Remember that companies aren't evil, they are just amoral.
Amoral + Near-term-focused = Long-term-evil
Atlantic Richfield, Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil all purchased photovoltaic technologies in the late 70's and soon thereafter lobbied for the repeal of tax credits for solar power. Now why would they do that? Because once they've hedged their bets with IP acquisitions, they can go right back to protecting their core business. Yes, it's perfectly reasonable if all you care about is the fiscal year, but it's perfectly evil if the larger community is running out of time to develop and transition into oil alternatives.
If oil companies had sincerely developed and promoted these technologies when they acquired them 35 years ago, we would now see much wider adoption of solar in the US, and we would be significantly less dependant on oil.
No, it means negotiating an ACTA agreement beyond public purview, with stipulations that all parties at table must get their ducks in a row within six months. This is the result of "international politics" not "diplomacy", which, in its traditional forms, is extinct.
That's not what I'm suggesting. To know that a price is less appealing you would have to comparison shop. I think it's possible that MS is trying to exploit it's nonsavvy aol-like users under the assumption that most will either fail to comparison shop through other search engines, or will think that non-bing vendors' prices are too good to be true. I also think it's possible, and more likely, that participating vendors are just ensuring their bottom line without complaint from MS. In either case, as a later poster points out, discriminatory pricing is illegitimate and should merit some policy response from MS.
Oh god, don't believe the hype about NZ. Freer perhaps, if you don't count the social incarceration of the Anglo-regressive bigots who run the country. That country is SOLD OUT, and you will be too if you go there with anything less than a fortune of investment capital. You'll find your job options very limited as well, especially if you're asian or some other less white race. Immigration Services likes to talk about how they have lots of jobs and too few Kiwis to fill them--but they neglect to mention that most Kiwis are reluctant to hire foreigners, no matter how good their qualifications. Also know that you can be free with your opinions in NZ, so long as you don't criticize NZ or the Kiwi way of life. Believe me, not even a humble helping of constructive criticism goes down easy in New Zealand...not when it's offered by a foreigner. Finally, consider the freedom afforded you by your information infrastructure. NZ's is as antiquated as its building codes.
All of this is starting to feel like more than just an Iranian power struggle. I wonder if we might look back in a decade and see this moment as a first sign of Web Sovereignty--and realize that for all our hand-wringing over the BRIC countries' economic rise, the next truly global power will not be national in origin, but technological. Even if the popular protests "fail" in Iran, the comraderie, the sense of identity and belonging, as *citizens* of the Web, is likely to persist.
I have long asserted that conscious minds-in-general must accept as first principle the existince of free will as the indisputable result of the world's easiest thought experiment. This is not epistemological chicanery; it is ontological honesty.
Given such a first principle, one should then view quantum uncertainty as a categorical imperative of reality. I am confident that when we begin simulating living, evolving virtual realities from the "ground up", we will find that the uncertainty principle and the observer's paradox are more fundamental to our "intelligent designs" than any constant or formula. In fact, they are necessary to the computing substrate on which these designs execute.
In essence, we live inside a self-improving, tail-recursive algorithm. SITRA for short.
This remake ought to reach back further than Lynch's Dune and take inspiration from the work done by H.R. Geiger and Moebius for Jodorowsky's planned nine-hour screen adaptation of the novel. Jodorowski's a kook, but he understood something essential about Dune: that it ought to be profoundly unfamiliar--alien.
Integrated with a magneto-inductive device instead of a mini-gyro, the MEMS device becomes a dead-reckoner for orientation and movement. The combined device then gets OEM'd to all sorts of new input devices.
Agreed. People seem to think Sony is reeling because Microsoft is throwing a punch, when surely it is Microsoft that is in trouble. If they don't score a knockdown right now, they'll lose this round just like the first.
Much truth is said in jest. As I see it, Gates took a body blow in the first round and is having his chin tested in the second, with the blind-side of Blue-Ray incompatibility. Twice underselling an underpriced console doesn't merely hurt the pocket, it shakes the stubborn confidence of the favored fighter, the one who picked the fight and expected to control the action. Sony is fight-tested, disciplined and poised, despite what this (possibly propagandistic?) article suggests. It is much better trained in hardware convergence and has deeper strategic vision.
End of Sony? Shyeah. With Google and Open Source cutting off the ring, Microsoft is beginning to look and act like a cornered fighter who knows he can no longer punch his way out.
The fusion of western motifs with space travel comes from Whedon's interest in the confederate south in the aftermath of the US Civil War. Totally unrelated.
