Sony has over-promised and under-delivered before with the PS3. Explain why this PR statement should be treated any differently, given that it also comes from Sony and is on the same subject?
The purpose of that part of the 1st Amendment specifically is to preclude Congress from arbitrarily criminalizing any speech they wish and throwing people into jail on a whim. Remember, Congress does not interpret the Constitution - that power is left to the Supreme Court. And the Constitution, like ALL law made my Man, is interpreted in the context of how it serves society. If you read the Constitution and expect it to be interpreted as a computer would interpret source code, then you do are not recognizing some fundamental tenets of law.
Your point about S/PDIF may be correct, but it was not exactly clear to me that it was the connector output itself which was disabled or if it was the internal audio path to the S/PDIF output which was disabled. WOuld you be less affronted if that were the case?
Secondly, while the loss of all of those extra pixels of HD-DVD is certainly a tragedy, I would point out that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have not only higher resolutions but also better compression algorithms which yield a better picture even with the same number of pixels. People need to stop equating pixel count with image quality in thie stupid DVD format war.
Finally, it's not like MS actually has a choice here. The movie studios can and will use their lawyers to rape any commercial entity that gets in their way right now. Microsoft does not see this as being their battle to fight, they just want their customers to have a good experience, even if it's not the best possible. Do you think Apple will be able to allow unrestricted HD-DVD and Blu-Ray playback on their machines?
If you want someone to blame, blame yourselves. You keep buying the movies and music that supports this behavior. Exercise some self control and go read a book.
Clearly you were not aware that the XBox 360 add-on (which can be connected to a normal PC) is like $200 and NetFlix rents HD DVDs.
And it's not just the resolution of the media, but the quality of the picture itself. HD formats have much more bandwidth AND better compression technologies to reduce artifacting. I regularly notice compression artifacting on my 100" 720p home theater setup. I expect that will be mitigated with the new formats and better digital mastering by the studios.
The article is aimed at Average Joe User. The information therein generally does not apply to the Slashdot crowd, who should already know and practice safe computing. The reason you have not been the subject of such an attack is likely because you do exactly that. The zealots out in force on this thread simply wish to use the ineptitude of the common computer user to advance their favorite OS/applications, without properly recongizing that doing so will necessarily decrease the safety of their own operating systems. As someone else pointed out, the real solution is to educate users on how they can protect themselves REGARDLESS of what software they choose to use.
Personally, I also have not been the subject of a malware attack. I run XP SP2 and IE7 along with OTC AV software with a built-in firewall. My Linux box, when it was online, was the subject of a couple of FTP server break-ins, but I don't blame the software for my own inability to practive safe file serving. Likewise, I don't blame windows for crashing due to crappy drivers, nor do I blame it for allowing malware on my machine when I click an attachment from hotsex4u, which, I guarantee you, is where more than half the problem comes from. PORN SURFERS (that means most of the Slashdot crowd who has been malware infected) GET A CLUE! It's not the OS which is doing you in. It's YOU.
You've made two counter assertions vis-a-vis grammar and context with no reasoning behind them. In dealing with suggestion that there was some intention to invest the right in some other power, we are left hanging as to what that power might be. This is again inconsistent with the remainder of the Constitution, where powers are a) enumerated and b) the receiver of the power is clearly denoted.
My argument about what kind of right it is derives additionally from what is NOT said. It is not stated to be within the power of Congress to regulate the ownership of firearms, nor of the States. Neither is it stated in that amendment that people shall be required to bear arms, nor that the bearing of arms is only for the purpose of supporting the militia. It *is* stated in Article I Section 8 that the Congress shall regulate the militia, and some detail is in fact given to the particulars of this. It does not seem reasonable that this power would be reinforced in the Bill of Rights as opposed to in Article I Section 8.
I am led to this conclusion by two principles of the Constitution: The government is granted ONLY the powers expressly listed, not through omission of a denial. This is evident throughout the Constitution, with the courts being left to determine what is meant by the granting of a particular power. Certainly the 2nd Amendment grants no power to Congress or any other body the right to regulate the ownership of arms.
Secondly, the Bill of Rights appears to have been designed specifically to speak of individual rights, particular rights so important that they should be mentioned directly lest we become intellectually lazy and begin to think the powers granted by the Constitution are broader than were intended. The wisdom of this is clearly evident today where government is constantly pushing the boundaries of the 1st and 4th amendments - I suspect that without this enumeration we would have signed away these rights (which we would still have even if NOT listed) long ago. A reading of the Bill of Rights in fact shows that there are no communal rights listed at all. One could of course argue that the 2nd amendment is somehow special, but sufficient reason would have to be given to believe that it should be interpreted differently from the other rights listed.
A plain reading of the 2nd Amendment indicates that the right to bear arms is a necessary condition for the existence of a well-regulated militia, and the militia is a requirement for the security of a free state. It does not, in a plain reading, indicate the opposite; that is, that a well regulated militia is a necessary condition for the right to bear arms. As all of the rights in the Constitution are individual rights, it thus follows that this one is as well. I've always found it a bit curious the linguistic and semantic hoops people are willing to through to to make the Constitution sound like something it is not. Why would this one right be suddenly so contentious while the others are so plainly clear and consistently upheld as such?
The DOJ paper, whether you believe the authors were partisan or not, covers extensively the historical, linguistic and semantic context for the Constitution and the 2nd Amendment specifically and can be reasonably considered to be more well researched than the arguments most on Slashdot will present. Arguing, as some have, that it is a work done by people with a specific agenda is an ad-hominim attack and is not valid - it doesn't matter who made the argument, it's the facts of the argument which are at issue.
