I'd considered the anomaly as effectively breaking the whole timeline into an infinite number of alternate timelines nearly parallel to each other but actually intersecting inside the anomaly.
Awesome! We'll apply that to the Stargate series and clean up any plotholes and other annoyances in one big special called "Crisis of the Infinite Stargates"! And in ten years we'll do it again!
Who cares about graphics? The problem was that they made DX2 too arcade-y. The much inferior inventory, the removable upgrades... DX2 just wasn't as good as DX1, graphics aside.
Hasbro Interactive was producing three sequels, of which one (X-COM: Genesis) was what the first two games were, with modern technology - ie. that what every X-Com fan was aching for.
Then Hasbro decided to shut down Hasbro Interactive and sell the rights to X-COM to Infogrames.
Then Infogrames (now part of Atari) decided to scrap all X-Com projects and produce X-COM: Enforcer. On top of that, Atari doesn't plan to revive the series, despite the unbroken popularity. (Thanks a lot, Atari! I hope you die a horrible death!)
Yes, but the competition is between two players. Everyone else doesn't have much of a chance to get significant market share - especially when the two big players decide to work together to keep amsll players out.
Sure, a monopoly would be much worse, but a duopoly (or oligopoly in general) can be similarly devastating to small players, especially when the big players form a cartel. Actually, national politics form a good environment for cartel-like structures to form. I quote the German Wikipedia (yes, I know that WP isn't the most reliable source):
Cartels typically form in markets for mass products where the providers have relatively little opportunities to differentiate themselves on technology. The less providers there are in a market the easier it is for a cartel to form. It also forms the easier the more similar the providers are to each other.
National politics are a market where you don't compete on know-how but on popularity and money. The only way to differentiate yourself from other parties is by the size of your campaign and your plans for the next period. There typically are few providers that are relevant (even countries with a proportional system rarely have more then about half a dozen parties in their parliament), especially in non-proportional systems. Also, the big parties tend to become somewhat similar as extreme parties don't get any votes from the middle of the spectrum.
Thus, even though there isn't a single party that holds a monopoly, an oligopoly does exist and might decide to pass laws that make it harder for new parties to break up that oligopoly.
The only foreign affairs stories you'll hear are either that we've killed evil and the world loves us, or that our soldiers are dead and we'll be hit with nuclear weapons soon. We don't seem to care about anything else.
So you say America is becoming numb? Hmm... Maybe music can offer us some insight into the mental state of some global players.
USA:I've become so numb, I can't feel you there! I've become so tired, so much more aware! Iran:Everything you say to me~ takes me one step closer to the edge and I'm about to break! Iraq:Don't stay! Forget our memories, forget our possibilities, what you were changing me into~! Just take myself back and don't stay! EU:I've lied to you the same way that I always do! This is the last smile that I'll fake for the sake of being with you!
Japan: Would you please stop singing Linkin Park, you emos? Some people are trying to make real music here. *cough* Lalaaa lalalalalalaalaa la Katamari Damacy~
What third party? Your political system would only allow a third party to have any significance if it could get about 1/3 of all votes. A party suddenly going from near-zero to 1/3 is not going to happen and a gradual increase in voters is also not going to happen because those who actually do care to vote give their votes to parties with a higher chance of winning.
The Dems and Reps do have an duopoly on power in the States, with exactly the same kind of power a monopoly grants one (the power to keep competitors out of the market, in this case facilitated by simply not changing the system to allow smaller parties to have influence).
iro|nynoun
[...] 2 a: the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b: a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c: an ironic expression or utterance
[...]
Then it would be -1, Obvious. The fact that Han shot first is so much common knowledge that it is implicitly mentioned whenever someone besides George Lucas uses the term "Star Wars".
Hey, the company did look good: It was ~10 km from my home, it was an IT shop that actually trained people and it was neither very small nor very big, indicating both interesting possibilities and no corporate work climate. And I didn't have any inside sources to tell me about their HR policies.
OTOH, I'm studying now and when I have my diploma I'll not only be under-qualified but also too expensive. Take that, job market!
