The iPhone may be expensive for a "phone" -- but as a pocket computer, it's a pretty cool device.
I actually question its value as a general-purpose pocket computer. With no stylus and only a touchscreen for data entry, using it to take notes or do any sort of serious data entry would be a ponderous process.
Throw a stylus in and open it up so anyone can write 3rd-party apps, though, and it could be a serious contender in the handheld computing industry. Goodness knows they need a kick in the pants - I probably won't be replacing my Tungsten T2 because Palm OS is a walking corpse and Windows Mobile fills me with hate.
One of the things that has amazed me about the Linux community (and really, it seems to be a Linux thing; other open-source apps seem to be able to weather honest critiques without all the knee-jerk bile spewing) is its inability to stomach criticism. I read ESR's article, and regardless of what someone might feel about his personality, the article and its writing made sense.
He gave a very reasoned explanation for why he left, and one that deserves consideration. I know I ditched RPM distros for the same reason years ago, and if he's complaining about the same things that I was experiencing back around the turn of the century then I'm very willing to believe his allegation that package management on RH/Fedora has been stagnant for a long time.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming color of the response has been people attacking ESR's personality rather than trying to speak to his criticism. Like you said, it makes us look damn bad. Moreover, it should serve as evidence that ESR is right to any outside observer, since character assassination is usually only used by people who can't actually refute a person's arguments.
Given the rather short time between the introduction of DVD and the introduction of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I wouldn't be surprised if they do kindasorta fail in that they'll be replaced by a new format before either really gets a chance to take over the market.
Most of the reason DVD caught on quickly was that it offered a bazillion advantages over VHS. All that the HD formats really have to offer is that a small percentage of the consumers can view movies at a higher resolution than they could with DVD. The rest have to buy a new TV or computer for there to be any advantage, which is going to retard the adoption of both formats.
The point is the summary claimed "Visual Basic on GNU/Linux", and that's not really true.
Yes it is. Microsoft calls VB.NET Visual Basic. When I want to create a new VB.NET project in Visual Studio, I select the "Visual Basic" widget. Yes, you're right, VB.NET and VB6 are different languages, but if the company that developed both of them refers to both of them as Visual Basic, then it is perfectly legal to refer to either of them as Visual Basic.
By your same reasoning, it wouldn't be valid to refer to Windows NT, 2K, XP, etc. as Windows, because the first product to be called Windows was the Win9x series and NT represents a separate lineage. Yeah, you could tell people who refer to XP as Windows they're wrong, but I'd suggest the best way to do that is by donning a sandwich board and standing on a street corner yelling it at passersby.
There needs to be a version of Godwin's Law for referring to anything that competes with an Apple product as an "insert product name here" killer. This is getting stupid. A few days ago we had an "iPhone killer" when the iPhone hasn't even come out on the market yet, and now we have an "Aperture killer" when Aperture, being a Mac-only program, is decidedly _not_ the dominant software in its market niche.
Hence, I propose Bastian's Law to fill the gap:
Anyone who refers to a product as an Apple product killer rather than describing what it actually does will be drug out into the street, severely beaten, and left to be crapped on by pigeons and crows. Repeat offenders, such as tech columnists who have gone so far as to delete the term "mp3 player" from their vocabulary in favor of "iPod killer" will also have their computers destroyed in an effort to prevent future offenses.
The only way something like this could work is if every municipality were to have a recycling program in which people don't have to sort their recyclables. However, right away I see a serious problem with bulbs breaking and releasing their gas into the atmosphere.
I also have to wonder what the total energy equation for incandescent vs. CFL looks like - just looking at the two side by side suggest to me that the total energy cost of a CFL must be massive compared to an incandescent, possibly enough to mean that the incandescent actually produces less pollution over its entire lifecycle.
It doesn't matter if you are trying to prohibit drinking alcohol or paying someone else for sexual favors, prohibition doesn't work -- all it does is create artificial scarcity which then develops a black market for the product or service. When alcohol was prohibited in the U.S., the mob was created. When incandescent light bulbs are banned, the black market will flourish, unless people see a real reason to switch.
