I think the problem with this is, that most people don't know there's a format war going on.
Those that do are the ones paying attention, and they probably won't be fooled by the marketing hype declaring Sony the winner.
25 titles release in a month, compared to 11 for the competition, is far too small of a number to actually draw any kind of conclusion. Sure, it's more than twice as much, but with numbers this small impressive-sounding percentages are easy to come by.
Somebody at Microsoft didn't understand what somebody else was doing...
The whole reason for Microsoft giving free computers to schools in the first place was to get them used to the Windows OS, and hopefully prevent them from wanting to switch to Linux. It wasn't supposed to be just a short-term revenue stream.
If they actually use this, schools will start saying no thanks to their "free" computers - which will, in the long term, be a serious blow to Microsoft.
Yeah, but on the bright side, think of all the terrorists who are kicking themselves now for all the time they've spent and damage to themselves they've caused messing about with bombs, now that they realize they could have brought a major metropolitan city to a grinding halt with a few lite-brites.
Even if it does take a few weeks before anyone notices them.
The law is very clear about the kinds of propaganda that get banned, namely anything attempting to incite hate or violence against people or attempting to overthrow the government system
That isn't true. None of these games are attempting to incite hate or violence against people, nor are they trying to overthrow any government system.
I bet you that no country would tolerate it if you handed out leaflets calling for a Coup d'Etat.
I bet you it would.
"And, if any man should advocate the dissolution of this union, let him stand free and unmolested as an example of how even the most egregious error of reason can be tolerated in a free society." (Thomas Jefferson)
So it's un-American to not have 10 years.NET experience?
No - he's saying that it's un-American to, when you need someone with ten years of.NET experience, to have to hire someone who doesn't have it and have to pay for all their training and then live with their lack of productivity while paying them an artificially inflated salary for the years which it takes them to learn everything about.NET.
If you honestly believe that there's nothing you can learn in several years of doing something that you wouldn't learn in the first few weeks, then I can only assume that you're some kind of super-genius (in which case you wouldn't be thinking $100k is a lot of money), or you have never mastered any kind of skill.
It's easy. Just email your logs to the Attorney General each evening. Solves both the problem of where to store them and how to get them to him when he wants to see them. Simple.
...you are correct, they make about 8% more than the average worker.
That's 8% more than the average of all workers.
Teachers, though, are degreed professionals.
When compared against other degreed professionals (page 5 of that same document), you'll see they make considerably less. In 2004, about 60% of the average for other professions that require a four year degree plus certification.
Oh, yeah, it used to be much more common. They just switched to e-mail because it's easier, cheaper, and harder to catch them at it. (There used to be actual investigations when someone engaged in inter-state fraud through the Post Office).
There are still companies that will send you misleading but not actually fraudulent snail mail along the lines of "You've been selected as the winner of this Brand New digital camera! Absolutely free, just sent $49.95 shipping and handling..."
I had the same experience. CF lights produce notably yellower and more flickery light than incandescents. At least, all the ones I've tried have.
I still have them for my porch lights and kitchen lamp, but places where I spend more time I've had to go back to regular lightbulbs and my headaches have gone away once I did.
Though it looks like LEDs might be cleaner, brighter, whiter light as well as lasting even longer than CFs, so I'll be giving those a try now that they're starting to be available.
But until we have a better replacement, we're not ready for this legislation. Tax 'em, sure, use the money to subsidize a better replacement, but don't outlaw them until we have something that can take their place in all cases.
At which point the Chinese government will erect the Great Firewall of China (adding in their buddy North Korea for good measure), and then force their citizens to use government-sponsored computers, routers, network connections, mail clients, etc. And then Chinese censors will be able to have the data anytime they want it. China has all the capability needed to do this, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
I highly doubt that they could actually do that.
If they had that capability, they wouldn't have invited Google, Yahoo, Cisco, etc., in in the first place.
I think the far more likely possibility if this law passes is, either these governments live with a little less monitoring of their own citizens, or they end up not providing internet access to mosts of them.
If you ran a business where you allowed people to rent (subscription), say, a car (account), then a person started renting that car out or using it as a taxi service (selling account items, i.e.: gold or a sword) out to people and making money off the deal. You'd be pretty pissed, eh? Same thing.
I agree that it's essentially the same thing.
I don't agree that there's a problem.
If I'm getting what I consider a fair value for the use of the goods, why would I care what use they were put to?
In fact, this is exactly the business model of many (maybe most?) taxi drivers. They lease the car, and use it as a taxi. So, they pay by the month and charge by the hour. The driver has to take the risk of getting enough passengers every day to make enough money to pay expenses (gas, repairs, insurance, licensing fees, and enough left over to live on). The leasing company only takes the risk of possible default on payments. Works out well for everybody involved.
