All Beta jokes aside, Google is warping (eroding) the definition of beta. GMail left beta when invitations were no longer needed to get an account. Even then, they were stretching the meaning.
Maybe you're English. In the US we say THE highway, 'get on the highway and go 5 miles'. Americans say 'I'm going to the hospital', whereas Queen's English speakers drop 'the'. So we would say 'the autobahn'. But we wouldn't capitalize it because we're not German and it's not a proper noun.
Have the Slashdotters given up on resisting the media's misuse of the word hacker? Every time we use their misnomer, it becomes all the more entrenched. If the people who know better don't resist, who will?
To do so is easier, mostly because people hate being corrected (having their ignorance revealed), but what word should we use to reclaim the lost distinction between criminal behavior and finding elegant solutions/learning/testing?
For those who aren't familiar with the other meaning of OBE:
OBE (in this case) stands for Overcome By Events. Meaning, "it's no longer an issue because of some other event". For instance, if you were having trouble finding a present for your nephew, and your nephew died in a cash crash, the problem of the present would be OBE.
Don't sell games at all. Just sell subscriptions, even for single player games. Instead of paying 50$, i would pay 5$/mo for that game. That lowers the barrier to something WAY more people can afford. Then there is no way to "pirate", short of cracking into the servers and giving yourself a free account.
Put more games on Steam like systems. Stop charging me for boxes, discs and booklets.
Let's take the case of Bioshock 2.
1) Before the full release, offer a one level demo for free 2) When the game is fully tested and ready to rock, post it as a free download (with the demo option available) on Steam, BT and whatever else 3) If you want to keep playing, you subscribe to the game for a few bucks a month. At first it could be something like 10$ a month, as popularity flags drop the price. 4) Offer deluxe bells and whistles accounts for slightly more.
Then the DRM is just a matter of having the game check in once in while.
Also: Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery. Calling copyright infringement 'piracy' makes light of what is happening in Somalia and overblows kids sharing music.
"It seems odd to talk about ethics and advanced AI without considering the AI's own interest. If there were an AI intelligent enough to be an Asimov-like robot, then to have it follow Asimov's Laws would be slavery."
My toaster isn't a slave, it's a machine*. No more a slave than my pen or a door stop. So the solution might be to not make them intelligent enough to resent their condition. i can imagine a cow disliking pulling a cart for me, or having a bolt slammed into her skull. But my toaster doesn't resent making toast (unless i get animist about everything). Make machines sophisticated and alert, but stupid.
OR - Decide that artificial life is the next step in evolution, as humans are unsuited for space travel and immortality. Make them smart as we can and let them make us obsolete.
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. - George Orwell
This is part of why i'm a "grammar snob". i'm resisting the dumbing down of language and expression itself.
That said....
It amazes me how egocentric and paranoid people are to think that the gov't cares about what they had for lunch. You're an ant on an elephant. Get over yourselves already. You're just not that interesting.
Sci-Fi writers like to make some silly assumptions. One of which is that humans are warlike, and that somehow more warlike than other sapient species. What if on planet XJ46 there is a species that doesn't even have a word for peace? It's arrogant to assume we're violent when we have no basis of comparison. Methinks that just writers appealing to pacifists. Statistically speaking, humans are becoming less violent over time. (check out the TED presentation on the subject)
Then there is the assumption that science will rob us of humanity. This is a two part assumption. 1) Technology will destroy humanity/humanness. 2) That such would be inherently bad. What if it means we can perpetually download into super awesome robot bodies and/or want for nothing? i think that would be awesome.
This feeds into another assumption popular in fiction: Death gives live meaning. Death makes life SCARY, it makes us hurry. Fear of death or losing time (prison) gives others great power over us. i'm unsure of the value of that.
