Speaking of Match.com, have you seen their latest ads? What a fucking joke. "Sign up now and if you're not satisfied you'll get 6 months free!" Yeah...all that means is that they keep your money, you're still not satisfied and you'll likely catch them trying to bill you again. Insulting.
Please mod parent down. This guy is some farmer in Saskatchewan who has ZERO academic credentials listed on his site and who continuosly spams his energy crap. Just check his posting history. Hell, he even spams it twice in this same story.
I'm the PC gamer market who buys/downloads lots of games that take up several gigs each. I also pirate a LOT of music, TV, anime and movies (many MANY gigs of which are pr0n even though I won't typically admit it). I may also do occasional video editing work making music videos and youtube videos for my friends. I need this drive, and am willing to spend good money on it right along with the several grand I dropped on my new.
Yours truly, Joe Average Gamer
In all seriousness...without citing some studies I'm having a hard time believing your claim. While I think the masses certainly don't use that much space I know the more advanced users (who are willing to spend more on these sorts of things) certainly do. I fall squarely into that category and I filled up 2 150GB HDDs in the first month I had them. I just bought myself an external 200GB drive and am already half full on that.
The other thing you're not taking into account is HD quality video. When people start downloading and pirating that, it WILL need that kind of capacity.
Or the flip-side...could these statistical preferences be uncovered and gamed? Seems to me there is an army of SEO experts out there willing to try for a buck.
Even more comforting is that these stockpiles are under the control of a mad man who has gone on record saying something to the extent of "if we are losing a war I'm going to try to destroy the planet and take everybody down with me".
Why exactly has this nutjob NOT been assasinated yet? If not by the US, then how about by one of the other countries that hate them, such as South Korea, China or Japan? I'm sure the rest of the world would be willing to look the other way. A nice double-tap to the head and a post-it note on his corpse threatening anybody who tries to fill his shoes is all that would be needed.
Taking up resources and dragging down your family is a bad thing, so at a certain age genes tend to help kill off individuals rather than help them live longer.
On the contrary I'd say living longer for wealthy people could be a great boon for their genes as that wealth would not only provide healthcare for their family but would help the family live a safer life.
Because the only possible explanation is that they will weaponize it. Nevermind the fact that there are other potentially/definitely hostile countries who could have access to this as well that we need to defend against. You'd be surprised how much research the DoD does for defensive purposes. And with the current terror scare this seems like it would be the kind of thing they would research to protect our soil from infection so to speak.
Of course I'm not naive and realise they will also likely study its uses as a weapon for their own purposes but thats the way the cookie crumbles.
Let me ask you something though...in a world with wars going on and pissed off nations, would you rather be on the side of the guy who has this kind of super deadly weapon and understands how to defend against it, or would you rather be on the side that has no clue what it is, no clue how to react to it, etc? If I was honest with myself my answer is obviously the one that would give me the greatest chance of survival in an international conflict. I just hope there is enough red tape and political pressure to prevent something like this from ever being used on the battlefield.
While I fully agree with you...what can we the citizens do about it? I guess our only hope is that the Democrats take them to task. Unfortunately they're politicians too so who knows if THAT will ever happen. And lets say we found evidence of tampering, how do we handle that situation? The damage is already done.
Like microtransactions, the thought of the idea becoming an industry standard makes me sick to my stomach. But hey, I'm waiting for someone to prove me wrong. That's the problem. For all the talk, no one has done it.
Not only has no one done it, but they have in fact done the opposite. Bethesda and Sony I'm looking at you.
Um...I know we're not supposed to argue about what we get modded, but could someone please explain to me how this is at ALL offtopic? This sounds like it will tweak settings to give the user an unfair advantage over other users at their expense...I FULLY expect this to be banned if it picks up steam. Private torrent sites are anal about people trying to game the system which is exactly what this new client does.
