So we should burn any movie script that dares insult some violent tyrant, lest they get upset? Should we also stop publishing reports on said tyrants? Just how much would you like the West to appease the likes of Kim Jong-Un?
I've gone back and forth on this. On one hand, you have Sony and the movie theaters ceding to the demands/threats of the hackers/terrorists. On another hand, you have Hollywood doing one of the things it does best, pushing the limits of shock value for the sake of monetary gain. On the third hand, you have a smaller group provoking a larger, despotic group, with considerable power, with little regard to the tensions it would cause.
If the movie were merely insulting, I would think the reaction of North Korea to be unwarranted. But this is basically a threat, however unlikely, backed by a US company and its Japanese parent. If I were to create a fiction involving the assassination of the president of the US, you can be pretty sure the US government would try to shut it down.
At the risk of sounding like a luddite:
Off and on I will think about how people want to treat the internet as a utility. We try to conserve water, we try to conserve electricity, we are metered for these. For phones, we pay for minutes, though you can opt for unlimited plans, and the infrastructure is such that unlimited plans don't burden others. For cars, we have gasoline (though technically not a utility), and when gas is cheap, people buy larger vehicles. When the price of gas goes up, people become concerned about gas efficiency.
Noone is terribly concerned about "conserving" the internet, or conserving computer resources. Every year computers get faster, and every year websites get less efficient. More bloat, bigger images, more script nonsense. They find more ways to update the browser, to make it smarter and yet more bloated. My NoScript and RequestPolicy plugins are so laden with websites that aren't obviously related to the one I'm on. If I'm lucky, there are one or two sites with a related name, or a CDN, and I can allow these and continue on. If not, I sometimes temporarily allow all, sick of going down the rabbit hole and just wanting to get to my destination.
I'm sure there is an electricity cost related to the extra computing. The time required for page loads is simply time you've wasted, unless you have managed to multitask a few pages. A site taking 15 seconds more than it did a year ago isn't a lot one time, but it adds up page after page, day after day. Even mobile versions of sites, using 4G services, load slower than they did years ago.
I just want my information, I want it simple, and I want it now. I'm sick of all this crap that is designed to make my life better somehow. I liked my life the way it was. I liked being able to do Verbatim searches on Google and actually getting verbatim results. I don't need fancy maps that take 10 times as long to load, I need simple maps that work fast when the network is congested. I don't need functionality changes to make things look slicker. I want to be able to do more with the hardware I have, and we just keep going in the opposite direction.
This Bennett Hasselton thing has gotten out of hand enough to become a meme. Now I have to read his name when he isn't writing some clickbait article. I'm done with Slashdot.
Ebola is actually no worse than AIDS, from what I can tell from a quick search. ...
Just don't lick it, and you're fine.
I can put AIDs in my mouth all I want and not get AIDs.
If I put Ebola in my mouth, I will get infected with Ebola.
Please stop spreading this nonsense that Ebola is as difficult as AIDs to transmit. It is carried in more bodily fluids, and can be spread by contact with those fluids. It does not require a wound, as AIDs does.
Poster is entirely aware that his unreliability comes from his mobile links. That is why he is asking the question. Better, affordable, providers probably don't exist in his area, and this is the game that he has decided he wants to play.
Chances are that his situation is similar to mine: around $20 a month towards Freedompop (WiMax) for one mobile connection, and tethering through my phone (4G) for another connection.
My other options are $55/month for Verzion FIOS (they no longer offer DSL in my area and have no affordable lower bandwidth plans available to me), or Comcast, which I would rather avoid based on all of the horror stories. Unless Google shows up to offer these guys some competition, the idea of a better provider is largely a myth.
The cellular networks are usually adequate. Latency and bandwidth are generally good when demand isn't peaked. When there is a lot of demand (friday nights, for instance), you just have to hope for the best, as latency will be very unpredictable. However, even when the connection seems good during non-peak hours, mobile networks seem to be plagued by random latency spikes. You can be playing a game with less than 200ms ping and all of a sudden you're looking at 1000ms+ ping times.
If you could use both mobile networks at once, the chances of them both crapping out at the same time is going to be less than it is for one or the other.
They also skipped over hair care products. Silicon is becoming much more common in them. I see dimethicone more often than not in shampoos and conditioners.
The problem is that there is a very random factor involved here, and that factor is humans.
In an age of not taking responsibility for our actions, we are relying on people to 1) recognize they may be sick, and 2) take the proper actions once they suspect that they are sick.
I can imagine all sorts of scenarios, someone in denial about having it, someone that thinks they have a more benign illness and can't afford to take off from work, someone uneducated about Ebola, someone who denies the existence of Ebola, or someone who thinks that God will protect him from Ebola and that he will recover on his own.
