- Saw Star Trek 2009. Explained beforehand, very briefly, that it was a "darker and edgier reboot" of the original series that for canon purposes took place in an alternate universe. Answer any questions she has ("Why is Spock bleeding green? What is a Romulan? What is Warp?")
It might help to point out that the rest of Trek wasn't directed by J.J. Abrams and thus has things besides lens flares visible on screen.
Firstly, rework patent examiner commissions. Examiners get paid a reasonable monthly wage and they get a small bonus if they successfully reject a patent on grounds of prior art or unpatentability. However, every rejection is checked by another examiner who gets the bonus if they can show that the first examiner didn't do their job properly. There are no other repercussions for the first examiner if that's the case; they just don't get the bonus.
Result: Patent examiners are now interested in building a strong case against a patent but the bonuses aren't so large that they become overly reject-happy or want to go through patents as quickly as possible. Of course we'd also need to hire more examiners to make up for their more reasonable pace.
Secondly, introduce a variable filing fee. It's a flat base amount plus a variable amount dependent on how many failed and pending applications the submitter has made in the last twelve months. (Yes, you can game this by using shell companies but at least then you get some organisational overhead.) Let's use random number and say it's 1.000 USD plus 500 USD per failed patent. A first-time submitter pays 1k$. If they come up with another patent a year later they pay 1k$ again. A corporation which tries to achieve patents by bruteforcing the patent office ends up with fees in the five-digit range per application.
Thirdly, reduce the duration of patents on nonphysical things. If you can convince the patent office that the thirty-nine hour week or the concept of middle-clicking a menu bar are novel then you get your patent... for, let's say, three years with the usual renewal fees if you want to extend to six. "$ACTION on a computer" counts as nonphysical unless you can prove that your patent involves a substantial change to the physical design of the computer.
I think that would weed out a lot of the cruft. I also think that you'd need to spend billions in lobbyist wages and bribes in order to acheive even one of those points.
We need someone to operate the defreezing equipment. That means we need to send more people up. Since the procedure for diong that is to freeze them, send them up and then send someone after them to defreeze them that's what we do. Of course that someone will be frozen, which means we need someone to defreeze them. After enough iterations of this the entire population of Earth will be frozen in space and no one will be able to defreeze them.
I think the best approach to solve this issue would be to raise the ambient temperature of space so they thaw out on their own. That would also save us the cost of the defreezing equipment.
But if they refer to your average TN display that often can't even display TrueColor without dithering, 50% more colors may essentially mean "it's not the trash your laptop probably uses".
Also, their speed is also so similar that you can mix and match without much effort. In fact, there's even a sketch where they do that. (If they're right, though, twenty years might be a little bit too optimistic.)
I found that folding up once (not twisting) the corner of a bit of tissue or toilet paper and gently inserting it in the ear canal for a second works very well. You don't want to hear the tissue; that's too far. You just let it come into contact with the moisture and wick most of it away (thus only folding once; you don't want the tissue to have much in the way of structural integrits). That plus a few minutes of time before putting in the IEMs works well to keep the ears reasonably dry and the monitors reasonably clean.
Then again, using the monitors "wet" never gave me an infection, just messy monitors. I may simply be more resistant to ear infections than you are.
Try the ViSang VS-R02/R03. They're pretty much identical except that the R03 hat nicer-looking buds, although I think that the R02 hat the better sound - they're both above what you'd expect for the price but the R02 is slightly clearer in my opinion. Then again the R03 is a bit more forgiving of badly-mixed music. It's not exactly night and day, though.
Generally-speaking the R02/R03 are solid (semi-)budget IEMs with a fairly flat, rather analytical sound; you get good separation and while their bass isn't quite on par with more "fun-oriented" IEMs they're quite good with mids, which puts most singers front and center. Plus, you're not looking for bass monsters anyway. I recommend them for classical/orchestral music, a cappella and similarly intricate (and well-mixed) stuff and don't recommend them for punk rock and anything else where the mixing quality is secondary to being loud. Electronic music works very well, metal heavily depends on how well it's mixed. Oh, and you will hear badly-encoded MP3s.
