fossile fuels in the long run also kills, but that's yet another issue (I don't want to recommend fossile fuels, either).
Well, we can assume one thing for sure: the Chernobyl desaster was the result of a fault, somewhere. What does it matter if the fault was in the training of the staff, the design of the reactor, the politics, or whatever? What matters is: can you guarantee that you wouldn't produce any faults if you were to design a nuclear power plant? Do you know of any kind of training that turns humans into fail-safe humans, and guarantees that they will handle every situation in the proper way? I highly doubt that such a method is known yet, nor do I have reasons to believe that the US or anybody else would do a better job in training the staff than the Russians did. People just try to do their best, but at times they still fail - it's just a shame if the failure results in huge parts of the earth being devastated.
Post-9/11 concerns have remarkably little to do with the real world.
I was only mentioning that as an example that unforessen things can happen, not because 9/11 made me particulary worried.
whatever breaches the containment is likely to be as dangerous to the surrounding countryside as the containment breach itself.
I don't think so, surely spreading radioactive waste is more perilious than just creating a big hole in the floor.
With a sane reactor design, you could even breach the containment dome and nothing really terrible would happen because all of the nasty substances will still stay in one place, absent a large quantity of explosives or flammable substances.
Unless a jumbo jet crashes into it... Thanks for your infos, but I am not fully convinced yet. It seems to me you are mostly making the old point, that an accident like Chernobyl couldn't happen in modern plants. My point was that other things can happen, that we didn't take into consideration yet. Your point with the PC that can't explode was a good one, however, you kind of refuted your own argument by admitting that the Chernobyl reactor was following similiar principles as other reactors. So apparently even with such a technology, the stuff in the core is still dangerous. It doesn't always take explosions, for example - maybe some evapourated polluted water would do the trick just as nicely? (but again, this is just an example trying to make a theoretical point - don't bother replying by explaining why water can't evaporate etc., we could go on like that forever).
I don't know what you build in Germany, but American reactors can take an airliner and not even blink. Well, the control rooms and other outlying buildings will be toast, of course, but the core is inside several feet of steel-reinforced concrete and it won't even notice than you drove several hundred tons of fully-fueled airliner into it.
Are you sure? As far as I remember, there were concerns about aircrafts before 9/11, and german power plants have the concrete shield as well. But maybe they only thought of smaller aircrafts. Steel-inforced concrete maybe sounds good from the point of view of human being, consisting largely out of soft material like water. Jumbo Jets might be less impressed. And what about those new rockets the US developed to penetrate bunkers 12m below rock?
it is possible to design nuclear reactors which have no physical way of exploding or melting down.
interesting point, although surely a power plant contains more energy than a PC, so it seems less obvious to me why the explosion couldn't be big enough to blow up my house. So how is it supposed to work? Is there some kind of feedback loop to decrease the activity the hotter it gets (or whatever, I am no nuclear scientist)? Does that loop work without extra controlers, which might have been destroyed in the case of an accident?
I think he (or she) is reffering to the fact that GPRS (aka General Packet Radio Service) is a 'phone network and that GPS (aka Global Positioning System) would be a better bet.
Thanks, I am always mixing up those two abbreviations. But I think it was clear what I really meant.
How does having GPRS help? People going to PXT in the location on their mobile phones?;)
I didn't work out a complete scheme of how to hit a power plant with a jumbo jet, but yes, why not zone in using GPRS? Surely it's possible to determine the coordinates of the targets before launching the assault. (I don't know what PXT means?).
Chernobyl was caused in the large part by inexperienced and/or badly trained technicians disabling safety devices that were *built in* so they could run some idiot experiment they were ordered to.
Didn't read the rest of your post, but about this: actually I have always heard that the staff of chernobyl was highly qualified and well trained. If you think you are so much better than those poor people, you are just fooling yourself. Smart people have been wondering since why people started to work around the security measures. It's a problem everywhere, to be sure you'll find laboratories in the US where people don't adhere to the safety instructions, because it's too cumbersome. Yes, human errors where responsible for the desaster, but power plants are being operated by humans everywhere in the world, not only in russia. And american humans are just humans, too, not smarter than the russian ones.
Whenever Chernobyl is mentioned, there are always those people eager to explain why it doesn't matter, because the same thing couldn't happen with more advanced reactors. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure....
Of course the SAME thing couldn't happen. But other things could/will/do. Anyone who is an engineer knows that, as there simply are no perfect fail-safe systems.
