Given how faithful Baum himself was to the books, I don't fault MGM for the times they strayed. Read about the play Baum co-wrote based on the first book if you really want to see something off base from the original.
Eff the best bidder, I've had SBC and AT&T and their ilk handling my telco needs all my life and I know exactly what I'd be getting with them being in control. A pile of useless crap, over priced and under maintained.
May GOOGLE win it. Even if they do absolutely nothing with it and just sit around using the paperwork as toliet paper, it's a fair cry better than letting the rapidly reforming Mother Bell have a hand over it.
Stuff like this makes me want to break out the Christmas fund and invest in Google, not to get rich off them (though that wouldn't hurt) but to help encourage companies that actually seem to make a positive difference in the world.
And no, I'm not naive enough to think that Google is an angel, but their track record is a far far shinier one than any of the other folk that'll be in the bidding for this spectrum. And I'm willing to trust them alot farther than I am the companies that have already proven to me what their core ethics are.
I don't expect everyone to make the right decision every time. I do expect the ones that want my respect to be able to correct their mistake when it's appearent to them.
They get kudos from me, though as another person joked I doubt the $10 extra they are now out is going to hit their bottom line that hard.
Yes and what that means is that the programs which collect the information either base themselves outside of Canada or they aren't publizied in Canada. If you honestly think that those laws actually mean that NO ONE has the indicated information collected, you are fooling yourself.
The US had laws about spying on its own citizens. How well did that turn out?
The US made promises that the SSN would ONLY be used in relation to Social Security matters, that it wouldn't be used as a universal "ID" tag. How well did that turn out?
You _are_ trying to put the genie back in the bottle when you attempt to paint 'passing another law' as the solution.
What used to be publicly available but extremely tedious to collect has become child's play to obtain. People slept too long under the impression that "security through obscurity" was a horrible way to lock down a computer system but perfectly ok to use to lock down their private life. It's too late to complain about it being out there. Maybe there should have been stronger safeguards. Maybe it shouldn't have been public. It DOES NOT MATTER, it's already out there.
The information brokers today are people who operate above the board, but do you honestly think that if you made their business illegal there wouldn't be groups out there ready to play the part of the Mob in our little play of modern Prohibition? People are already out there selling pre-made kits for identity theft, CC#s, and other such black market 'information.
What sort of fun could be had if we all just pretended the information wasn't out there and we were 'safe' to continue to use the old methods of doing things because it was 'illegal' to use the information that way.
No, you won't have to worry about your supermarket knowing what you buy and sending you coupons. No, you won't have to worry about web sites saying "Looking for pills? Try BRANDX!" Instead you'll be wondering why your credit rating is in the shitter and find out that it's because you've been the target of 10 different identity theft scams. You'll find out that your credit card has been canceled because the bank has had enough of dealing with fradulent charges and simply cuts you off the first time you report one. Instead you'll come home to badly worded email threating to forward your boss every posting you've ever made online unless you start paying a 'fee' every month to keep the info buried. Or come home to a squad of SWAT police ready to knock down your door because someone put their face on an ID with your information on it before strolling into a bank and shooting up the place.
What should be done is to minimize the amount of damage that can be done with that information. You aren't going to stem the flow, so stop trying to put up dams and instead work on routing the water around the places you care about. Start teaching people how to keep their public life and their private life seperate. Start teaching banks that no, it's not ok to just accept every CC application you receive and dump the costs of fraud on the consumer and the merchant. Start teaching companies, that they shouldn't be using SSN as a replacement employee identification.
You aren't going to remove the ability to get this information, I'm sorry. Canada and the UK had a far easier time of it because they aren't the size of the US. What flies there doesn't always fly here, and it's not always about lobbies or will.
While avocate strongly for the right to privacy, to complain that there are groups out there collecting information on people is the height of trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
We are in the INFORMATION AGE. Your information is going to be collected whether you like it or not. What you should be agitating for is more responsible use of that information by the collectors and consumers and more education on what information being collected and how for the 'targets'.
