Bzzt. Make up your mind. Either I paid for possessing it - and so I can use it anyway I see fit - or I just licensed it, and so they can (reasonably) limit the circumstances under which I can use it. The real problem with EULAs is that you actually think you're buying something, but it's convenient to them to tell you you are in fact licensing the software, after money has changed hands.
Never played FEAR, but I'd like to point that an AI that uses waypoints is somewhat less independent and, in a sense, real, than otherwise. Of course, to the player there might be no difference.
In HL2E2 the hunters, aka mini-striders, do exhibit some (or most) of the traits you talked aboutt. They will corner you, they will flank you, they will pack together to get you. I found their weapons somewhat underpowered, and that is probably needed. Had they been as deadly as a run of the mill Combine it would take a very experienced player to beat them. Nice stuff.
It doesn't matter if it is a factor in declining game sales or not. You have a damn right to resell whatever you bought - it's YOURS, not theirs. Car sales have declined much more and no one thinks of forbidding people to sell used cars in order to fix that.
People have less money, they will buy cheaper games - and less games altogether, since they are somewhat frivolous items. That is expected, and the game industry should learn to deal with it without finding a scape goat. Cut your development costs, your marketing budget, make better games. And stop whining.
You need to have a monitor that don't support HDCP and a DRM-infested HD video. A VGA connection will do, since some DVI do support HDCP. Videos downloaded off the internets usually don't have any DRM. You'd have to buy/rent one or perhaps try a Blu Ray.
Of course. You read it aloud, record it and then process it through a speech-recognizing software, and - bingo! Encryption broken. It is more of an analog hole really. I am waiting anxiously for the equivalent of HDCP for e-books. Perhaps a device that scramble the letters if it hears you reading the text. It will be mandatory in every ebook reader or consumer oriented OS, of course, or else you can't upload text to it. The IP must be protected at all costs from these damn pirates.
So, why wouldn't someone do it to a non-clone? Don't allow babies to develop their brains and harvest their organs.
If it is wrong with a human, it would be wrong with a clone too - since it's human as well, by definition. The real moral question is that too many people do not think that is wrong to do this to humans anyways - as long as there are profits to be done. So, if we happen to develop (cheap) clones, and people can have control over their producing process - well, they will feel able to do whatever they want with them, brains or no brains (yes, The Island is a pretty good movie. Scarlet Yohansson rocks! I'd pay for a clone of her!).
The question is that all these are assumptions. Don't lecture me that you are 100% certain that we can build microprobes or biotech that can stand travelling through space. I am not saying we can't either. But perhaps it is not possible to microprobes withstand interstellar radiation, biotech might loose their genetic programming after a few millenia or even centuries (they evolve don't they?) and so on.
All these are theoretical possibilities. Until either a probe from a foreign civilization come to us or we build our own, they will stand this way. I may be as thrilled as you by sci-fi, but we have to recognize it's still firmly in the fi camp.
First,you assume interstellar travel is possible. What if it isn't? What if the only ways to travel in space are no much better than the ones we know? We'd be all restrained to our own star systems. Perhaps we can have space stations and colonies in nearby planets and moons, but not much more than that. Perhaps they can't be self sustainable. Perhaps the likehood of finding another environment in another planet that can be converted to supporting life without an extreme expense of energy is extremely low.
AFAIK, the Fermi paradox has nothing to do with interstellar travel. It only assumes things that we already know, and hence are definitely possible - using radio waves as a means of communication. I myself think this may be too much of an assumption.
Why? Because the product being sold already has features A, B and C. In fact, as someone pointed out, there is a cost of disabling the feature, so the version with only feature A should be more expensive. So in fact you are telling your costumers - or the ones who can think anyway - they're idiots.
Secondly, it is not as easy as saying person X wants feature A and is prepared to pay price P. Things are much more complicated than that: people have usually a general set of expectations of what they want in a product - specially one as complicated as an OS -and the value they should pay for it. There is a marketing effort to convince people their expectations will be met by a product only with feature A, or perhaps the most complete with features B and C, and it is worth of paying whatever price they ask for it.