And it's Cowboy Bebop that has the cookie-cutter characters, not Firefly. Firefly's characters are among the deepest I've seen on any television show, ever. That's why it's audience has grown--even as FOX railroaded it off-the-air.
I highly recommend a second viewing of the show on DVD, starting with the proper pilot episode, which never aired. You need to give this show another chance.
You say you're "calling it right now" and that this is going to be a "flop of titanic proportions"? Whew! I'll take that bet as far as you like. This movie may not reign supreme at the box office, but it will outperform on DVD, just as the series has.
Posts by Nathan Fillion on one of the fansites indicated that the movie deal with Paramount was exclusive--i.e. that there would be no TV series until the film franchise has run its course. Assuming the deal is a standard 3-film option, we can assume that Firefly is reserved for the big screen for at least the next few years. Kind of a shame since the prolific Joss Whedon really shines in serial format.
Maybe the answer is an entirely new distribution channel like Mark Cuban's HDNet. Whedon should not be burdened with product placements and FOX-style scorecarding.
...That's the bottom line. We need our PC's. We don't need our consoles. So long as the platform remains, people will put it to use. That the PC enjoys a number of advantages over consoles makes this all the more obvious.
Who knows? With Java+OpenGL making strides, and top-end graphics showing diminishing returns, we may see a whole new round of digital-interactive innovation on the PC.
The 3D digital-interactive medium was hijacked so quickly by large corporate interests that it never had a chance to expand its horizons, as pop music did in the 60's, or as video did in the 80's. Now massive realms of digital-interactive space are left unexplored and new projects must launch from a small continent of established genre: RPG, FPS, RTS, SIM, etc. Deus Ex was one of these projects. It promised open-ended, cross-genre gameplay, and worked hard to achieve it, but it never promised new territory. Without that promise, users can be expected to stick with what has amused them before--e.g. weapon-based infiltration.
What the industry needs is some blue-sky investment: creative endowments, personal stipends, etc. Either this, or a breakdown of the current "distributocracy".
Popular dialogue always prefers simplistic origination (the genius) to complex evolution. Otherwise, history would be too difficult to fit into bite-sized narrative.
John Carmack may deserve more credit for the current state of FPS gaming than, say, Abner Doubleday deserves for modern Baseball, but not because Doom was any more revolutionary. Doom's leap forward was in the sudden alert it sent to a game industry which still assumed that realtime 3D gaming (save for flight sims) was years away. A player running around and shooting things in a rectlinear 3D environment is a pretty obvious application of early realtime 3D (or in Doom's case, 2.5D) technology. What was not obvious was that it could be done so well so early.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that companies aren't evil, they are just amoral.
Amoral + Near-term-focused = Long-term-evil
Atlantic Richfield, Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil all purchased photovoltaic technologies in the late 70's and soon thereafter lobbied for the repeal of tax credits for solar power. Now why would they do that? Because once they've hedged their bets with IP acquisitions, they can go right back to protecting their core business. Yes, it's perfectly reasonable if all you care about is the fiscal year, but it's perfectly evil if the larger community is running out of time to develop and transition into oil alternatives.
If oil companies had sincerely developed and promoted these technologies when they acquired them 35 years ago, we would now see much wider adoption of solar in the US, and we would be significantly less dependant on oil.
How is this better than ranked voting? The last thing we want is more power for deeply grooved special interests.
No, it means negotiating an ACTA agreement beyond public purview, with stipulations that all parties at table must get their ducks in a row within six months. This is the result of "international politics" not "diplomacy", which, in its traditional forms, is extinct.
That's not what I'm suggesting. To know that a price is less appealing you would have to comparison shop. I think it's possible that MS is trying to exploit it's nonsavvy aol-like users under the assumption that most will either fail to comparison shop through other search engines, or will think that non-bing vendors' prices are too good to be true. I also think it's possible, and more likely, that participating vendors are just ensuring their bottom line without complaint from MS. In either case, as a later poster points out, discriminatory pricing is illegitimate and should merit some policy response from MS.
Taking the time to "game the system" is also a cost. What I expect from /. is astute agitation and bad PR for large players who try to game us.
The "yes" answer can't be calculated up front, but we can do our best to push toward it.
Could MS be liable in a class action lawsuit if it explicitly offered or otherwise encouraged this practice? This story could have teeth.