Disney makes a movie, let's say a rendered one. Who's the artist? The lead character designer? The storyboard author? The company? Most probably the rights reside with the company. Do you really want Disney to retain the rights to everythng they ever prodused until eternity? (Remember, companies rarely really die; they tend to get bought out when they're in a bad shape.)
Of course you could tie it to the lifespan of everyone involved, but that leaves other loopholes.
True. Before I started studying CS I applied for three apprenticeships at a local data warehouse company (application developer, sysadmin, network admin) as all three jobs interested me and I'd take any. The company is a Unix/Windows shop with most of the number crunching done by Unix boxen. During the interview I was told that I was actually the only applicant that has ever worked with a unixoid operating system, which leads to the assumption that I was likely to get the apprenticeship.
I got turned down. It turned out that someone who knew someone within the company needed an apprenticeship for a relative.
Qualification is nice but utterly irrelevant when someone with connections enters the competition.
We see articles at least weekly, in various newspapers and on Slashdot, of databases of millions and millions of records of customer data being stolen.
Actually I don't. Once every couple of months I see reports about such leaks, but those happen not only with CC companies.
By the way, you still haven't explained how this relates to the topic. Why is the search they did for the police a bad thing exactly? Don't tell me that their database workers accessing the database is such a rare event that the police asking them to run a query significantly increases the chance of a data leak.
Random interns at Microsoft don't have access to all source code of all Microsoft programs. Random people at CC companies don't have access to the full customer and transaction databases.
Also, covering their asses means keeping it from happening. If any of that data ever got out and somebody noticed they'd be in massive problems.
Besides, it's not like they specifically told their least trustworthy people to perform this search because the police asked. They will have used the same people they always use, so either the CC companies are inherently untrustworthy because they let anyone perform sensitive database queries or the queries they ran for the police didn't significantly increase the chance for a data leak.
In case you want to answer that, yes indeed, all CC companies are run with the same amount of professionalism as a discussion on Slashdot, I'd like you to show me the corresponding numbers that indicate the high rate of data leaks among CC accounts. Of course there will have been a study about a problem as serious as that.
Same thing happens here. People are less and less interested in (and the media is reporting less and less) real facts and news and more the entertaining fluff. Doesn't mean that society has changed that much in terms of actions, but rather has changed in what they want to spend their free time reading.
Which one might see as something going wrong. I didn't say that it's neccessarily the US American culture that's at fault (even though you do have an unusually large number of lawyers per capita); it might just as well be that the media are getting less reliable or that we have become so numb that the only thing that can grab our attention is something like the SCO vs. (IBM|Novell) cases.
Of course the USA aren't as bad as their image, but the fact that the image has went from "the land of infinite possibilities" to "the land where you get sued if you don't cover your ass" should be an indicator that something is going wrong.
Who's making sure that some random intern at Microsoft posts the source code of all MS projects on public FTP? How ever can any company do any business when it's clear that anyone in the organization can do anything and that even highly sensitive data that could easily cost the company billions if treated wrongly is always entrusted to the least trustworthy dork in the organization?
Do you really think that the CC companies are letting someone access their customer database in a fashion like this without making sure that the data isn't misused? Those people aren't idiots and I do trust them to be smart enough not to randomly open themselves up to multi-million-Euro lawsuits as well as investigations which may cost them even more.
Because
a) The site was either altready shut down or operates in a country where it's not likely to be pursued,
b) the site already had customers and
c) the possession of child porn is illegal in Germany.
The police isn't trying to stop people from accessing the site, it's trying to find the people who bought the child porn. For that, knowing which CC accounts were used is more helpful than telling CC companies to block all transactions to that company (which probably would involve lots of red tape anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
Let's be honest, RSS already is broken in more than one way.
I'd considered the anomaly as effectively breaking the whole timeline into an infinite number of alternate timelines nearly parallel to each other but actually intersecting inside the anomaly.
Awesome! We'll apply that to the Stargate series and clean up any plotholes and other annoyances in one big special called "Crisis of the Infinite Stargates"! And in ten years we'll do it again!