The solution to this is simple. Take a page from NPR. I'm in advertising and we recently did some radio scripts for ads on NPR and they have some of the TOUGHEST copy standards out there. They do not allow their ads to have a call to action, which is one of the key parts of any successful ad. There are other strict rules as well. So what you end up with is a very basic, bare bones information ad with little to no spin. At first I was annoyed with them because they made my project more difficult, but I really do appreciate them for approaching advertising in a very correct way for the type of content and audience they have.
Wikipedia should be fine with ads as long as they draw the line DEEP in the sand and give similar guidelines as NPR and make it crystal clear to potential advertisers that there is nothing that can or will be done to alter entries on their product or company, nor is there anything that can be done to prevent their ad from showing up on a competitors entry or something like a DeBeers ad showing up in an article on blood diamonds. If advertisers are willing to take the gamble and follow those guidelines, then the advertisers can reach a large ripe audience, and the content on Wikipedia shouldn't suffer.
What can be a bigger problem is what I see happening to a lot of people who just graduated and are entering the professional world for the first time. You come out of school cocky, but still aware that you don't know a lot at all, but then they have a boss who basically makes them feel like they don't know anything about their chosen profession and kills their confidence, which in turn leads to more mistakes etc.
The reason this is such a problem is while a seasoned professional who runs into a bad boss can still walk out of there knowing deep down "its a bad boss, I know my shit, I'm good at what I do even if he doesn't think so" whereas a recent graduate might think "wow, maybe I chose the wrong career path, spent all that money for nothing..." and end up working at Starbucks because they no longer have confidence in their abilities.
I DL the demo of Kudos and played it and I have to say it was certainly an intriguing concept and seemed to have a lot of depth....however there is absolutely no excuse for the mouse being as slow and stuttery as it was. I felt like I was playing Far Cry on a Pentium 2. However there is a fix involving tweaking one of the data files to display 16 bit color depth as opposed to the default of 32. My other gripe with it was you start out in a crappy job in a crappy life. That would be fine and all if the demo actually lasted long enough for you to actually accomplish something to make the game fun. The other thing that would be nice is if you could change your initial settings to setup your own initial starting point in life, perhaps to make it more similar to your own life.
I'm still trying out virtual villagers, that one seems entertaining....but the graphics are horrible and I don't think I have the patience the game requires as it runs even while your computer is off.
There's another one on that site called Tasty Planet which is kind of a down and dirty 2D version of Katamari Damacy, right down to catchy music. Its fun for a bit and amusing, and well put together, however there is little diversity between the levels, at least initially, and you end up having to hunt around for tiny insects and things that respawn frequently to get your size up instead of there being enough static objects to engulf.
Agreed. Gold farmers are definitely a sign that there is something wrong with your game. Of course Blizzard et. al will never REALLY do anything about them since they are paying accounts. Nor will the MMORPG companies ever remove the time sinks that cause the problem since that is what keeps people playing month after month. There's a reason why they make it take forever to run all over the world for your quests and you only get your mount at lvl 40 in WoW. Try timing it and adding up all that time.
Part of the reason I loved CoH so much was that they made the travel FUN. The game got you to missions quickly, had a great group finder and was a blast, except that it had nothing in it for people looking for cool items to show off their efforts and the powers were very limiting and all looked the same. Guarantee it would be a lot more popular if you could alter the particle effects for your powers as much as you could your costume.
These reasons are why I have high hopes for the Warhammer Online game. Taking the fun bits of WoW and removing the grind hopefully while making it much more PVP intensive.
They'll care about it when it's practical for some of them to take a trip into space or to the Moon.
Bingo. Welcome to the age where successfuly web entrepeneurs are able to become space tourists. The only way you can get through to my generation (I refuse to call us the iPod Generation) is by showing us what is in it for us. Selfish? Yes. But also true. Space travel is nothing new, but us having the chance to actually go into space one day is. The space elevator is another cool thing to renew interest, of course with terrorists running around and our governments paranoia that will never happen.