That really only happens when the ban is on something with relatively inelastic demand. I severely doubt most people will go through the effort of finding a black-market source of light bulbs just to get a hold of incandescents. Nor do I think that demand is inelastic enough to support much of a black market. People would have to prefer incandescent light to all other options strongly enough that they'd be willing to pay a much higher price to cover the costs associated with smuggling the bulbs into Australia. In California there will probably be some small mom-and-pop retailers who get incandescents shipped in from other states, but chain hardware and big box stores aren't going to be able to get away with that and really, who cares if the local hardware store is selling gray-market incandescent bulbs?
More likely, this will just increase the rate at which LED lights are adopted as light bulb manufacturers try to accommodate people who have a problem with CFLs and to fill the gap created for applications in which fluorescent lighting really isn't appropriate, such as bathrooms and closets.
There will probably be increased consumer knowledge about fluorescent lighting, too - for example, realizing that you really do get what you pay for with fluorescent lights. Buzzing and flickering are really only a problem with cheap CFLs, and in the long run the more expensive ones are cheaper, too, since they tend to last much longer. CFLs will also improve, since manufacturers will have to (finally) start producing bulbs that are small enough to fit in most globe fixtures and with increased marketshare there will be increased incentive for manufacturers to develop bulbs that produce a better quality of light.
While I don't feel that bludgeoning people into switching their lights is the right choice, the period of growing pains really shouldn't be that long (or bad) and I certainly don't believe that a ban on incandescent lighting is going to be a huge boon for organized crime like you seem to suggest.
Speaking as someone who dropped his satellite radio subscription after he moved to an area where the local radio was better, I can say I don't believe that a merged Sirius and XM counts as a monopoly. They still have to compete heavily with the free radio that everyone's used to getting, as well as with internet radio and podcasting, and considering how many other satellite radio users I've met, their combined customer bates probably accounts for a very small percentage of the market.
Really, it's interesting to note that the most multiracial games on the mass marke are the GTA series, where everyone is a hoodlum. Most other games feature overwhelmingly white casts, especially if that game's characters have much personality. The first non-white protagonist that pops into my mind outside of GTA is Barret, and he is laden with a multitude of stereotypes - basically just Mr. T with a prosthesis.
But I still think that that understanding is incompatible with the kind of Christianity that holds to Creationism, particularly the young-earth kind. The deist God and the God of Biblical literalism are two very different Gods.
But that's simply not the evolutionary theory that science is talking about. The standard scientific understanding is that evolution is not a directed process and humans are not an end result, any more than homo erectus or australopithecus was an end product. We're going to continue evolving and eventually there will be no such thing as homo sapiens anymore; we will have been superseded by a new species.
According to evolutionary science, humans have more to do with the patterns you might see at any one moment in a lava lamp than they do with a manufactured product.
The Christianity that you recognize reconciles easily with scientific discovery is not the Christianity practiced by Creationists.* This other form of Christianity includes a large amount of doctrine that simply cannot coexist with much of science, including evolutionary theory. Examples are: The world is 7,000 years old, humanity is the centerpiece of creation, the world as described in the Bible is the world as it has always been, etc.
Really, I think the most important chafing point is the understanding that humans are somehow special - created in God's own image, whereas that's usually associated with evolution is that we're an unremarkable (except by our own measure) midpoint in a process of random chance that has been happening for billions of years and will happen for billions more.
The second most important chafing point is that there is simply no way to reconcile evolution with Biblical literalism - to someone who is a Biblical literalist, the Bible is either true or it is false. It is God's word, and therefore must be 100% perfect - even one factual error, such as whether the earth is a few thousand or a few thousand thousand years old, calls the entire thing into question.
For this kind of Christian, evolution (and cosmology) is worse than an attack on their beliefs - it's an attack on the entire foundation for their understanding of the world.
*Just to put it on the table - Intelligent Design is a straw man. It's Creationism in a lab coat picked up at the local thrift store. The idea was cooked up shortly after Creationism was shot down by the US court as a way to try to submarine Creationism back into the school systems.
Well, he's definitely ahead of the curve compared to most people. He's been writing RPGs since about the time I first discovered them. However, a quick look at the games published by Spiderweb suggests that, other than a switch from bird's eye to isometric perspective sometime last century, their games are all pretty much the same.
Which makes me wonder why he's writing this column about why we need to move on. He's a game developer - if he doesn't like the way things are being done now he shouldn't just sit there and spout vitriol in column on IGN, he should sit down and come up with something better.
I don't think that's exactly what the author is talking about. I think the point he was trying (and, admittedly, not really succeeding) to get across is the way pacing is done in most RPGs. It's the same system that has been happening on console RPGs since Dragon Warrior came out 20 years ago - the level grind.
