"Why did Top Gear say your car sucked and only went 50 miles for 16 hours of charge" is not a very good sales lead. Having to explain to every customer that asks that question that Top Gear was running the Tesla at race-track performance and simulated the breakdown without actually testing it is expecting the customer to believe the owner of the car saying a negative review is biased/wrong/lying/whatever. People on Slashdot won't listen when a Microsoft rep says something bad about Google or Apple, why would a Top Gear viewer believe Tesla?
Okay, so we have an organization that invites everyone to join in and write stuff. There is no discrimination, as long as you follow the guidelines which are perfectly reasonable for keeping Wikipedia a useful and informative source of information. Years pass. Then some analyst comes along and says there aren't enough women contributors at Wikipedia... Well, it isn't like there was a sign that said 'no girls allowed.' There was nothing barring women from joining the community at all, except possibly their own personal decisions not to.
Wikipedia is 'equal opportunity' in just about every sense of the term. If they start incentivising or somehow attempting to skew the population of contributors to get more women, they become LESS so, not more. This is like the manager of a McDonalds seeing he only has white employees so he posts a sign that says "Black help wanted." It's completely batshit crazy. Maybe women who use the site just don't want to become contributors; maybe the majority of users of the site are men; maybe people in general don't know how to become contributors (which is at least somewhat more of a legitimate issue).
There could be any number of reasons for the shortage of female contributors, but as long as there are no restrictions on women joining and putting up their information I don't see this as any problem. I'd be saying the exact same thing if they said only 13% of the wikipedia contributors are men, or black, or jewish, or whatever denomination. It really doesn't matter when they haven't prevented anyone from joining.
RIAA representative: "There are so many things our two cultures can share." Leader of the 100: "Perhaps you haven't noticed, but we've been sharing our culture with you for the past decade."
if 9/11 taught us anything it should be that occasionally terrorists are good at coordinating large plots. One store bombing in one city might not be that big a deal, but what about multiple store bombings across several states? We're talking about people who aren't afraid to kill themselves if it means blowing up 12 people on a bus - what about a few hundred people packed into the line in front of a walmart (or a few hundred thousand, in front of a few hundred walmarts)?
The reason the idea of a water supply attack is so scary is precisely because there are so many disparate municipals systems. Terrorism is only a physical threat to a small percentage of the population, but it's a massive mind game for everyone that isn't. Imagine what would happen if a terrorist plot to poison a city water supply (to some, say 100,000 people) were discovered and foiled. The news media would have reports from the potential victims saying they had no idea it could happen here, and the security just wasn't in place, etc etc, and the government would act rashly and without thinking, creating some ungodly structure to protect every water supply... The terrorists won the mind game, and that's just for getting caught.
From a different perspective, it looks like you're arguing AGAINST the plot becoming more fleshed out and focused. SC2 answers questions you might have asked in SC1, like why the zerg suddenly became more aggressive - Mengsk's psi emitters played a small role in that but now we know it was mostly the dark entities.
Tassadar's ghost is also fairly reasonable. A powerful psionic being makes direct contact with another; strange results happen. Throw in the whole plot of Tassadar learning to harness the dark templar energies from Zeratul and you really should have expected something more than just 'he died killing the overmind.'
If you thought the story was incoherent, that probably is due to the design of choosing your own missions. Each of the 6 story arcs in the game is a complete story that is completely justifiable in the game's context. You don't just accidentally put the artifact together. You were guided there by Tychus who was being manipulated by Mengsk. Mengsk is a total badass - he manipulated Raynor the whole time to get him to attack Char for a final showdown with Kerrigan. It isn't Blizzard's fault if you didn't understand that.
And now there's a new overarching narrative with a clear and present danger of the Hybrid forces, which I honestly believe is a step up from the original starcraft where each race was antagonizing eachother.. there can now be a brand new dynamic.
And back on the topic of Tassadar's death: they barely touched on it in Wings, it's true. But it's a Protoss plot that you uncovered in a Protoss mission. Wings is otherwise pretty much completely a terran campaign. I think we're going to see a LOT more of Tassadar. My own personal opinion is that he was somehow (perhaps unknowingly) instrumental in the creation of the hybrids.
I really don't understand all this annoyance with having no lan play. People pitched a huge fit over it in SC2 and frankly I think it's just a stupid complaint that people bring up because they want to bitch about something and there's nothing else bad to say. The game is missing one feature that might matter to 10% of its total playerbase... it's still a great game, whether it's missing that feature and whether that 10% buys it or not. And to be honest every LAN party I've ever been at had one legal copy of any given video game and a ton of illegal ones to get people playing. There's no reason Blizzard should be obligated to encourage that kind of environment for their games.