Finally an appeal to common sense. Does it even seem reasonable that the Founding Fathers would have gone to all of the trouble to set up a Constitution specifically designed to keep government powers in check, and then reserve all combat power only for organizations under government direction?
My understanding was that PS3 actually failed to produce 1080i or p resolutions due to a hardware problem. Does anyone know if this is true and if so, do they plan to rev the HW?
The real question is how exactly would you like to answer questions from your children after their viewing a collection of still images from a hardcore porn movie dealing with rape and/or bondage? Is this something that you would be comfortable with?
You are a parent. You do not have the luxury of choosing whether you are or are not comfortable with answering those questions - it is your duty as a parent to answer. And your answers will do far more to help them understand than simply hiding those images from them. Eventually they will be found - will you be there to provide guidance?
If, in response to viewing pornography, you treat sexual partners as objects to be used for self-gratification, you aren't behaving as society - any society - would like.
This is a gross generalization. In fact there more than a few people out there who believe sex, in some if not mosst circumstances, is just for pleasure. That's fine, not everyone rolls the same way you do. Your child will not be a pariah because of it unless you decide to make him out to be one. The variety in the human condition is far greater than you perhaps would like to believe, but it does not require your belief in order to exist.
You will be a more effective parent when you recognize the reality of what your children will be exposed to and help them deal with it in an open and honest manner. Children can usually tell when their parents are concealing things from them, and they'll investigate all the harder. Your only choice then is whether or not you will be there to help them process that information when they find it.
Eve Online has no such rules restricting PvP, and after 3 years there is still no single controlling faction. And yet the wars there have actual meaning because territory and resources are genuinely gained or lost based on how the wars go. Additionally, even small groups can engage in conflicts for their own purposes - there aren't just two or three sides to the war, there are as many as people want to create. Warhammer and DAoC fail to offer this because they set up a world that can only have two or three sides, and if you don't fit into one of those molds, your play experience suffers accordingly.
That's all fine and well, of course, if you wish to fight in a world where your actions don't REALLY count because the rules are set up to prevent any ultimate success. This is why most MMO PvP is seen as such a joke and so fatally flawed - it's limited in its scope and has no actual influence on the way the world plays out. Can you imagine the Warhammer guys actually letting one side win? I think not, so they won't let you even attempt to bring it about.
Finally, if the game has a sufficiently well-developed PvP system, the dreaded Zerg won't occur because hegemonies always collapse due to differences of opinion, especially in the online world. The only way it can occur is if the worlds are so small that a relatively small organization can actually control it. Again, Eve doesn't suffer this problem because every player in the game plays in the same world, and there are tens of thousands of them. If WAR goes the 'shard' route, then perhaps they could succumb to the Zerg on any given shard, but that's a flaw with their implementation of the world, and not open PvP.
To understand the typical company behavior with such games you have to understand that the number of cheaters and suspected cheaters is FAR outstripped by the number of people not under suspicion. Game companies generally work very hard trying to root out the cheaters, but the first weapon is almost always a ban of some sort, as this eliminates the threat to the players they want to retain (the non-cheaters.) Even when the ban falls short on precision, it accomplishes more good than the bad of losing a few legitimate customers, because one person's cheating can affect a disproportionately large number of non-cheaters, and the longer it goes on, the less people trust the system to be fair.
It's pretty simple math, actually: Say you have 100 players, 2 cheaters, and 98 people who you don't suspect. Those 2 cheaters may be affecting the play of 10 or 20 or more of your non-cheating players. You ban 3 people, the two cheaters and one person who looks like they were cheating but wasn't. Now you have 97 players. But those 10 or 20 other players are no longer being treated unfairly and won't stop their accounts because of the cheating. By using the ban, you have lost one legitimate player but potentially saved many more. Whether you later go back and reinstate the one player's account who wasn't cheating depends on exactly what sort of image you want to project and how much time you have to investigate. But from a business standpoint you've done the right thing.
There's one flaw in your analagy. Those sports to which you refer involve playing against other people, not computer-controlled content with highly-patterned behaviors. WoW is a game for people who enjoy Mario-style challenges with their friends. And that's fine. But it's not a team sport.
In PvP is it different - you are playing against other players and in some sense your reputation is on the line when you enter combat, assuming the combat is important enough for people to notice and maybe record the outcome.
The OP may be confused about what makes WoW great (it is certainly appealing to a large class of MMO players) but he's not asking for more 'role-playing gayness', and WoW is not comparatively high on the 'strategy/teamwork/progression' rankings. It is a run-of-the-mill fantasy MMO with average game mechanics, the Honda of MMOs. People like Hondas. The OP prefers something more exotic, I think.
As with the real world, the largest powers rarely undergo massive uphevals, but the smaller ones do all the time. And if you look at the map, the majority of space is still controlled by a variety of small, dynamic, interesting alliances that come and go rather frequently enough to make things interesting. The war between the two largest alliances is interesting in as much as the outcome could result in a major balance-of-power change in the South, but to many in the North the local struggles are more important. All politics is local, right?:)
A good example of these dynamics happened over the past year when Red Alliance, which grew to take over vast portions of the East, came under attack from all sides and was essentially torn asunder by their myriad foes. Some of those victorious alliances have since gone on to diminsh themselves, but others still remain strong. The North saw the Forsaken Empire collapse and alliances of alliances crumble, allowing new organizations to form and claim territory.
CCP has done a good job, I think, of providing a framework in which players can tell a story of their own which is as compelling as the one CCP lays out for Empire space itself. The fact that that story is undirected makes it all the more interesting.