USS Make Some Shit Up by Voltaire (no, not that Voltaire, the singer)
I was stranded on a planet, Just me and Spock We met a nasty nazi alien who locked our asses up We found a hunk of crystal and a metal piece of bed We made a laser phaser gun and shot him in the head
Bust a move, Tog
I was standing on the bridge when Sulu came to me His eyes were full of tears he said "Captain, can't you see the ship is gonna blow do something I beseech" I grabbed a tribble and some chewing gum and stopped the warp core breach
And I say, Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish Thats the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us 'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
And though he's just a child, and some think him a twit Wesley is the master when it comes to making up some shit He's the guy you want with you when you go out in space Now if only he could beam those pimples off his face
And if you're at a party on the starship Enterprise And the karaoke player just plain old up and dies Set up a neutrino field inside a can of peas Hold on to Geordi's visor and sing into Data's knee
And I say Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us 'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
Sisko's on a mission to go no bloody place He loiters on a space station above Bajoran space The wormhole's opened up and now they come from near and far We'll keep the booze but please send back the fucking Jem-hadar
What is with the Klingons, remember in the day They looked like Puerto Ricans and they dressed in gold lame Now they look like heavy metal rockers from the dead With leather pants and frizzy hair and lobsters on their heads
And I say Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us 'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
Well, I was stuck on Voyager, pounding on the door When suddenly it dawned on me I've seen this show before Perhaps I'm in a warp bubble and slightly out of phase 'Cause it was way back in the sixties when they called it "Lost in Space"
We were looking for a way to make the ratings soar So we orchestrated an encounter with the Borg Normally you'd think that that would get us into shit But this one has a smashing ass and a lovely set of tits
And I say Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us 'Cause if we find we're in a bind we're totally screwed but nevermind We'll pull something out of our behinds, we just make some shit up
Like play WoW, PlanetSide, Crysis, Sound Forge, Avid, SQL, run MS Office, use just about any hardware (internal or peripheral) or just about any software? (the answer is no) Without needing to compile code or learning CLI? (no, again)
But what you want might not be what most people want. i'm glad you're saving all that money, but you're in a tiny minority. The learning curve and extra effort involved in operating the way you do would drive away just about everyone else. Even the Mac users. i work in IT for a living and even i don't have the time to struggle against Ubuntu.
OO.o isn't a viable competitor to MSO yet, though i'd love to see that.
i guess what i'm saying is, don't pretend that what works for you will work for everyone. Or that FOSS can do anything proprietary can. That's a lie. It can't... yet. i look forward to the day when that is the case. It's a long way away.
Also, dictionaries are written by Descriptivists, people who think "anything goes". Dictionaries record how words are used(right or wrong), not what they mean. The plural of curriculum is curricula. The plural of forum is fora. Just because people type/write/say "cirriculums" doesn't make it right. Just as policies have an effect, not an impact. Meteorites and bullets have an impact.
"Common/Accepted use" and "living language" are excuses used by people who don't know better. Or made by people who do know better to make excuses for those who don't. Allowing people to be wrong takes less effort than correcting people. Plus we don't want to hurt people's feewings by telling them they're wrong.
Indeed, terrorism is not about motive, but about tactics and goals. Tactics being "things that cause terror" and goals being "influence people/gov'ts". One can have the cause of religious fundamentalism w/o being a terrorist. One could be a terrorist in the emacs/vi wars by planting car bombs to kill vi users.
Unless you're abbreviating Lord of Transforming Rings, it should be LotR. If you're going to show prepositions as lower case, you should do the same for articles.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't that be "crackers" or "cyber-criminals"?
Are we giving up on resisting the bastardization of the word hacker?
All Beta jokes aside, Google is warping (eroding) the definition of beta. GMail left beta when invitations were no longer needed to get an account. Even then, they were stretching the meaning.
Maybe you're English. In the US we say THE highway, 'get on the highway and go 5 miles'. Americans say 'I'm going to the hospital', whereas Queen's English speakers drop 'the'. So we would say 'the autobahn'. But we wouldn't capitalize it because we're not German and it's not a proper noun.