One of my relatives PCs got some really nasty malware recently that pretended to be antivirus software and would halt any action taken by the user with a popup saying the thing you were doing (Taskmanager.exe and the like) was infected. It implied you had to pay $30 to buy the 'full version' of the software to fix it, and the only way to pay was with a credit card. I have never seen a more aggressive piece of software and I had no idea how to fix it other than a boot from CD reformat. Scary stuff:\
I think it is a decidedly bad idea to start writing our revisionist version of history before it becomes history. The fact is we're fighting a group of terrorists called the Taliban that happens to be a radical Muslim group. Putting them in a video game doesn't lend them any more 'legitimacy' than putting them in a book or a movie. If the other radical Muslims out there are offended that the Taliban are in the game, they can deal with them in real life instead of wasting time getting their names changed to 'opposing force.' Or alternatively they can make their own better version of the Taliban, but this time with blackjack and hookers. Then maybe they'll get in the next CoD.
Good laugh. For anyone actually looking for some answers though, the article doesn't say anything about its actual fuel efficiency. It has a ~16 gallon tank that runs on diesel, natural gas, biofuels, and liquid petroleum (o.o;;). I am not sold on it being particularly eco-friendly, despite the nice fuel compatibility.
It's only lost revenue if the person making the copy would have bought it. If they never had an intention of making a purchase, there was no potential for revenue gain to begin with. As an example, say that you hear a song on the radio (which is free!) and you decide to check out the band. Their CD is $20 and has 9 songs you've never heard, plus the one you liked. You decide you won't buy the CD. Instead, you get a tape deck and record the song off the radio the next time you hear it. Now you can listen to the song whenever you want, and have managed to do nothing illegal. Replace the tape deck with a computer that downloaded the song you liked.... and suddenly you've done something illegal. There's no functional difference between the two scenarios, so why is one legal but the other isn't?
AMD's chips perform threaded tasks faster than Intel's - if you want to talk about tomorrow's chips you should also look at tomorrow's software, where heavy threading is going to be the norm. From that perspective, the value of the AMD chips easily doubles.
Re:Nothings confirmed...
on
UVB-76 Explained
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· Score: 2, Funny
Since we are talking about the possibility of the transmissions being related to espionage missions, it is likely that the transmissions sent from this station (if they were indeed for that purpose to begin with) are NOT the only form of communication available to their field operatives. UVB-76 could be used to signal operatives to change their other communication methods, to switch mission objectives, to begin or end a specific operation, or any of an ungodly number of other tactical possibilities. I don't think it's impossible for the station to have a military purpose at all, if you consider this as a probable use for it.
Would it not be plausible for at least SOME glaciers to melt them as they get closer to civilization? Send some guys with flamethrowers, or throw down some napalm (or something else nice and hot, I don't know if napalm is environmentally safe..) every few days. You could even devise some ingenious aqueduct system to catch the water as it melts. I don't see why we have technology that can cut down huge chunks of forest or strip-mine out miles of earth but somehow are unable to stop slow-moving and predictable ice sheets...
Let's see... Activision's seven pillars are most likely: World of Warcraft Unnamed Blizzard MMORPG Diablo StarCraft Guitar/Band Hero Call of Duty.... And what else?
They only have a few other franchises to work with.. the LEGO game series, Cabela's hunting games (lol), and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. As far as I know their contract with Marvel is over, so they might not be able to produce another M:UA game. None of these remaining franchises seem like 1 billion dollar winners, so what does that leave for the seventh pillar?
It's possible for a PS3 owner to share everything they buy on the Playstation Store with up to 5 other people. For example, if a friend of mine buys Final Fantasy VII off the store, I can download it and play it, for free, on my PS3 and PSP because I have access, and so do 4 of his other friends. And this is a supported feature of the Playstation Network. Despite this fact, developers continue putting games and downloadable content on the PSN. This isn't a case of partial functionality either; anything and everything can be shared and work 100% this way. So either developers are losing money hand over fist from this piracy or it's profitable somehow... it can't really be both.
Suppose you're in the army and you come across a minefield. Do you want to be the guy who carries that line grenade launcher to the front of the minefield, potentially step on a mine that's not where you expected, to stand out in the open for all to see and shoot at for however long it takes to prepare the weapon and fire it? The bad guys on the other side of the mines at looking right at you through their crosshairs. OR would you rather have a durable, bulletproof robot capable of doing that job as well as having multiple weapon mounts to be capable of other things?
Every episode of South Park is available for free on its official website. At that point the only thing you're really pirating is a pittance of internet ad-revenue and the convenience of having the actual video file.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. My Mr.Fusion powered DeLorean doesn't need roads.