College is NOT meant to teach you about life OR practical job skills, at least not directly. College is about academics, which means theory in the case of software engineering. You will be taught algorithms (good), process (probably not useful) and supposedly how to write code (count yourself lucky if interviewers don't snicker at what you think is code straight out of college.)
College degrees are by no means job assurance, and at least for the places I worked for, aren't even a consideration because, truth be told, there does not appear to be a correlation between education and capability when it comes to the almighty interview. It may be that someone who processes resumes will discard yours because it lacks the right amount of BS, but that tends to happen more frequently at larger companies (i.e. ones that can afford to hire ignorant people to process resumes.)
You will be best served by a) being passionate about software, b) being able to communicate with others and c) being able to network with those who can help you find the right way to approach a job. The last part is an oft-overlooked part of tech industry job hunting. Make friends with other people in the software industry so that you have a better chance of knowing someone who can help you get your foot in the door. This is one way to bypass the part of the hiring process which has no real bearing on your ability, which is the initial resume review by a non-technical hiring manager.
Oh, one more thing. If you go through a hiring agency, make DAMN sure they don't tamper with your resume and put things on there which would be embarassing to account for in an interview. You should be very comfortable with everything you assert on a resume, and expect to get called on it.
For the OP, concentrate on making sure you are passionate about software, and make sure you have a solid foundation in the basics (i.e. algorithms, program structure, standard syntax.) you don't need college for either of those, and once you start networking, you'll find that the resume is less important than many would have you believe.
At this point you exercise your Second Amendment rights and shoot the officer, loudly proclaiming:
"Now you see the violence inherent in the system! Now you see the violence inherent in the system!!! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"
Seriously, at some point, someone is gonna get fed up, and the shooting will begin. Mark my words though, that probably won't happen until there is federal action to take away our guns. Fact is most people don't believe in the Bill of Rights enough to stop, using force, those who blatantly violate it. But when they come after the guns in earnest, we'll see...
Well, I already know that here in Washington State, our gas taxes and auto taxes pay the state's portion of roads - I believe property taxes are not allowed to be used for that purpose, but I could be wrong. Bus systems, of course, directly benefit from the existence of a solid road system, so for the purposes of comparing bus systems to automobile, it probably isn't useful to examine the cost of road maintenance. Here in the Puget Sound, we don't have an alternative mass transit system from buses to speak of. A combination of poor topography and crappy public planning ensure that we probably never will.
Of course it isn't really an "us vs. them" problem any how, as city dwellers have entirely different desires and requirements from a suburban dweller such as myself. Arguably the suburban lifestyle as it exists in America is antithetical to an efficient mass-transit system, due to population density. On the other hand, it offers the ability for people to actually own a bit of land and not necessarily have neighbors on their walls - a highly desirable trait in my opinion, and something essentially unachievable in an urban setting.
To get back on topic though, the notion of federal subsidies is a tricky one, since it could be argued that we might not be as advanced today if we did not build the interstate highway system, and yet much of that system services locales which cannot possibly hope to ever contribute back as much as they receive.
$76 cost to the rider. What is the ACTUAL cost? Most public transportation systems are subsidized by the non-public-transportation-using public, often through things like a gasoline tax or sales tax. Most of the people in favor of public transportation (over the personal automobile) are not bearing (or even cognizant) of the true cost of such services.
I would be interested to see if public transportation riders would happily pay for their chosen mode of transportation if it were not subsidized. Does anyone have a good comparative analysis of the actual costs of public transportation systems?
For brevity I am only quoting the rules you stated, not your responses to them.
Don't provide unnecessary details. A well-labeled progress bar provides sufficient information, so provide additional progress information only if users can do something with it.
Error log files should be provided for these cases. The single line of rapidly flashing text will either be ignored by most users or be cause for alarm (because a lot of very important/cryptic stuff is happening rapidly.) IT pros are already used to log files. I have, in fact, noticed more and more applications are providing logs of what occurred during lengthy operations and these have the capacity to provide much more useful information than a status bar. MS is right on this one, what they forgot to say was where such additional progress information should go.
Present choices and settings in terms of user goals, not technology.
I agree that from a helpdesk perspective, this is going to cause issues, but from a 'can the user get themselves through the first hour without reaching for a book of computer terminology' perspective it's probably more of a win. I am not sure which choice is better - it feels to me like either way you go you get problems. But given the general design theme MS is trying to achieve (not alienating the user with cryptic text) this rule is at least consistent.
While the minimum Windows Vista screen resolution remains at 800 x 600 pixels, resizable window layouts should be optimized for 1024 x 768 pixels.
"Optimized for" is not equal to "design only for." This rule is treated more completely in the detailed rules for Vista UI design. 800x600 is really, REALLY low resolution these days - you'd be hard pressed to find a Vista-capable computer that couldn't display 1280x1024 and be sold with a monitor to match. I suspect this particular element was influenced in part by the possibility that Media Center PCs would be hooked up to TVs or some other such case. I'd imagine the chances of a general application actually being constrained to this requirement is very small.
Don't accompany error messages with sound effects. Doing so is jarring and unnecessary.
This should probably read "Only use sound effects for critical error messages, not for less important notifications and warnings which do not require immediate user response." On the other hand, MS may have decided that if the user really cared about the operation, they'd be sitting at the machine actively tending the UI, and making undesired sounds would interrupt their other activities. I personally find the flashing window notification method in the task bar to be suitable when I am at the machine, even if I am reading a book. Again, if the immediate completion of the operation is important to me, I'll watch it. In the corporate IT environment perhaps this requirement is different.