To cap it all, free market and MS don't go very well in the same post. MS have a lot of control over what they put down their costumers throat, since they have a monopoly. The real problem with free market is that it is a fictional, theoretical construct. The real market is usually nowhere like that, and people should know the difference.
I am not saying this doesn't happen in other business, but it is a bad practice nonetheless. It is akin to Intel disabling the FPU in 486 CPUs and selling them as a 486SX. If you want a car analogy, it would be like a Corvette that has it speed capped to 50 mph. The actual cost of producing the car is the same.
You touched a very important point here. NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE DOCUMENT BASED. iTunes is the perfect example: say you want to listen to all the 80's music you have. Possibly that will be smeared upon a dozen of folders. Now, you could arrange them differently - but then you would have trouble choosing all the songs from an album or an artist. The document- the file - is just a container for the information. As we interact with that info in different ways, a pure document based metaphor gets lacking pretty quick.
A DB-based filesystem and OS could overcome this. Even then, I wouldn't dismiss the "vanity" as an important factor, albeit I would call it a different name. Awareness. Software houses sell software. They want their product to have a distinctive name and look, so they can market it better. If if couldn't tell an application from one another we would probably live in a world where we only use the ones pre-bundled with the OS. That might be OK with open source distributions OSs, but I doubt it would work in a closed source, commercial software environment.
Perhaps a car analogy would help: people really want to get from point A to point B, but they somehow end up buying a Corvette.
Whatever leads to a server crash is not a random event. There is a finite, albeit large, number of bugs in the code that can lead to a crash. In fact, a lot of things that we consider random aren't - such as dice tossing - there are just too many variables for we to track, so we just think of them as random.
But a server crash in any platform, is a different beast. THERE is a definite reason for the crash. One bug among those millions of lines of code caused the crash. It wasn't anything random, not even pseudo-random as a dice toss.
And notice that his machine was rock stable. And he wasn't running anything extraordinary. There is a definite chance it has something to do with the leap second. You're analising it as if server crashes simply occured out of thin air.
Hear, hear! This guy is right. Let's do away with this M$ meme, it just look retarded. Mature dudes just throw chairs all over the place instead of calling good and inventive companies names. Unless it is f*cking Google, I am so gonna kill those bastards.
AFAIK, there has never been a time during which too many people customized their PCs for gaming. People who would pay top dollar for the latest videocard, overclocked their rigs with liquid nitrogen cooling to achieve 10 extra points in 3Dmark, have always been a minority.
But they are a very vocal minority, and it might happen that some of these voices are calming down. For one, some of them got older and haven't got the time or money to spend on it now. Some of them might have migrated to consoles, but these kind of gamers like to tweak everything, and you can't do that on a console. I'd say they get most of the fun bragging about how great their system is, rather than actually using it.
So, I disagree even with the death of the overkill gaming PC. There will always be people with too much time on their hands willing to obtain some extra 3DMarks. It's like saying people won't buy Ferraris en masse - duh, they never did.
They are not licensing it. I can buy a Windows box and install it in a machine. Psystar simply says (or should be arguing) there is nothing that should prevent them from doing the same with OS X. If Apple doesn't wan't people to install OS X in other machines, don't sell it.
I respectfully disagree. I was emotionally connected to the story itself - the story of 300 men fighting to death a war they knew they couldn't win. And while the characters were undoubtedly shallow, I found they somewhat believable.
Well, I watched the movie then rea the comics. I found the movie refreshing - yes, it glorifies violence, and more, it displays violence as a form of art. If you don't like that - you're not going to enjoy the movie.
Of course, don't go for any historical accuracy. There is none. But it makes sense in the context of the movie. It is being told from the eyes - well, one eye really;) - of a spartan soldier. It is obvious he would raise the Spartan feats and those of his king to a demigod standard, and portray the Persians as evil monsters.
That said, I think the movie has some racist undertones which weren't present in the comic book. But I can live with that. In short, expect a work of fiction with lots of violence, an innovative photography and choreography, and not an accurate historical recreation. Then you might enjoy the movie.