Do the ViSangs measure up against bigger players like Phonak? No, but then again they only cost half as much and sound more than half as good. (Plus, unlike Phonak's weird IEMs they actually fit into my ears.)
The wires are somewhat stiff and have a memory effect; on the other hand they're robust and not very prone to telephony (that is, you hear the music and not the cable rubbing against your clothes). Both come with a shirt clip, a carrying box and an assortment of silicone and foam rubber caps with the R02's assortment being slightly larger (it comes with an additional pair of biflanges). Both are very comfortable to wear, even for long periods of time. As for sturdiness, it took me almost two years to break my R02s, which is okay for a 30 EUR investment in my book.
If you're in the states you might know the R02 as the Brainwavz ProAlpha and the R03 as the Brainwavz m2. They're pretty much straight-up rebrands.
I bought my R02 and R03 as imports from HK and UK, respectively. The prices including postage were 30 and 50 EUR, which is very cheap compared to what these things deliver. Between the two I'd recommend the R02. The R03 might be built slightly better and might look nicer but the R02 delivers virtually the same sound for less money.
tl;dr:
Pros: Cheap for what they do; flat sound profile; good separation; quiet wires
Cons: Very sensitive to badly-mixed music and compression artifacts; you might need to import them (try eBay, though; the import costs might be low)
That argument falls flat on its face once you consider drawn CP. Porn involving fictional minors is just as illegal as real CP in many jurisdictions. In which way does attempting to reduce the demand for drawn CP stem the supply for real CP?
I'm all for stopping real CP. The laws tend to be on the rabid side (cf. teenagers getting arrested because their girlfriends sent them pictures of their breasts) but actual CP involves sex with people who can't give informed consent and who will probably take lasting psychological damage from the ordeal. We should be more careful when prosecuting it so as not to create victims where there are none (such as in the teenager case) but the basic idea of prosecuting it is valid.
Drawn CP, however, is another thing. Yes, there probably is CP that was drawn using real sexual intercourse as a template but I'd estimate that that's the exception, not the rule. After all, any semi-talented artist with a basic understanding of human anatomy can crank out smut with any given fictitious character without any template at all. And there are plenty mostly anatomically accurate smut drawings that obviously have no counterpart in real life so if you really want to and are capable of drawing realistic-looking CP you don't need a template other than perhaps a few perfectly legal art reference books.
The "treat fictitious characters as real persons" type of prosecution seems more driven by outrage (or, as others have noted, a desire for power) than by actual reason. It looks good to the "think of the children" crowd and thus it's done, whether it makes sense or not. The question is whether this blind moralism might actually harm society more than it helps.
One reason why isolation is neccessary is because GMO plants tend to contain patented genes. If the pollen spreads then random farmers can now be sued by large corporatons even though they did nothing wrong. The only reasonable options I can think of are:
- GMO plants must be cultivated in sealed greenhouses or the farmer needs to take other effective measures to prohibit the spread of pollen to unlicensed farms. Can be combined with the second option.
- If pollen spreads it's clearly the fault of the farmer who grew the plants and thus THAT farmer is liable for patent violation, not the receiving farmer. The courts should find as such. Unfortunately, most farmers are going to settle without going to court so this is not a satisfactory solution. Also, the corporations are going to fight this tooth and nail as it doesn't allow them to pressure people into buying licenses.
- GMO licenses are required to cover the farm and any area likely to be pollinated around it. The lobby won't allow it.
- GMO plants are required to be sterile and pollen-free. This would probably lead to those plants being clones, which is not a good solution.
- Gene patents are declared invalid or unenforcable. Unlikely.
- GMO plants are banned entirely. Baby-and-bathwater scenario.
Do we have any better feasible option than to require the use of greenhouses to reduce unlicensed pollination? I don't think that "you can be sued by a big corporation because of something perfectly legal your neighbor did" is a state we should put farmers in.