It'd be so cool if they would make a series based on Serenity!
Who cares about graphics? The problem was that they made DX2 too arcade-y. The much inferior inventory, the removable upgrades... DX2 just wasn't as good as DX1, graphics aside.
Hasbro Interactive was producing three sequels, of which one (X-COM: Genesis) was what the first two games were, with modern technology - ie. that what every X-Com fan was aching for.
Then Hasbro decided to shut down Hasbro Interactive and sell the rights to X-COM to Infogrames.
Then Infogrames (now part of Atari) decided to scrap all X-Com projects and produce X-COM: Enforcer. On top of that, Atari doesn't plan to revive the series, despite the unbroken popularity. (Thanks a lot, Atari! I hope you die a horrible death!)
Yes, but the competition is between two players. Everyone else doesn't have much of a chance to get significant market share - especially when the two big players decide to work together to keep amsll players out.
Sure, a monopoly would be much worse, but a duopoly (or oligopoly in general) can be similarly devastating to small players, especially when the big players form a cartel. Actually, national politics form a good environment for cartel-like structures to form. I quote the German Wikipedia (yes, I know that WP isn't the most reliable source):
Cartels typically form in markets for mass products where the providers have relatively little opportunities to differentiate themselves on technology. The less providers there are in a market the easier it is for a cartel to form. It also forms the easier the more similar the providers are to each other.
National politics are a market where you don't compete on know-how but on popularity and money. The only way to differentiate yourself from other parties is by the size of your campaign and your plans for the next period. There typically are few providers that are relevant (even countries with a proportional system rarely have more then about half a dozen parties in their parliament), especially in non-proportional systems. Also, the big parties tend to become somewhat similar as extreme parties don't get any votes from the middle of the spectrum.
Thus, even though there isn't a single party that holds a monopoly, an oligopoly does exist and might decide to pass laws that make it harder for new parties to break up that oligopoly.
The only foreign affairs stories you'll hear are either that we've killed evil and the world loves us, or that our soldiers are dead and we'll be hit with nuclear weapons soon. We don't seem to care about anything else.
So you say America is becoming numb? Hmm... Maybe music can offer us some insight into the mental state of some global players.
USA: I've become so numb, I can't feel you there! I've become so tired, so much more aware!
Iran: Everything you say to me~ takes me one step closer to the edge and I'm about to break!
Iraq: Don't stay! Forget our memories, forget our possibilities, what you were changing me into~! Just take myself back and don't stay!
EU: I've lied to you the same way that I always do! This is the last smile that I'll fake for the sake of being with you!
Japan: Would you please stop singing Linkin Park, you emos? Some people are trying to make real music here. *cough* Lalaaa lalalalalalaalaa la Katamari Damacy~
What third party? Your political system would only allow a third party to have any significance if it could get about 1/3 of all votes. A party suddenly going from near-zero to 1/3 is not going to happen and a gradual increase in voters is also not going to happen because those who actually do care to vote give their votes to parties with a higher chance of winning.
The Dems and Reps do have an duopoly on power in the States, with exactly the same kind of power a monopoly grants one (the power to keep competitors out of the market, in this case facilitated by simply not changing the system to allow smaller parties to have influence).
iro|ny noun
[...]
2 a: the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b: a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c: an ironic expression or utterance
[...]
So obviously NVidia card work even less on MBPs than on Mac Pros. Well done, NVidia, well done.
This is almost as bad as that time when it turned out that their AGP cards weren't compatible with standard PCI slots.
Sony's reputation is to shoot themselves into the foot when it comes to media formats. It's two birds with a stone...
Hey, I know that movie! The soundtrack is made by Lemon Demon and it totally rocks!
...saying that he had a bad feeling about that movie.
If you think the fanfics are bad you haven't done a search on HP on Deviantart yet.
Then it would be -1, Obvious. The fact that Han shot first is so much common knowledge that it is implicitly mentioned whenever someone besides George Lucas uses the term "Star Wars".