What you should be agitating for is for companies and governments to stop basing their security/identification on now publicly avaliable information (Dates of Birth, SSN, "mother's madien name").
Don't waste your time on trying to 'control' what is being collected, the bad guys won't pay any heed and the good guys already have enough problems on their plate. Instead, spend your time on pushing for this information to be handled responsibly and INTELLIGENTLY, and not just as an afterthough.
They were attacked primarily because almost everyone outside of MS and Novell thought it was a mistake and a trap. We were watching someone good naturedly walking into what we believed (and most of us still believe) to be a minefield. In other words, the backlash they have received is more for being boneheaded as opposed to being malicious (as SCO received).
I can't tell you why it is "So popular"; however I can tell you why I like it: It was a game created by Bungie in the same tradition as their previous games.
In other words, in addition to being an FPS, it also had a fairly intricate back-story. And most of that back-story wasn't shoved into your face, but woven into the background. This meant that I could actually consider it two games, an FPS and a puzzler.
You are correct in your assessment of it's qualities as an FPS game. Really, it wasn't that much to write home to. Other than being one of the only 'good' multi-player FPS games out there for the XBOX. Since I play on the PC that doesn't mean much to me.
But Bungie has always been known for the hidden stories, Myth, Marathon, even Pathway into Darkness all had well built (for games) stories that gave evidence that they weren't just another Doom/Quake shat out of someone's orifice. I Love Bees may have just been a marketing gimmick, but it was a gimmick that was pretty much exactly what one would expect from Bungie. It was quintessential Bungie, if you will.
Your last sentence pretty much hit it on the head. These are games which have had an incredible level of detail embedded in them. Bungie makes the story part of the game, as opposed to just a blurb at the start of the game so you'll be able to figure out who the bad guys are.
No, we aren't talking Tolkien or Asimov. But for games, the stories are pure gold.
And exactly how would they verify by email address that you were at the demonstration? Oh yeah, you registered an email address at anarchist.org before you went....
This might be useful for 'human intrest' stories, and company/stock news stories, but I fail to see it being even doable for large scale stories like a demonstration, natural disaster, or etc.
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. (Lt.) Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he [Yossarian] observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed
The one thing that I thought was "remarkable" about Microsoft's Surface demo was that the machine seemed to recognize that a wireless device had been placed on the surface and interacted with it. Now, obviously "seeing" a wireless device itself isn't that remarkable. But knowing which one was a particular blob on the 'screen' seemed fairly magical. Anyone have an idea how that was done?
The rest of the stuff cool, and I'm sure that whomever can afford those toys will enjoy them, but as demonstrated it didn't really seem worth the price tag.
The real difference in what Scooter did and these guys is that these guys can't dish any dirt on the actual heads of Administration, where Scooter was in a position to leave his bosses twisting in the winds.
"If the guy's system is screwed up, it's screwed up, and it's not the guy's fault."
And thus you utter the words that have pissed off a thousand support personel and are sympomatic of the crap adittude that most "anti-tech" computer users exhibit.
You have no clue if the the OP was the cause of their issues or not. Maybe they do have a borked install, maybe it was borked from the begining or maybe it was borked by them. Given the number of extremely broken issues they came up with, issues which weren't indicative of a general problem with Ubantu but a problem with their own install, I'm more inclined to believe that the root cause is something they did as opposed to something that came that way out of the box.
But that doesn't matter. The fact that you seem to think even IMPLYING that it could be his configuration that could be an issue is an insult is unbelievably wrongminded.
Porn has decided more than once, it's just that the main round that you remember is the VHS vs Beta arguement.
Porn was the bulk of what drove the penny arcades, which in turn promoted the old silent movies (themselves started mostly as a vehicle for porn). Most of the visual entertainment media used throughout history either started out, or was heavily fininanced at the start by porn.
And they've decided today as well. You youself made the point without realizing it.
BOTH formats have lost, it's not about hard media anymore. People are drifting more and more to downloading what they want, and only using hard media as a saftey blanket/backup option.
