It's very self-sacrificing of you to play every RPG, even though you hate the genre so much, so that you can be justified in making such sweeping generalizations. You're a paragon among haters, and I salute you.
Their new stuff might be good, but they lost me as a customer years ago, due to some less than stellar K7 stuff. Unless their competition in the AMD chipset arena (read: NVIDIA) really makes a hash of it with future products, I won't be going back to VIA. Goes to show, customers have long memories for vendor reliability!
While you have a point regarding making a per capita comparison, I feel your comment about the murder rate being linked to a "very small portion of the US population" is beyond the pale. Be honest, "very small portion" is just a euphemism for "poor people who are mostly not Caucasian." I'm sorry, you don't get to ignore minorities, or people of lower socioeconomic status, when computing statistics at a national level. Just because they aren't part of your community doesn't mean they don't count. Part of the reason that America has a violence problem is that people like you won't face up to the fact that America has a violence problem. "The first step is admission", and all that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-step_program.
I saw the SuperHiDef demonstration at the Aichi Expo this summer. Yes, the name sounds silly. Yes, the concept of needing something beyond the HDTV we already have seems ridiculous. But don't knock it until you've actually seen it for yourself. Mark my words, many of the people heaping sarcasm into this topic now will be the same people who will be craving a SHDTV-capable display for their next cool toy.
For those of you who don't know, one of the major attractions at the Aichi expo was the incredibly well preserved partial remains of a wooly mammoth. In order to see the mammoth, you had to sit through what was essentially a SHDTV sales pitch, after which you actually got to see a short SHDTV movie of scenes from around Japan. And only after all of that, and wandering through some antiquities dispay, did you finally get to see the mammoth. We happened to go on a really, really rainy day (not entirely surprising, as I was there during monsoon season), and were lucky enough to actually get a chance to go in (on a day where the weather wasn't terrible, the lineups would have been prohibitive).
We were making all kinds of wisecracks about the silly sales tactic, how we were literally a captive audience, "If I buy one, will you release me?" and all that sort of thing. What I mean to say is, by that point in the day, tired, soaked, snared into this unexpected sales pitch trap, we were very much what you'd call a tough audience. When we actually went into the theater to see the movie, we were set to rip into the experience with a fresh round of sarcastic venom. Every single one of us came out of the theater absolutely wowed.
The opening scene was of a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. It was utterly incredible. Every single leaf, every single branch, every single twig was defined with unbelievable clarity. It actually seemed to look three-dimensional, almost popping off the screen. For a moment, I thought they must have pulled the screen away to reveal a real tree behind it. There were other scenes, one of my favorites being a panoramic shot of a small Japanese mountain town covered in snow. You could make out incredible detail on tiny people way off in the distance shovelling snow. If you ever get the chance to see it for yourselves, I hope you take the opportunity, because it was a sight to behold.
I don't mean to say that this technology has many practical applications. Do we really need to watch cartoons, or sitcoms, or dramas, or porn, or home videos, at SHDTV resolution? Probably not. Would the nature documentaries and other subjects normally filmed in IMAX format look orders of magnitude more impressive if filmed in SHDTV? Absolutely so. I think HDTV will predominate for quite a while yet, while SHDTV will be used in specialty applications, maybe gaining market penetration in a decade or so, if ever.
Anyway, for those of you spouting off on this topic, I can safely say that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I hope you get a chance to find out just how wrong you are.
For my money, the GTA series has to be one of the most overrated franchises currently being milked. While it certainly enjoys lots of free press by virtue of its once-shocking but now-old-news violence and depravity, it really doesn't seem to have grown much since it first went 3D. Rockstar found a working formula in GTA3 (after the the original games failed commercially), and have been suckling at that same teat ever since. I played the original GTA3 for a short while, and saw a little of Vice City, and I have to say, it does nothing for me. Once you get past the shock value of being able to beat a granny to death with a baseball bat, there's really not much in the way of compelling gameplay. The missions are fairly uninspired, the story is utterly generic, and there's nothing in it that really grabs me. I think "open-ended" in and of itself doesn't necessarily make for a good game, and leads to the pacing of the game being very haphazard, depending. I'm sure fans of the series would disagree, but perhaps they're better able to overlook the games' flaws than I am.