The problem isn't the leveling, it's the grinding. In most CRPGs, the game play (as I see it) goes like so: Walk into a maze whose primary purpose is to force you to do a lot of exploring (read: walking around aimlessly) so that you have to fight a whole lot of random encounters with puny little enemies. Fighting in these random encounters is more or less mindless, because they're puny and their real purpose isn't to present a challenge so much as to level your party up. This makes you powerful enough to go on to the next maze. . .
The problem with this mechanic is that it's tedious, repetetive, and boring; and that it isn't necessary. In most any CRPG, you could easily cut out all the random encounters, get rid of the mazes (which serve no purpose without the random encounters), and make the difficulty jump between bosses smaller (since we're not level grinding anymore) and have the exact same game except that it really does only take a few hours to complete instead of weeks of your life. The story (the core of an RPG like this) would be the same.
FFVII, which I spent months working through, could probably be cut down to a weekend's worth of playing with all the fluff cut out.
Contrast this with Fallout, which manages to change the whole feel of the game with only a little tweaking to the basic idea of the game. The mazes aren't nearly so large (barely even worth calling mazes, really), random encounters only happen on the map and there aren't nearly as many of them, battles are harder, and the whole battle system is more interesting since it takes actual thought rather than being something you handle by hitting the X button repeatedly while chugging a Mountain Dew and staring out the window. Yeah, you still have to level to get through the game, but leveling doesn't require grinding.
Personally, I'd like to see an RPG that trims the fat even more than Fallout did, but at least it's a start.
This might have been meant as a joke, but there's a healthy dose of truth to it. There's enough physiological difference between mice and humans that you can't trust research on them to be applicable to humans. This is why animal testing has to be followed up with extensive human trials before a drug can be released to the market.
For example, many animal trials (mice in particular) didn't show cigarette smoke to be nearly as much of a cancer risk as it is for humans. This research data was in turn used by Big Tobacco in their defense back when they were still trying to pretend that smoking isn't so bad.
Similarly, penicillin's release to the market was delayed because it had a tendency to kill lab animals.
Yeah, that would be great if they would just port Office to Apple. I'd probably get a Mac if they did that. Oh and if Macs could read my PC floppy discs, and use my two button mouse, and my LCD monitor. I wish Macs could do all that; dare to dream.
I know you're being sarcastic, but since/. seems to be full of people who are surprisingly clueless about this stuff and may miss the sarcasm and I love being an apologist whore:
It's the false fear that if DRM doesn't exist their income will plummet to 0, which isn't the case.
While I can't claim to read the minds of the top brass in the music industry, I'm inclined to believe that this is not the case. They're literate people, so I find it hard to believe that they don't know as well as everyone else does that filesharing is not going to kill them and that DRM on general-purpose computers is not workable.
It's much more likely that what this is really about is the bread-and-butter of every cartel: control.
Sad thing is, there's really no one in particular we can blame. Most everyone in the global upper class (the vast majority of Americans, for example) are all a part of the capitalist system.
If you have money invested in the stock market or a mutual fund, chances are you chose how to invest based on expected capital gains and didn't really pay attention to the social responsibility of the companies you invested in - thus making you a part of the problem rather than the solution.
Same for if you have money in an interest-bearing bank account - the interest your money earns comes from the bank investing that money, loaning it out, etc., and nobody ever pays attention to what the money in their savings account is being used to fund.
I don't seem to remember it being such a big deal when Microsoft was fashionably late to the porting-apps-to-OSX party. Their stuff (mostly) worked under Classic from day one. It was no big deal; folks barely even noticed.
Comparatively speaking, this is making a mountain out of an almost imperceptible molehill.
can't we come up with some GPL'ish license to free any product based on this data?"
No. Drug companies don't play games like this. None will sink money into developing a vaccine based on a virus sample if they cannot be granted exclusive rights to produce that vaccine for a period of time. They'll go spend their R&D dollars on fighting developing some other drug that they can use to rake in big stinking piles of cash instead.
That's the way capitalism works - when people decide what to invest in, they rarely look at putting money behind something that they realize is not likely to give them a large return out of the goodness of their hearts. They figure out what's going to make them the most money. The market is not known for rewarding altruism. As a result, any drug company that wants to continue to exist as a drug company is going to do very little in the way of charity research, and instead do the kind of stuff that attracts capital.