Hey, the company did look good: It was ~10 km from my home, it was an IT shop that actually trained people and it was neither very small nor very big, indicating both interesting possibilities and no corporate work climate. And I didn't have any inside sources to tell me about their HR policies.
OTOH, I'm studying now and when I have my diploma I'll not only be under-qualified but also too expensive. Take that, job market!
Disney makes a movie, let's say a rendered one. Who's the artist? The lead character designer? The storyboard author? The company? Most probably the rights reside with the company. Do you really want Disney to retain the rights to everythng they ever prodused until eternity? (Remember, companies rarely really die; they tend to get bought out when they're in a bad shape.)
Of course you could tie it to the lifespan of everyone involved, but that leaves other loopholes.
I wonder if that lawyer is affiliated with a certain Count Insidious...
True. Before I started studying CS I applied for three apprenticeships at a local data warehouse company (application developer, sysadmin, network admin) as all three jobs interested me and I'd take any. The company is a Unix/Windows shop with most of the number crunching done by Unix boxen. During the interview I was told that I was actually the only applicant that has ever worked with a unixoid operating system, which leads to the assumption that I was likely to get the apprenticeship.
I got turned down. It turned out that someone who knew someone within the company needed an apprenticeship for a relative.
Qualification is nice but utterly irrelevant when someone with connections enters the competition.
We see articles at least weekly, in various newspapers and on Slashdot, of databases of millions and millions of records of customer data being stolen.
Actually I don't. Once every couple of months I see reports about such leaks, but those happen not only with CC companies.
By the way, you still haven't explained how this relates to the topic. Why is the search they did for the police a bad thing exactly? Don't tell me that their database workers accessing the database is such a rare event that the police asking them to run a query significantly increases the chance of a data leak.
I know I should stop feeding the trolls, but...
Random interns at Microsoft don't have access to all source code of all Microsoft programs. Random people at CC companies don't have access to the full customer and transaction databases.
Also, covering their asses means keeping it from happening. If any of that data ever got out and somebody noticed they'd be in massive problems.
Besides, it's not like they specifically told their least trustworthy people to perform this search because the police asked. They will have used the same people they always use, so either the CC companies are inherently untrustworthy because they let anyone perform sensitive database queries or the queries they ran for the police didn't significantly increase the chance for a data leak.
In case you want to answer that, yes indeed, all CC companies are run with the same amount of professionalism as a discussion on Slashdot, I'd like you to show me the corresponding numbers that indicate the high rate of data leaks among CC accounts. Of course there will have been a study about a problem as serious as that.
Same thing happens here. People are less and less interested in (and the media is reporting less and less) real facts and news and more the entertaining fluff. Doesn't mean that society has changed that much in terms of actions, but rather has changed in what they want to spend their free time reading.
Which one might see as something going wrong. I didn't say that it's neccessarily the US American culture that's at fault (even though you do have an unusually large number of lawyers per capita); it might just as well be that the media are getting less reliable or that we have become so numb that the only thing that can grab our attention is something like the SCO vs. (IBM|Novell) cases.
Of course the USA aren't as bad as their image, but the fact that the image has went from "the land of infinite possibilities" to "the land where you get sued if you don't cover your ass" should be an indicator that something is going wrong.
Who's making sure that some random intern at Microsoft posts the source code of all MS projects on public FTP? How ever can any company do any business when it's clear that anyone in the organization can do anything and that even highly sensitive data that could easily cost the company billions if treated wrongly is always entrusted to the least trustworthy dork in the organization?
Do you really think that the CC companies are letting someone access their customer database in a fashion like this without making sure that the data isn't misused? Those people aren't idiots and I do trust them to be smart enough not to randomly open themselves up to multi-million-Euro lawsuits as well as investigations which may cost them even more.
Because
a) The site was either altready shut down or operates in a country where it's not likely to be pursued,
b) the site already had customers and
c) the possession of child porn is illegal in Germany.
The police isn't trying to stop people from accessing the site, it's trying to find the people who bought the child porn. For that, knowing which CC accounts were used is more helpful than telling CC companies to block all transactions to that company (which probably would involve lots of red tape anyway).