I hate to say it, but SCART is pretty much dead, for two reasons:
1) it can't carry digital signals
2) it can't carry surround sound signals
SCART was an interesting all-in-one design that was great in its day, but it wasn't adequately future-proofed, and it never made any impression in markets outside of Europe. See this page for more info. Welcome to the digital future, I hope a new TV is in your budget! Seriously though, they're going to all the trouble of enforcing HD content, they want to encourage people to actually use HD, rather than maximizing their SD experience. On top of that, SCART is not DRM-capable like the forthcoming HDCP digital standard, something MS is keenly aware of since their box can play DVDs.
Oh come on, you didn't even have to read the article for this one. It's right in the post, in the second sentence:
"Mac shipments rose 35 percent"
If the number of Mac shipments shipped is growing significantly, they have to be going to someone. Unless there's another more compelling explanation, it would be logical to conclude that many of these systems are getting shipped to new Mac users.
Are there truly 400,000 Windows users who have switched? It's hard to say, of course. Maybe many of those new shipments went to Windows users buying a second PC (whether or not that's defined as a switch is entirely a semantic argument, and completely uninteresting to me). Maybe there's been an aberrant spike in the number of existing Mac users buying a second system or upgrading. I doubt any combination of alternate explanations can account for the entire increase, at any rate.
Whatever, the numbers can be quibbled over if one wants to waste time, but the point still remains that there are strong indications that Apple is growing their brand, which is good news for them. Throwing out a big number just gets the website more page impressions, more posts on Slashdot, etc.
The Inq used to be decent, or at least their staffers could bloody well proofread. From the article:
Berners-Lee said that even though there is a need for more content that can be browsable from PDAs and cell phones, a separate domain isn't the way to achieve this, Berners-Lee said.
If you want to avoid RSI, stop touch-typing. I'm also nearly 30, and have been typing since I was 7 or 8 as well. I've never had RSI, because I don't use a single static abnormal posture for my forearms. I can type over 60 words per minute using (mainly) my two index fingers. To do this, my forearms have to move around a lot, and my wrists can almost always be inline with my forearms. And no, I don't look at the keyboard when I type. I've been doing it for so long that I can move my arm and have my index finger land on the key I want, without the need to peek. I have to glance occaisionally to make sure my fingers are over the keys I'm expecting, but that's about it.
There are some downsides, though. I have to slow down a lot on so-called "ergonomic" keyboards, I can't hit 100 wpm like some touch typists, and changing the motion required from wrists to arms means my shoulders will get tired after long days typing. On the plus side, the shoulders are a lot more durable than the wrists, and I'm betting I'll be able to sustain 60 wpm for the rest of my life while most touch-typists will hampered by wrist bracers by the time they're 40. 100 wpm ain't worth it, as far as I'm concerned. QWERTY, DVORAK, doesn't matter, just get your damn wrists off the desk!
Assuming that list is correct, with all the features, what are the chances the virus author actually coded them all? I'm guessing some extensive customization probably had to go into whatever code was used. Possibly it was created using open source libraries for certain components?
Also, this strikes me as the first truly bloatware virus... how big is this thing anyway??
Human memory is inherently fallible, far more than most people realize. Most of us implicitly believe that our memories are 1) accurate, and 2) stable over time. Neither is even remotely true when tested objectively. If you want to remember an event exactly as it occurred, your best bet is to commit it to some other medium than human memory.
Soooo... Sony's won the next-gen "console wars" before they've even started because they're going to sell a lot of PS3's, er, because, uh... this analyst company... um, says so. Yeah, that's some pretty persuasive arguin'! Seriously, this is the silliest proclamation I've ever seen, based on the thinnest evidence I've ever seen. The conclusion may be reasonable based on some evidence, but unfortunately they don't put any of the evidence in the article. And I'm not convinced Nintendo or Microsoft can't profit while selling "only" 5 and 10 million consoles respectively.