In America, critical thinking is a college level skill. :(
"Why did Top Gear say your car sucked and only went 50 miles for 16 hours of charge" is not a very good sales lead. Having to explain to every customer that asks that question that Top Gear was running the Tesla at race-track performance and simulated the breakdown without actually testing it is expecting the customer to believe the owner of the car saying a negative review is biased/wrong/lying/whatever. People on Slashdot won't listen when a Microsoft rep says something bad about Google or Apple, why would a Top Gear viewer believe Tesla?
As of today I have watched more Top Gear than I have in the rest of my life.
This would be true whether you'd never seen any episodes or Top Gear, or seen every episode but the Tesla one...
Can we fine her up to $15,000 for each case of infringement?
You make it sound as if re-election is a foregone conclusion....
Okay, so we have an organization that invites everyone to join in and write stuff. There is no discrimination, as long as you follow the guidelines which are perfectly reasonable for keeping Wikipedia a useful and informative source of information. Years pass. Then some analyst comes along and says there aren't enough women contributors at Wikipedia... Well, it isn't like there was a sign that said 'no girls allowed.' There was nothing barring women from joining the community at all, except possibly their own personal decisions not to.
Wikipedia is 'equal opportunity' in just about every sense of the term. If they start incentivising or somehow attempting to skew the population of contributors to get more women, they become LESS so, not more. This is like the manager of a McDonalds seeing he only has white employees so he posts a sign that says "Black help wanted." It's completely batshit crazy. Maybe women who use the site just don't want to become contributors; maybe the majority of users of the site are men; maybe people in general don't know how to become contributors (which is at least somewhat more of a legitimate issue).
There could be any number of reasons for the shortage of female contributors, but as long as there are no restrictions on women joining and putting up their information I don't see this as any problem. I'd be saying the exact same thing if they said only 13% of the wikipedia contributors are men, or black, or jewish, or whatever denomination. It really doesn't matter when they haven't prevented anyone from joining.
RIAA representative: "There are so many things our two cultures can share."
Leader of the 100: "Perhaps you haven't noticed, but we've been sharing our culture with you for the past decade."
if 9/11 taught us anything it should be that occasionally terrorists are good at coordinating large plots. One store bombing in one city might not be that big a deal, but what about multiple store bombings across several states? We're talking about people who aren't afraid to kill themselves if it means blowing up 12 people on a bus - what about a few hundred people packed into the line in front of a walmart (or a few hundred thousand, in front of a few hundred walmarts)?
The reason the idea of a water supply attack is so scary is precisely because there are so many disparate municipals systems. Terrorism is only a physical threat to a small percentage of the population, but it's a massive mind game for everyone that isn't. Imagine what would happen if a terrorist plot to poison a city water supply (to some, say 100,000 people) were discovered and foiled. The news media would have reports from the potential victims saying they had no idea it could happen here, and the security just wasn't in place, etc etc, and the government would act rashly and without thinking, creating some ungodly structure to protect every water supply... The terrorists won the mind game, and that's just for getting caught.
You can play Starcraft 2 offline. You only need to connect to the Battle.net server once.
From a different perspective, it looks like you're arguing AGAINST the plot becoming more fleshed out and focused. SC2 answers questions you might have asked in SC1, like why the zerg suddenly became more aggressive - Mengsk's psi emitters played a small role in that but now we know it was mostly the dark entities.
Tassadar's ghost is also fairly reasonable. A powerful psionic being makes direct contact with another; strange results happen. Throw in the whole plot of Tassadar learning to harness the dark templar energies from Zeratul and you really should have expected something more than just 'he died killing the overmind.'
If you thought the story was incoherent, that probably is due to the design of choosing your own missions. Each of the 6 story arcs in the game is a complete story that is completely justifiable in the game's context. You don't just accidentally put the artifact together. You were guided there by Tychus who was being manipulated by Mengsk. Mengsk is a total badass - he manipulated Raynor the whole time to get him to attack Char for a final showdown with Kerrigan. It isn't Blizzard's fault if you didn't understand that.
And now there's a new overarching narrative with a clear and present danger of the Hybrid forces, which I honestly believe is a step up from the original starcraft where each race was antagonizing eachother.. there can now be a brand new dynamic.
And back on the topic of Tassadar's death: they barely touched on it in Wings, it's true. But it's a Protoss plot that you uncovered in a Protoss mission. Wings is otherwise pretty much completely a terran campaign. I think we're going to see a LOT more of Tassadar. My own personal opinion is that he was somehow (perhaps unknowingly) instrumental in the creation of the hybrids.
I really don't understand all this annoyance with having no lan play. People pitched a huge fit over it in SC2 and frankly I think it's just a stupid complaint that people bring up because they want to bitch about something and there's nothing else bad to say. The game is missing one feature that might matter to 10% of its total playerbase... it's still a great game, whether it's missing that feature and whether that 10% buys it or not. And to be honest every LAN party I've ever been at had one legal copy of any given video game and a ton of illegal ones to get people playing. There's no reason Blizzard should be obligated to encourage that kind of environment for their games.