DVD's will always be around in some form or another, but eventually (sooner in other countries where their telco industry hasn't shamelessly refused to upgrade their infrastructure to handle it) what you want, what you see, and how you get it will be online.
Parent was meaning to say Myth, a similarly named real-time tactical game which was created by Bungie and it so popular that people have actually taken it upon themselves to continue to release updated clients for it's various incarnations (Myth:The Fallen Lords, Myth II: Soulblighter, and provisionally Myth III: Wolf Age)
Myth III is considered provisionally part of the series as it wasn't actually developed by Bungie. When Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, they lost the rights to the Myth franchise to Take 2 Interactive. Take2 had another company created a Myth III based off the world that Bungie had already come up with.
Regardless, Myth is a supporting point to the parent's argument. The backstory to the series was ridiculously detailed.
We learn, it's just that certain groups have far more 'leeway' when pulling that then others.
If Peter Molyneux had announced Spore back in 2005, it'd alreay be out now. The only problem is, it'd be a crappy PacMan clone as all he'd ever actually get into the game would be the first "cellular evolution" portion. Or if it hadn't been released yet, I'd expect a 10 hour game on rails where each 'mini-game' could be beat in less than an hour by a five year old. The sandbox end game would only let you access planets you've already been to, and the much hyped "get content from a million other players" would be a seperate piece of the game, never turned on. (No, I'm not bitter over Fable or B&W, honest. Well not very bitter at least.)
If this was a Sony or Microsoft product, I'd expect all the customization to actually be removed and replaced with a "you can buy new parts for your creatures, for only $5 a limb or torso piece!" micro-payment rip off.
But this is Sid Meier's baby, the guy whose games I've primarily woreshiped, even the bad ones. And I'm alot more willing to buy into what he's selling, even if it's heavily delayed, than I am for most people.
Friend, if they are charging you $300 for an ounce of weed...
But to answer your point seriously, the wastefulness of the "Pot Grower" method is primarily due to lack of necessity in reducing the cost. Why work to save a penny when you make a dollar.
Greenhouses already use artificial lighting and manage to make profits, and there are numerous refinements and improvements that could be introduced given the assumption that you are working large scale and can thus rationalize customized equipment. Especially if you understand you providing lighting for for plants as opposed to trying to light a room.
Just two for instances here:
Only provide the wavelenghts being used by the plants.
Only provide "intense" enough lighting to match what the plant can absorb and process, the rest is waste.
A combine is big because in addition to its other work it has to be mobile and more importantly to be mobile while maintaining the ability to have a stable RPM for the equipment while still allowing for a variable ground speed.
A stationary combine that simply handles what is shoved into its maw would take far less room.
Also, while I'm sure you are of the age of farmers where it was no longer an issue, remember a combine is called a combine because it's actually a multi-purpose machine which harvests, threshes, and cleans all at once. This is necessary because you are in the middle of a thousand acres of grain and need to do all three before you could leave with the product. The introduction of the combine is what ENABLED you to have thousand acre fields.
This isn't an issue in a vertical farm, and it would probably save a lot of space to simply have mobile harvesters bringing the crop to a central thresher.
Lastly, a 1,000 acre field is the equivalent of 43,560,000 square feet. Assuming a 30 floor building, that is 1,452,000 sq ft per floor. One building may not completely replace a 1,000 acre field; as it would need a little over a 1,000 ft by 1,000 ft footprint to match the total square footage. However unlike your field, this space would be productive all year long, allowing for more than one harvest. And also unlike traditional multi-harvest plans (like winter wheat harvests), both crops will be growing under as close as ideal conditions as can be offered to the plant.
I don't quite think our science is yet up to the task of replacing mega-farms with veritical farms, but it isn't as unlikely as you would think.
Slashdot Mirror
Given how faithful Baum himself was to the books, I don't fault MGM for the times they strayed. Read about the play Baum co-wrote based on the first book if you really want to see something off base from the original.