The only way we're going to get drug research without patent protection is to start some sort of government agency whose primary purpose is to do this stuff. But good luck getting that to happen (in the US, anyway) voters don't have a history of being in favor of things like this, and the drug industry would viciously lobby against any sort of government-sponsored competitor.
If what they're advertising is true, then it's more complicated than that. Pixel counting alone would only allow them to accurately calculate the length of line segments that are both the same distance from the camera and orthogonal to the camera's view axis. Even then, it would be hard to achieve 99.5% accuracy in many cases because the edges of the calibration block probably don't line up very well with pixel boundaries. So to provide a reasonable guarantee of accuracy on that plane alone requires the ability to extract sub-pixel information from the image with reasonable accuracy.
To calculate lengths that are not close to lying on that plane is more complicated. The software needs to be able to very accurately account for perspective, which involves doing a pretty respectable amount of analysis. There's been a lot of research into that and I'd actually be very surprised if this were the first commercial software to do something like that, but it's still a non-trivial problem.
Actually, I think they're generally indifferent to whether their policies strengthen America, weaken it, or whatever. To the Republicans, a policy or program is considered desirable if and only if it opens the federal treasury to their corporate patrons, who are subsequently expected to return a portion of the loot in the form of campaign contributions and other favors. Thus, privatization is a convenient and reliable way of converting taxpayers' money into campaign funds and continued power. It is the "marriage of State and corporate power" of which Mussolini spoke.
Not to be picky, but this is hardly a behavior that is the exclusive province of the Republican party. Plenty of Democrats have done the same thing. Now it is true that the folks who really raised this kind of socially corrosive scheming to a high art (Tom DeLay and his buddies) were members of the Republican party, but using this as an excuse to ignore the Democrats' corruption won't do a thing to make the US Government less sucky.
It's also worth noting that the names on the McCain-Feingold finance reform bill represent one Republican and one Democrat.
What I find interesting about that sentiment, is Jobs is basically saying "We would be totally happy competing on a level playing field where the quality of our offering would go up against the other guys stuff". He says that, because he believes it -- and, as an iPod owner who has never bought a track from the iTunes music store, I agree with him. I find the iPod and iTunes to be good products.
I wouldn't be surprised if, at this point, Apple has realized that what makes iTMS so great for them is not that it sells DRM-encumbered AAC files so much as that it is the most well-known location for selling all sorts of media, as well as distributing free content such as podcasts. And that it tightly integrates with the iPod, and the iPod is the only MP3 player that is integrated with iTunes.
Folks who worry about Apple's DRM are missing the point - Apple's DRM contributes nothing to their command of the market. The real power is in that tight integration, and while Apple might be more than happy to drop the DRM, I have a feeling that hell would freeze over before Apple willingly opens up the protocol for syncing with iPods so other MP3 player manufacturers can integrate their products with iTunes.
Right now, the Space Shuttle is only infrequently used to launch satellites. The vast majority of them (military and otherwise) are launched with standard rockets. It's much cheaper to just launch the satellite, rather than launching the satellite plus a bunch of squishy bodies plus all the thousands and thousands of pounds of equipment it takes to keep those squishy bodies from going squish.
And we don't even need those squishy bodies there to successfully deploy a satellite; sending them up for such a mundane task is just wasting money and putting lives in danger for no good reason.
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The iPhone may be expensive for a "phone" -- but as a pocket computer, it's a pretty cool device.
I actually question its value as a general-purpose pocket computer. With no stylus and only a touchscreen for data entry, using it to take notes or do any sort of serious data entry would be a ponderous process.
Throw a stylus in and open it up so anyone can write 3rd-party apps, though, and it could be a serious contender in the handheld computing industry. Goodness knows they need a kick in the pants - I probably won't be replacing my Tungsten T2 because Palm OS is a walking corpse and Windows Mobile fills me with hate.
One of the things that has amazed me about the Linux community (and really, it seems to be a Linux thing; other open-source apps seem to be able to weather honest critiques without all the knee-jerk bile spewing) is its inability to stomach criticism. I read ESR's article, and regardless of what someone might feel about his personality, the article and its writing made sense.