Don't use the warning icon for routine questions. Doing so is counter to the encouraging tone of Windows Vista and makes using your program feel like a hazardous activity. Assume users understand the consequences of cancelling a task before it is finished.
MS is clearly trying to make computers "feel" less opaque than before, even if to the tech-oriented person that feel actually obscures the underlying operations. There is also an underlying meaning in this rule that the application developer should design their software such that cancelled operations have user-predictable outcomes. For instance, cancelling an install should NOT leave the application half-installed - it should revert any changes it has made. Cancelling the copying of a file shouldn't leave half of a file copied. On the other hand, users are expected to know that cancelling a format will not revert their drive to the previous state - this is why such irreversib
Hmm, unless I am horribly mistaken, the right to be secure in ones papers and effects is a civil liberty which can ONLY be overcome when the government obtains a legal warrant.
So how do you protect civil liberties by destroying them? The TRUE test of the strength of a country is not in its ability to pass laws in the name of protecting its citizens, but in its ability to protect all, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, of the rights of its citizens, especially in times of crisis and war.
The more my government tramples on my rights, the more they become the enemy, for while the terrorists are only ATTEMPTING to destroy my democracy and my rights, my government is actually DOING it.
The trouble is that the person who is being cheated can't ascertain your motives over the internet unless you tell them - they will assume the worst (and be partially right.)
Making people upset by cheating just engenders more mistrust and hate, regardless of the fun you might perceive out of it. The end result is a smaller community, which means less profits and ultimately less of those kinds of games, presumably an outcome you are not trying to obtain. Heck, in the worst case scenario, the only people you have left to play with are cheaters, so not only do you have no one left to irritate when you want to cheat (because they are doing it to you too), you don't have any place to go when you want a straight-up game.
Beware the law of unintended consequences.
Why would you want to irritate total strangers? Would you _want_ total strangers to irritate you by cheating? And more interestingly, can you answer the second question without resorting to some discussion about how they are going to try to cheat against you or they are likely to have some mental malady which you have to ensure they don't get a chance to annoy you with?
Most of the points here have counterpoints against Linux. For example:
- Companies won't demand guaranteed support and updates for their problems
- Every version of Linux will continue to make significant improvements
- Linux will not get infected with patented/licensed implementations, or will be able to continue to support the latest licensed technologies freely
The point the Harvard article makes and which does not analogize to Tiger Woods is that Tiger Woods will eventually retire - Microsoft does not have to. Thus, the initial installed base does present a substantial, though not automatically insurmountable, hurdle to Linux dominance. Furthermore, as the article states, MS has substantial leeway to set pricing, such that the proposed point at which MS features are no longer worth the price increase can be postponed indefinitely.
And yes, the best thing MS has going for it is application support, which is still leagues ahead of Linux. In my opinion, the development system is still superior as well, even though you can't get into the internals as easily. For casual application development, MS is again far and away ahead in the game. None of these leads are insurmountable of course, and the gap will close. The questions are when and by how much. The article does not attempt to address that, only to identify the conditions under which moves can be made.
I think we agree more than we disagree. Generally speaking, I prefer government to stay out of the way unless it is absolutely needed, not out of convenience (which is why government is often involved today) but because it is not realistic for us to go something on our own via other, less invasive means.
Consider some ways in which we can accomplish things without government:
1. Corporation abuses monopoly by raising prices
Government Solution (G): Declare company a monopoly (if proper officials haven't been paid off,) subject company to mandatory oversight for some period of time or force a breakup or whatever other remedy happens to be in the law at the time.
Consumer Solution (C): Educate consumers, boycott company's products, picket company, boycott company's suppliers and affiliated stores, run media campaign (using a consumer group), form competing businesses, encourage competing businesses by buying their products. Convince organized labor to strike.
2. Education of the public
(G): Create system of quasi-mandatory attendance where the rich districts get the best money and teachers, create ineffective testing regimes which pander to someone's pet philosophy about teaching, direct studies based on the whims of politics, tax everyone even if they don't send their children to the public school system because of the aforementioned problems, and because of the existence of this system, private schools cannot get into the areas they are most needed because children are already stuck in the public system.
(C): Parents or citizen groups want education for their children, business forms to provide it. Business held accountable by need to keep parents (the consumers) happy. Parents may withdraw their children if school is doing poorly and send them elsewhere WITHOUT having to keep paying for school. Parents may send their children to schools which uphold their values.
3. Health Care
(G): Create a massive, mandatory system of healthcare which provides only those services the government is convinced are necessary. All persons pay into it even if they don't use it (mandatory insurance.) All persons subsidize the poorest and least healthy, even if those people are not inclined the improve their health or to improve their income. Government only provides coverage up to a certain amount, which may be much less than the person can afford themselves, and may not fund some services because they are (a) too experimental (b) conflict with the ideological whims of the current administration (c) have been excluded because of lobbying by interested parties. Bureaucracy drives up the cost of medical care, lowering the kind and quality of service which can be provided.
(C): Individuals choose insurance based on their perceived need and ability to pay - even low income persons can band together and show there is a need to be fulfilled by an enterprising business. Lack of bureaucracy and _unnecessary_ oversight lowers cost of medical care, bringing more and higher quality service into the reach of more people. Bad doctors/services lose money and go out of business because they do not have a government trough (i.e. Medicare/Medicaid) to feed from. Individuals are not taxed for what they do not need and pay for what they get.
