If it got to that point.. why not just use a distributed effort (like Amazon's Mechanical Turk?) to blur out the faces of people? It could be simple--they have an interface that would show each still frame, and a user would select the areas where faces. The user would get a few cents per image they "censor." Software blurs the faces before the images go into production, and everyone is happy.
Hell, Google has a checkout system. They could offer this credit to users as a gift certificate--which would increase the demand for Google Checkout.
Who loves the police officer that pulls you over? Even when you were clearly going faster than the posted speed limit. (I'll agree that there are shady tactics--like pulling people over right after a speed limit change, and the like). Most cops are just out there doing their jobs, no need to take it out on them. Not to quote our President, but "we are a nation of laws." We have people out there to enforce them, and we hope that they will do so fairly.
It's also easy to see that we hear more about the cops out there making questionable decisions, like this case (or the cops in the UCLA incident not too long ago which was caught on cell phone videos). But these are not the norm.
... and to your comment, 90% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Theres a great way to save old books--BookMooch. People list their unwanted books to give away to other users of the website. It's pretty simple--list your books for 1/10th point each, receive 1 point for giving a book away, and spend 1 point to get a book from another member.
...and thats my pimping BookMooch speech.
I'd doubt that there is enough profit at $1 a book to organize and store the books--you're talking about a lot of books. Most older books just don't have much of a market value; I assure you that nothing you would want to read was destroyed (although, I still cringe on the thought of burning books).
Both sites have "younger" audiences--neither represent a cross section of society. Youth are generally more liberal than older people, and thats probably why you justify the label "extremely liberal." We don't have the same audience as the 10 O'Clock News.
I'll say this: here, I'm not likely to mod up a post that I strongly disagree with (unless it's very insightful in a way I've never heard before, factually and logically sound). I guess an alternative viewpoint must meet a stronger standard than one that just seems obvious to me. Maybe thats not completely fair.
I'd be interested in you pointed out your posts that have been modded troll while being "well informed, concise, accurate and written in a professional manner." Generally the posts I see modded as troll are disrespectful and incomplete. Tone matters. If you really think there's some vast conspiracy to undermine your positions, well . . . a tin foil hat might not be thick enough.
Slashdot's moderation has instructions--bring posts deserving attention up, and get the completely unproductive stuff out of the way. Digg doesn't have this. There are no guidelines at all. What criteria should I use? If I'm participating in a thread, should I mod the people up that have agreed with me? Mod down the ones that don't? Mod up the buried comments that are well stated but not the popular opinion? If a comment is modded +20, what does that mean? It's a popularity contest. In terms of groupthink, digg's system will always be worse when everyone's opinion matters all the time.
Of course Slashdot's moderation is also at the whim of the subset of users that have mod points on a given day.
The more I think of it, the more I think that's a bonus. A huge problem on digg is that people will go through and mod up or down anything that they either agree with or disagree with, without regard to the actual content of the post. At least when mod points are scarce, users generally only use them on posts that are actually deserving.
As has already been said, there's a great difference in the userbases of each site. I'd be willing to bet that the average Slashdot user is better educated, has more experience (in industry, in life,...), and is older. Digg is just in it's infancy compared to Slashdot; I think there could be a lot of improvement when they fix their commenting system and their user base ages a bit.
As a community, Slashdot is pretty critical of itself--but it really is one of the best online communities out there. If you don't believe me, you spend way too much time here.
Yes, but evolution you can read up about. You can study it in school, become involved in the research. It's all out there waiting for you to figure it out.
Now the church route? Well... good luck on proving the existence of a supernatural being. Much less that it had a few spare days to create all this and leave behind the evidence of evolution we have now.
You are using services provided by these companies--can't they ask for anything in return? That is, advertising to you.
There is of course a line where this tracking is invasive, but tracking searches on eBay to provide more relevant advertising doesn't seem to be too offensive at all.
