I doubt a judge (or anybody with sense, really) would conceed that using Vonage's VoIP creates an overly large burden on the network, in light of the fact that Comcast is days away from rolling out their own VoIP. If VoIP created such a huge burden, then why would they start offering it themselves?
Seriously, I've known dozens of people who download lots of music, and they almost *never* burn their music to a CD. They just keep it on their hard drives. Besides, who would want to burn 40 gigs of mp3's onto CDs? That would take forever! And when you wanted to listen to it you'd be spending all your time swapping CDs, unless you had a 60-disc changer.
Meanwhile, CDs are used all the time for backing up data, distributing applications, sharing family pictures, etc... I burned almost 20 CDs in the past week, backing up data.
It would make a *lot* more sense to tax something that's used entirely for music, such as speakers or portable music players.
Don't blame the guy you hired for your lack of investigation before hiring him.
Don't blame the guy who flat-out lied to us? Yes, maybe we should have investigated him better, but it's ridiculous to say that none of the blame falls on him. It's exactly that kind of mindset which leads people to lying on their resumes in the first place. They have no appreciation for the damage they do by misrepresenting their capabilities, thinking that it's somebody else's responsibility to clean up their mess.
We made a bad call, but that certainly doesn't let him off the hook.
That definitely fits our experience in the Dallas area. We've tried twice in the last 6-8 months to hire another.NET developer, but both times we've come up short. Hundreds of resumes were submitted, and only about 5-10 of them had the.NET experience that we requested.
And unfortunately, the guy we ended up hiring had lied on his resume about his 2 years of.NET experience... he was hoping to learn "on the job" as it were, and we ended up having to fire him and rewrite all the code he had written, which was, of course, awful.
"we're just basically pulling it all together and trying to make it fun"
That doesn't sound like a good sign. Good games are usually fun long before all the bells and whistles are added and the last open bugs are squashed. Fun isn't something that can be tacked onto a game at the last moment; either the game's core aspects are fun or they aren't. And you can't really go changing the core aspects of the game right before launch.
Erm... can someone give me an example of a decision that would be moral but not ethical, or vice versa? The distinction between the two seems a little blurry to me.
I got stuck on that mission where you had to make it through the subway tunnels without getting killed by the trains.
Yeah, that's my least favorite mission. Well... that and the mission where you're supposed to use stealth to sneak past robot guards. I hate it when game designers take a perfectly good action game and slow it to a crawl with non-action-themed levels. If I wanna sneak around, I'll go play Thief!
Descent should be about blowing up robots, and precious little else:)
I'd use a cheat code to skip level 4 if you're getting too bored with it. Levels 5, 7, and 8 are among my favorites - it'd be a shame for you to miss them!
As stated on the Dynalifter web site, their airship is NOT lighter than air, even when empty. So the only "savings" in weight are limited to the weight of the mass of the ship. That doesn't seem like a large percentage to me, when compared to the weight of the payload that the ship will be carrying.
Looking at a couple other aircraft:
Boeing 747 Weight Empty: 361,600 lbs Maximum Take-Off Weight: 825,600 lbs Empty Weight ~= 43% of maximum take-off weight
C-5 Galaxy cargo plane Weight Empty: 374,000 Maximum Take-Off weight: 840,000 lbs Empty Weight ~= 44% of maximum take-off weight
How much fuel would an airship hybrid really save, since it still has to pull the entire weight of the payload, which accounts for more than 50% of the weight of other fully-loaded modern aircraft? And would the fuel savings really justify the other hassles of dealing with an airship hybrid?
The answer to your question should be fairly obvious to anyone who has worked for a software development company: quality assurance. Windows is an extremely large and complicated piece of software. Any changes must go through a rigorous testing process, probably using dozens if not hundreds of configurations. Otherwise, Microsoft risks releasing a patch which breaks a few thousand servers/desktops and brings their customers' businesses to a grinding halt.
"Oops, sorry about that. We forgot to test the patch with that configuration."
Microsoft's primary responsibility here is to make sure that they don't inadvertently break something. Fixing the security vulnerability is a distant second.