He gave a very reasoned explanation for why he left, and one that deserves consideration. I know I ditched RPM distros for the same reason years ago, and if he's complaining about the same things that I was experiencing back around the turn of the century then I'm very willing to believe his allegation that package management on RH/Fedora has been stagnant for a long time.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming color of the response has been people attacking ESR's personality rather than trying to speak to his criticism. Like you said, it makes us look damn bad. Moreover, it should serve as evidence that ESR is right to any outside observer, since character assassination is usually only used by people who can't actually refute a person's arguments.
Given the rather short time between the introduction of DVD and the introduction of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I wouldn't be surprised if they do kindasorta fail in that they'll be replaced by a new format before either really gets a chance to take over the market.
Most of the reason DVD caught on quickly was that it offered a bazillion advantages over VHS. All that the HD formats really have to offer is that a small percentage of the consumers can view movies at a higher resolution than they could with DVD. The rest have to buy a new TV or computer for there to be any advantage, which is going to retard the adoption of both formats.
The point is the summary claimed "Visual Basic on GNU/Linux", and that's not really true.
Yes it is. Microsoft calls VB.NET Visual Basic. When I want to create a new VB.NET project in Visual Studio, I select the "Visual Basic" widget. Yes, you're right, VB.NET and VB6 are different languages, but if the company that developed both of them refers to both of them as Visual Basic, then it is perfectly legal to refer to either of them as Visual Basic.
By your same reasoning, it wouldn't be valid to refer to Windows NT, 2K, XP, etc. as Windows, because the first product to be called Windows was the Win9x series and NT represents a separate lineage. Yeah, you could tell people who refer to XP as Windows they're wrong, but I'd suggest the best way to do that is by donning a sandwich board and standing on a street corner yelling it at passersby.
Managing to tack a port of VB6 on top of a port of .NET would be interesting indeed.
For an encore performance, we could implement Delphi on top of Java/SWT.
Hence, I propose Bastian's Law to fill the gap:
The only way something like this could work is if every municipality were to have a recycling program in which people don't have to sort their recyclables. However, right away I see a serious problem with bulbs breaking and releasing their gas into the atmosphere.
I also have to wonder what the total energy equation for incandescent vs. CFL looks like - just looking at the two side by side suggest to me that the total energy cost of a CFL must be massive compared to an incandescent, possibly enough to mean that the incandescent actually produces less pollution over its entire lifecycle.
It doesn't matter if you are trying to prohibit drinking alcohol or paying someone else for sexual favors, prohibition doesn't work -- all it does is create artificial scarcity which then develops a black market for the product or service. When alcohol was prohibited in the U.S., the mob was created. When incandescent light bulbs are banned, the black market will flourish, unless people see a real reason to switch.
That really only happens when the ban is on something with relatively inelastic demand. I severely doubt most people will go through the effort of finding a black-market source of light bulbs just to get a hold of incandescents. Nor do I think that demand is inelastic enough to support much of a black market. People would have to prefer incandescent light to all other options strongly enough that they'd be willing to pay a much higher price to cover the costs associated with smuggling the bulbs into Australia. In California there will probably be some small mom-and-pop retailers who get incandescents shipped in from other states, but chain hardware and big box stores aren't going to be able to get away with that and really, who cares if the local hardware store is selling gray-market incandescent bulbs?
More likely, this will just increase the rate at which LED lights are adopted as light bulb manufacturers try to accommodate people who have a problem with CFLs and to fill the gap created for applications in which fluorescent lighting really isn't appropriate, such as bathrooms and closets.
There will probably be increased consumer knowledge about fluorescent lighting, too - for example, realizing that you really do get what you pay for with fluorescent lights. Buzzing and flickering are really only a problem with cheap CFLs, and in the long run the more expensive ones are cheaper, too, since they tend to last much longer. CFLs will also improve, since manufacturers will have to (finally) start producing bulbs that are small enough to fit in most globe fixtures and with increased marketshare there will be increased incentive for manufacturers to develop bulbs that produce a better quality of light.
While I don't feel that bludgeoning people into switching their lights is the right choice, the period of growing pains really shouldn't be that long (or bad) and I certainly don't believe that a ban on incandescent lighting is going to be a huge boon for organized crime like you seem to suggest.
Speaking as someone who dropped his satellite radio subscription after he moved to an area where the local radio was better, I can say I don't believe that a merged Sirius and XM counts as a monopoly. They still have to compete heavily with the free radio that everyone's used to getting, as well as with internet radio and podcasting, and considering how many other satellite radio users I've met, their combined customer bates probably accounts for a very small percentage of the market.