We use it at work, and deal with corrupted databases frequently. There's been talk of moving to SVN for a while, but I doubt they'd make a full switchover. We have years worth of projects stored in VSS, and it's really not worth moving them over (fortunately closed projects, so getting back to them is only necessary if any issues arise with a customer).
Yep, I bought my 360 for the streaming media features.
That makes no sense.
The 360 is a gaming device first and foremost. If you disagree with this, you have never used one for more than a few minutes--or have never played games on it.
Aside from the larger storage device, I fail to see how the PS3 is "future proof." This is console gaming, not PC gaming. There wont be Wii, 360, or PS3 games released in the future that cannot be played on their respective console. Do you really believe that the PS3 is that much more powerful than the other consoles that it's life will be longer than the others? I don't.
Underpants gnomes and FSM are just artificial creations that mock thousands of years of human insight, intuition, art, and culture.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
-Bertrand Russell
Point is, to the student who doesn't have some other motivation to do well in school, none of those consequences have any meaning. So all you can really conclude from a dropout is "this person won't expend effort for no reason" - you can't conclude that he won't be a good employee, because you pay your employees, giving them a reason to expend effort.
I think education is enough pay.
That doesn't address the issues of bad schools--because there are plenty of those. Fortunately, I went to a good high school. There was an excellent music program with a top rated band, jazz band, and orchestra (which I played in). I was fortunate to have plenty of great teachers (in AP courses and others) who always tried to challenge the class--the whole class, not the below average or the above average.
What I'd give for my college education to be free. . .
Again, in light of the above, it's a mistake to attribute this to a lack of self-discipline. If you aren't going to get anything out of studying for a test or working on a project, why should you want to do it?
You're not going to get anything out of a test or project if you only put in is the bare minimum. You get what you put in back. You can have the greatest teachers in the world, but you're not going to get anything out of it if you're not willing to put your fair share of work in.
Better formfactor?
How so? PS3: about 13.5" x 3.25" and 11 lbs, versus Xbox360 about 10.25" x 2.5" deep at 7.7 lbs. hell the PS3 is LARGER than the original XBox that everyone was complaining was too big!
Point Microsoft
The 360 also has a massive power brick. The PS3 has a standard PC power plug on the back (for that, I give them props).
Disclaimer: I have a 360, and I love it. Even though I really shouldn't have spent as much as I did on it (I realize this as my credit card statement is coming in).
If you haven't already decided on a college, you should check out Kettering University (formerly GMI Engineering and Management Institute, formerly General Moters Institute, no longer associated with GM). School is 6 months out of the year (split into 3 month semesters), and you're required to have a co-op job for the other 6 months. While the school's largest major is Mechanical Engineering and it's top rated major is Industrial Engineering, it has a great Computer Science department.
I am a Junior there now, working on my Computer Engineering degree and an Applied Mathematics minor. It's a pretty good school and has only been getting better with the new President. The school has excellent resources for finding a job, along with all the help you could need in making a proper resume and improving your interviewing skills. Kettering is definitely worth a look.
I agree that being honest--and, not to be cliche, but it's the best policy--would have been the best course for Clinton to take. I think that politicans talking about what they've experienced is always a good thing--I don't give a shit if you inhaled or not or where you stuck it.
I think I'd like Bush a lot more if he came out and said he and Condi have been having kinky nasty sex in the oval office. Then, I could at least see him as a human.
... and when the government starts using that sort of force against it's own citizens, I think the tide will entirely change. Our soldiers are also citizens.
People have said you can always just use multiple DVD's on the 360, but really that is way more clunky and drastically reduces profits for manufacturers. The extra storage space will be useful to PS3 developers, as it is even at launch. I'm not sure why people discount this as an advantage for Sony, given that the game developers have expressed displeasure with the 360's anemic storage and we can see right before our eyes that it is being used.
I have to say, I'm happy with my 360. All the games I've played have been perfect on DVD.