I think your parent is arguing on common decency. People usually prefer customers (or in this case an audience) who treat them with respect. You probably served customers who would calmly inform you that (for example) you got an order wrong and you had customers who would immediately yell at you as if you tried to personally insult them by forgetting their diet Coke. I don't need to be a pscyhic to know which ones you preferred.
Booth babes are booth babes and of course then can expect to be stared at but they probably do prefer the less creepy audience members.
I always thought that the obvious approach for commercial open source games would be to make the executable freely available but to assert your copyright on the other assets. Of course that doesn't work if the assets are also open-sourced, in which case I think a prefunded model (cf. Kickstarter, Desura Alpha Funding) would be the most plausible approach.
Of course you always have to ensure that you actually are allowed to sell the assets you use. While the GPL doesn't prohibit commercial use, CC-BY-NC does.
1. Web developers who were apparently born after 1998 decide that "optimized for WebKit" is the way to go.
2. Other engines pretend to be WebKit in order to work with the standards-incompatible websites designed by the "WebKit only" people.
3. Congratulations, we're back in 1998 where you have to do arcane browser-sniffing hacks because more reliable methods of distinguishing between engines (like vendor prefixes) were made useless.
If you have such an aversion to writing '-moz-', '-o-' and '-ms-' then just use SASS/Compass and let that handle your CSS. One nice advantage is that Compass doesn't come with mixins for extremely nonstandard stuff so you can be reasonably certain that your website will actually work outside your beloved WebKit.
Or, of course, you can just pretend that it's 1998 and WebKit is the new IE 6.
I used to like intricate rules for everything until I realized that they mostly just serve to make the game more complicated. If you have a GM and players who are committed to making the game fun and semi-sensible you don't need anatomically correct hit zone rules; you just estimate what effect the given hit could have and move on. If you do decide you need more complex rules you can still introduce them as neccessary.
An enlightenment in this regard was moving from Shadowrun 3E with its utterly complex combat system to Exalted 2E where the combat rules are so simple and flexible that they're also used for army-scale combat and social arguments with only minor tweaks. Are they precise? No, even with their per-second timing. Are they realistic? Hell, no. In fact, they go out of their way to reward improbable but cool maneuvers. Then again we're talking about a game with characters who can leap over mountains and punch people so hard they stop existing entirely.
(I do like, however, how Exalted does model injured characters being in worse shape. It does so by dividing the health levels (hit points) into groups with associated penalties to all rolls. Easy as pie and still a big step up from being in perfect shape at 1 HP.)
In fact, an even bigger enlightenment was playing (d6) BESM where there is only one kind of die roll ever and characters have about half a dozen stats in total. And it still works very well for what it does as long as you are aware it doesn't even try to be detailed. It's fairly well suited for quick fire-and-forget one-shot rounds.
On the other hand my group's role playing style is 95% character interaction with combat taking the back seat, usually being reserved for "boss" fights. Someone who wants to play a wargame with some character interaction added in is going to have entirely different preferences as a stay-out-of-the-players'-way approach won't do them any good. In their case something like the very first first-edition D&D might work: Take a wargame and put some social rules on top.
That's not going to happen. SSDs aren't going to shrink much anymore; they can't make the transistors significantly smaller as Flash doesn't perform well at such small sizes. We're already seeing SSDs becoming less and less reliable due to this. (Okay, they might release Flash drives at 10 cents/GB but I certainly wouldn't trust those drives with my data. Not without a backup to a more reliable drive.) Besides, HDDs are still under active development so the goalposts keep moving.
I'd love to see HDDs getting replaced with something that's faster, more energy-efficient, more shock-resistant and more reliable. Unfortunately, Flash isn't that technology due to its scaling issues. Perhaps the memristor will be the technology that displaces the magnetic platter but it's still a few decades away from that point.