Really, it's interesting to note that the most multiracial games on the mass marke are the GTA series, where everyone is a hoodlum. Most other games feature overwhelmingly white casts, especially if that game's characters have much personality. The first non-white protagonist that pops into my mind outside of GTA is Barret, and he is laden with a multitude of stereotypes - basically just Mr. T with a prosthesis.
Gotcha.
But I still think that that understanding is incompatible with the kind of Christianity that holds to Creationism, particularly the young-earth kind. The deist God and the God of Biblical literalism are two very different Gods.
But that's simply not the evolutionary theory that science is talking about. The standard scientific understanding is that evolution is not a directed process and humans are not an end result, any more than homo erectus or australopithecus was an end product. We're going to continue evolving and eventually there will be no such thing as homo sapiens anymore; we will have been superseded by a new species.
According to evolutionary science, humans have more to do with the patterns you might see at any one moment in a lava lamp than they do with a manufactured product.
The Christianity that you recognize reconciles easily with scientific discovery is not the Christianity practiced by Creationists.* This other form of Christianity includes a large amount of doctrine that simply cannot coexist with much of science, including evolutionary theory. Examples are: The world is 7,000 years old, humanity is the centerpiece of creation, the world as described in the Bible is the world as it has always been, etc.
Really, I think the most important chafing point is the understanding that humans are somehow special - created in God's own image, whereas that's usually associated with evolution is that we're an unremarkable (except by our own measure) midpoint in a process of random chance that has been happening for billions of years and will happen for billions more.
The second most important chafing point is that there is simply no way to reconcile evolution with Biblical literalism - to someone who is a Biblical literalist, the Bible is either true or it is false. It is God's word, and therefore must be 100% perfect - even one factual error, such as whether the earth is a few thousand or a few thousand thousand years old, calls the entire thing into question.
For this kind of Christian, evolution (and cosmology) is worse than an attack on their beliefs - it's an attack on the entire foundation for their understanding of the world.
*Just to put it on the table - Intelligent Design is a straw man. It's Creationism in a lab coat picked up at the local thrift store. The idea was cooked up shortly after Creationism was shot down by the US court as a way to try to submarine Creationism back into the school systems.
Well, he's definitely ahead of the curve compared to most people. He's been writing RPGs since about the time I first discovered them. However, a quick look at the games published by Spiderweb suggests that, other than a switch from bird's eye to isometric perspective sometime last century, their games are all pretty much the same.
Which makes me wonder why he's writing this column about why we need to move on. He's a game developer - if he doesn't like the way things are being done now he shouldn't just sit there and spout vitriol in column on IGN, he should sit down and come up with something better.
I don't think that's exactly what the author is talking about. I think the point he was trying (and, admittedly, not really succeeding) to get across is the way pacing is done in most RPGs. It's the same system that has been happening on console RPGs since Dragon Warrior came out 20 years ago - the level grind.
The problem isn't the leveling, it's the grinding. In most CRPGs, the game play (as I see it) goes like so:
Walk into a maze whose primary purpose is to force you to do a lot of exploring (read: walking around aimlessly) so that you have to fight a whole lot of random encounters with puny little enemies. Fighting in these random encounters is more or less mindless, because they're puny and their real purpose isn't to present a challenge so much as to level your party up. This makes you powerful enough to go on to the next maze. . .
The problem with this mechanic is that it's tedious, repetetive, and boring; and that it isn't necessary. In most any CRPG, you could easily cut out all the random encounters, get rid of the mazes (which serve no purpose without the random encounters), and make the difficulty jump between bosses smaller (since we're not level grinding anymore) and have the exact same game except that it really does only take a few hours to complete instead of weeks of your life. The story (the core of an RPG like this) would be the same.
FFVII, which I spent months working through, could probably be cut down to a weekend's worth of playing with all the fluff cut out.
Contrast this with Fallout, which manages to change the whole feel of the game with only a little tweaking to the basic idea of the game. The mazes aren't nearly so large (barely even worth calling mazes, really), random encounters only happen on the map and there aren't nearly as many of them, battles are harder, and the whole battle system is more interesting since it takes actual thought rather than being something you handle by hitting the X button repeatedly while chugging a Mountain Dew and staring out the window. Yeah, you still have to level to get through the game, but leveling doesn't require grinding.