Here in germany people were also priding themselves about their fail-safe reactors, especiually compared to Chernobyl. But then along came 9/11, and they wondered what would happen if a Jumbo Jet would crash on the nuclear power plant. No, the shielding wouldn't hold - the best idea they come up with now is to use fog bombs to make the plant invisible. Like that's going to make a difference with GPRS available.
You know, the nature of such catstrophies is that they come in a way nobody has thought of before. Of course Chernobyl has been analyzed over and over, and people won't make the SAME mistakes. But you bet they'll make OTHER mistakes. To deny that is just being in denial.
The job sites kept sending me nothing but "work at home" jobs
Couldn't you just set the search agent to filter all job offers that contain 'work at home'? Most of them allow you to create search masks with some basic logic ('containing all words','containing none of the words', etc...).
But just like WINE always lacks behind Windows, classpath is likely to lack behind the official java class library, especially if documentation is lacking (not something I can judge, but developing in java I do seem to recall occations where the API documentation from Sun was not too good, and I was only trying to use it - not trying to recreate it).
Sure, but the issue of classpath lacking behind the official java class library seems to be a non-issue, as the official class library is available anyway.
As for documentation, people might have differing preferences, but to me the documentation is actually the best thing about java. I've never needed to buy a single Java book. No other language I have seen so far has matched the documentation that is available for Java.
Last time I checked, C# documentation was available in either Word.doc-format or in windows help format - YUK!
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The article doesn't make sense. If the gaming industrie suffers from having to ask for 50$ for the boxed game, a ka charge 50$ for the first month of subscription, why don't they just give 3 months free subscription along with it (or whatever would be the equivalent of 50$ playtime)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Basically, yes, the more you pay for something, the more you will like it.
That's what the rental costs. And I think it would also make it not worthwhile to copy the movie from a friend, because burning a CD and giving it to him would be more hassle than the equivalent of $3.
I also think they shouldn't bother with DRM or worry about erasing the movie from my HD or whatever. If I get a DVD as a rental I can also copy it - nevertheless the system works and people are still renting DVDs. Weird, huh? I think the price has to be low enough to make breaking the law, wasting a raw DVD, wasting time with ripping are not worth it. And that's 3$. About those people for whom 3$ makes it still worthwhile to copy it - they must be very poor, so why not give it to them. There is not much money to be made from them anyway.
Too bad for those DVDs they sell for 20$ these days. I have no idea how to justify those, but then again, no idea who buys those, either. Except I also bought a few, but only because they are really, really my all-time favourite movies. I suspect people would continue to buy their favourite music, just to say thanks.
so let's all be scared and buy lots and lots of FaceTime products!
First off, a small company, or a startup, has a hell of lot better things to do with its money than build offices for its employees. If it's not demonstrably benefiting the customer, it's not worth the investment.
Isn't that just what is implied by "it's not a sucessful company"? I wonder how far a company will get that doesn't deem it necessary to treat it's employees well. What incentive is there to work at such a company?
But the root cause is usually not the absence of a door and ceiling: it's the lack of self-discipline that causes some folks to holler back and forth over cube walls, and it's the lack of an ability to focus that causes some folks to be distracted by any conversation in earshot.
Funny line of argumentation. Employees are people, so they have some human traits. To assume they would not chat, be self-disciplined etc. is just stupid. What is your proposed remedy, have a boss standing on the cubicle-crossroads, 'bossing' people into silent behaviour? I am sure that would be great for morale...
Did you ever worry that your games might give players a false impression about the workings of reality? Did you work your own political convictions into the game, or did you try to be as objective as possible? Do you even bother at all about the realism of the game?
they don't keep getting destroyed, they are being destroyed by human influence. I am not sure if US media conveyed that knowledge to the US citizens, though. But all experts seem to agree that all the causes for the strong impact were human made (ie destruction of the buffering marshes).
I am surprised how few people seem to use XSLT. For static pages, I use the ant style task to generate my web page via XSLT and XML. So no 'bringing down the server' at all.
You forget that said company can also shell out enough money to bankrupt you and keep the case from reaching an unfavourable conclusion.
:-(
But then they could probably just do that anyway, with or without the 'patent'. I don't like it, but what can we do? In the future, I can't imagine living without breaking patent and copyright laws all the time. The only alternative seems to be a consumer drone
The patent is for a handheld emulator that can dynamically chose which platform to emulate based on the input file it was asked to load.