Are you kidding me? My boss regularily sends emails with "the" spelled "teh"! And that's just the most common misspelling ("the" being such a common word and all). He just wants to pound out the messages as fast as possible and get them sent, and doesn't care if things aren't quite properly spelled, as long as he thinks the email is only going to be seen internally. He's turned off his email spellcheck because he doesn't want to spend the time it takes to make a decision about badly spelled words. I'm sure this consultant is much the same.
As for a lot of the content of the leaked email, I can't make heads or tails of it either However, we really don't have a good handle on the context, so maybe it shouldn't be surprising. I'd guess the email makes a lot more sense to the intended recipient, spelling mistakes and all.
Naomi Klein can't be trusted. I remember reading some diatribe of hers complaining about chic downtime loft apartments. The concept of a loft apartment got picked up by real estate marketers after artists made it popular, and apartments manufactured to be loft-style started popping up all over the urban landscape. Ms. Klein fancies herself an artist, I suppose, and thought her chic downtown loft was quite the pad, until everyone started moving into these newly created "fake" loft apartments. This pisses her off supposedly because of they're "branded" as lofts, and she hates all things branding. But really, she just seemed to me to be annoyed that her loft wasn't as cool anymore. On the surface, No Logo seems to be a deep and meaningful book. When you scratch the surface, though, you find it's as shallow as its author.
In my mind, then, Ms. Klein is simply the opposite extreme on an unpalatable scale. On the one hand, you have branding, marketing and mass consumerism; these are the things she aims to tear down. On the other end of that scale, though, you have people like Ms. Klein, elitists who assign cachet to things simply because they are harder to find. I'm not even on the scale, so the whole thing seems pathetic and narcissistic to me.
You're knowledge of voting methods is obviously lacking. If you'd investigated the issue to any significant degree, you'd know that most countries using paper ballots have plenty of viable methods of working around the problems you mentioned. Stolen ballot boxes can be avoided by security and auditing at the polling station, and counting the votes onsite. Green votes can be avoided by counting the votes the same day they're cast. Recounts and endless challenges can be avoided by having each candidate provide their own counter, and have all counters agree on the vote count before the results are phoned in.
None of this is revolutionary, it's how the Canadian system works. In Canada, we know who our new Prime Minister (Canadian equivalent to a President, I guess you'd say) the same day the votes are cost. And the entire yearly budget for Elections Canada is less than the cost of a single election in a single major US city. Paperless elections are not safer or better, will not address the problems plaguing the US election system, and waste a ton of taxpayers money in the process.
In the interests of disclosure, I should note that none of these factoids are at all original or "mine" in any way, they're all from the I, Cringely article linked above. Read the article for a far more comprehensive overview.
It really depends on what types of games you include. If you lump in online web games (Hearts, Bridge, what have you), then women actually make up the larger percentage. Check it out!
Obviously Apple's not giving away to iPod design without getting something in return. For every iPod HP sells, they're going to have to give Apple a cut. So, HP won't be able to make as much profit per iPod as Apple does, but HP has much larger distribution channels than Apple, especially outside North America. There's a lot of interest in tapping emerging markets in eastern Europe and parts of Asia (especially China). By partnering with HP, Apple can get in on that action without having to spend money up front to increase production capacity and develop distro channels overseas, where it currently has little of either.
Apple could likely make more money in the long run by building overseas production and distribution capabilities, but it would require a huge investment up front. Apple does have lots of cash on hand (close to $5 billion!), but right now time is far more of a concern for them. They want to establish themselves in as many marketplaces as possible, as fast as possible, before competing MP3 products get there. It would be no use for them to spend all kinds of money breaking into new markets, only to find that some other vendor has been saturating that same market for six months already with cheaper (albeit less cool) competing product.