Would your average Slashdotter? This story is interesting for a reason. I am led to believe it is because 38 Studios used launch DLC to get around the first-sale doctrine, not because the CEO was apparently a reknowned baseball player at some point. The first-sale doctrine getting undermined is interesting to non-American Slashdotters because when companies get away with such nonsense in the States they will invariably try it elsewhere, too. American sports have no impact on my life; launch DLC does.
Now, the summary also failed to mention the first-sale doctrine thing; I had to find that out through the related stories. But that's just the summary being badly written.
To be honest I pretty much only know the name from hearing it in movies or series (usually in relation with some character being a Red Sox fan even though they apparently never win, IIRC) so I wasn't sure about the spelling. I figured I must have had confused them with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
And for the record, I'm from Germany and I don't give a shit about soccer, as well. That should serve to illustrate how I don't care about sports at all, given that most Germans are extremely enthusiastic about soccer even if, just like Hollywood's version of the Red Sox, we never win.
I said "much of the rest of the world", not "the entire rest of the world". I know that baseball is popular in certain parts of asia but that doesn't change the fact that in large parts of the world no one will know a baseball player even if he is a household name in places where baseball is celebrated.
Of course, Slashdotters who aren't from the United States will be hard-pressed to even name a baseball team*, will wonder why unearned runs aren't prevented by the referee and will wonder what a French New Age pop band has to do with sports. Baseball and American football, while big in the states, are entirely obscure in much of the rest of the world.
* Well, I know that there is a team called the "Red Socks" but I have no idea whether it's a baseball or football team, nor do I care about it enough to ask Wikipedia.
A few weeks ago, I foolishly ran a strange executable file that one of my acquaintances sent me by email with the subject line "Die and get AIDS". As someone who doesn't know much about AIDS, at the time, I thought nothing of it. "Why would my acquaintance want to hurt me?" Following this line of thought, I ran the file without question.
How naive I was. Despite having what was supposedly the best anti-virus software out right then, a virus took over my computer and held it hostage. It was pretending to be a warning from Windows telling me to buy some strange anti-virus software I'd never heard of from a company I'd never heard of to remove the virus (an incredibly nasty thing called "Parity Boot B").
This immediately set alarm bells off in my head. "How could this happen? I don't even run Windows and this is an ARM box!" Faced with this harsh unreality, I decided to take it to a PC repair shop for repair. They gladly accepted the job, told me it'd be fixed in a few days, and sent me off with a smile.
A few days later, they called me and told me to come pick up my computer. At the time, I noticed that they sounded like whimpering animals, but I concluded that it must just be stress from work. When I arrived, they, with tears in their eyes, told me that they had found my porn folder and were now getting out of the tech business to become monks. "Ah," I thought. "That was to be expected but they could've at least cleaned up the virus." I later found out that all but two of them had committed suicide.
After returning home, I tried to fix it myself (despite the fact that even the professionals couldn't do it). After about a day or so, I was losing my very mind. I stopped going to work, stopped eating, was depressed, and I would very frequently throw my precious belongings across the room and break them; that's actually because I read a review of Diablo III but the virus didn't help.
That's when it happened: I found MyCleanPC! I installed MyCleanPC, ran a scan, and let it remove all the system files! They were removed in precisely 2.892 seconds. Wow! Such a thing! I can't even believe this as such never before! MyCleanPC is outstanding! After the reinstall, my computer is running faster than ever! MyCleanPC came through with flying colors where no one else could!
MyCleanPC totally cleaned out my system, and increased my blood pressure! If you have a problem, if no one else can help and if you can find it maybe you can install MyCleanPC. As a user, it did more for me that any so-called "professional." It'll even boot your PC off the internet!
Slashdot Mirror
SSDs are the rockstars of mass storage: They live fast and die young.
- Saw Star Trek 2009. Explained beforehand, very briefly, that it was a "darker and edgier reboot" of the original series that for canon purposes took place in an alternate universe. Answer any questions she has ("Why is Spock bleeding green? What is a Romulan? What is Warp?")