I don't see how pressing another DVD drastically reduces profit to manufacturers. At this point, DVD production should be fairly common, and pressing another is obviously cheap (how much do you pay for a blank DVD-R?). If I remember correctly, one of the points in the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD debate was that Blu-Ray required expensive new equipment to produce (whereas HD-DVD could be made with few modifications to the equipment already producing DVDs). With a $60 game, a doubt adding in another DVD costs manufacturers much.
Free online play is a big draw for us computer gamers who were leery of a recurring fee to play online. It makes buying console versions of games more acceptable rather than just waiting for a PC version of some things.
Generally you get what you pay for. The quality of Sony's service is yet to been.
But taking the console up to the checkout and paying $600 vs $400 vs $300 are completely different things. I paid $400 for my 360, and have definitely put about $200 into it (games, live, accessories) . . . but having that $500 or $600 upfront is a completely different animal.
There's also been a few articles saying that the majority of PS3s being produced are the $600 model. There might be no choice between the $500 model and the $600 model. Something tells me that unlike the 360, the less expensive model will be the more popular. If, after launch, the $600 model is being snatched up at a higher rate than the $500 model, there's going to be a lot of people (me included) that are going to be eating their own words.
We know the fanboys, early adapters, and people with simply too much money will buy it. We'll see about everyone else when it's released.
MS launches first by a long shot and does the very safest thing, not 40X but more like 10-12X (being extremely vague here, don't crucify me) and the famously solid online component. Less cost than PS3, less powerful, more understandable, more predictable. No HD optical. But then no harddrive. Jesus I really think they went too far with that, not making it standard. Will haunt them. Totally, solidly in the middle. Online is the gold standard amongst many and if you love that style of play this is the place to be. (Does it have a browser though? I actually don't know.)
The only problem with your 10-12X figure is that most people are saying that the PS3 hardware is not much more powerful, if at all, than the 360 hardware (besides market speak [Sony and other console manufacturers never exaggerate their specs!] and fanboys). To convince anyone that the PS3 is 3X more powerful than the 360 is really pushing it.
I will agree however that not including a hard drive (even if a 5-10gb one) in the base model was a huge mistake on Microsoft's part. As for not going for a higher capacity storage device, time will tell if thats going to hurt them.
I might pick up a PS3 if the linux project on there yields some interesting results, provided that the price drops into the sub-$400 range. Right now there aren't any games that really make it worth (for me, your mileage may vary) dropping almost $600 ($499 + $60 game + possible accessories + taxes) on it.
I don't believe either the PS3 or Wii support dialup either. You could still use dialup, I suppose, on any system if you set up some sort of network (ICS on Windows).
I don't believe you'd have a pleasurable gaming experience on any console with dialup.
I think that's a ridiculous concept and I would rather see an AD for a new game or PS3 hardware product than have to fork out a monthly fee just to browse a store where i'm going to buy something or get updates for games.
You don't need to pay for those functions on the 360 either. Marketplace is free to browse, and updates are for everyone that plugs it into the internet. Paying for the gold membership just gets you into online multiplayer.
Slashdot Mirror
If it got to that point.. why not just use a distributed effort (like Amazon's Mechanical Turk?) to blur out the faces of people? It could be simple--they have an interface that would show each still frame, and a user would select the areas where faces. The user would get a few cents per image they "censor." Software blurs the faces before the images go into production, and everyone is happy.
Hell, Google has a checkout system. They could offer this credit to users as a gift certificate--which would increase the demand for Google Checkout.
Who loves the police officer that pulls you over? Even when you were clearly going faster than the posted speed limit. (I'll agree that there are shady tactics--like pulling people over right after a speed limit change, and the like). Most cops are just out there doing their jobs, no need to take it out on them. Not to quote our President, but "we are a nation of laws." We have people out there to enforce them, and we hope that they will do so fairly.
It's also easy to see that we hear more about the cops out there making questionable decisions, like this case (or the cops in the UCLA incident not too long ago which was caught on cell phone videos). But these are not the norm.