Third parties, on the other hand, don't have to do any testing at all. If you really need a patch NOW then you are welcome to use their stuff, but you can be sure that it has not been put through anything close to the testing that Microsoft would perform. There's no guarantee that it'll work for you.
We need another Descent clone! My joystick is getting all rusty. How long has it been since there was a 6 degrees-of-freedom game? Descent 3 was released almost seven years ago; it's about time for a new one.
Or is the genre just not profitable enough to warrant a new game?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't pulling it with gravity use even MORE fuel, since you're basically expending the same amount of fuel to move the target, plus additional fuel to move the 20-ton gravity "tug"?
Microsoft's.NET platform, which is supposed to be managed code, has built-in support for rendering WMF and EMF images (the image formats that are affected by this security vulnerability). So are applications written in.NET still vulnerable to the buffer overflow exploit, or was the underlying rendering code rewritten for the managed environment?
Writing managed applications won't protect you (completely) if the underlying framework isn't also managed.
I should certainly hope that a member of congress could submit a single page of text without spelling errors. I'm sure that many slashdot readers have written longer error-free posts to their own blogs. Why should the lack of errors indicate that it's been "scrubbed" by a staffer?
For years, some analysts claimed that ordinary processors would eventually obsolete 3D accelerators, because they would be fast enough to handle all of the rendering in software. Since graphics processing can usually make pretty good use of parallelism, then perhaps a package like this along with multiple CPUs is the "wave of the future"?
There's absolutely no reason why the Internet has to fall apart. If it does then it's because they want it to. I think the countries behind this push for change should seriously consider whether they're doing more harm than good... if you were a citizen in a country that decided to "break off" from the rest of the Internet, wouldn't you prefer to keep your access to the old one rather than start over from scratch?
I would expect to see a huge demand for access to the primary Internet, and the new one would just sortof shrivel up and die.
I think the parent is entirely correct. Religion is just a scapegoat in this case. Who cares if evolution takes a back seat in this country? I seriously doubt that China or India is going to overtake us technologically just because they spend more time theorizing about the origin of species.
Religion certainly didn't curb Isaac Newton's interest in science.
I think the more likely culprit in this country is the entertainment industry. Americans have become way too skilled at turning off our brains and consuming hours of mindless junk, whether that be TV, movies, music, video games, etc...
Obviously, the RIAA wants to maximize their profit. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do just that? What happened to "charge what the market will bear?" Why shouldn't the market be allowed to set the price of music in this case?
It's not like music is a necessity. If music becomes too expensive then people will just stop buying it, and the RIAA will be forced to lower the price. Or, it will encourage more competition as consumers search for cheaper alternatives.
The woman manipulated by the Shadows was actually Bester's lover, not his wife. His marriage was arranged by the Psi Corps, and his wife was still safe and sound back home.
I played both LORD and Usurper, but there were a couple other games I enjoyed more. Trade Wars was a big favorite, along with VGA Planets (which technically isn't a door game). I still play VGA Planets, in fact.
Kindof. He mentioned that the PunkBuster stuff will be removed from the code, so that people can't compile their own versions for the purpose of cheating.
I think all organizations ought to have a mission or vision statement. However, for many organizations, the role of these statements seems to have degraded into nothing more that PR/propoganda.
The proper role of a mission statement is to assist in the decision-making process. It should serve as a set of criteria for evaluating options. By writing out your organization's goals in a concrete form, you hope to keep the organization focused on its original goals and values even though the leadership figures might change. Theoretically speaking, of course.
The problem with buzzword-ridden corporate mission statements, such as "We conveniently fashion professional methods of empowerment so that we may endeavor to continually initiate innovative solutions", is that they're too ambiguous to provide any proper guidance in the decision-making process. That, and the fact many mission statements are ignored when making big decisions, or just rewritten to fit the goals of new leadership.
Almost everyone seems to forget that 3 years is the maximum sentence. The actual penalty handed down would be at the discretion of the judge/jury. And I seriously doubt they would even consider the maximum sentence except in the most extreme of circumstances.
A reasonable judge/jury is going to weigh at least a few different factors:
How serious was the crime? Did the defendent distribute a single episode of Friends, or is he running an international DVD pirating ring?
Does the defendent have any prior convictions? For what?