Eff the best bidder, I've had SBC and AT&T and their ilk handling my telco needs all my life and I know exactly what I'd be getting with them being in control. A pile of useless crap, over priced and under maintained.
May GOOGLE win it. Even if they do absolutely nothing with it and just sit around using the paperwork as toliet paper, it's a fair cry better than letting the rapidly reforming Mother Bell have a hand over it.
Stuff like this makes me want to break out the Christmas fund and invest in Google, not to get rich off them (though that wouldn't hurt) but to help encourage companies that actually seem to make a positive difference in the world.
And no, I'm not naive enough to think that Google is an angel, but their track record is a far far shinier one than any of the other folk that'll be in the bidding for this spectrum. And I'm willing to trust them alot farther than I am the companies that have already proven to me what their core ethics are.
I agree. On the other hand, sometimes... people make it hard.
I don't expect everyone to make the right decision every time. I do expect the ones that want my respect to be able to correct their mistake when it's appearent to them.
They get kudos from me, though as another person joked I doubt the $10 extra they are now out is going to hit their bottom line that hard.
Yes and what that means is that the programs which collect the information either base themselves outside of Canada or they aren't publizied in Canada. If you honestly think that those laws actually mean that NO ONE has the indicated information collected, you are fooling yourself.
The US had laws about spying on its own citizens. How well did that turn out?
The US made promises that the SSN would ONLY be used in relation to Social Security matters, that it wouldn't be used as a universal "ID" tag. How well did that turn out?
You _are_ trying to put the genie back in the bottle when you attempt to paint 'passing another law' as the solution.
What used to be publicly available but extremely tedious to collect has become child's play to obtain. People slept too long under the impression that "security through obscurity" was a horrible way to lock down a computer system but perfectly ok to use to lock down their private life. It's too late to complain about it being out there. Maybe there should have been stronger safeguards. Maybe it shouldn't have been public. It DOES NOT MATTER, it's already out there.
The information brokers today are people who operate above the board, but do you honestly think that if you made their business illegal there wouldn't be groups out there ready to play the part of the Mob in our little play of modern Prohibition? People are already out there selling pre-made kits for identity theft, CC#s, and other such black market 'information.
What sort of fun could be had if we all just pretended the information wasn't out there and we were 'safe' to continue to use the old methods of doing things because it was 'illegal' to use the information that way.
No, you won't have to worry about your supermarket knowing what you buy and sending you coupons. No, you won't have to worry about web sites saying "Looking for pills? Try BRANDX!" Instead you'll be wondering why your credit rating is in the shitter and find out that it's because you've been the target of 10 different identity theft scams. You'll find out that your credit card has been canceled because the bank has had enough of dealing with fradulent charges and simply cuts you off the first time you report one. Instead you'll come home to badly worded email threating to forward your boss every posting you've ever made online unless you start paying a 'fee' every month to keep the info buried. Or come home to a squad of SWAT police ready to knock down your door because someone put their face on an ID with your information on it before strolling into a bank and shooting up the place.
What should be done is to minimize the amount of damage that can be done with that information. You aren't going to stem the flow, so stop trying to put up dams and instead work on routing the water around the places you care about. Start teaching people how to keep their public life and their private life seperate. Start teaching banks that no, it's not ok to just accept every CC application you receive and dump the costs of fraud on the consumer and the merchant. Start teaching companies, that they shouldn't be using SSN as a replacement employee identification.
You aren't going to remove the ability to get this information, I'm sorry. Canada and the UK had a far easier time of it because they aren't the size of the US. What flies there doesn't always fly here, and it's not always about lobbies or will.
While avocate strongly for the right to privacy, to complain that there are groups out there collecting information on people is the height of trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
We are in the INFORMATION AGE. Your information is going to be collected whether you like it or not. What you should be agitating for is more responsible use of that information by the collectors and consumers and more education on what information being collected and how for the 'targets'.
What you should be agitating for is for companies and governments to stop basing their security/identification on now publicly avaliable information (Dates of Birth, SSN, "mother's madien name").