Personally, I'd like to see an RPG that trims the fat even more than Fallout did, but at least it's a start.
This might have been meant as a joke, but there's a healthy dose of truth to it. There's enough physiological difference between mice and humans that you can't trust research on them to be applicable to humans. This is why animal testing has to be followed up with extensive human trials before a drug can be released to the market.
For example, many animal trials (mice in particular) didn't show cigarette smoke to be nearly as much of a cancer risk as it is for humans. This research data was in turn used by Big Tobacco in their defense back when they were still trying to pretend that smoking isn't so bad.
Similarly, penicillin's release to the market was delayed because it had a tendency to kill lab animals.
I know you're being sarcastic, but since
Macs do all that.
While I can't claim to read the minds of the top brass in the music industry, I'm inclined to believe that this is not the case. They're literate people, so I find it hard to believe that they don't know as well as everyone else does that filesharing is not going to kill them and that DRM on general-purpose computers is not workable.
It's much more likely that what this is really about is the bread-and-butter of every cartel: control.
Sad thing is, there's really no one in particular we can blame. Most everyone in the global upper class (the vast majority of Americans, for example) are all a part of the capitalist system.
If you have money invested in the stock market or a mutual fund, chances are you chose how to invest based on expected capital gains and didn't really pay attention to the social responsibility of the companies you invested in - thus making you a part of the problem rather than the solution.
Same for if you have money in an interest-bearing bank account - the interest your money earns comes from the bank investing that money, loaning it out, etc., and nobody ever pays attention to what the money in their savings account is being used to fund.
Thank you.
I don't seem to remember it being such a big deal when Microsoft was fashionably late to the porting-apps-to-OSX party. Their stuff (mostly) worked under Classic from day one. It was no big deal; folks barely even noticed.
Comparatively speaking, this is making a mountain out of an almost imperceptible molehill.
No. Drug companies don't play games like this. None will sink money into developing a vaccine based on a virus sample if they cannot be granted exclusive rights to produce that vaccine for a period of time. They'll go spend their R&D dollars on fighting developing some other drug that they can use to rake in big stinking piles of cash instead.
That's the way capitalism works - when people decide what to invest in, they rarely look at putting money behind something that they realize is not likely to give them a large return out of the goodness of their hearts. They figure out what's going to make them the most money. The market is not known for rewarding altruism. As a result, any drug company that wants to continue to exist as a drug company is going to do very little in the way of charity research, and instead do the kind of stuff that attracts capital.
The only way we're going to get drug research without patent protection is to start some sort of government agency whose primary purpose is to do this stuff. But good luck getting that to happen (in the US, anyway) voters don't have a history of being in favor of things like this, and the drug industry would viciously lobby against any sort of government-sponsored competitor.
If what they're advertising is true, then it's more complicated than that. Pixel counting alone would only allow them to accurately calculate the length of line segments that are both the same distance from the camera and orthogonal to the camera's view axis. Even then, it would be hard to achieve 99.5% accuracy in many cases because the edges of the calibration block probably don't line up very well with pixel boundaries. So to provide a reasonable guarantee of accuracy on that plane alone requires the ability to extract sub-pixel information from the image with reasonable accuracy.
To calculate lengths that are not close to lying on that plane is more complicated. The software needs to be able to very accurately account for perspective, which involves doing a pretty respectable amount of analysis. There's been a lot of research into that and I'd actually be very surprised if this were the first commercial software to do something like that, but it's still a non-trivial problem.
It's also worth noting that the names on the McCain-Feingold finance reform bill represent one Republican and one Democrat.
Folks who worry about Apple's DRM are missing the point - Apple's DRM contributes nothing to their command of the market. The real power is in that tight integration, and while Apple might be more than happy to drop the DRM, I have a feeling that hell would freeze over before Apple willingly opens up the protocol for syncing with iPods so other MP3 player manufacturers can integrate their products with iTunes.
Right now, the Space Shuttle is only infrequently used to launch satellites. The vast majority of them (military and otherwise) are launched with standard rockets. It's much cheaper to just launch the satellite, rather than launching the satellite plus a bunch of squishy bodies plus all the thousands and thousands of pounds of equipment it takes to keep those squishy bodies from going squish.
And we don't even need those squishy bodies there to successfully deploy a satellite; sending them up for such a mundane task is just wasting money and putting lives in danger for no good reason.