How serious does one need to take a patent like that? Just because some company shells out money to 'patent' something, doesn't mean it would hold up in court. I can't imagine that thing to hold up, given that OS like Windows have been choosing Applications based on file types for years.
Isolating children from peers and reality is not a good way to impart social skills.
Why should I be forced to be peer to everyone who just happens to be around? Nothing against social skills, but maybe sometimes people are simply not in the right environment - better to move on than to try too hard.
It's forcing kids into an environment where they don't belong that makes for a traumatzied youth. You sure as hell don't build social skills from being bullied and laughed about.
I guess you are priding yourself for having stood against all the ass kicking that was dealt to you, and now you think everybody should have to endure the same things. But imho, running away sometimes is the smart thing. Why waste your time with dumb people?
So combing hair == social skill?? Do you REALLY want your talent to blend in with the anonymous masses? Maybe THEY are having a problem, not him...
if they bundle iTunes :)
:-(
Not with me - I tested iTunes, but it seems to install permanent background processes that consume cpu time and memory (Why, only why???). Don't like that
Maybe it's still too early in the morning for me, but I didn't understand much of what that article said. OK, Kiddies organize in gangs and they hang out on IRC. What else is going on?? What does the 'war' consist of, who controls more machines on the internet? And it's being fought by copy & pasting the lastet Viri, Trojan Horses etc. and spreadng them around? Why can't IRC be secured, after all those years?
Some understandable explanations would be much appreciated...
But I would like to point out that doubting the safety of nuclear power in general because of a single accident, while simultaneously not understanding how nuclear power works from an engineering and physics standpoint, is foolish.
There simply is a big difference: coal power plant blows up (if it can), maybe a city is polluted for a few months or years. Nuclear power plant blows up, whole continent might be polluted (or whatever), perhaps for hundreds or thousands of years. I believe you that as long as nothing bad happens, nuclear power is better for the environment. But I don't believe that taking into consideration the risk*damage equation, nuclear power is still so good. I think most people in favour of nuclear power just forget to multiply by 'damage' in the above equation. The odds of winning in the lottery are also neglectible, but people are becoming millionaires because of the lottery every week.
I don't think it's just that people don't understand it enough. Would you go out and fertilize your vegetables with Plutonium? Why not? I think there goes your strange nitrate-analogy (which to me seems completely unrelated - as long as we don't blow up the whole planet, you can find an infinite list of things that have killed more people than nuclear weapons).
The bottom line is: nuclear power is NOT a harmless thing, and the only mistake is not that people don't know it's harmless. You have to admit that you have to handle it in the right way. Think about coal - people have been storing coal in their cellars for ages, carrying it to the ovens by hand. Would you recommend the same with nuclear power? I think that shows that there is a fundamental difference that people are aware of. Sure, maybe burning those fossile fuels in the long run also kills, but that's yet another issue (I don't want to recommend fossile fuels, either).
Well, perhaps it was a fault in their training,
Well, we can assume one thing for sure: the Chernobyl desaster was the result of a fault, somewhere. What does it matter if the fault was in the training of the staff, the design of the reactor, the politics, or whatever? What matters is: can you guarantee that you wouldn't produce any faults if you were to design a nuclear power plant? Do you know of any kind of training that turns humans into fail-safe humans, and guarantees that they will handle every situation in the proper way? I highly doubt that such a method is known yet, nor do I have reasons to believe that the US or anybody else would do a better job in training the staff than the Russians did. People just try to do their best, but at times they still fail - it's just a shame if the failure results in huge parts of the earth being devastated.
Post-9/11 concerns have remarkably little to do with the real world.
I was only mentioning that as an example that unforessen things can happen, not because 9/11 made me particulary worried.
whatever breaches the containment is likely to be as dangerous to the surrounding countryside as the containment breach itself.
I don't think so, surely spreading radioactive waste is more perilious than just creating a big hole in the floor.
With a sane reactor design, you could even breach the containment dome and nothing really terrible would happen because all of the nasty substances will still stay in one place, absent a large quantity of explosives or flammable substances.