Think of a somewhat possible worst case scenario: This person lives in New York city, takes 2 or 3 different trains/buses to get to work, maybe uses an elevator, visits a public cafeteria, doesn't wash their hands. How many people could be exposed in two days?
It might not be likely to happen, but if it does, how would you contain it?
With current consoles, these games can be patched. So not only is Ubi just pissing and moaning, but they could still find ways to dumb down the AI, remove NPC's, and find other ways to lower CPU load. Instead of changing their game to make it better, they fingerpoint at the thing that they cannot change.
An Ebola outbreak in the US is undesirable by pretty much everybody here, except maybe for people with stock in the companies producing cures and vaccines.
Travel bans seem entirely reasonable to me. If aid workers want to go over and help, then by all means we should have some sort of quarantine procedure in place so we can get them home. But we don't need Joe Schmoe going over there, getting infected, and bringing it back with him. It's an unnecessary risk, just as it is unnecessary to take a leisure trip to Liberia in the middle of an epidemic.
I am a little surprised that noone is fear mongering about someone intentionally spreading Ebola. It seems like the perfect thing to let loose in a country you are at odds with, whether you are another country or a terrorist organization.
Well, when the spec is "Glass doesn't crack when you drop it", and the glass cracks when you drop it, it shouldn't have taken the company until they were knee deep in shit to figure out that they couldn't deliver. They should have found out from the early prototypes that they had a problem.
There was a lot of money involved so they decided to play the game. They played, and they lost.
Better that the EA model of "eh, fuck it; publish what we got and close the shop."
Starting out, it sounded like Blizzard really had something with Titan. Or at least they made it sound that way. I wouldn't mind seeing a half finished product, just to see what they had.
I would say there is nothing wrong with a project failing. I don't fund a project thinking "failure is not an option."
However, the projects I have had "fail" were not due to problems related to the project. Instead, funds disappeared, with nothing to account for them. Army Men playing cards had its funds disappear, about the same time the creator took a honeymoon. Somehow, he ended up finding the money and giving everyone a refund.
Another fail, still in progress, is the Asylum playing cards. Ed Nash took a lot of people's money and had the artwork for the cards. He never got the cards printed, and has offered very little in explanation for the status of the project, or where the money has gone. A legal case has started against him in Washington state.
In short, if a project tries, and fails, that's one thing. But if it is simply fraud, that is entirely unacceptable.
They're lighter too, so you need less energy all together.
Google tells me that a Tesla Model S weighs 4,464 or 4,647 lbs.
A 2008 Toyota Camry is supposedly 3307 lbs. A 2014 Camry is 3190.
I think any reduction in engine weight is made up for by the batteries.
Whatever you will spend on a new battery will be a lot less than what you pay to maintain your gas engine car over it's lifetime. There is already a robust market for rebuilt battery packs and that will baloon in the near future. (Not all cells go bad at the same time. Just replace the bad performing cells and you're good to go)
When your battery has diminished life due to age of the battery, you will not be replacing individual cells. This post puts the cost of a battery for a Tesla S at $45k. Alternatively, it looks like you can pre-pay $12k when you get your car and get your replacement battery years later. http://www.teslamotors.com/en_...
I have no idea of what the availability is/will be for third party huge car batteries... It is a little bit of a specialty item.
I have a friend, a Comp Sci graduate no less, that can't see the endless utility of AI. His viewpoint is that you can simply program things to behave like they're intelligent, like these robots. He does not see the distinction, that an AI can be your friend, your researcher, your 24/7 slave/military tactician holed up underground somewhere. That it can do things without having to be programmed to do them.
I'm a little more concerned that the fact that Janet Jackson's led to over a million complains. Why are American's afraid of tits?! There wasn't even a nipple. I don't get it!
Because their football game was tits up and it wasn't even the second half.
One counter argument would be the small municipalities who don't get get broadband at all, despite already having the wire/fiber running through their town.
Another counter argument would be the lack of infrastructure upgrades, combined with overselling bandwidth, combined with Verizon not playing fair with Netflix.
As for offering service to out of towners - if a neighboring town wanted to buy service from my municipal broadband, and they were willing to create their own infrastructure to connect with mine, it doesn't sound too unreasonable.
So why has every environmental initiative in the past 40 years been pushed by the Democrats and resisted by the Republicans?
Why did "mega-corporate bitch" Obama introduce new carbon emissions rules in June that will cost energy producers a fortune?