Let's get the headline's word order right:
CBS sent Last.fm user data to RIAA.
How many Polacks does it take to screw in a few hundred light bulbs and wire them into a computer?
(joking aside... neat stuff)
i can't count the number of these i've received. Sometimes i talk to the people just to yell at them.
Have the Slashdotters given up on resisting the media's misuse of the word hacker? Every time we use their misnomer, it becomes all the more entrenched. If the people who know better don't resist, who will?
To do so is easier, mostly because people hate being corrected (having their ignorance revealed), but what word should we use to reclaim the lost distinction between criminal behavior and finding elegant solutions/learning/testing?
For those who aren't familiar with the other meaning of OBE:
OBE (in this case) stands for Overcome By Events. Meaning, "it's no longer an issue because of some other event". For instance, if you were having trouble finding a present for your nephew, and your nephew died in a cash crash, the problem of the present would be OBE.
Don't sell games at all. Just sell subscriptions, even for single player games. Instead of paying 50$, i would pay 5$/mo for that game. That lowers the barrier to something WAY more people can afford. Then there is no way to "pirate", short of cracking into the servers and giving yourself a free account.
Put more games on Steam like systems. Stop charging me for boxes, discs and booklets.
Let's take the case of Bioshock 2.
1) Before the full release, offer a one level demo for free
2) When the game is fully tested and ready to rock, post it as a free download (with the demo option available) on Steam, BT and whatever else
3) If you want to keep playing, you subscribe to the game for a few bucks a month. At first it could be something like 10$ a month, as popularity flags drop the price.
4) Offer deluxe bells and whistles accounts for slightly more.
Then the DRM is just a matter of having the game check in once in while.
Also: Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery. Calling copyright infringement 'piracy' makes light of what is happening in Somalia and overblows kids sharing music.
"It seems odd to talk about ethics and advanced AI without considering the AI's own interest. If there were an AI intelligent enough to be an Asimov-like robot, then to have it follow Asimov's Laws would be slavery."
My toaster isn't a slave, it's a machine*. No more a slave than my pen or a door stop. So the solution might be to not make them intelligent enough to resent their condition. i can imagine a cow disliking pulling a cart for me, or having a bolt slammed into her skull. But my toaster doesn't resent making toast (unless i get animist about everything). Make machines sophisticated and alert, but stupid.
OR - Decide that artificial life is the next step in evolution, as humans are unsuited for space travel and immortality. Make them smart as we can and let them make us obsolete.
Uh huh huh. Manually review.
Hehe, yeah. MANUAL!
She didn't dies, she died.
Hamlet dies, everyone dies. But a person dies just the once.
She died. She is dead. Stop trying to make her less dead by avoiding the past tense.
We better hose all the K-Y off these slopes. Someone could get hurt!
Maybe he meant "vitamins" as the pills people take.
Get a full time job at a university. Plunder the employee benefits. i'm about to start at a very expensive school for 100$ a credit.
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
- George Orwell
This is part of why i'm a "grammar snob". i'm resisting the dumbing down of language and expression itself.
That said....
It amazes me how egocentric and paranoid people are to think that the gov't cares about what they had for lunch. You're an ant on an elephant. Get over yourselves already. You're just not that interesting.
But what will stop verbification, Hobbes?
Sci-Fi writers like to make some silly assumptions. One of which is that humans are warlike, and that somehow more warlike than other sapient species. What if on planet XJ46 there is a species that doesn't even have a word for peace? It's arrogant to assume we're violent when we have no basis of comparison. Methinks that just writers appealing to pacifists. Statistically speaking, humans are becoming less violent over time. (check out the TED presentation on the subject)
Then there is the assumption that science will rob us of humanity. This is a two part assumption. 1) Technology will destroy humanity/humanness. 2) That such would be inherently bad. What if it means we can perpetually download into super awesome robot bodies and/or want for nothing? i think that would be awesome.