Unless a jumbo jet crashes into it... Thanks for your infos, but I am not fully convinced yet. It seems to me you are mostly making the old point, that an accident like Chernobyl couldn't happen in modern plants. My point was that other things can happen, that we didn't take into consideration yet. Your point with the PC that can't explode was a good one, however, you kind of refuted your own argument by admitting that the Chernobyl reactor was following similiar principles as other reactors. So apparently even with such a technology, the stuff in the core is still dangerous. It doesn't always take explosions, for example - maybe some evapourated polluted water would do the trick just as nicely? (but again, this is just an example trying to make a theoretical point - don't bother replying by explaining why water can't evaporate etc., we could go on like that forever).
I don't know what you build in Germany, but American reactors can take an airliner and not even blink. Well, the control rooms and other outlying buildings will be toast, of course, but the core is inside several feet of steel-reinforced concrete and it won't even notice than you drove several hundred tons of fully-fueled airliner into it.
Are you sure? As far as I remember, there were concerns about aircrafts before 9/11, and german power plants have the concrete shield as well. But maybe they only thought of smaller aircrafts. Steel-inforced concrete maybe sounds good from the point of view of human being, consisting largely out of soft material like water. Jumbo Jets might be less impressed. And what about those new rockets the US developed to penetrate bunkers 12m below rock?
it is possible to design nuclear reactors which have no physical way of exploding or melting down.
interesting point, although surely a power plant contains more energy than a PC, so it seems less obvious to me why the explosion couldn't be big enough to blow up my house. So how is it supposed to work? Is there some kind of feedback loop to decrease the activity the hotter it gets (or whatever, I am no nuclear scientist)? Does that loop work without extra controlers, which might have been destroyed in the case of an accident?
I think he (or she) is reffering to the fact that GPRS (aka General Packet Radio Service) is a 'phone network and that GPS (aka Global Positioning System) would be a better bet.
Thanks, I am always mixing up those two abbreviations. But I think it was clear what I really meant.
How does having GPRS help? People going to PXT in the location on their mobile phones? ;)
I didn't work out a complete scheme of how to hit a power plant with a jumbo jet, but yes, why not zone in using GPRS? Surely it's possible to determine the coordinates of the targets before launching the assault. (I don't know what PXT means?).
Chernobyl was caused in the large part by inexperienced and/or badly trained technicians disabling safety devices that were *built in* so they could run some idiot experiment they were ordered to.
Didn't read the rest of your post, but about this: actually I have always heard that the staff of chernobyl was highly qualified and well trained. If you think you are so much better than those poor people, you are just fooling yourself. Smart people have been wondering since why people started to work around the security measures. It's a problem everywhere, to be sure you'll find laboratories in the US where people don't adhere to the safety instructions, because it's too cumbersome. Yes, human errors where responsible for the desaster, but power plants are being operated by humans everywhere in the world, not only in russia. And american humans are just humans, too, not smarter than the russian ones.
Whenever Chernobyl is mentioned, there are always those people eager to explain why it doesn't matter, because the same thing couldn't happen with more advanced reactors. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure....
Of course the SAME thing couldn't happen. But other things could/will/do. Anyone who is an engineer knows that, as there simply are no perfect fail-safe systems.
Here in germany people were also priding themselves about their fail-safe reactors, especiually compared to Chernobyl. But then along came 9/11, and they wondered what would happen if a Jumbo Jet would crash on the nuclear power plant. No, the shielding wouldn't hold - the best idea they come up with now is to use fog bombs to make the plant invisible. Like that's going to make a difference with GPRS available.
You know, the nature of such catstrophies is that they come in a way nobody has thought of before. Of course Chernobyl has been analyzed over and over, and people won't make the SAME mistakes. But you bet they'll make OTHER mistakes. To deny that is just being in denial.
SCNR
The job sites kept sending me nothing but "work at home" jobs
Couldn't you just set the search agent to filter all job offers that contain 'work at home'? Most of them allow you to create search masks with some basic logic ('containing all words','containing none of the words', etc...).
But just like WINE always lacks behind Windows, classpath is likely to lack behind the official java class library, especially if documentation is lacking (not something I can judge, but developing in java I do seem to recall occations where the API documentation from Sun was not too good, and I was only trying to use it - not trying to recreate it).
.doc-format or in windows help format - YUK!
Sure, but the issue of classpath lacking behind the official java class library seems to be a non-issue, as the official class library is available anyway.
As for documentation, people might have differing preferences, but to me the documentation is actually the best thing about java. I've never needed to buy a single Java book. No other language I have seen so far has matched the documentation that is available for Java.
Last time I checked, C# documentation was available in either Word