Of course, one can question the wisdom in allowing real-world money to be exchanged for what is essentially a particularly tedious and inefficient database update.
While I was in college (in the 80's), a major source of my income was entering data off of printed lists for various companies. These companies seemed to think it was worth exchanging real-world money (up to $8.00/hour!) for a particularly tedious and inefficient database update.
$12,000 over 15 years?
Still more than I've made on half a dozen short stories, a couple of dozen non-fiction articles, and the two plays that've been produced in the same time frame...
They actually have it in the airport, too, and have for a couple of years at least.
The ssid isn't "Free WiFi", though. As I recall last time I used it, it was something-pdx. Though of course,it would be easy for someone to set up any ssid. They could even use the same name as the legitimate one, I guess.
Windows machines do tell you whether the connection is infrastructure or ad-hoc ("access point" or "peer to peer" is how XP SP2 lists it), though I guess it's too much for the average user to know what the diffference is. And, who knows, it might just be someone being nice and sharing their connection.
Yeah, that's the first thing I thought of when I heard of this.
According to the last email I got from a friend in Basra, it was 120 degree.
A hundred and flippin' twenty degrees!
Somehow I don't see this as that great of a weapon. "Oh, gee, it's ten degrees warmer now. I better stop shooting as these guys."
I can see this as very useful for crowd control, but not so great for actual combat. Or even for a riot, for that matter, where adrenaline is running high and people won't know which way to run to get away from it. If it takes a few seconds per person to warm them up to an uncomfortable degree, pissed off rioters seem more likely to charge than flee when faced with this.
Good way to keep protestors away from the White House, though.
Or those damn kids off your lawn. I wonder if they'll be marketing this for home use.
...your neighbor from across the hall whom you know only by sight.
And this is where the problem lies.
Some people actually know their neighbors, not just by sight. When I was in St. Louis, I could have asked half the people in the building if they'd pick something up for me and they would have. We knew each other's names, would sometimes drink or dine together, and watched each others cats while out of town.
Moved to California about six months ago, and talk daily with friends in Missouri and Oregon, but probably couldn't pick more than a few of my neighbors out of a lineup.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem with this is, that most people don't know there's a format war going on.
Those that do are the ones paying attention, and they probably won't be fooled by the marketing hype declaring Sony the winner.
25 titles release in a month, compared to 11 for the competition, is far too small of a number to actually draw any kind of conclusion. Sure, it's more than twice as much, but with numbers this small impressive-sounding percentages are easy to come by.
When it comes to believing people you don't know, a healthy cynicism is a good thing.
I wonder if people will start distrusting all those videos that companies make about their products and give to "news" shows to show for them next...
Of course, what would be perfectly ironic, and, given their ages, I wouldn't be too shocked if it actually happened:
They could be tried as adults.
Somebody at Microsoft didn't understand what somebody else was doing...
The whole reason for Microsoft giving free computers to schools in the first place was to get them used to the Windows OS, and hopefully prevent them from wanting to switch to Linux. It wasn't supposed to be just a short-term revenue stream.
If they actually use this, schools will start saying no thanks to their "free" computers - which will, in the long term, be a serious blow to Microsoft.
Yeah, but on the bright side, think of all the terrorists who are kicking themselves now for all the time they've spent and damage to themselves they've caused messing about with bombs, now that they realize they could have brought a major metropolitan city to a grinding halt with a few lite-brites.
Even if it does take a few weeks before anyone notices them.
That isn't true. None of these games are attempting to incite hate or violence against people, nor are they trying to overthrow any government system.
I bet you it would.
"And, if any man should advocate the dissolution of this union, let him stand free and unmolested as an example of how even the most egregious error of reason can be tolerated in a free society." (Thomas Jefferson)
No - he's saying that it's un-American to, when you need someone with ten years of .NET experience, to have to hire someone who doesn't have it and have to pay for all their training and then live with their lack of productivity while paying them an artificially inflated salary for the years which it takes them to learn everything about .NET.
If you honestly believe that there's nothing you can learn in several years of doing something that you wouldn't learn in the first few weeks, then I can only assume that you're some kind of super-genius (in which case you wouldn't be thinking $100k is a lot of money), or you have never mastered any kind of skill.
Heehee.
:)
Yeah, well, when headline writers adjectivefy a noun and noun a verb, things can get confusing...
Disclaimer would only be necessary if posting early in the morning, before I get coffee either
"Warning: May contain humor which can be missed by the uncaffeinated."