These are just a few examples of problems traditionally "solved" by government which have private sector solutions. The general theme is that consumers, if they are motivated to take care of it themselves, can do so. Government in the form we presently have encourages individual laziness, which has a noticeable deleterious effect on those of us who are NOT lazy and who suffer in various ways from the methods our government uses to accomplish its goals. Since the "majority" of people are lazy in the manner, all of us must succumb to these policies, even though they are quite inefficient and in many ways harmful to the non-lazy component of society.
So yes, I agree with your statement that modern democracies cannot be held accountable. I can propose an alternative which relies on individuals to take mor
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Sony has over-promised and under-delivered before with the PS3. Explain why this PR statement should be treated any differently, given that it also comes from Sony and is on the same subject?
The purpose of that part of the 1st Amendment specifically is to preclude Congress from arbitrarily criminalizing any speech they wish and throwing people into jail on a whim. Remember, Congress does not interpret the Constitution - that power is left to the Supreme Court. And the Constitution, like ALL law made my Man, is interpreted in the context of how it serves society. If you read the Constitution and expect it to be interpreted as a computer would interpret source code, then you do are not recognizing some fundamental tenets of law.
About the same as going down there and buying one with currency from Austria. Which tells you absolutely nothing.
Your point about S/PDIF may be correct, but it was not exactly clear to me that it was the connector output itself which was disabled or if it was the internal audio path to the S/PDIF output which was disabled. WOuld you be less affronted if that were the case?
Secondly, while the loss of all of those extra pixels of HD-DVD is certainly a tragedy, I would point out that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have not only higher resolutions but also better compression algorithms which yield a better picture even with the same number of pixels. People need to stop equating pixel count with image quality in thie stupid DVD format war.
Finally, it's not like MS actually has a choice here. The movie studios can and will use their lawyers to rape any commercial entity that gets in their way right now. Microsoft does not see this as being their battle to fight, they just want their customers to have a good experience, even if it's not the best possible. Do you think Apple will be able to allow unrestricted HD-DVD and Blu-Ray playback on their machines?
If you want someone to blame, blame yourselves. You keep buying the movies and music that supports this behavior. Exercise some self control and go read a book.
Clearly you were not aware that the XBox 360 add-on (which can be connected to a normal PC) is like $200 and NetFlix rents HD DVDs.
And it's not just the resolution of the media, but the quality of the picture itself. HD formats have much more bandwidth AND better compression technologies to reduce artifacting. I regularly notice compression artifacting on my 100" 720p home theater setup. I expect that will be mitigated with the new formats and better digital mastering by the studios.
The article is aimed at Average Joe User. The information therein generally does not apply to the Slashdot crowd, who should already know and practice safe computing. The reason you have not been the subject of such an attack is likely because you do exactly that. The zealots out in force on this thread simply wish to use the ineptitude of the common computer user to advance their favorite OS/applications, without properly recongizing that doing so will necessarily decrease the safety of their own operating systems. As someone else pointed out, the real solution is to educate users on how they can protect themselves REGARDLESS of what software they choose to use.
Personally, I also have not been the subject of a malware attack. I run XP SP2 and IE7 along with OTC AV software with a built-in firewall. My Linux box, when it was online, was the subject of a couple of FTP server break-ins, but I don't blame the software for my own inability to practive safe file serving. Likewise, I don't blame windows for crashing due to crappy drivers, nor do I blame it for allowing malware on my machine when I click an attachment from hotsex4u, which, I guarantee you, is where more than half the problem comes from. PORN SURFERS (that means most of the Slashdot crowd who has been malware infected) GET A CLUE! It's not the OS which is doing you in. It's YOU.
You've made two counter assertions vis-a-vis grammar and context with no reasoning behind them. In dealing with suggestion that there was some intention to invest the right in some other power, we are left hanging as to what that power might be. This is again inconsistent with the remainder of the Constitution, where powers are a) enumerated and b) the receiver of the power is clearly denoted.
My argument about what kind of right it is derives additionally from what is NOT said. It is not stated to be within the power of Congress to regulate the ownership of firearms, nor of the States. Neither is it stated in that amendment that people shall be required to bear arms, nor that the bearing of arms is only for the purpose of supporting the militia. It *is* stated in Article I Section 8 that the Congress shall regulate the militia, and some detail is in fact given to the particulars of this. It does not seem reasonable that this power would be reinforced in the Bill of Rights as opposed to in Article I Section 8.
I am led to this conclusion by two principles of the Constitution: The government is granted ONLY the powers expressly listed, not through omission of a denial. This is evident throughout the Constitution, with the courts being left to determine what is meant by the granting of a particular power. Certainly the 2nd Amendment grants no power to Congress or any other body the right to regulate the ownership of arms.
Secondly, the Bill of Rights appears to have been designed specifically to speak of individual rights, particular rights so important that they should be mentioned directly lest we become intellectually lazy and begin to think the powers granted by the Constitution are broader than were intended. The wisdom of this is clearly evident today where government is constantly pushing the boundaries of the 1st and 4th amendments - I suspect that without this enumeration we would have signed away these rights (which we would still have even if NOT listed) long ago. A reading of the Bill of Rights in fact shows that there are no communal rights listed at all. One could of course argue that the 2nd amendment is somehow special, but sufficient reason would have to be given to believe that it should be interpreted differently from the other rights listed.
A plain reading of the 2nd Amendment indicates that the right to bear arms is a necessary condition for the existence of a well-regulated militia, and the militia is a requirement for the security of a free state. It does not, in a plain reading, indicate the opposite; that is, that a well regulated militia is a necessary condition for the right to bear arms. As all of the rights in the Constitution are individual rights, it thus follows that this one is as well. I've always found it a bit curious the linguistic and semantic hoops people are willing to through to to make the Constitution sound like something it is not. Why would this one right be suddenly so contentious while the others are so plainly clear and consistently upheld as such?