How much damage was done to the copyright owners?
The maximum sentence would only be given in the most extreme circumstances, and it's really there for the protection of the defendent. I can't see your average TV-copyright-infringer getting more than a couple months of probation.
Well what do you expect, when evil professors tell students that they must comment EVERY line of code or lose points on their grade? That was my experience.
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Scientific consensus has nothing to do with it. Americans will believe almost anything once they've heard it enough.
I doubt a judge (or anybody with sense, really) would conceed that using Vonage's VoIP creates an overly large burden on the network, in light of the fact that Comcast is days away from rolling out their own VoIP. If VoIP created such a huge burden, then why would they start offering it themselves?
Seriously, I've known dozens of people who download lots of music, and they almost *never* burn their music to a CD. They just keep it on their hard drives. Besides, who would want to burn 40 gigs of mp3's onto CDs? That would take forever! And when you wanted to listen to it you'd be spending all your time swapping CDs, unless you had a 60-disc changer.
Meanwhile, CDs are used all the time for backing up data, distributing applications, sharing family pictures, etc... I burned almost 20 CDs in the past week, backing up data.
It would make a *lot* more sense to tax something that's used entirely for music, such as speakers or portable music players.
We made a bad call, but that certainly doesn't let him off the hook.
And unfortunately, the guy we ended up hiring had lied on his resume about his 2 years of .NET experience... he was hoping to learn "on the job" as it were, and we ended up having to fire him and rewrite all the code he had written, which was, of course, awful.
That doesn't sound like a good sign. Good games are usually fun long before all the bells and whistles are added and the last open bugs are squashed. Fun isn't something that can be tacked onto a game at the last moment; either the game's core aspects are fun or they aren't. And you can't really go changing the core aspects of the game right before launch.
Erm... can someone give me an example of a decision that would be moral but not ethical, or vice versa? The distinction between the two seems a little blurry to me.
Yeah, that's my least favorite mission. Well... that and the mission where you're supposed to use stealth to sneak past robot guards. I hate it when game designers take a perfectly good action game and slow it to a crawl with non-action-themed levels. If I wanna sneak around, I'll go play Thief!
Descent should be about blowing up robots, and precious little else :)
I'd use a cheat code to skip level 4 if you're getting too bored with it. Levels 5, 7, and 8 are among my favorites - it'd be a shame for you to miss them!
As stated on the Dynalifter web site, their airship is NOT lighter than air, even when empty. So the only "savings" in weight are limited to the weight of the mass of the ship. That doesn't seem like a large percentage to me, when compared to the weight of the payload that the ship will be carrying.
Looking at a couple other aircraft:
Boeing 747
Weight Empty: 361,600 lbs
Maximum Take-Off Weight: 825,600 lbs
Empty Weight ~= 43% of maximum take-off weight
C-5 Galaxy cargo plane
Weight Empty: 374,000
Maximum Take-Off weight: 840,000 lbs
Empty Weight ~= 44% of maximum take-off weight
How much fuel would an airship hybrid really save, since it still has to pull the entire weight of the payload, which accounts for more than 50% of the weight of other fully-loaded modern aircraft? And would the fuel savings really justify the other hassles of dealing with an airship hybrid?
The answer to your question should be fairly obvious to anyone who has worked for a software development company: quality assurance. Windows is an extremely large and complicated piece of software. Any changes must go through a rigorous testing process, probably using dozens if not hundreds of configurations. Otherwise, Microsoft risks releasing a patch which breaks a few thousand servers/desktops and brings their customers' businesses to a grinding halt.
"Oops, sorry about that. We forgot to test the patch with that configuration."
Microsoft's primary responsibility here is to make sure that they don't inadvertently break something. Fixing the security vulnerability is a distant second.
Third parties, on the other hand, don't have to do any testing at all. If you really need a patch NOW then you are welcome to use their stuff, but you can be sure that it has not been put through anything close to the testing that Microsoft would perform. There's no guarantee that it'll work for you.
We need another Descent clone! My joystick is getting all rusty. How long has it been since there was a 6 degrees-of-freedom game? Descent 3 was released almost seven years ago; it's about time for a new one.
Or is the genre just not profitable enough to warrant a new game?