I think the major reason HP jumped from Napster to iTMS is the iPod itself. Comparing the two music distro partnerships, I doubt HP saw much difference in terms of the profit potential. But selling rebranded iPods?? The margins on those things are huge! And they have serious cool factor going for them right now. It's no wonder HP would switch to iTMS, given the chance to tap the kind of hardware profit margins Apple is currently enjoying.
The definition of intelligence doesn't change? I would argue otherwise, in the extreme! In an earlier post, you mentioned Bayesian networks in AI. These work quite well in allowing AI systems to make decisions. However, most evidence to date indicates that humans do not in fact use Bayesian logic when making decisions (or at least that was the case a few years ago, when I took a Cognitive Science course). Does a sufficiently complex AI system founded on Bayesian networks qualify as intelligent? Not if you're measuring it against human intelligence... but of course that's not the only standard for comparison.
To say that there's one unified, accepted definition of intelligence would be pretty much false. Your definition seems very strongly rooted in the classical AI tradition. Psychologists, cognitive science people, and many others would disagree with your definition of intelligence. Of course, if you have a very useful and effective robot or expert system whose decisions are rooted in Bayes theorem, it may not matter if it's "intelligent," per se. It works, doesn't it?;-)
For once I agree with something MS did. There are already too many mediocre MMORPGs floundering around in the marketplace. It's only a matter of time before some of them are forced to close their doors. As I understand it, there are a bunch of them (like Anarchy Online) that are caught between having too few subscribers to make a significant profit, but too many to pull the plug without facing a significant backlash. Aside from pure financial considerations, though, I wonder how much Mythic's lawsuit played into the decision (that's Mythic, developer of Dark Age of Camelot, as opposed to the just-cancelled project Mythica).
'Raph Koster of Sony Online adds that it "was startling to me... that (the federal comment process) is identical to how we build our patches and patch notes"'
Well that explains why both the govt. and SOE take forever to create change, and when they do, it's usually a change that no one wanted, that doesn't manage to fix the original problem. I suppose it's interesting that the Feds are looking at MMORPG as a model, blah blah blah, but why for the love of God did they have to pick SOE? Expect households with total annual income between $30K and 40K to be nerfed next term...;-)
I'm sure many of you have seen this before, but in case you haven't, I like Cringely's take on how to fix the voting system. Then again, since I'm a Canadian, my opinion is not without bias. But it certainly is nice to know who your new Prime Minister is the same day the ballots were cast! And hardly a computer involved, imagine that...
...as long as there's a way to send email "collect". If sending an email costs you 2 cents, you're not going to want to send out a list mailing to 30000. That's $600 per issue! However, if you can send each of those emails and have the recipient agree to pay the 2 cents, then there's no problem. Of course, then you need to prevent spammers from sending collect... Maybe have people wanting on your list pay 24 whole cents up front for a year's subscription? Idunno, seems like yet another 'net problem that could be overcome with micropayments.
When I was in high school, I had a job at a fresh fruit and vegetable market. We had a trash compactor where you'd toss any garbage from the front of the store (packaging in the pre-recycling days, anything gone rotten, etc). There was a sign next to the chute that said "After throwing anything in compactor, press green Compact button." That button started the compactor, obviously. If anyone ignored the sign, eventually we'd end up with a situation where stuff would get jammed in the chute, and wouldn't reach the compactor at the bottom.
When that happened, the job of the newest stock boy (also known as the "company bitch") would be to slide down the compactor chute and toss the offending trash bags out. Guess who the most junior stock boy was? That's right: ME! Lucky me... that has to be one of the most repulsive things you can imagine. Sliding down that greasy, slimy, stinking chute, chucking out heavy bags filled with some of the nastiest stuff imaginable, and then trying to get back up that slick, treacherous, stinking chute without sliding back down again. And to top it all off, someone up top might decide it would be fun and games to hit the Compact button while you were down there. Ha ha, what hilarity!