What happened to your brain in the 60 minutes between your posts? At first you extoll the virtues of the Democrats, and now you claim your original post is about Democrats and Rebulicans being the same. Do you see the discontinuity?
GP has it right. The US was built disregarding the damage we were doing to the environment. Now that we're on top, its easy for us to tell people not to do things. But if anyone else wants to get ahead, they're going to do it the cheap and easy way. Without some sort of alternative financial incentive, greed will drive countries to disregard the environment to ensure their industry evolves. While you can point at Democrats and Republicans and call them angels or devils, the rest of the world is going to do what they want with regards to the environment (and there are a lot more of them than there are of us).
Min/maxing is half the fun of the game, unless it leaves the PCs woefully unbalanced between one another.
I'm not sure how you can have min/maxing without it unbalancing the PC's. It becomes an arms race between players to find the most powerful, game breaking combos. Spreadsheets, forums, and research on things that can be abused. It leaves the non min/maxers in the dust, and the GM has to find some way to tone up encounters without destroying everyone else.
Not the idea that if I'm going to be a wizard, I'm going to be the smartest guy around, or if I'm going to hit people in the face with my axe, then I'm going to be the biggest, toughest guy around. Those are totally viable character ideas, especially your first time playing before you've grown bored of the shallow archetypes. And yet, that's min-maxing.
You can roleplay the smartest/strongest guy around, or you can abuse the rule system to become the strongest/smartest guy around. When your level 5 character has godly powers to influence the game through some clever min/maxing, it really ruins the experience for others.
It's a broken system where in order to be an non-cliche character you have to be disadvantaged mechanically, because the game is build on archetype enforcement, that's the problem.
I'll give you this one. The upside, you can use min/maxing to offset your mechanical flaws. So my martial adept, Gravedigger, used a shovel as a weapon. He had a penalty to fight with it, but I was still able to game the system to still be overpowered.
On a side note, there were enough base classes in 3.5 that you could almost make whatever character you wanted by dipping into them a la carte. See my rogue/scout/ranger/fighter.
That was my first thought before reading the article. Pay the employee, no hassle and red rape to worry about getting caught up in. However, FTFA:
Under a joint drug enforcement task force that includes the DEA and Amtrakâ(TM)s own police agency, the task force can obtain Amtrak confidential passenger reservation information at no cost, the inspector generalâ(TM)s report said. Under an agreement, Amtrak police would receive a share of any money seized as a result of such drug task force investigations, and Amtrakâ(TM)s inspector general concluded that DEAâ(TM)s purchase of the passenger information deprived the Amtrak Police Department of money it would have received from resulting drug arrests.
So it may simply be that there was a lot of money to be made by screwing Amtrak out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
So we should burn any movie script that dares insult some violent tyrant, lest they get upset? Should we also stop publishing reports on said tyrants? Just how much would you like the West to appease the likes of Kim Jong-Un?
I've gone back and forth on this. On one hand, you have Sony and the movie theaters ceding to the demands/threats of the hackers/terrorists. On another hand, you have Hollywood doing one of the things it does best, pushing the limits of shock value for the sake of monetary gain. On the third hand, you have a smaller group provoking a larger, despotic group, with considerable power, with little regard to the tensions it would cause.
If the movie were merely insulting, I would think the reaction of North Korea to be unwarranted. But this is basically a threat, however unlikely, backed by a US company and its Japanese parent. If I were to create a fiction involving the assassination of the president of the US, you can be pretty sure the US government would try to shut it down.
I guess it depends on how complex the individual is.
Obviously this is his method of escape. He will conceal himself inside the statue, and then it will be shipped to Russia, among other places.
Could probably pump a gas out at the lens so debris and dust don't make it onto the lens.
At the risk of sounding like a luddite:
Off and on I will think about how people want to treat the internet as a utility. We try to conserve water, we try to conserve electricity, we are metered for these. For phones, we pay for minutes, though you can opt for unlimited plans, and the infrastructure is such that unlimited plans don't burden others. For cars, we have gasoline (though technically not a utility), and when gas is cheap, people buy larger vehicles. When the price of gas goes up, people become concerned about gas efficiency.
Noone is terribly concerned about "conserving" the internet, or conserving computer resources. Every year computers get faster, and every year websites get less efficient. More bloat, bigger images, more script nonsense. They find more ways to update the browser, to make it smarter and yet more bloated. My NoScript and RequestPolicy plugins are so laden with websites that aren't obviously related to the one I'm on. If I'm lucky, there are one or two sites with a related name, or a CDN, and I can allow these and continue on. If not, I sometimes temporarily allow all, sick of going down the rabbit hole and just wanting to get to my destination.