The DOJ paper, whether you believe the authors were partisan or not, covers extensively the historical, linguistic and semantic context for the Constitution and the 2nd Amendment specifically and can be reasonably considered to be more well researched than the arguments most on Slashdot will present. Arguing, as some have, that it is a work done by people with a specific agenda is an ad-hominim attack and is not valid - it doesn't matter who made the argument, it's the facts of the argument which are at issue.
Finally an appeal to common sense. Does it even seem reasonable that the Founding Fathers would have gone to all of the trouble to set up a Constitution specifically designed to keep government powers in check, and then reserve all combat power only for organizations under government direction?
My understanding was that PS3 actually failed to produce 1080i or p resolutions due to a hardware problem. Does anyone know if this is true and if so, do they plan to rev the HW?
You are a parent. You do not have the luxury of choosing whether you are or are not comfortable with answering those questions - it is your duty as a parent to answer. And your answers will do far more to help them understand than simply hiding those images from them. Eventually they will be found - will you be there to provide guidance?
This is a gross generalization. In fact there more than a few people out there who believe sex, in some if not mosst circumstances, is just for pleasure. That's fine, not everyone rolls the same way you do. Your child will not be a pariah because of it unless you decide to make him out to be one. The variety in the human condition is far greater than you perhaps would like to believe, but it does not require your belief in order to exist.
You will be a more effective parent when you recognize the reality of what your children will be exposed to and help them deal with it in an open and honest manner. Children can usually tell when their parents are concealing things from them, and they'll investigate all the harder. Your only choice then is whether or not you will be there to help them process that information when they find it.
Eve Online has no such rules restricting PvP, and after 3 years there is still no single controlling faction. And yet the wars there have actual meaning because territory and resources are genuinely gained or lost based on how the wars go. Additionally, even small groups can engage in conflicts for their own purposes - there aren't just two or three sides to the war, there are as many as people want to create. Warhammer and DAoC fail to offer this because they set up a world that can only have two or three sides, and if you don't fit into one of those molds, your play experience suffers accordingly.
That's all fine and well, of course, if you wish to fight in a world where your actions don't REALLY count because the rules are set up to prevent any ultimate success. This is why most MMO PvP is seen as such a joke and so fatally flawed - it's limited in its scope and has no actual influence on the way the world plays out. Can you imagine the Warhammer guys actually letting one side win? I think not, so they won't let you even attempt to bring it about.
Finally, if the game has a sufficiently well-developed PvP system, the dreaded Zerg won't occur because hegemonies always collapse due to differences of opinion, especially in the online world. The only way it can occur is if the worlds are so small that a relatively small organization can actually control it. Again, Eve doesn't suffer this problem because every player in the game plays in the same world, and there are tens of thousands of them. If WAR goes the 'shard' route, then perhaps they could succumb to the Zerg on any given shard, but that's a flaw with their implementation of the world, and not open PvP.
To understand the typical company behavior with such games you have to understand that the number of cheaters and suspected cheaters is FAR outstripped by the number of people not under suspicion. Game companies generally work very hard trying to root out the cheaters, but the first weapon is almost always a ban of some sort, as this eliminates the threat to the players they want to retain (the non-cheaters.) Even when the ban falls short on precision, it accomplishes more good than the bad of losing a few legitimate customers, because one person's cheating can affect a disproportionately large number of non-cheaters, and the longer it goes on, the less people trust the system to be fair.
It's pretty simple math, actually: Say you have 100 players, 2 cheaters, and 98 people who you don't suspect. Those 2 cheaters may be affecting the play of 10 or 20 or more of your non-cheating players. You ban 3 people, the two cheaters and one person who looks like they were cheating but wasn't. Now you have 97 players. But those 10 or 20 other players are no longer being treated unfairly and won't stop their accounts because of the cheating. By using the ban, you have lost one legitimate player but potentially saved many more. Whether you later go back and reinstate the one player's account who wasn't cheating depends on exactly what sort of image you want to project and how much time you have to investigate. But from a business standpoint you've done the right thing.
There's one flaw in your analagy. Those sports to which you refer involve playing against other people, not computer-controlled content with highly-patterned behaviors. WoW is a game for people who enjoy Mario-style challenges with their friends. And that's fine. But it's not a team sport.
In PvP is it different - you are playing against other players and in some sense your reputation is on the line when you enter combat, assuming the combat is important enough for people to notice and maybe record the outcome.
The OP may be confused about what makes WoW great (it is certainly appealing to a large class of MMO players) but he's not asking for more 'role-playing gayness', and WoW is not comparatively high on the 'strategy/teamwork/progression' rankings. It is a run-of-the-mill fantasy MMO with average game mechanics, the Honda of MMOs. People like Hondas. The OP prefers something more exotic, I think.
As with the real world, the largest powers rarely undergo massive uphevals, but the smaller ones do all the time. And if you look at the map, the majority of space is still controlled by a variety of small, dynamic, interesting alliances that come and go rather frequently enough to make things interesting. The war between the two largest alliances is interesting in as much as the outcome could result in a major balance-of-power change in the South, but to many in the North the local struggles are more important. All politics is local, right? :)
A good example of these dynamics happened over the past year when Red Alliance, which grew to take over vast portions of the East, came under attack from all sides and was essentially torn asunder by their myriad foes. Some of those victorious alliances have since gone on to diminsh themselves, but others still remain strong. The North saw the Forsaken Empire collapse and alliances of alliances crumble, allowing new organizations to form and claim territory.