Mind you, the compactor didn't move that fast, so it's not like you were in much danger. The first time someone did it to me, I nearly shit myself, though. Thought for sure I was going to end up as a WarAmps kid, doing those TV commercials pimping those little numbered key tags. So, to summarize, you're a wuss. I'll take noise and cold any damn day over the stench, filth, revulsion, and general potential for limb loss that I experienced that entire summer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's very self-sacrificing of you to play every RPG, even though you hate the genre so much, so that you can be justified in making such sweeping generalizations. You're a paragon among haters, and I salute you.
/sarcasm
Their new stuff might be good, but they lost me as a customer years ago, due to some less than stellar K7 stuff. Unless their competition in the AMD chipset arena (read: NVIDIA) really makes a hash of it with future products, I won't be going back to VIA. Goes to show, customers have long memories for vendor reliability!
While you have a point regarding making a per capita comparison, I feel your comment about the murder rate being linked to a "very small portion of the US population" is beyond the pale. Be honest, "very small portion" is just a euphemism for "poor people who are mostly not Caucasian." I'm sorry, you don't get to ignore minorities, or people of lower socioeconomic status, when computing statistics at a national level. Just because they aren't part of your community doesn't mean they don't count. Part of the reason that America has a violence problem is that people like you won't face up to the fact that America has a violence problem. "The first step is admission", and all that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-step_program.
I saw the SuperHiDef demonstration at the Aichi Expo this summer. Yes, the name sounds silly. Yes, the concept of needing something beyond the HDTV we already have seems ridiculous. But don't knock it until you've actually seen it for yourself. Mark my words, many of the people heaping sarcasm into this topic now will be the same people who will be craving a SHDTV-capable display for their next cool toy.
For those of you who don't know, one of the major attractions at the Aichi expo was the incredibly well preserved partial remains of a wooly mammoth. In order to see the mammoth, you had to sit through what was essentially a SHDTV sales pitch, after which you actually got to see a short SHDTV movie of scenes from around Japan. And only after all of that, and wandering through some antiquities dispay, did you finally get to see the mammoth. We happened to go on a really, really rainy day (not entirely surprising, as I was there during monsoon season), and were lucky enough to actually get a chance to go in (on a day where the weather wasn't terrible, the lineups would have been prohibitive).
We were making all kinds of wisecracks about the silly sales tactic, how we were literally a captive audience, "If I buy one, will you release me?" and all that sort of thing. What I mean to say is, by that point in the day, tired, soaked, snared into this unexpected sales pitch trap, we were very much what you'd call a tough audience. When we actually went into the theater to see the movie, we were set to rip into the experience with a fresh round of sarcastic venom. Every single one of us came out of the theater absolutely wowed.
The opening scene was of a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. It was utterly incredible. Every single leaf, every single branch, every single twig was defined with unbelievable clarity. It actually seemed to look three-dimensional, almost popping off the screen. For a moment, I thought they must have pulled the screen away to reveal a real tree behind it. There were other scenes, one of my favorites being a panoramic shot of a small Japanese mountain town covered in snow. You could make out incredible detail on tiny people way off in the distance shovelling snow. If you ever get the chance to see it for yourselves, I hope you take the opportunity, because it was a sight to behold.
I don't mean to say that this technology has many practical applications. Do we really need to watch cartoons, or sitcoms, or dramas, or porn, or home videos, at SHDTV resolution? Probably not. Would the nature documentaries and other subjects normally filmed in IMAX format look orders of magnitude more impressive if filmed in SHDTV? Absolutely so. I think HDTV will predominate for quite a while yet, while SHDTV will be used in specialty applications, maybe gaining market penetration in a decade or so, if ever.
Anyway, for those of you spouting off on this topic, I can safely say that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I hope you get a chance to find out just how wrong you are.