It might help to point out that the rest of Trek wasn't directed by J.J. Abrams and thus has things besides lens flares visible on screen.
I'd do it like this:
Firstly, rework patent examiner commissions. Examiners get paid a reasonable monthly wage and they get a small bonus if they successfully reject a patent on grounds of prior art or unpatentability. However, every rejection is checked by another examiner who gets the bonus if they can show that the first examiner didn't do their job properly. There are no other repercussions for the first examiner if that's the case; they just don't get the bonus.
Result: Patent examiners are now interested in building a strong case against a patent but the bonuses aren't so large that they become overly reject-happy or want to go through patents as quickly as possible. Of course we'd also need to hire more examiners to make up for their more reasonable pace.
Secondly, introduce a variable filing fee. It's a flat base amount plus a variable amount dependent on how many failed and pending applications the submitter has made in the last twelve months. (Yes, you can game this by using shell companies but at least then you get some organisational overhead.) Let's use random number and say it's 1.000 USD plus 500 USD per failed patent. A first-time submitter pays 1k$. If they come up with another patent a year later they pay 1k$ again. A corporation which tries to achieve patents by bruteforcing the patent office ends up with fees in the five-digit range per application.
Thirdly, reduce the duration of patents on nonphysical things. If you can convince the patent office that the thirty-nine hour week or the concept of middle-clicking a menu bar are novel then you get your patent... for, let's say, three years with the usual renewal fees if you want to extend to six. "$ACTION on a computer" counts as nonphysical unless you can prove that your patent involves a substantial change to the physical design of the computer.
I think that would weed out a lot of the cruft. I also think that you'd need to spend billions in lobbyist wages and bribes in order to acheive even one of those points.
HQ9+ and DWIM?
That approach is unrealistic. Here's why:
We need someone to operate the defreezing equipment. That means we need to send more people up. Since the procedure for diong that is to freeze them, send them up and then send someone after them to defreeze them that's what we do. Of course that someone will be frozen, which means we need someone to defreeze them. After enough iterations of this the entire population of Earth will be frozen in space and no one will be able to defreeze them.
I think the best approach to solve this issue would be to raise the ambient temperature of space so they thaw out on their own. That would also save us the cost of the defreezing equipment.
Yes. Sometimes they're also miserable at hardware.
But if they refer to your average TN display that often can't even display TrueColor without dithering, 50% more colors may essentially mean "it's not the trash your laptop probably uses".
Also, their speed is also so similar that you can mix and match without much effort. In fact, there's even a sketch where they do that. (If they're right, though, twenty years might be a little bit too optimistic.)
I found that folding up once (not twisting) the corner of a bit of tissue or toilet paper and gently inserting it in the ear canal for a second works very well. You don't want to hear the tissue; that's too far. You just let it come into contact with the moisture and wick most of it away (thus only folding once; you don't want the tissue to have much in the way of structural integrits). That plus a few minutes of time before putting in the IEMs works well to keep the ears reasonably dry and the monitors reasonably clean.
Then again, using the monitors "wet" never gave me an infection, just messy monitors. I may simply be more resistant to ear infections than you are.
Try the ViSang VS-R02/R03. They're pretty much identical except that the R03 hat nicer-looking buds, although I think that the R02 hat the better sound - they're both above what you'd expect for the price but the R02 is slightly clearer in my opinion. Then again the R03 is a bit more forgiving of badly-mixed music. It's not exactly night and day, though.
Generally-speaking the R02/R03 are solid (semi-)budget IEMs with a fairly flat, rather analytical sound; you get good separation and while their bass isn't quite on par with more "fun-oriented" IEMs they're quite good with mids, which puts most singers front and center. Plus, you're not looking for bass monsters anyway. I recommend them for classical/orchestral music, a cappella and similarly intricate (and well-mixed) stuff and don't recommend them for punk rock and anything else where the mixing quality is secondary to being loud. Electronic music works very well, metal heavily depends on how well it's mixed. Oh, and you will hear badly-encoded MP3s.