CCP has done a good job, I think, of providing a framework in which players can tell a story of their own which is as compelling as the one CCP lays out for Empire space itself. The fact that that story is undirected makes it all the more interesting.
College is NOT meant to teach you about life OR practical job skills, at least not directly. College is about academics, which means theory in the case of software engineering. You will be taught algorithms (good), process (probably not useful) and supposedly how to write code (count yourself lucky if interviewers don't snicker at what you think is code straight out of college.) College degrees are by no means job assurance, and at least for the places I worked for, aren't even a consideration because, truth be told, there does not appear to be a correlation between education and capability when it comes to the almighty interview. It may be that someone who processes resumes will discard yours because it lacks the right amount of BS, but that tends to happen more frequently at larger companies (i.e. ones that can afford to hire ignorant people to process resumes.) You will be best served by a) being passionate about software, b) being able to communicate with others and c) being able to network with those who can help you find the right way to approach a job. The last part is an oft-overlooked part of tech industry job hunting. Make friends with other people in the software industry so that you have a better chance of knowing someone who can help you get your foot in the door. This is one way to bypass the part of the hiring process which has no real bearing on your ability, which is the initial resume review by a non-technical hiring manager. Oh, one more thing. If you go through a hiring agency, make DAMN sure they don't tamper with your resume and put things on there which would be embarassing to account for in an interview. You should be very comfortable with everything you assert on a resume, and expect to get called on it. For the OP, concentrate on making sure you are passionate about software, and make sure you have a solid foundation in the basics (i.e. algorithms, program structure, standard syntax.) you don't need college for either of those, and once you start networking, you'll find that the resume is less important than many would have you believe.
Published: 4th October 2005 by Geoff Richards
Um, yeah.
At this point you exercise your Second Amendment rights and shoot the officer, loudly proclaiming:
"Now you see the violence inherent in the system! Now you see the violence inherent in the system!!! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"
Seriously, at some point, someone is gonna get fed up, and the shooting will begin. Mark my words though, that probably won't happen until there is federal action to take away our guns. Fact is most people don't believe in the Bill of Rights enough to stop, using force, those who blatantly violate it. But when they come after the guns in earnest, we'll see...
Well, I already know that here in Washington State, our gas taxes and auto taxes pay the state's portion of roads - I believe property taxes are not allowed to be used for that purpose, but I could be wrong. Bus systems, of course, directly benefit from the existence of a solid road system, so for the purposes of comparing bus systems to automobile, it probably isn't useful to examine the cost of road maintenance. Here in the Puget Sound, we don't have an alternative mass transit system from buses to speak of. A combination of poor topography and crappy public planning ensure that we probably never will.
Of course it isn't really an "us vs. them" problem any how, as city dwellers have entirely different desires and requirements from a suburban dweller such as myself. Arguably the suburban lifestyle as it exists in America is antithetical to an efficient mass-transit system, due to population density. On the other hand, it offers the ability for people to actually own a bit of land and not necessarily have neighbors on their walls - a highly desirable trait in my opinion, and something essentially unachievable in an urban setting.
To get back on topic though, the notion of federal subsidies is a tricky one, since it could be argued that we might not be as advanced today if we did not build the interstate highway system, and yet much of that system services locales which cannot possibly hope to ever contribute back as much as they receive.
$76 cost to the rider. What is the ACTUAL cost? Most public transportation systems are subsidized by the non-public-transportation-using public, often through things like a gasoline tax or sales tax. Most of the people in favor of public transportation (over the personal automobile) are not bearing (or even cognizant) of the true cost of such services.
I would be interested to see if public transportation riders would happily pay for their chosen mode of transportation if it were not subsidized. Does anyone have a good comparative analysis of the actual costs of public transportation systems?
Error log files should be provided for these cases. The single line of rapidly flashing text will either be ignored by most users or be cause for alarm (because a lot of very important/cryptic stuff is happening rapidly.) IT pros are already used to log files. I have, in fact, noticed more and more applications are providing logs of what occurred during lengthy operations and these have the capacity to provide much more useful information than a status bar. MS is right on this one, what they forgot to say was where such additional progress information should go.
I agree that from a helpdesk perspective, this is going to cause issues, but from a 'can the user get themselves through the first hour without reaching for a book of computer terminology' perspective it's probably more of a win. I am not sure which choice is better - it feels to me like either way you go you get problems. But given the general design theme MS is trying to achieve (not alienating the user with cryptic text) this rule is at least consistent.
"Optimized for" is not equal to "design only for." This rule is treated more completely in the detailed rules for Vista UI design. 800x600 is really, REALLY low resolution these days - you'd be hard pressed to find a Vista-capable computer that couldn't display 1280x1024 and be sold with a monitor to match. I suspect this particular element was influenced in part by the possibility that Media Center PCs would be hooked up to TVs or some other such case. I'd imagine the chances of a general application actually being constrained to this requirement is very small.
This should probably read "Only use sound effects for critical error messages, not for less important notifications and warnings which do not require immediate user response." On the other hand, MS may have decided that if the user really cared about the operation, they'd be sitting at the machine actively tending the UI, and making undesired sounds would interrupt their other activities. I personally find the flashing window notification method in the task bar to be suitable when I am at the machine, even if I am reading a book. Again, if the immediate completion of the operation is important to me, I'll watch it. In the corporate IT environment perhaps this requirement is different.