For my money, the GTA series has to be one of the most overrated franchises currently being milked. While it certainly enjoys lots of free press by virtue of its once-shocking but now-old-news violence and depravity, it really doesn't seem to have grown much since it first went 3D. Rockstar found a working formula in GTA3 (after the the original games failed commercially), and have been suckling at that same teat ever since. I played the original GTA3 for a short while, and saw a little of Vice City, and I have to say, it does nothing for me. Once you get past the shock value of being able to beat a granny to death with a baseball bat, there's really not much in the way of compelling gameplay. The missions are fairly uninspired, the story is utterly generic, and there's nothing in it that really grabs me. I think "open-ended" in and of itself doesn't necessarily make for a good game, and leads to the pacing of the game being very haphazard, depending. I'm sure fans of the series would disagree, but perhaps they're better able to overlook the games' flaws than I am.
Dictionary.com says yes. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=enhances And it does so probably because it's standard third person singular English verb conjugation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_verbs#Third_p erson_singular
I enhance...
You enhance...
He/She/It/Internet voice capability enhances...
I hate to say it, but SCART is pretty much dead, for two reasons:
1) it can't carry digital signals
2) it can't carry surround sound signals
SCART was an interesting all-in-one design that was great in its day, but it wasn't adequately future-proofed, and it never made any impression in markets outside of Europe. See this page for more info. Welcome to the digital future, I hope a new TV is in your budget! Seriously though, they're going to all the trouble of enforcing HD content, they want to encourage people to actually use HD, rather than maximizing their SD experience. On top of that, SCART is not DRM-capable like the forthcoming HDCP digital standard, something MS is keenly aware of since their box can play DVDs.
Oh come on, you didn't even have to read the article for this one. It's right in the post, in the second sentence:
"Mac shipments rose 35 percent"
If the number of Mac shipments shipped is growing significantly, they have to be going to someone. Unless there's another more compelling explanation, it would be logical to conclude that many of these systems are getting shipped to new Mac users.
Are there truly 400,000 Windows users who have switched? It's hard to say, of course. Maybe many of those new shipments went to Windows users buying a second PC (whether or not that's defined as a switch is entirely a semantic argument, and completely uninteresting to me). Maybe there's been an aberrant spike in the number of existing Mac users buying a second system or upgrading. I doubt any combination of alternate explanations can account for the entire increase, at any rate.
Whatever, the numbers can be quibbled over if one wants to waste time, but the point still remains that there are strong indications that Apple is growing their brand, which is good news for them. Throwing out a big number just gets the website more page impressions, more posts on Slashdot, etc.
If you want to avoid RSI, stop touch-typing. I'm also nearly 30, and have been typing since I was 7 or 8 as well. I've never had RSI, because I don't use a single static abnormal posture for my forearms. I can type over 60 words per minute using (mainly) my two index fingers. To do this, my forearms have to move around a lot, and my wrists can almost always be inline with my forearms. And no, I don't look at the keyboard when I type. I've been doing it for so long that I can move my arm and have my index finger land on the key I want, without the need to peek. I have to glance occaisionally to make sure my fingers are over the keys I'm expecting, but that's about it. There are some downsides, though. I have to slow down a lot on so-called "ergonomic" keyboards, I can't hit 100 wpm like some touch typists, and changing the motion required from wrists to arms means my shoulders will get tired after long days typing. On the plus side, the shoulders are a lot more durable than the wrists, and I'm betting I'll be able to sustain 60 wpm for the rest of my life while most touch-typists will hampered by wrist bracers by the time they're 40. 100 wpm ain't worth it, as far as I'm concerned. QWERTY, DVORAK, doesn't matter, just get your damn wrists off the desk!
Assuming that list is correct, with all the features, what are the chances the virus author actually coded them all? I'm guessing some extensive customization probably had to go into whatever code was used. Possibly it was created using open source libraries for certain components?
Also, this strikes me as the first truly bloatware virus... how big is this thing anyway??