Don't waste your time on trying to 'control' what is being collected, the bad guys won't pay any heed and the good guys already have enough problems on their plate. Instead, spend your time on pushing for this information to be handled responsibly and INTELLIGENTLY, and not just as an afterthough.
They were attacked primarily because almost everyone outside of MS and Novell thought it was a mistake and a trap. We were watching someone good naturedly walking into what we believed (and most of us still believe) to be a minefield. In other words, the backlash they have received is more for being boneheaded as opposed to being malicious (as SCO received).
It wasn't unfair, it was worry.
I can't tell you why it is "So popular"; however I can tell you why I like it: It was a game created by Bungie in the same tradition as their previous games.
In other words, in addition to being an FPS, it also had a fairly intricate back-story. And most of that back-story wasn't shoved into your face, but woven into the background. This meant that I could actually consider it two games, an FPS and a puzzler.
You are correct in your assessment of it's qualities as an FPS game. Really, it wasn't that much to write home to. Other than being one of the only 'good' multi-player FPS games out there for the XBOX. Since I play on the PC that doesn't mean much to me.
But Bungie has always been known for the hidden stories, Myth, Marathon, even Pathway into Darkness all had well built (for games) stories that gave evidence that they weren't just another Doom/Quake shat out of someone's orifice. I Love Bees may have just been a marketing gimmick, but it was a gimmick that was pretty much exactly what one would expect from Bungie. It was quintessential Bungie, if you will.
Your last sentence pretty much hit it on the head. These are games which have had an incredible level of detail embedded in them. Bungie makes the story part of the game, as opposed to just a blurb at the start of the game so you'll be able to figure out who the bad guys are.
No, we aren't talking Tolkien or Asimov. But for games, the stories are pure gold.
And exactly how would they verify by email address that you were at the demonstration? Oh yeah, you registered an email address at anarchist.org before you went....
This might be useful for 'human intrest' stories, and company/stock news stories, but I fail to see it being even doable for large scale stories like a demonstration, natural disaster, or etc.
Not that I think this is the case.
Probably because their not on their 20th nervous breakdown. (it's a joke, but there is a point to it.)
It's done without the benefit of a trial and in secret. If that isn't a blatent violation of the right to due process....
Ah, unbridled arrogance. You know, it's amazing how many things have been brought down solely to the effects of that particular Achilles' heel.
can it be replicated in Linux?
The one thing that I thought was "remarkable" about Microsoft's Surface demo was that the machine seemed to recognize that a wireless device had been placed on the surface and interacted with it. Now, obviously "seeing" a wireless device itself isn't that remarkable. But knowing which one was a particular blob on the 'screen' seemed fairly magical. Anyone have an idea how that was done?
The rest of the stuff cool, and I'm sure that whomever can afford those toys will enjoy them, but as demonstrated it didn't really seem worth the price tag.
The real difference in what Scooter did and these guys is that these guys can't dish any dirt on the actual heads of Administration, where Scooter was in a position to leave his bosses twisting in the winds.
I hear Boston has already passed legistation to ban the game...
And thus you utter the words that have pissed off a thousand support personel and are sympomatic of the crap adittude that most "anti-tech" computer users exhibit.
You have no clue if the the OP was the cause of their issues or not. Maybe they do have a borked install, maybe it was borked from the begining or maybe it was borked by them. Given the number of extremely broken issues they came up with, issues which weren't indicative of a general problem with Ubantu but a problem with their own install, I'm more inclined to believe that the root cause is something they did as opposed to something that came that way out of the box.
But that doesn't matter. The fact that you seem to think even IMPLYING that it could be his configuration that could be an issue is an insult is unbelievably wrongminded.
Porn has decided more than once, it's just that the main round that you remember is the VHS vs Beta arguement.
Porn was the bulk of what drove the penny arcades, which in turn promoted the old silent movies (themselves started mostly as a vehicle for porn). Most of the visual entertainment media used throughout history either started out, or was heavily fininanced at the start by porn.
And they've decided today as well. You youself made the point without realizing it.