An Asus EeePC or an MSI Wind are not to be considered UMPC. The concepts are different. UMPC are overgrown palm devices (or shrunken tablets, depending how you see it), with a touchscreen, and an emphasis on watching/listening media. Hence the name. They are usually quite expensive, do not have a normal keyboard or lack one completely - you are supposed to use the touchscreen for that, and since you are not expected to type a lot, that should be ok.
The category you are talking about should be called netbooks. They are notebooks which are smaller, cheaper, and slower than a typical notebook. Most of all, they are very portable without the price premium associated with an ultraportable notebook. The points here are price, form-factor, and intended purpose. Your typical netbook has a (smallish) notebook keyboard, perhaps not so much storage, but it will let you do - and expects you to - all the things you do with a normal notebook, providing you can put up with the small screen and keyboard.
, Ok, I will stop being a dick now and answer your question. Since so many people told you not to get any kind of computer, I won't do the same, but... anyways, consider an OLPC machine. It is supposed to be more sturdy, and the Sugar interface is (IMHO) a great way to teach children what computers are all about without being tied to the dominant GUI/OS.
That said, no matter how gifted your child is, he is still a 2 year old and so he is bound to shred the computer to little pieces. And eat them. So either get the cheapest one, or get a very sturdy one.
I don't know about you, but I live in an unbounded Universe.;) Of course, The Turing Machines here take almost all the space available, so it's no big deal.
You sure? I'd like to see a proof of that. Speaking out of my ass really, but it doesn't seem logical to me. After all, MD5(b+pad2) still *is* an MD5 of an image file, call it c if you want. So MD5(a+ pad1) = MD5 (c). Perhaps I am missing something very obvious but I don't see how that can be true.
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Bzzt. Make up your mind. Either I paid for possessing it - and so I can use it anyway I see fit - or I just licensed it, and so they can (reasonably) limit the circumstances under which I can use it. The real problem with EULAs is that you actually think you're buying something, but it's convenient to them to tell you you are in fact licensing the software, after money has changed hands.
Never played FEAR, but I'd like to point that an AI that uses waypoints is somewhat less independent and, in a sense, real, than otherwise. Of course, to the player there might be no difference.
In HL2E2 the hunters, aka mini-striders, do exhibit some (or most) of the traits you talked aboutt. They will corner you, they will flank you, they will pack together to get you. I found their weapons somewhat underpowered, and that is probably needed. Had they been as deadly as a run of the mill Combine it would take a very experienced player to beat them. Nice stuff.
It doesn't matter if it is a factor in declining game sales or not. You have a damn right to resell whatever you bought - it's YOURS, not theirs. Car sales have declined much more and no one thinks of forbidding people to sell used cars in order to fix that.
People have less money, they will buy cheaper games - and less games altogether, since they are somewhat frivolous items. That is expected, and the game industry should learn to deal with it without finding a scape goat. Cut your development costs, your marketing budget, make better games. And stop whining.
Sometimes there is a large chronological interval between the events in a completed work and its sequel [citation needed].
There, fixed it for you. Of course, you can add this post as a citation in the wikipedia page.
You need to have a monitor that don't support HDCP and a DRM-infested HD video. A VGA connection will do, since some DVI do support HDCP. Videos downloaded off the internets usually don't have any DRM. You'd have to buy/rent one or perhaps try a Blu Ray.
Of course. You read it aloud, record it and then process it through a speech-recognizing software, and - bingo! Encryption broken. It is more of an analog hole really. I am waiting anxiously for the equivalent of HDCP for e-books. Perhaps a device that scramble the letters if it hears you reading the text. It will be mandatory in every ebook reader or consumer oriented OS, of course, or else you can't upload text to it. The IP must be protected at all costs from these damn pirates.
So, why wouldn't someone do it to a non-clone? Don't allow babies to develop their brains and harvest their organs.