Soooo... Sony's won the next-gen "console wars" before they've even started because they're going to sell a lot of PS3's, er, because, uh... this analyst company... um, says so. Yeah, that's some pretty persuasive arguin'! Seriously, this is the silliest proclamation I've ever seen, based on the thinnest evidence I've ever seen. The conclusion may be reasonable based on some evidence, but unfortunately they don't put any of the evidence in the article. And I'm not convinced Nintendo or Microsoft can't profit while selling "only" 5 and 10 million consoles respectively.
Are you kidding me? My boss regularily sends emails with "the" spelled "teh"! And that's just the most common misspelling ("the" being such a common word and all). He just wants to pound out the messages as fast as possible and get them sent, and doesn't care if things aren't quite properly spelled, as long as he thinks the email is only going to be seen internally. He's turned off his email spellcheck because he doesn't want to spend the time it takes to make a decision about badly spelled words. I'm sure this consultant is much the same.
As for a lot of the content of the leaked email, I can't make heads or tails of it either However, we really don't have a good handle on the context, so maybe it shouldn't be surprising. I'd guess the email makes a lot more sense to the intended recipient, spelling mistakes and all.
Naomi Klein can't be trusted. I remember reading some diatribe of hers complaining about chic downtime loft apartments. The concept of a loft apartment got picked up by real estate marketers after artists made it popular, and apartments manufactured to be loft-style started popping up all over the urban landscape. Ms. Klein fancies herself an artist, I suppose, and thought her chic downtown loft was quite the pad, until everyone started moving into these newly created "fake" loft apartments. This pisses her off supposedly because of they're "branded" as lofts, and she hates all things branding. But really, she just seemed to me to be annoyed that her loft wasn't as cool anymore. On the surface, No Logo seems to be a deep and meaningful book. When you scratch the surface, though, you find it's as shallow as its author.
In my mind, then, Ms. Klein is simply the opposite extreme on an unpalatable scale. On the one hand, you have branding, marketing and mass consumerism; these are the things she aims to tear down. On the other end of that scale, though, you have people like Ms. Klein, elitists who assign cachet to things simply because they are harder to find. I'm not even on the scale, so the whole thing seems pathetic and narcissistic to me.
You're knowledge of voting methods is obviously lacking. If you'd investigated the issue to any significant degree, you'd know that most countries using paper ballots have plenty of viable methods of working around the problems you mentioned. Stolen ballot boxes can be avoided by security and auditing at the polling station, and counting the votes onsite. Green votes can be avoided by counting the votes the same day they're cast. Recounts and endless challenges can be avoided by having each candidate provide their own counter, and have all counters agree on the vote count before the results are phoned in.
None of this is revolutionary, it's how the Canadian system works. In Canada, we know who our new Prime Minister (Canadian equivalent to a President, I guess you'd say) the same day the votes are cost. And the entire yearly budget for Elections Canada is less than the cost of a single election in a single major US city. Paperless elections are not safer or better, will not address the problems plaguing the US election system, and waste a ton of taxpayers money in the process.
In the interests of disclosure, I should note that none of these factoids are at all original or "mine" in any way, they're all from the I, Cringely article linked above. Read the article for a far more comprehensive overview.
It really depends on what types of games you include. If you lump in online web games (Hearts, Bridge, what have you), then women actually make up the larger percentage. Check it out!
Obviously Apple's not giving away to iPod design without getting something in return. For every iPod HP sells, they're going to have to give Apple a cut. So, HP won't be able to make as much profit per iPod as Apple does, but HP has much larger distribution channels than Apple, especially outside North America. There's a lot of interest in tapping emerging markets in eastern Europe and parts of Asia (especially China). By partnering with HP, Apple can get in on that action without having to spend money up front to increase production capacity and develop distro channels overseas, where it currently has little of either.
Apple could likely make more money in the long run by building overseas production and distribution capabilities, but it would require a huge investment up front. Apple does have lots of cash on hand (close to $5 billion!), but right now time is far more of a concern for them. They want to establish themselves in as many marketplaces as possible, as fast as possible, before competing MP3 products get there. It would be no use for them to spend all kinds of money breaking into new markets, only to find that some other vendor has been saturating that same market for six months already with cheaper (albeit less cool) competing product.