I like the idea of a headline about "some European" doing something, though...
"European" is an adjective. Try reading the headline now.
We could just put the spammers in jail, and tell the other inmates they're pedophiles...
It's easy.
Just email your logs to the Attorney General each evening.
Solves both the problem of where to store them and how to get them to him when he wants to see them.
Simple.
That's 8% more than the average of all workers.
Teachers, though, are degreed professionals.
When compared against other degreed professionals (page 5 of that same document), you'll see they make considerably less. In 2004, about 60% of the average for other professions that require a four year degree plus certification.
That is not a question about hair!
Oh, yeah, it used to be much more common.
They just switched to e-mail because it's easier, cheaper, and harder to catch them at it. (There used to be actual investigations when someone engaged in inter-state fraud through the Post Office).
There are still companies that will send you misleading but not actually fraudulent snail mail along the lines of "You've been selected as the winner of this Brand New digital camera! Absolutely free, just sent $49.95 shipping and handling..."
Wouldn't it make more sense just to have the computer not respond to voice commands that it, itself, is issuing?
Can't the OS determine what's playing on output audio channels and just ignore it?
I had the same experience.
CF lights produce notably yellower and more flickery light than incandescents. At least, all the ones I've tried have.
I still have them for my porch lights and kitchen lamp, but places where I spend more time I've had to go back to regular lightbulbs and my headaches have gone away once I did.
Though it looks like LEDs might be cleaner, brighter, whiter light as well as lasting even longer than CFs, so I'll be giving those a try now that they're starting to be available.
But until we have a better replacement, we're not ready for this legislation. Tax 'em, sure, use the money to subsidize a better replacement, but don't outlaw them until we have something that can take their place in all cases.
I highly doubt that they could actually do that.
If they had that capability, they wouldn't have invited Google, Yahoo, Cisco, etc., in in the first place.
I think the far more likely possibility if this law passes is, either these governments live with a little less monitoring of their own citizens, or they end up not providing internet access to mosts of them.
I agree that it's essentially the same thing.
I don't agree that there's a problem.
If I'm getting what I consider a fair value for the use of the goods, why would I care what use they were put to?
In fact, this is exactly the business model of many (maybe most?) taxi drivers. They lease the car, and use it as a taxi. So, they pay by the month and charge by the hour. The driver has to take the risk of getting enough passengers every day to make enough money to pay expenses (gas, repairs, insurance, licensing fees, and enough left over to live on). The leasing company only takes the risk of possible default on payments. Works out well for everybody involved.
While I was in college (in the 80's), a major source of my income was entering data off of printed lists for various companies. These companies seemed to think it was worth exchanging real-world money (up to $8.00/hour!) for a particularly tedious and inefficient database update.
$12,000 over 15 years? Still more than I've made on half a dozen short stories, a couple of dozen non-fiction articles, and the two plays that've been produced in the same time frame...
They actually have it in the airport, too, and have for a couple of years at least.
The ssid isn't "Free WiFi", though. As I recall last time I used it, it was something-pdx. Though of course,it would be easy for someone to set up any ssid. They could even use the same name as the legitimate one, I guess.
Windows machines do tell you whether the connection is infrastructure or ad-hoc ("access point" or "peer to peer" is how XP SP2 lists it), though I guess it's too much for the average user to know what the diffference is. And, who knows, it might just be someone being nice and sharing their connection.
Yeah, that's the first thing I thought of when I heard of this.
According to the last email I got from a friend in Basra, it was 120 degree.
A hundred and flippin' twenty degrees!
Somehow I don't see this as that great of a weapon. "Oh, gee, it's ten degrees warmer now. I better stop shooting as these guys."
I can see this as very useful for crowd control, but not so great for actual combat. Or even for a riot, for that matter, where adrenaline is running high and people won't know which way to run to get away from it. If it takes a few seconds per person to warm them up to an uncomfortable degree, pissed off rioters seem more likely to charge than flee when faced with this.
Good way to keep protestors away from the White House, though.
Or those damn kids off your lawn. I wonder if they'll be marketing this for home use.
A new Star Control game? Sweet, it's about time!
(Goes to check.)
Damn - they're not taking pre-orders yet.
(Refreshes)
Nope, still not.
Damn.
And this is where the problem lies.
Some people actually know their neighbors, not just by sight. When I was in St. Louis, I could have asked half the people in the building if they'd pick something up for me and they would have. We knew each other's names, would sometimes drink or dine together, and watched each others cats while out of town.
Moved to California about six months ago, and talk daily with friends in Missouri and Oregon, but probably couldn't pick more than a few of my neighbors out of a lineup.
You must be new here.