If it is wrong with a human, it would be wrong with a clone too - since it's human as well, by definition. The real moral question is that too many people do not think that is wrong to do this to humans anyways - as long as there are profits to be done. So, if we happen to develop (cheap) clones, and people can have control over their producing process - well, they will feel able to do whatever they want with them, brains or no brains (yes, The Island is a pretty good movie. Scarlet Yohansson rocks! I'd pay for a clone of her!).
The question is that all these are assumptions. Don't lecture me that you are 100% certain that we can build microprobes or biotech that can stand travelling through space. I am not saying we can't either. But perhaps it is not possible to microprobes withstand interstellar radiation, biotech might loose their genetic programming after a few millenia or even centuries (they evolve don't they?) and so on.
All these are theoretical possibilities. Until either a probe from a foreign civilization come to us or we build our own, they will stand this way. I may be as thrilled as you by sci-fi, but we have to recognize it's still firmly in the fi camp.
First,you assume interstellar travel is possible. What if it isn't? What if the only ways to travel in space are no much better than the ones we know? We'd be all restrained to our own star systems. Perhaps we can have space stations and colonies in nearby planets and moons, but not much more than that. Perhaps they can't be self sustainable. Perhaps the likehood of finding another environment in another planet that can be converted to supporting life without an extreme expense of energy is extremely low.
AFAIK, the Fermi paradox has nothing to do with interstellar travel. It only assumes things that we already know, and hence are definitely possible - using radio waves as a means of communication. I myself think this may be too much of an assumption.
These kids nowadays. Real men telnet to port 110!
Why? Because the product being sold already has features A, B and C. In fact, as someone pointed out, there is a cost of disabling the feature, so the version with only feature A should be more expensive. So in fact you are telling your costumers - or the ones who can think anyway - they're idiots.
Secondly, it is not as easy as saying person X wants feature A and is prepared to pay price P. Things are much more complicated than that: people have usually a general set of expectations of what they want in a product - specially one as complicated as an OS -and the value they should pay for it. There is a marketing effort to convince people their expectations will be met by a product only with feature A, or perhaps the most complete with features B and C, and it is worth of paying whatever price they ask for it.
To cap it all, free market and MS don't go very well in the same post. MS have a lot of control over what they put down their costumers throat, since they have a monopoly. The real problem with free market is that it is a fictional, theoretical construct. The real market is usually nowhere like that, and people should know the difference.
I am not saying this doesn't happen in other business, but it is a bad practice nonetheless. It is akin to Intel disabling the FPU in 486 CPUs and selling them as a 486SX. If you want a car analogy, it would be like a Corvette that has it speed capped to 50 mph. The actual cost of producing the car is the same.
You touched a very important point here. NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE DOCUMENT BASED. iTunes is the perfect example: say you want to listen to all the 80's music you have. Possibly that will be smeared upon a dozen of folders. Now, you could arrange them differently - but then you would have trouble choosing all the songs from an album or an artist. The document- the file - is just a container for the information. As we interact with that info in different ways, a pure document based metaphor gets lacking pretty quick.
A DB-based filesystem and OS could overcome this. Even then, I wouldn't dismiss the "vanity" as an important factor, albeit I would call it a different name. Awareness. Software houses sell software. They want their product to have a distinctive name and look, so they can market it better. If if couldn't tell an application from one another we would probably live in a world where we only use the ones pre-bundled with the OS. That might be OK with open source distributions OSs, but I doubt it would work in a closed source, commercial software environment.
Perhaps a car analogy would help: people really want to get from point A to point B, but they somehow end up buying a Corvette.
Better yet, repackage with the signature from someone high up from Valve (or the publisher in question). That's one thing I'd like to see...
Shit, MS won this one. Never saw a Linux distro doing that. When is the next release of Ubuntu? We gotta catch up. Bastards.
So you seem to imply all Windows users should install, like, ten different antivirus in their machines?
Whatever leads to a server crash is not a random event. There is a finite, albeit large, number of bugs in the code that can lead to a crash. In fact, a lot of things that we consider random aren't - such as dice tossing - there are just too many variables for we to track, so we just think of them as random.