... and to your comment, 90% of statistics are made up on the spot.
For your post, I really wish it could be possible to mod +6.
I guess someone didn't get invited out for beers.
Theres a great way to save old books--BookMooch. People list their unwanted books to give away to other users of the website. It's pretty simple--list your books for 1/10th point each, receive 1 point for giving a book away, and spend 1 point to get a book from another member.
...and thats my pimping BookMooch speech.
I'd doubt that there is enough profit at $1 a book to organize and store the books--you're talking about a lot of books. Most older books just don't have much of a market value; I assure you that nothing you would want to read was destroyed (although, I still cringe on the thought of burning books).
Theres always graphical programming languages, like LabVIEW. You can make your code a piece of art.
Everybody should just stop voting. They're all wasting their time.
Yeah, thats going to work out well.
Both sites have "younger" audiences--neither represent a cross section of society. Youth are generally more liberal than older people, and thats probably why you justify the label "extremely liberal." We don't have the same audience as the 10 O'Clock News.
I'll say this: here, I'm not likely to mod up a post that I strongly disagree with (unless it's very insightful in a way I've never heard before, factually and logically sound). I guess an alternative viewpoint must meet a stronger standard than one that just seems obvious to me. Maybe thats not completely fair.
I'd be interested in you pointed out your posts that have been modded troll while being "well informed, concise, accurate and written in a professional manner." Generally the posts I see modded as troll are disrespectful and incomplete. Tone matters. If you really think there's some vast conspiracy to undermine your positions, well . . . a tin foil hat might not be thick enough.
Slashdot's moderation has instructions--bring posts deserving attention up, and get the completely unproductive stuff out of the way. Digg doesn't have this. There are no guidelines at all. What criteria should I use? If I'm participating in a thread, should I mod the people up that have agreed with me? Mod down the ones that don't? Mod up the buried comments that are well stated but not the popular opinion? If a comment is modded +20, what does that mean? It's a popularity contest. In terms of groupthink, digg's system will always be worse when everyone's opinion matters all the time.
The more I think of it, the more I think that's a bonus. A huge problem on digg is that people will go through and mod up or down anything that they either agree with or disagree with, without regard to the actual content of the post. At least when mod points are scarce, users generally only use them on posts that are actually deserving.
As has already been said, there's a great difference in the userbases of each site. I'd be willing to bet that the average Slashdot user is better educated, has more experience (in industry, in life, ...), and is older. Digg is just in it's infancy compared to Slashdot; I think there could be a lot of improvement when they fix their commenting system and their user base ages a bit.
As a community, Slashdot is pretty critical of itself--but it really is one of the best online communities out there. If you don't believe me, you spend way too much time here.
Yes, but evolution you can read up about. You can study it in school, become involved in the research. It's all out there waiting for you to figure it out.
Now the church route? Well... good luck on proving the existence of a supernatural being. Much less that it had a few spare days to create all this and leave behind the evidence of evolution we have now.
You are using services provided by these companies--can't they ask for anything in return? That is, advertising to you.
There is of course a line where this tracking is invasive, but tracking searches on eBay to provide more relevant advertising doesn't seem to be too offensive at all.
Simple answer: yes.
We use it at work, and deal with corrupted databases frequently. There's been talk of moving to SVN for a while, but I doubt they'd make a full switchover. We have years worth of projects stored in VSS, and it's really not worth moving them over (fortunately closed projects, so getting back to them is only necessary if any issues arise with a customer).
Yep, I bought my 360 for the streaming media features.
That makes no sense.
The 360 is a gaming device first and foremost. If you disagree with this, you have never used one for more than a few minutes--or have never played games on it.
Aside from the larger storage device, I fail to see how the PS3 is "future proof." This is console gaming, not PC gaming. There wont be Wii, 360, or PS3 games released in the future that cannot be played on their respective console. Do you really believe that the PS3 is that much more powerful than the other consoles that it's life will be longer than the others? I don't.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
-Bertrand Russell
The 360 also has a massive power brick. The PS3 has a standard PC power plug on the back (for that, I give them props).