Do the ViSangs measure up against bigger players like Phonak? No, but then again they only cost half as much and sound more than half as good. (Plus, unlike Phonak's weird IEMs they actually fit into my ears.)
The wires are somewhat stiff and have a memory effect; on the other hand they're robust and not very prone to telephony (that is, you hear the music and not the cable rubbing against your clothes). Both come with a shirt clip, a carrying box and an assortment of silicone and foam rubber caps with the R02's assortment being slightly larger (it comes with an additional pair of biflanges). Both are very comfortable to wear, even for long periods of time. As for sturdiness, it took me almost two years to break my R02s, which is okay for a 30 EUR investment in my book.
If you're in the states you might know the R02 as the Brainwavz ProAlpha and the R03 as the Brainwavz m2. They're pretty much straight-up rebrands.
I bought my R02 and R03 as imports from HK and UK, respectively. The prices including postage were 30 and 50 EUR, which is very cheap compared to what these things deliver. Between the two I'd recommend the R02. The R03 might be built slightly better and might look nicer but the R02 delivers virtually the same sound for less money.
tl;dr:
Pros: Cheap for what they do; flat sound profile; good separation; quiet wires
Cons: Very sensitive to badly-mixed music and compression artifacts; you might need to import them (try eBay, though; the import costs might be low)
That argument falls flat on its face once you consider drawn CP. Porn involving fictional minors is just as illegal as real CP in many jurisdictions. In which way does attempting to reduce the demand for drawn CP stem the supply for real CP?
I'm all for stopping real CP. The laws tend to be on the rabid side (cf. teenagers getting arrested because their girlfriends sent them pictures of their breasts) but actual CP involves sex with people who can't give informed consent and who will probably take lasting psychological damage from the ordeal. We should be more careful when prosecuting it so as not to create victims where there are none (such as in the teenager case) but the basic idea of prosecuting it is valid.
Drawn CP, however, is another thing. Yes, there probably is CP that was drawn using real sexual intercourse as a template but I'd estimate that that's the exception, not the rule. After all, any semi-talented artist with a basic understanding of human anatomy can crank out smut with any given fictitious character without any template at all. And there are plenty mostly anatomically accurate smut drawings that obviously have no counterpart in real life so if you really want to and are capable of drawing realistic-looking CP you don't need a template other than perhaps a few perfectly legal art reference books.
The "treat fictitious characters as real persons" type of prosecution seems more driven by outrage (or, as others have noted, a desire for power) than by actual reason. It looks good to the "think of the children" crowd and thus it's done, whether it makes sense or not. The question is whether this blind moralism might actually harm society more than it helps.
One reason why isolation is neccessary is because GMO plants tend to contain patented genes. If the pollen spreads then random farmers can now be sued by large corporatons even though they did nothing wrong. The only reasonable options I can think of are:
- GMO plants must be cultivated in sealed greenhouses or the farmer needs to take other effective measures to prohibit the spread of pollen to unlicensed farms. Can be combined with the second option.
- If pollen spreads it's clearly the fault of the farmer who grew the plants and thus THAT farmer is liable for patent violation, not the receiving farmer. The courts should find as such. Unfortunately, most farmers are going to settle without going to court so this is not a satisfactory solution. Also, the corporations are going to fight this tooth and nail as it doesn't allow them to pressure people into buying licenses.
- GMO licenses are required to cover the farm and any area likely to be pollinated around it. The lobby won't allow it.
- GMO plants are required to be sterile and pollen-free. This would probably lead to those plants being clones, which is not a good solution.
- Gene patents are declared invalid or unenforcable. Unlikely.
- GMO plants are banned entirely. Baby-and-bathwater scenario.
Do we have any better feasible option than to require the use of greenhouses to reduce unlicensed pollination? I don't think that "you can be sued by a big corporation because of something perfectly legal your neighbor did" is a state we should put farmers in.