Oh god, don't believe the hype about NZ. Freer perhaps, if you don't count the social incarceration of the Anglo-regressive bigots who run the country. That country is SOLD OUT, and you will be too if you go there with anything less than a fortune of investment capital. You'll find your job options very limited as well, especially if you're asian or some other less white race. Immigration Services likes to talk about how they have lots of jobs and too few Kiwis to fill them--but they neglect to mention that most Kiwis are reluctant to hire foreigners, no matter how good their qualifications. Also know that you can be free with your opinions in NZ, so long as you don't criticize NZ or the Kiwi way of life. Believe me, not even a humble helping of constructive criticism goes down easy in New Zealand...not when it's offered by a foreigner. Finally, consider the freedom afforded you by your information infrastructure. NZ's is as antiquated as its building codes.
All of this is starting to feel like more than just an Iranian power struggle. I wonder if we might look back in a decade and see this moment as a first sign of Web Sovereignty--and realize that for all our hand-wringing over the BRIC countries' economic rise, the next truly global power will not be national in origin, but technological. Even if the popular protests "fail" in Iran, the comraderie, the sense of identity and belonging, as *citizens* of the Web, is likely to persist.
I have long asserted that conscious minds-in-general must accept as first principle the existince of free will as the indisputable result of the world's easiest thought experiment. This is not epistemological chicanery; it is ontological honesty. Given such a first principle, one should then view quantum uncertainty as a categorical imperative of reality. I am confident that when we begin simulating living, evolving virtual realities from the "ground up", we will find that the uncertainty principle and the observer's paradox are more fundamental to our "intelligent designs" than any constant or formula. In fact, they are necessary to the computing substrate on which these designs execute. In essence, we live inside a self-improving, tail-recursive algorithm. SITRA for short.
This remake ought to reach back further than Lynch's Dune and take inspiration from the work done by H.R. Geiger and Moebius for Jodorowsky's planned nine-hour screen adaptation of the novel. Jodorowski's a kook, but he understood something essential about Dune: that it ought to be profoundly unfamiliar--alien.
Deep in the thread so maybe it won't get slashdotted: http://www.pnicorp.com/productDetail?nodeId=cMM3
Integrated with a magneto-inductive device instead of a mini-gyro, the MEMS device becomes a dead-reckoner for orientation and movement. The combined device then gets OEM'd to all sorts of new input devices.
Agreed. People seem to think Sony is reeling because Microsoft is throwing a punch, when surely it is Microsoft that is in trouble. If they don't score a knockdown right now, they'll lose this round just like the first.
End of Sony? Shyeah. With Google and Open Source cutting off the ring, Microsoft is beginning to look and act like a cornered fighter who knows he can no longer punch his way out.
Merely to imagine a reality outside the banal orbit of a the fundamentalist's brain must surely be as offensive as showing evidence of same.
And it's Cowboy Bebop that has the cookie-cutter characters, not Firefly. Firefly's characters are among the deepest I've seen on any television show, ever. That's why it's audience has grown--even as FOX railroaded it off-the-air.
I highly recommend a second viewing of the show on DVD, starting with the proper pilot episode, which never aired. You need to give this show another chance.
You say you're "calling it right now" and that this is going to be a "flop of titanic proportions"? Whew! I'll take that bet as far as you like. This movie may not reign supreme at the box office, but it will outperform on DVD, just as the series has.
Maybe the answer is an entirely new distribution channel like Mark Cuban's HDNet. Whedon should not be burdened with product placements and FOX-style scorecarding.
...That's the bottom line. We need our PC's. We don't need our consoles. So long as the platform remains, people will put it to use. That the PC enjoys a number of advantages over consoles makes this all the more obvious. Who knows? With Java+OpenGL making strides, and top-end graphics showing diminishing returns, we may see a whole new round of digital-interactive innovation on the PC.
What the industry needs is some blue-sky investment: creative endowments, personal stipends, etc. Either this, or a breakdown of the current "distributocracy".
Popular dialogue always prefers simplistic origination (the genius) to complex evolution. Otherwise, history would be too difficult to fit into bite-sized narrative. John Carmack may deserve more credit for the current state of FPS gaming than, say, Abner Doubleday deserves for modern Baseball, but not because Doom was any more revolutionary. Doom's leap forward was in the sudden alert it sent to a game industry which still assumed that realtime 3D gaming (save for flight sims) was years away. A player running around and shooting things in a rectlinear 3D environment is a pretty obvious application of early realtime 3D (or in Doom's case, 2.5D) technology. What was not obvious was that it could be done so well so early.