Disclaimer: I have a 360, and I love it. Even though I really shouldn't have spent as much as I did on it (I realize this as my credit card statement is coming in).
I downloaded it last night (usual places). And I agree, Hats off to Bev Harris. America needs more people like her.
Now really is the time to scream. There is something wrong with our election system.
If you haven't already decided on a college, you should check out Kettering University (formerly GMI Engineering and Management Institute, formerly General Moters Institute, no longer associated with GM). School is 6 months out of the year (split into 3 month semesters), and you're required to have a co-op job for the other 6 months. While the school's largest major is Mechanical Engineering and it's top rated major is Industrial Engineering, it has a great Computer Science department.
I am a Junior there now, working on my Computer Engineering degree and an Applied Mathematics minor. It's a pretty good school and has only been getting better with the new President. The school has excellent resources for finding a job, along with all the help you could need in making a proper resume and improving your interviewing skills. Kettering is definitely worth a look.
I agree that being honest--and, not to be cliche, but it's the best policy--would have been the best course for Clinton to take. I think that politicans talking about what they've experienced is always a good thing--I don't give a shit if you inhaled or not or where you stuck it.
I think I'd like Bush a lot more if he came out and said he and Condi have been having kinky nasty sex in the oval office. Then, I could at least see him as a human.
... and when the government starts using that sort of force against it's own citizens, I think the tide will entirely change. Our soldiers are also citizens.
I have to say, I'm happy with my 360. All the games I've played have been perfect on DVD.
I don't see how pressing another DVD drastically reduces profit to manufacturers. At this point, DVD production should be fairly common, and pressing another is obviously cheap (how much do you pay for a blank DVD-R?). If I remember correctly, one of the points in the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD debate was that Blu-Ray required expensive new equipment to produce (whereas HD-DVD could be made with few modifications to the equipment already producing DVDs). With a $60 game, a doubt adding in another DVD costs manufacturers much.
Generally you get what you pay for. The quality of Sony's service is yet to been.
But taking the console up to the checkout and paying $600 vs $400 vs $300 are completely different things. I paid $400 for my 360, and have definitely put about $200 into it (games, live, accessories) . . . but having that $500 or $600 upfront is a completely different animal.
There's also been a few articles saying that the majority of PS3s being produced are the $600 model. There might be no choice between the $500 model and the $600 model. Something tells me that unlike the 360, the less expensive model will be the more popular. If, after launch, the $600 model is being snatched up at a higher rate than the $500 model, there's going to be a lot of people (me included) that are going to be eating their own words.
We know the fanboys, early adapters, and people with simply too much money will buy it. We'll see about everyone else when it's released.
The only problem with your 10-12X figure is that most people are saying that the PS3 hardware is not much more powerful, if at all, than the 360 hardware (besides market speak [Sony and other console manufacturers never exaggerate their specs!] and fanboys). To convince anyone that the PS3 is 3X more powerful than the 360 is really pushing it.
I will agree however that not including a hard drive (even if a 5-10gb one) in the base model was a huge mistake on Microsoft's part. As for not going for a higher capacity storage device, time will tell if thats going to hurt them.
I might pick up a PS3 if the linux project on there yields some interesting results, provided that the price drops into the sub-$400 range. Right now there aren't any games that really make it worth (for me, your mileage may vary) dropping almost $600 ($499 + $60 game + possible accessories + taxes) on it.
I don't believe either the PS3 or Wii support dialup either. You could still use dialup, I suppose, on any system if you set up some sort of network (ICS on Windows).
I don't believe you'd have a pleasurable gaming experience on any console with dialup.
You don't need to pay for those functions on the 360 either. Marketplace is free to browse, and updates are for everyone that plugs it into the internet. Paying for the gold membership just gets you into online multiplayer.