True, you're moving the tug either way. I was merely assuming that a gravity tug would be more massive than a pushing tug.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't pulling it with gravity use even MORE fuel, since you're basically expending the same amount of fuel to move the target, plus additional fuel to move the 20-ton gravity "tug"?
Microsoft's .NET platform, which is supposed to be managed code, has built-in support for rendering WMF and EMF images (the image formats that are affected by this security vulnerability). So are applications written in .NET still vulnerable to the buffer overflow exploit, or was the underlying rendering code rewritten for the managed environment?
Writing managed applications won't protect you (completely) if the underlying framework isn't also managed.
I should certainly hope that a member of congress could submit a single page of text without spelling errors. I'm sure that many slashdot readers have written longer error-free posts to their own blogs. Why should the lack of errors indicate that it's been "scrubbed" by a staffer?
Can it take advantage of multiple processors?
For years, some analysts claimed that ordinary processors would eventually obsolete 3D accelerators, because they would be fast enough to handle all of the rendering in software. Since graphics processing can usually make pretty good use of parallelism, then perhaps a package like this along with multiple CPUs is the "wave of the future"?
Obviously not now... but in 20 years?
There's absolutely no reason why the Internet has to fall apart. If it does then it's because they want it to. I think the countries behind this push for change should seriously consider whether they're doing more harm than good... if you were a citizen in a country that decided to "break off" from the rest of the Internet, wouldn't you prefer to keep your access to the old one rather than start over from scratch?
I would expect to see a huge demand for access to the primary Internet, and the new one would just sortof shrivel up and die.
I think the parent is entirely correct. Religion is just a scapegoat in this case. Who cares if evolution takes a back seat in this country? I seriously doubt that China or India is going to overtake us technologically just because they spend more time theorizing about the origin of species.
Religion certainly didn't curb Isaac Newton's interest in science.
I think the more likely culprit in this country is the entertainment industry. Americans have become way too skilled at turning off our brains and consuming hours of mindless junk, whether that be TV, movies, music, video games, etc...
Playing Devil's advocate...
Profit = Price Per Song * Songs Sold
Obviously, the RIAA wants to maximize their profit. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do just that? What happened to "charge what the market will bear?" Why shouldn't the market be allowed to set the price of music in this case?
It's not like music is a necessity. If music becomes too expensive then people will just stop buying it, and the RIAA will be forced to lower the price. Or, it will encourage more competition as consumers search for cheaper alternatives.
The woman manipulated by the Shadows was actually Bester's lover, not his wife. His marriage was arranged by the Psi Corps, and his wife was still safe and sound back home.
I played both LORD and Usurper, but there were a couple other games I enjoyed more. Trade Wars was a big favorite, along with VGA Planets (which technically isn't a door game). I still play VGA Planets, in fact.
Kindof. He mentioned that the PunkBuster stuff will be removed from the code, so that people can't compile their own versions for the purpose of cheating.
I think all organizations ought to have a mission or vision statement. However, for many organizations, the role of these statements seems to have degraded into nothing more that PR/propoganda.
The proper role of a mission statement is to assist in the decision-making process. It should serve as a set of criteria for evaluating options. By writing out your organization's goals in a concrete form, you hope to keep the organization focused on its original goals and values even though the leadership figures might change. Theoretically speaking, of course.
The problem with buzzword-ridden corporate mission statements, such as "We conveniently fashion professional methods of empowerment so that we may endeavor to continually initiate innovative solutions", is that they're too ambiguous to provide any proper guidance in the decision-making process. That, and the fact many mission statements are ignored when making big decisions, or just rewritten to fit the goals of new leadership.
A reasonable judge/jury is going to weigh at least a few different factors:
- How serious was the crime? Did the defendent distribute a single episode of Friends, or is he running an international DVD pirating ring?
- Does the defendent have any prior convictions? For what?
- How much damage was done to the copyright owners?
The maximum sentence would only be given in the most extreme circumstances, and it's really there for the protection of the defendent. I can't see your average TV-copyright-infringer getting more than a couple months of probation.Well what do you expect, when evil professors tell students that they must comment EVERY line of code or lose points on their grade? That was my experience.