I'm sure there is an electricity cost related to the extra computing. The time required for page loads is simply time you've wasted, unless you have managed to multitask a few pages. A site taking 15 seconds more than it did a year ago isn't a lot one time, but it adds up page after page, day after day. Even mobile versions of sites, using 4G services, load slower than they did years ago.
I just want my information, I want it simple, and I want it now. I'm sick of all this crap that is designed to make my life better somehow. I liked my life the way it was. I liked being able to do Verbatim searches on Google and actually getting verbatim results. I don't need fancy maps that take 10 times as long to load, I need simple maps that work fast when the network is congested. I don't need functionality changes to make things look slicker. I want to be able to do more with the hardware I have, and we just keep going in the opposite direction.
This Bennett Hasselton thing has gotten out of hand enough to become a meme. Now I have to read his name when he isn't writing some clickbait article. I'm done with Slashdot.
It's not competitor, it's counterfeiter. These are chips stamped with FTDI's logo that aren't made by FTDI. http://hackaday.com/2014/02/19...
The chips are counterfeits using the logo of FTDI stamped on the the chip. http://hackaday.com/2014/02/19...
Ebola is actually no worse than AIDS, from what I can tell from a quick search.
...
Just don't lick it, and you're fine.
I can put AIDs in my mouth all I want and not get AIDs.
If I put Ebola in my mouth, I will get infected with Ebola.
Please stop spreading this nonsense that Ebola is as difficult as AIDs to transmit. It is carried in more bodily fluids, and can be spread by contact with those fluids. It does not require a wound, as AIDs does.
Poster is entirely aware that his unreliability comes from his mobile links. That is why he is asking the question. Better, affordable, providers probably don't exist in his area, and this is the game that he has decided he wants to play.
Chances are that his situation is similar to mine: around $20 a month towards Freedompop (WiMax) for one mobile connection, and tethering through my phone (4G) for another connection.
My other options are $55/month for Verzion FIOS (they no longer offer DSL in my area and have no affordable lower bandwidth plans available to me), or Comcast, which I would rather avoid based on all of the horror stories. Unless Google shows up to offer these guys some competition, the idea of a better provider is largely a myth.
The cellular networks are usually adequate. Latency and bandwidth are generally good when demand isn't peaked. When there is a lot of demand (friday nights, for instance), you just have to hope for the best, as latency will be very unpredictable. However, even when the connection seems good during non-peak hours, mobile networks seem to be plagued by random latency spikes. You can be playing a game with less than 200ms ping and all of a sudden you're looking at 1000ms+ ping times.
If you could use both mobile networks at once, the chances of them both crapping out at the same time is going to be less than it is for one or the other.
They also skipped over hair care products. Silicon is becoming much more common in them. I see dimethicone more often than not in shampoos and conditioners.
This.
The problem is that there is a very random factor involved here, and that factor is humans.
In an age of not taking responsibility for our actions, we are relying on people to 1) recognize they may be sick, and 2) take the proper actions once they suspect that they are sick.
I can imagine all sorts of scenarios, someone in denial about having it, someone that thinks they have a more benign illness and can't afford to take off from work, someone uneducated about Ebola, someone who denies the existence of Ebola, or someone who thinks that God will protect him from Ebola and that he will recover on his own.
Think of a somewhat possible worst case scenario: This person lives in New York city, takes 2 or 3 different trains/buses to get to work, maybe uses an elevator, visits a public cafeteria, doesn't wash their hands. How many people could be exposed in two days?
It might not be likely to happen, but if it does, how would you contain it?
With current consoles, these games can be patched. So not only is Ubi just pissing and moaning, but they could still find ways to dumb down the AI, remove NPC's, and find other ways to lower CPU load. Instead of changing their game to make it better, they fingerpoint at the thing that they cannot change.
No mod points, or I would have modded GP up.
An Ebola outbreak in the US is undesirable by pretty much everybody here, except maybe for people with stock in the companies producing cures and vaccines.
Travel bans seem entirely reasonable to me. If aid workers want to go over and help, then by all means we should have some sort of quarantine procedure in place so we can get them home. But we don't need Joe Schmoe going over there, getting infected, and bringing it back with him. It's an unnecessary risk, just as it is unnecessary to take a leisure trip to Liberia in the middle of an epidemic.
I am a little surprised that noone is fear mongering about someone intentionally spreading Ebola. It seems like the perfect thing to let loose in a country you are at odds with, whether you are another country or a terrorist organization.
Well, when the spec is "Glass doesn't crack when you drop it", and the glass cracks when you drop it, it shouldn't have taken the company until they were knee deep in shit to figure out that they couldn't deliver. They should have found out from the early prototypes that they had a problem.