This feeds into another assumption popular in fiction: Death gives live meaning. Death makes life SCARY, it makes us hurry. Fear of death or losing time (prison) gives others great power over us. i'm unsure of the value of that.
USS Make Some Shit Up
by Voltaire (no, not that Voltaire, the singer)
I was stranded on a planet, Just me and Spock
We met a nasty nazi alien who locked our asses up
We found a hunk of crystal and a metal piece of bed
We made a laser phaser gun and shot him in the head
Bust a move, Tog
I was standing on the bridge when Sulu came to me
His eyes were full of tears he said "Captain, can't you see
the ship is gonna blow do something I beseech"
I grabbed a tribble and some chewing gum and stopped the warp core breach
And I say,
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
And though he's just a child, and some think him a twit
Wesley is the master when it comes to making up some shit
He's the guy you want with you when you go out in space
Now if only he could beam those pimples off his face
And if you're at a party on the starship Enterprise
And the karaoke player just plain old up and dies
Set up a neutrino field inside a can of peas
Hold on to Geordi's visor and sing into Data's knee
And I say
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
Sisko's on a mission to go no bloody place
He loiters on a space station above Bajoran space
The wormhole's opened up and now they come from near and far
We'll keep the booze but please send back the fucking Jem-hadar
What is with the Klingons, remember in the day
They looked like Puerto Ricans and they dressed in gold lame
Now they look like heavy metal rockers from the dead
With leather pants and frizzy hair and lobsters on their heads
And I say
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
Well, I was stuck on Voyager, pounding on the door
When suddenly it dawned on me I've seen this show before
Perhaps I'm in a warp bubble and slightly out of phase
'Cause it was way back in the sixties when they called it "Lost in Space"
We were looking for a way to make the ratings soar
So we orchestrated an encounter with the Borg
Normally you'd think that that would get us into shit
But this one has a smashing ass and a lovely set of tits
And I say
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we're totally screwed but nevermind
We'll pull something out of our behinds, we just make some shit up
Like play WoW, PlanetSide, Crysis, Sound Forge, Avid, SQL, run MS Office, use just about any hardware (internal or peripheral) or just about any software? (the answer is no) Without needing to compile code or learning CLI? (no, again)
But what you want might not be what most people want. i'm glad you're saving all that money, but you're in a tiny minority. The learning curve and extra effort involved in operating the way you do would drive away just about everyone else. Even the Mac users. i work in IT for a living and even i don't have the time to struggle against Ubuntu.
OO.o isn't a viable competitor to MSO yet, though i'd love to see that.
i guess what i'm saying is, don't pretend that what works for you will work for everyone. Or that FOSS can do anything proprietary can. That's a lie. It can't... yet. i look forward to the day when that is the case. It's a long way away.
Tax Avoision.
Accepted != Right
Also, dictionaries are written by Descriptivists, people who think "anything goes". Dictionaries record how words are used(right or wrong), not what they mean. The plural of curriculum is curricula. The plural of forum is fora. Just because people type/write/say "cirriculums" doesn't make it right. Just as policies have an effect, not an impact. Meteorites and bullets have an impact.
"Common/Accepted use" and "living language" are excuses used by people who don't know better. Or made by people who do know better to make excuses for those who don't. Allowing people to be wrong takes less effort than correcting people. Plus we don't want to hurt people's feewings by telling them they're wrong.
Indeed, terrorism is not about motive, but about tactics and goals. Tactics being "things that cause terror" and goals being "influence people/gov'ts". One can have the cause of religious fundamentalism w/o being a terrorist. One could be a terrorist in the emacs/vi wars by planting car bombs to kill vi users.
Unless you're abbreviating Lord of Transforming Rings, it should be LotR. If you're going to show prepositions as lower case, you should do the same for articles.
This is good news for the Scheinhardt Wig Company.