NASA has shown us that space travel is no longer solely in the realm of science fiction. Now they need to get the rest of us up there so we can gain some perspective (I hear nothing changes your outlook on life like seeing the earth from orbit) and have a new common goal for humanity.
Plus...if this world goes any further into the shitter I know there will be quite a few of us looking for any method possible of getting off of this god-forsaken rock.
Correct me if I'm wrong...but isn't the reason that we haven't cured the flu yet with all of our advances in medical technology due to the fact that the virus keeps mutating and evolving due to natural selection taking place when we apply vaccines? Won't this just serve to create a super flu? I really hope that the people doing this research (who obviously know quite a bit more on the subject) have already thought of this...
More importantly, if our questions are used in the successful trouncing of the RIAA are we going to receive any of the money that would inevitably be awarded for legal expenses in a counter-suit? Not really too serious here....while I'd love for the winners to get paid...I'd much rather donate my services to crushing the RIAA.
Or, more interestingly, "Where do you sleep at night, and are you a sound sleeper?"
Followed up by, "Do you have currently live with a spouse or other individual who might alert the authorities if a home invader were to break in...say...later this week..."
While this IS technically a Roland story and I should be refusing to post in it (don't be fooled that he has an original link in his post, he still has his ZDNet blog link in there as well) I'd like to take this opportunity to copy/paste one of my favorite Santa posts of all time that I found on Slashdot. Props to rev_g33k_101 for this one.
Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective
I. There are approximately 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Jehovah's Witnesses, or Buddist religions, this reduces the workload on Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with at least one good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, jump out, go down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump in the sleigh, and move on to the next house. (That's why it's really pointless to stay up and wait for him....)
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom breaks. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 75.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child has nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull nothing more than 300 pounds. Even granted that "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or nine of them; Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the sleigh itself, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizibeth (the ship, not the monarch).
IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance; this would heat up the reindeer in the same fasion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and causing deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.2 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reaches the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in.001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G's. A 250 pound Santa (which seem ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pound of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Don't forget to click my link and read some of the responses to the original post, they're great. Merry Christmas Slashdot!
The funny part is that you'd probably get less jail time for throwing a burning coal through their window that then burned their house down than you would for filesharing.
I assume your website in your profile is beautifulassettes.com. Would you mind sharing some rough figures on traffic/revenue? Or if you'd like, you can email me at haltingpoint at gmail dot com. I started a babeblog briefly but ran into a lot of barriers and perhaps I can discuss those with you.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm the PC gamer market who buys/downloads lots of games that take up several gigs each. I also pirate a LOT of music, TV, anime and movies (many MANY gigs of which are pr0n even though I won't typically admit it). I may also do occasional video editing work making music videos and youtube videos for my friends. I need this drive, and am willing to spend good money on it right along with the several grand I dropped on my new .
Yours truly,
Joe Average Gamer
In all seriousness...without citing some studies I'm having a hard time believing your claim. While I think the masses certainly don't use that much space I know the more advanced users (who are willing to spend more on these sorts of things) certainly do. I fall squarely into that category and I filled up 2 150GB HDDs in the first month I had them. I just bought myself an external 200GB drive and am already half full on that.
The other thing you're not taking into account is HD quality video. When people start downloading and pirating that, it WILL need that kind of capacity.
Why exactly has this nutjob NOT been assasinated yet? If not by the US, then how about by one of the other countries that hate them, such as South Korea, China or Japan? I'm sure the rest of the world would be willing to look the other way. A nice double-tap to the head and a post-it note on his corpse threatening anybody who tries to fill his shoes is all that would be needed.
On the contrary I'd say living longer for wealthy people could be a great boon for their genes as that wealth would not only provide healthcare for their family but would help the family live a safer life.
Of course I'm not naive and realise they will also likely study its uses as a weapon for their own purposes but thats the way the cookie crumbles.