BOTH formats have lost, it's not about hard media anymore. People are drifting more and more to downloading what they want, and only using hard media as a saftey blanket/backup option.
DVD's will always be around in some form or another, but eventually (sooner in other countries where their telco industry hasn't shamelessly refused to upgrade their infrastructure to handle it) what you want, what you see, and how you get it will be online.
Indeed, many considered the Xbox to be the sign the Apocalypse has started.
Parent was meaning to say Myth, a similarly named real-time tactical game which was created by Bungie and it so popular that people have actually taken it upon themselves to continue to release updated clients for it's various incarnations (Myth:The Fallen Lords, Myth II: Soulblighter, and provisionally Myth III: Wolf Age)
Myth III is considered provisionally part of the series as it wasn't actually developed by Bungie. When Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, they lost the rights to the Myth franchise to Take 2 Interactive. Take2 had another company created a Myth III based off the world that Bungie had already come up with.
Regardless, Myth is a supporting point to the parent's argument. The backstory to the series was ridiculously detailed.
ARG! I do that every time. It's like the two have merged into my head as some super simulation gaming god.
We learn, it's just that certain groups have far more 'leeway' when pulling that then others.
If Peter Molyneux had announced Spore back in 2005, it'd alreay be out now. The only problem is, it'd be a crappy PacMan clone as all he'd ever actually get into the game would be the first "cellular evolution" portion. Or if it hadn't been released yet, I'd expect a 10 hour game on rails where each 'mini-game' could be beat in less than an hour by a five year old. The sandbox end game would only let you access planets you've already been to, and the much hyped "get content from a million other players" would be a seperate piece of the game, never turned on. (No, I'm not bitter over Fable or B&W, honest. Well not very bitter at least.)
If this was a Sony or Microsoft product, I'd expect all the customization to actually be removed and replaced with a "you can buy new parts for your creatures, for only $5 a limb or torso piece!" micro-payment rip off.
But this is Sid Meier's baby, the guy whose games I've primarily woreshiped, even the bad ones. And I'm alot more willing to buy into what he's selling, even if it's heavily delayed, than I am for most people.
Friend, if they are charging you $300 for an ounce of weed...
But to answer your point seriously, the wastefulness of the "Pot Grower" method is primarily due to lack of necessity in reducing the cost. Why work to save a penny when you make a dollar.
Greenhouses already use artificial lighting and manage to make profits, and there are numerous refinements and improvements that could be introduced given the assumption that you are working large scale and can thus rationalize customized equipment. Especially if you understand you providing lighting for for plants as opposed to trying to light a room.
Just two for instances here:
Only provide the wavelenghts being used by the plants.
Only provide "intense" enough lighting to match what the plant can absorb and process, the rest is waste.
A combine is big because in addition to its other work it has to be mobile and more importantly to be mobile while maintaining the ability to have a stable RPM for the equipment while still allowing for a variable ground speed.
A stationary combine that simply handles what is shoved into its maw would take far less room.
Also, while I'm sure you are of the age of farmers where it was no longer an issue, remember a combine is called a combine because it's actually a multi-purpose machine which harvests, threshes, and cleans all at once. This is necessary because you are in the middle of a thousand acres of grain and need to do all three before you could leave with the product. The introduction of the combine is what ENABLED you to have thousand acre fields.
This isn't an issue in a vertical farm, and it would probably save a lot of space to simply have mobile harvesters bringing the crop to a central thresher.
Lastly, a 1,000 acre field is the equivalent of 43,560,000 square feet. Assuming a 30 floor building, that is 1,452,000 sq ft per floor. One building may not completely replace a 1,000 acre field; as it would need a little over a 1,000 ft by 1,000 ft footprint to match the total square footage. However unlike your field, this space would be productive all year long, allowing for more than one harvest. And also unlike traditional multi-harvest plans (like winter wheat harvests), both crops will be growing under as close as ideal conditions as can be offered to the plant.
I don't quite think our science is yet up to the task of replacing mega-farms with veritical farms, but it isn't as unlikely as you would think.