I think your parent is arguing on common decency. People usually prefer customers (or in this case an audience) who treat them with respect. You probably served customers who would calmly inform you that (for example) you got an order wrong and you had customers who would immediately yell at you as if you tried to personally insult them by forgetting their diet Coke. I don't need to be a pscyhic to know which ones you preferred.
Booth babes are booth babes and of course then can expect to be stared at but they probably do prefer the less creepy audience members.
I always thought that the obvious approach for commercial open source games would be to make the executable freely available but to assert your copyright on the other assets. Of course that doesn't work if the assets are also open-sourced, in which case I think a prefunded model (cf. Kickstarter, Desura Alpha Funding) would be the most plausible approach.
Of course you always have to ensure that you actually are allowed to sell the assets you use. While the GPL doesn't prohibit commercial use, CC-BY-NC does.
This is essentially the only way to run this experiment, if you run all the cores at this speed, fusion is initiated [...]
So if you overclock all of the Intel's cores at once it turns into an AMD?
1. Web developers who were apparently born after 1998 decide that "optimized for WebKit" is the way to go.
2. Other engines pretend to be WebKit in order to work with the standards-incompatible websites designed by the "WebKit only" people.
3. Congratulations, we're back in 1998 where you have to do arcane browser-sniffing hacks because more reliable methods of distinguishing between engines (like vendor prefixes) were made useless.
If you have such an aversion to writing '-moz-', '-o-' and '-ms-' then just use SASS/Compass and let that handle your CSS. One nice advantage is that Compass doesn't come with mixins for extremely nonstandard stuff so you can be reasonably certain that your website will actually work outside your beloved WebKit.
Or, of course, you can just pretend that it's 1998 and WebKit is the new IE 6.
This.
I used to like intricate rules for everything until I realized that they mostly just serve to make the game more complicated. If you have a GM and players who are committed to making the game fun and semi-sensible you don't need anatomically correct hit zone rules; you just estimate what effect the given hit could have and move on. If you do decide you need more complex rules you can still introduce them as neccessary.
An enlightenment in this regard was moving from Shadowrun 3E with its utterly complex combat system to Exalted 2E where the combat rules are so simple and flexible that they're also used for army-scale combat and social arguments with only minor tweaks. Are they precise? No, even with their per-second timing. Are they realistic? Hell, no. In fact, they go out of their way to reward improbable but cool maneuvers. Then again we're talking about a game with characters who can leap over mountains and punch people so hard they stop existing entirely.
(I do like, however, how Exalted does model injured characters being in worse shape. It does so by dividing the health levels (hit points) into groups with associated penalties to all rolls. Easy as pie and still a big step up from being in perfect shape at 1 HP.)
In fact, an even bigger enlightenment was playing (d6) BESM where there is only one kind of die roll ever and characters have about half a dozen stats in total. And it still works very well for what it does as long as you are aware it doesn't even try to be detailed. It's fairly well suited for quick fire-and-forget one-shot rounds.
On the other hand my group's role playing style is 95% character interaction with combat taking the back seat, usually being reserved for "boss" fights. Someone who wants to play a wargame with some character interaction added in is going to have entirely different preferences as a stay-out-of-the-players'-way approach won't do them any good. In their case something like the very first first-edition D&D might work: Take a wargame and put some social rules on top.
That's not going to happen. SSDs aren't going to shrink much anymore; they can't make the transistors significantly smaller as Flash doesn't perform well at such small sizes. We're already seeing SSDs becoming less and less reliable due to this. (Okay, they might release Flash drives at 10 cents/GB but I certainly wouldn't trust those drives with my data. Not without a backup to a more reliable drive.) Besides, HDDs are still under active development so the goalposts keep moving.
I'd love to see HDDs getting replaced with something that's faster, more energy-efficient, more shock-resistant and more reliable. Unfortunately, Flash isn't that technology due to its scaling issues. Perhaps the memristor will be the technology that displaces the magnetic platter but it's still a few decades away from that point.