Let me ask you something though...in a world with wars going on and pissed off nations, would you rather be on the side of the guy who has this kind of super deadly weapon and understands how to defend against it, or would you rather be on the side that has no clue what it is, no clue how to react to it, etc? If I was honest with myself my answer is obviously the one that would give me the greatest chance of survival in an international conflict. I just hope there is enough red tape and political pressure to prevent something like this from ever being used on the battlefield.
Not only has no one done it, but they have in fact done the opposite. Bethesda and Sony I'm looking at you.
Wikipedia should be fine with ads as long as they draw the line DEEP in the sand and give similar guidelines as NPR and make it crystal clear to potential advertisers that there is nothing that can or will be done to alter entries on their product or company, nor is there anything that can be done to prevent their ad from showing up on a competitors entry or something like a DeBeers ad showing up in an article on blood diamonds. If advertisers are willing to take the gamble and follow those guidelines, then the advertisers can reach a large ripe audience, and the content on Wikipedia shouldn't suffer.
The reason this is such a problem is while a seasoned professional who runs into a bad boss can still walk out of there knowing deep down "its a bad boss, I know my shit, I'm good at what I do even if he doesn't think so" whereas a recent graduate might think "wow, maybe I chose the wrong career path, spent all that money for nothing..." and end up working at Starbucks because they no longer have confidence in their abilities.
I'm still trying out virtual villagers, that one seems entertaining....but the graphics are horrible and I don't think I have the patience the game requires as it runs even while your computer is off.
There's another one on that site called Tasty Planet which is kind of a down and dirty 2D version of Katamari Damacy, right down to catchy music. Its fun for a bit and amusing, and well put together, however there is little diversity between the levels, at least initially, and you end up having to hunt around for tiny insects and things that respawn frequently to get your size up instead of there being enough static objects to engulf.
Part of the reason I loved CoH so much was that they made the travel FUN. The game got you to missions quickly, had a great group finder and was a blast, except that it had nothing in it for people looking for cool items to show off their efforts and the powers were very limiting and all looked the same. Guarantee it would be a lot more popular if you could alter the particle effects for your powers as much as you could your costume.
These reasons are why I have high hopes for the Warhammer Online game. Taking the fun bits of WoW and removing the grind hopefully while making it much more PVP intensive.
Bingo. Welcome to the age where successfuly web entrepeneurs are able to become space tourists. The only way you can get through to my generation (I refuse to call us the iPod Generation) is by showing us what is in it for us. Selfish? Yes. But also true. Space travel is nothing new, but us having the chance to actually go into space one day is. The space elevator is another cool thing to renew interest, of course with terrorists running around and our governments paranoia that will never happen.
NASA has shown us that space travel is no longer solely in the realm of science fiction. Now they need to get the rest of us up there so we can gain some perspective (I hear nothing changes your outlook on life like seeing the earth from orbit) and have a new common goal for humanity.
Plus...if this world goes any further into the shitter I know there will be quite a few of us looking for any method possible of getting off of this god-forsaken rock.
More importantly, if our questions are used in the successful trouncing of the RIAA are we going to receive any of the money that would inevitably be awarded for legal expenses in a counter-suit? Not really too serious here....while I'd love for the winners to get paid...I'd much rather donate my services to crushing the RIAA.
Followed up by, "Do you have currently live with a spouse or other individual who might alert the authorities if a home invader were to break in...say...later this week..."
I'm Jewish you insensitive clod!
Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective I. There are approximately 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Jehovah's Witnesses, or Buddist religions, this reduces the workload on Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with at least one good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, jump out, go down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump in the sleigh, and move on to the next house. (That's why it's really pointless to stay up and wait for him....)
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom breaks. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 75.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child has nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull nothing more than 300 pounds. Even granted that "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or nine of them; Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the sleigh itself, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizibeth (the ship, not the monarch).
IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance; this would heat up the reindeer in the same fasion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and causing deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.2 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reaches the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G's. A 250 pound Santa (which seem ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pound of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Don't forget to click my link and read some of the responses to the original post, they're great. Merry Christmas Slashdot!