One of my relatives PCs got some really nasty malware recently that pretended to be antivirus software and would halt any action taken by the user with a popup saying the thing you were doing (Taskmanager.exe and the like) was infected. It implied you had to pay $30 to buy the 'full version' of the software to fix it, and the only way to pay was with a credit card. I have never seen a more aggressive piece of software and I had no idea how to fix it other than a boot from CD reformat. Scary stuff :\
I think it is a decidedly bad idea to start writing our revisionist version of history before it becomes history. The fact is we're fighting a group of terrorists called the Taliban that happens to be a radical Muslim group. Putting them in a video game doesn't lend them any more 'legitimacy' than putting them in a book or a movie. If the other radical Muslims out there are offended that the Taliban are in the game, they can deal with them in real life instead of wasting time getting their names changed to 'opposing force.' Or alternatively they can make their own better version of the Taliban, but this time with blackjack and hookers. Then maybe they'll get in the next CoD.
some sort of social networking BS to masses of people in hopes of building it into something larger
I think you mean this.
Good laugh. For anyone actually looking for some answers though, the article doesn't say anything about its actual fuel efficiency. It has a ~16 gallon tank that runs on diesel, natural gas, biofuels, and liquid petroleum (o.o;;). I am not sold on it being particularly eco-friendly, despite the nice fuel compatibility.
It's only lost revenue if the person making the copy would have bought it. If they never had an intention of making a purchase, there was no potential for revenue gain to begin with.
As an example, say that you hear a song on the radio (which is free!) and you decide to check out the band. Their CD is $20 and has 9 songs you've never heard, plus the one you liked. You decide you won't buy the CD. Instead, you get a tape deck and record the song off the radio the next time you hear it. Now you can listen to the song whenever you want, and have managed to do nothing illegal. Replace the tape deck with a computer that downloaded the song you liked.... and suddenly you've done something illegal. There's no functional difference between the two scenarios, so why is one legal but the other isn't?
AMD's chips perform threaded tasks faster than Intel's - if you want to talk about tomorrow's chips you should also look at tomorrow's software, where heavy threading is going to be the norm. From that perspective, the value of the AMD chips easily doubles.
Since we are talking about the possibility of the transmissions being related to espionage missions, it is likely that the transmissions sent from this station (if they were indeed for that purpose to begin with) are NOT the only form of communication available to their field operatives. UVB-76 could be used to signal operatives to change their other communication methods, to switch mission objectives, to begin or end a specific operation, or any of an ungodly number of other tactical possibilities. I don't think it's impossible for the station to have a military purpose at all, if you consider this as a probable use for it.
Would it not be plausible for at least SOME glaciers to melt them as they get closer to civilization? Send some guys with flamethrowers, or throw down some napalm (or something else nice and hot, I don't know if napalm is environmentally safe..) every few days. You could even devise some ingenious aqueduct system to catch the water as it melts. I don't see why we have technology that can cut down huge chunks of forest or strip-mine out miles of earth but somehow are unable to stop slow-moving and predictable ice sheets...
Let's see... .... And what else?
Activision's seven pillars are most likely:
World of Warcraft
Unnamed Blizzard MMORPG
Diablo
StarCraft
Guitar/Band Hero
Call of Duty
They only have a few other franchises to work with.. the LEGO game series, Cabela's hunting games (lol), and Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
As far as I know their contract with Marvel is over, so they might not be able to produce another M:UA game.
None of these remaining franchises seem like 1 billion dollar winners, so what does that leave for the seventh pillar?
It's possible for a PS3 owner to share everything they buy on the Playstation Store with up to 5 other people. For example, if a friend of mine buys Final Fantasy VII off the store, I can download it and play it, for free, on my PS3 and PSP because I have access, and so do 4 of his other friends. And this is a supported feature of the Playstation Network. Despite this fact, developers continue putting games and downloadable content on the PSN. This isn't a case of partial functionality either; anything and everything can be shared and work 100% this way. So either developers are losing money hand over fist from this piracy or it's profitable somehow... it can't really be both.
Suppose you're in the army and you come across a minefield. Do you want to be the guy who carries that line grenade launcher to the front of the minefield, potentially step on a mine that's not where you expected, to stand out in the open for all to see and shoot at for however long it takes to prepare the weapon and fire it? The bad guys on the other side of the mines at looking right at you through their crosshairs. OR would you rather have a durable, bulletproof robot capable of doing that job as well as having multiple weapon mounts to be capable of other things?
Every episode of South Park is available for free on its official website. At that point the only thing you're really pirating is a pittance of internet ad-revenue and the convenience of having the actual video file.