But a server crash in any platform, is a different beast. THERE is a definite reason for the crash. One bug among those millions of lines of code caused the crash. It wasn't anything random, not even pseudo-random as a dice toss.
And notice that his machine was rock stable. And he wasn't running anything extraordinary. There is a definite chance it has something to do with the leap second. You're analising it as if server crashes simply occured out of thin air.
Hear, hear! This guy is right. Let's do away with this M$ meme, it just look retarded. Mature dudes just throw chairs all over the place instead of calling good and inventive companies names. Unless it is f*cking Google, I am so gonna kill those bastards.
AFAIK, there has never been a time during which too many people customized their PCs for gaming. People who would pay top dollar for the latest videocard, overclocked their rigs with liquid nitrogen cooling to achieve 10 extra points in 3Dmark, have always been a minority.
But they are a very vocal minority, and it might happen that some of these voices are calming down. For one, some of them got older and haven't got the time or money to spend on it now. Some of them might have migrated to consoles, but these kind of gamers like to tweak everything, and you can't do that on a console. I'd say they get most of the fun bragging about how great their system is, rather than actually using it.
So, I disagree even with the death of the overkill gaming PC. There will always be people with too much time on their hands willing to obtain some extra 3DMarks. It's like saying people won't buy Ferraris en masse - duh, they never did.
They are not licensing it. I can buy a Windows box and install it in a machine. Psystar simply says (or should be arguing) there is nothing that should prevent them from doing the same with OS X. If Apple doesn't wan't people to install OS X in other machines, don't sell it.
I respectfully disagree. I was emotionally connected to the story itself - the story of 300 men fighting to death a war they knew they couldn't win. And while the characters were undoubtedly shallow, I found they somewhat believable.
Well, I watched the movie then rea the comics. I found the movie refreshing - yes, it glorifies violence, and more, it displays violence as a form of art. If you don't like that - you're not going to enjoy the movie.
Of course, don't go for any historical accuracy. There is none. But it makes sense in the context of the movie. It is being told from the eyes - well, one eye really ;) - of a spartan soldier. It is obvious he would raise the Spartan feats and those of his king to a demigod standard, and portray the Persians as evil monsters.
That said, I think the movie has some racist undertones which weren't present in the comic book. But I can live with that. In short, expect a work of fiction with lots of violence, an innovative photography and choreography, and not an accurate historical recreation. Then you might enjoy the movie.
An Asus EeePC or an MSI Wind are not to be considered UMPC. The concepts are different. UMPC are overgrown palm devices (or shrunken tablets, depending how you see it), with a touchscreen, and an emphasis on watching/listening media. Hence the name. They are usually quite expensive, do not have a normal keyboard or lack one completely - you are supposed to use the touchscreen for that, and since you are not expected to type a lot, that should be ok.
The category you are talking about should be called netbooks. They are notebooks which are smaller, cheaper, and slower than a typical notebook. Most of all, they are very portable without the price premium associated with an ultraportable notebook. The points here are price, form-factor, and intended purpose. Your typical netbook has a (smallish) notebook keyboard, perhaps not so much storage, but it will let you do - and expects you to - all the things you do with a normal notebook, providing you can put up with the small screen and keyboard.
, Ok, I will stop being a dick now and answer your question. Since so many people told you not to get any kind of computer, I won't do the same, but... anyways, consider an OLPC machine. It is supposed to be more sturdy, and the Sugar interface is (IMHO) a great way to teach children what computers are all about without being tied to the dominant GUI/OS.
That said, no matter how gifted your child is, he is still a 2 year old and so he is bound to shred the computer to little pieces. And eat them. So either get the cheapest one, or get a very sturdy one.
I don't know about you, but I live in an unbounded Universe. ;) Of course, The Turing Machines here take almost all the space available, so it's no big deal.
You sure? I'd like to see a proof of that. Speaking out of my ass really, but it doesn't seem logical to me. After all, MD5(b+pad2) still *is* an MD5 of an image file, call it c if you want. So MD5(a+ pad1) = MD5 (c). Perhaps I am missing something very obvious but I don't see how that can be true.