I think the major reason HP jumped from Napster to iTMS is the iPod itself. Comparing the two music distro partnerships, I doubt HP saw much difference in terms of the profit potential. But selling rebranded iPods?? The margins on those things are huge! And they have serious cool factor going for them right now. It's no wonder HP would switch to iTMS, given the chance to tap the kind of hardware profit margins Apple is currently enjoying.
The definition of intelligence doesn't change? I would argue otherwise, in the extreme! In an earlier post, you mentioned Bayesian networks in AI. These work quite well in allowing AI systems to make decisions. However, most evidence to date indicates that humans do not in fact use Bayesian logic when making decisions (or at least that was the case a few years ago, when I took a Cognitive Science course). Does a sufficiently complex AI system founded on Bayesian networks qualify as intelligent? Not if you're measuring it against human intelligence... but of course that's not the only standard for comparison.
;-)
To say that there's one unified, accepted definition of intelligence would be pretty much false. Your definition seems very strongly rooted in the classical AI tradition. Psychologists, cognitive science people, and many others would disagree with your definition of intelligence. Of course, if you have a very useful and effective robot or expert system whose decisions are rooted in Bayes theorem, it may not matter if it's "intelligent," per se. It works, doesn't it?
For once I agree with something MS did. There are already too many mediocre MMORPGs floundering around in the marketplace. It's only a matter of time before some of them are forced to close their doors. As I understand it, there are a bunch of them (like Anarchy Online) that are caught between having too few subscribers to make a significant profit, but too many to pull the plug without facing a significant backlash. Aside from pure financial considerations, though, I wonder how much Mythic's lawsuit played into the decision (that's Mythic, developer of Dark Age of Camelot, as opposed to the just-cancelled project Mythica).
I'm sure many of you have seen this before, but in case you haven't, I like Cringely's take on how to fix the voting system. Then again, since I'm a Canadian, my opinion is not without bias. But it certainly is nice to know who your new Prime Minister is the same day the ballots were cast! And hardly a computer involved, imagine that...
...as long as there's a way to send email "collect". If sending an email costs you 2 cents, you're not going to want to send out a list mailing to 30000. That's $600 per issue! However, if you can send each of those emails and have the recipient agree to pay the 2 cents, then there's no problem. Of course, then you need to prevent spammers from sending collect... Maybe have people wanting on your list pay 24 whole cents up front for a year's subscription? Idunno, seems like yet another 'net problem that could be overcome with micropayments.
When I was in high school, I had a job at a fresh fruit and vegetable market. We had a trash compactor where you'd toss any garbage from the front of the store (packaging in the pre-recycling days, anything gone rotten, etc). There was a sign next to the chute that said "After throwing anything in compactor, press green Compact button." That button started the compactor, obviously. If anyone ignored the sign, eventually we'd end up with a situation where stuff would get jammed in the chute, and wouldn't reach the compactor at the bottom.
When that happened, the job of the newest stock boy (also known as the "company bitch") would be to slide down the compactor chute and toss the offending trash bags out. Guess who the most junior stock boy was? That's right: ME! Lucky me... that has to be one of the most repulsive things you can imagine. Sliding down that greasy, slimy, stinking chute, chucking out heavy bags filled with some of the nastiest stuff imaginable, and then trying to get back up that slick, treacherous, stinking chute without sliding back down again. And to top it all off, someone up top might decide it would be fun and games to hit the Compact button while you were down there. Ha ha, what hilarity!
Mind you, the compactor didn't move that fast, so it's not like you were in much danger. The first time someone did it to me, I nearly shit myself, though. Thought for sure I was going to end up as a WarAmps kid, doing those TV commercials pimping those little numbered key tags. So, to summarize, you're a wuss. I'll take noise and cold any damn day over the stench, filth, revulsion, and general potential for limb loss that I experienced that entire summer.