You'd get a Superman clone with a blond mullet, of course.
Would your average Slashdotter? This story is interesting for a reason. I am led to believe it is because 38 Studios used launch DLC to get around the first-sale doctrine, not because the CEO was apparently a reknowned baseball player at some point. The first-sale doctrine getting undermined is interesting to non-American Slashdotters because when companies get away with such nonsense in the States they will invariably try it elsewhere, too. American sports have no impact on my life; launch DLC does.
Now, the summary also failed to mention the first-sale doctrine thing; I had to find that out through the related stories. But that's just the summary being badly written.
To be honest I pretty much only know the name from hearing it in movies or series (usually in relation with some character being a Red Sox fan even though they apparently never win, IIRC) so I wasn't sure about the spelling. I figured I must have had confused them with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
And for the record, I'm from Germany and I don't give a shit about soccer, as well. That should serve to illustrate how I don't care about sports at all, given that most Germans are extremely enthusiastic about soccer even if, just like Hollywood's version of the Red Sox, we never win.
I said "much of the rest of the world", not "the entire rest of the world". I know that baseball is popular in certain parts of asia but that doesn't change the fact that in large parts of the world no one will know a baseball player even if he is a household name in places where baseball is celebrated.
Of course, Slashdotters who aren't from the United States will be hard-pressed to even name a baseball team*, will wonder why unearned runs aren't prevented by the referee and will wonder what a French New Age pop band has to do with sports. Baseball and American football, while big in the states, are entirely obscure in much of the rest of the world.
* Well, I know that there is a team called the "Red Socks" but I have no idea whether it's a baseball or football team, nor do I care about it enough to ask Wikipedia.
A few weeks ago, I foolishly ran a strange executable file that one of my acquaintances sent me by email with the subject line "Die and get AIDS". As someone who doesn't know much about AIDS, at the time, I thought nothing of it. "Why would my acquaintance want to hurt me?" Following this line of thought, I ran the file without question.
How naive I was. Despite having what was supposedly the best anti-virus software out right then, a virus took over my computer and held it hostage. It was pretending to be a warning from Windows telling me to buy some strange anti-virus software I'd never heard of from a company I'd never heard of to remove the virus (an incredibly nasty thing called "Parity Boot B").
This immediately set alarm bells off in my head. "How could this happen? I don't even run Windows and this is an ARM box!" Faced with this harsh unreality, I decided to take it to a PC repair shop for repair. They gladly accepted the job, told me it'd be fixed in a few days, and sent me off with a smile.
A few days later, they called me and told me to come pick up my computer. At the time, I noticed that they sounded like whimpering animals, but I concluded that it must just be stress from work. When I arrived, they, with tears in their eyes, told me that they had found my porn folder and were now getting out of the tech business to become monks. "Ah," I thought. "That was to be expected but they could've at least cleaned up the virus." I later found out that all but two of them had committed suicide.
After returning home, I tried to fix it myself (despite the fact that even the professionals couldn't do it). After about a day or so, I was losing my very mind. I stopped going to work, stopped eating, was depressed, and I would very frequently throw my precious belongings across the room and break them; that's actually because I read a review of Diablo III but the virus didn't help.
That's when it happened: I found MyCleanPC! I installed MyCleanPC, ran a scan, and let it remove all the system files! They were removed in precisely 2.892 seconds. Wow! Such a thing! I can't even believe this as such never before! MyCleanPC is outstanding! After the reinstall, my computer is running faster than ever! MyCleanPC came through with flying colors where no one else could!
MyCleanPC totally cleaned out my system, and increased my blood pressure! If you have a problem, if no one else can help and if you can find it maybe you can install MyCleanPC. As a user, it did more for me that any so-called "professional." It'll even boot your PC off the internet!
MyCleanPC: Because I'm getting paid for this.
Blizzard is one of the few companies that allow you to install the same copy of the game on multiple computers for LAN parties.
As we all know, Diablo III is widely lauded for its excellent support for spawn copies. Right?