MS is clearly trying to make computers "feel" less opaque than before, even if to the tech-oriented person that feel actually obscures the underlying operations. There is also an underlying meaning in this rule that the application developer should design their software such that cancelled operations have user-predictable outcomes. For instance, cancelling an install should NOT leave the application half-installed - it should revert any changes it has made. Cancelling the copying of a file shouldn't leave half of a file copied. On the other hand, users are expected to know that cancelling a format will not revert their drive to the previous state - this is why such irreversib
Hmm, unless I am horribly mistaken, the right to be secure in ones papers and effects is a civil liberty which can ONLY be overcome when the government obtains a legal warrant.
So how do you protect civil liberties by destroying them? The TRUE test of the strength of a country is not in its ability to pass laws in the name of protecting its citizens, but in its ability to protect all, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, of the rights of its citizens, especially in times of crisis and war.
The more my government tramples on my rights, the more they become the enemy, for while the terrorists are only ATTEMPTING to destroy my democracy and my rights, my government is actually DOING it.
The trouble is that the person who is being cheated can't ascertain your motives over the internet unless you tell them - they will assume the worst (and be partially right.) Making people upset by cheating just engenders more mistrust and hate, regardless of the fun you might perceive out of it. The end result is a smaller community, which means less profits and ultimately less of those kinds of games, presumably an outcome you are not trying to obtain. Heck, in the worst case scenario, the only people you have left to play with are cheaters, so not only do you have no one left to irritate when you want to cheat (because they are doing it to you too), you don't have any place to go when you want a straight-up game. Beware the law of unintended consequences.
Why would you want to irritate total strangers? Would you _want_ total strangers to irritate you by cheating? And more interestingly, can you answer the second question without resorting to some discussion about how they are going to try to cheat against you or they are likely to have some mental malady which you have to ensure they don't get a chance to annoy you with?
Most of the points here have counterpoints against Linux. For example:
- Companies won't demand guaranteed support and updates for their problems
- Every version of Linux will continue to make significant improvements
- Linux will not get infected with patented/licensed implementations, or will be able to continue to support the latest licensed technologies freely
The point the Harvard article makes and which does not analogize to Tiger Woods is that Tiger Woods will eventually retire - Microsoft does not have to. Thus, the initial installed base does present a substantial, though not automatically insurmountable, hurdle to Linux dominance. Furthermore, as the article states, MS has substantial leeway to set pricing, such that the proposed point at which MS features are no longer worth the price increase can be postponed indefinitely.
And yes, the best thing MS has going for it is application support, which is still leagues ahead of Linux. In my opinion, the development system is still superior as well, even though you can't get into the internals as easily. For casual application development, MS is again far and away ahead in the game. None of these leads are insurmountable of course, and the gap will close. The questions are when and by how much. The article does not attempt to address that, only to identify the conditions under which moves can be made.
I think we agree more than we disagree. Generally speaking, I prefer government to stay out of the way unless it is absolutely needed, not out of convenience (which is why government is often involved today) but because it is not realistic for us to go something on our own via other, less invasive means. Consider some ways in which we can accomplish things without government: 1. Corporation abuses monopoly by raising prices Government Solution (G): Declare company a monopoly (if proper officials haven't been paid off,) subject company to mandatory oversight for some period of time or force a breakup or whatever other remedy happens to be in the law at the time. Consumer Solution (C): Educate consumers, boycott company's products, picket company, boycott company's suppliers and affiliated stores, run media campaign (using a consumer group), form competing businesses, encourage competing businesses by buying their products. Convince organized labor to strike. 2. Education of the public (G): Create system of quasi-mandatory attendance where the rich districts get the best money and teachers, create ineffective testing regimes which pander to someone's pet philosophy about teaching, direct studies based on the whims of politics, tax everyone even if they don't send their children to the public school system because of the aforementioned problems, and because of the existence of this system, private schools cannot get into the areas they are most needed because children are already stuck in the public system. (C): Parents or citizen groups want education for their children, business forms to provide it. Business held accountable by need to keep parents (the consumers) happy. Parents may withdraw their children if school is doing poorly and send them elsewhere WITHOUT having to keep paying for school. Parents may send their children to schools which uphold their values. 3. Health Care (G): Create a massive, mandatory system of healthcare which provides only those services the government is convinced are necessary. All persons pay into it even if they don't use it (mandatory insurance.) All persons subsidize the poorest and least healthy, even if those people are not inclined the improve their health or to improve their income. Government only provides coverage up to a certain amount, which may be much less than the person can afford themselves, and may not fund some services because they are (a) too experimental (b) conflict with the ideological whims of the current administration (c) have been excluded because of lobbying by interested parties. Bureaucracy drives up the cost of medical care, lowering the kind and quality of service which can be provided. (C): Individuals choose insurance based on their perceived need and ability to pay - even low income persons can band together and show there is a need to be fulfilled by an enterprising business. Lack of bureaucracy and _unnecessary_ oversight lowers cost of medical care, bringing more and higher quality service into the reach of more people. Bad doctors/services lose money and go out of business because they do not have a government trough (i.e. Medicare/Medicaid) to feed from. Individuals are not taxed for what they do not need and pay for what they get. These are just a few examples of problems traditionally "solved" by government which have private sector solutions. The general theme is that consumers, if they are motivated to take care of it themselves, can do so. Government in the form we presently have encourages individual laziness, which has a noticeable deleterious effect on those of us who are NOT lazy and who suffer in various ways from the methods our government uses to accomplish its goals. Since the "majority" of people are lazy in the manner, all of us must succumb to these policies, even though they are quite inefficient and in many ways harmful to the non-lazy component of society. So yes, I agree with your statement that modern democracies cannot be held accountable. I can propose an alternative which relies on individuals to take mor