There was a lot of money involved so they decided to play the game. They played, and they lost.
I get it, this is just another example of blame someone else rather than accept responsibility for your own actions.
Seems like a convenient way to avoid that this is a societal issue and not just an individual's personal failure.
Better that the EA model of "eh, fuck it; publish what we got and close the shop."
Starting out, it sounded like Blizzard really had something with Titan. Or at least they made it sound that way. I wouldn't mind seeing a half finished product, just to see what they had.
I would say there is nothing wrong with a project failing. I don't fund a project thinking "failure is not an option."
However, the projects I have had "fail" were not due to problems related to the project. Instead, funds disappeared, with nothing to account for them. Army Men playing cards had its funds disappear, about the same time the creator took a honeymoon. Somehow, he ended up finding the money and giving everyone a refund.
Another fail, still in progress, is the Asylum playing cards. Ed Nash took a lot of people's money and had the artwork for the cards. He never got the cards printed, and has offered very little in explanation for the status of the project, or where the money has gone. A legal case has started against him in Washington state.
In short, if a project tries, and fails, that's one thing. But if it is simply fraud, that is entirely unacceptable.
They're lighter too, so you need less energy all together.
Google tells me that a Tesla Model S weighs 4,464 or 4,647 lbs.
A 2008 Toyota Camry is supposedly 3307 lbs. A 2014 Camry is 3190.
I think any reduction in engine weight is made up for by the batteries.
Whatever you will spend on a new battery will be a lot less than what you pay to maintain your gas engine car over it's lifetime. There is already a robust market for rebuilt battery packs and that will baloon in the near future. (Not all cells go bad at the same time. Just replace the bad performing cells and you're good to go)
When your battery has diminished life due to age of the battery, you will not be replacing individual cells.
This post puts the cost of a battery for a Tesla S at $45k. Alternatively, it looks like you can pre-pay $12k when you get your car and get your replacement battery years later. http://www.teslamotors.com/en_...
I have no idea of what the availability is/will be for third party huge car batteries... It is a little bit of a specialty item.
I have a friend, a Comp Sci graduate no less, that can't see the endless utility of AI. His viewpoint is that you can simply program things to behave like they're intelligent, like these robots. He does not see the distinction, that an AI can be your friend, your researcher, your 24/7 slave/military tactician holed up underground somewhere. That it can do things without having to be programmed to do them.
I'm a little more concerned that the fact that Janet Jackson's led to over a million complains. Why are American's afraid of tits?! There wasn't even a nipple. I don't get it!
Because their football game was tits up and it wasn't even the second half.
One counter argument would be the small municipalities who don't get get broadband at all, despite already having the wire/fiber running through their town.
Another counter argument would be the lack of infrastructure upgrades, combined with overselling bandwidth, combined with Verizon not playing fair with Netflix.
As for offering service to out of towners - if a neighboring town wanted to buy service from my municipal broadband, and they were willing to create their own infrastructure to connect with mine, it doesn't sound too unreasonable.
So why has every environmental initiative in the past 40 years been pushed by the Democrats and resisted by the Republicans?
Why did "mega-corporate bitch" Obama introduce new carbon emissions rules in June that will cost energy producers a fortune?
What happened to your brain in the 60 minutes between your posts? At first you extoll the virtues of the Democrats, and now you claim your original post is about Democrats and Rebulicans being the same. Do you see the discontinuity?
GP has it right. The US was built disregarding the damage we were doing to the environment. Now that we're on top, its easy for us to tell people not to do things. But if anyone else wants to get ahead, they're going to do it the cheap and easy way. Without some sort of alternative financial incentive, greed will drive countries to disregard the environment to ensure their industry evolves. While you can point at Democrats and Republicans and call them angels or devils, the rest of the world is going to do what they want with regards to the environment (and there are a lot more of them than there are of us).
Min/maxing is half the fun of the game, unless it leaves the PCs woefully unbalanced between one another.
I'm not sure how you can have min/maxing without it unbalancing the PC's. It becomes an arms race between players to find the most powerful, game breaking combos. Spreadsheets, forums, and research on things that can be abused. It leaves the non min/maxers in the dust, and the GM has to find some way to tone up encounters without destroying everyone else.
Not the idea that if I'm going to be a wizard, I'm going to be the smartest guy around, or if I'm going to hit people in the face with my axe, then I'm going to be the biggest, toughest guy around. Those are totally viable character ideas, especially your first time playing before you've grown bored of the shallow archetypes. And yet, that's min-maxing.
You can roleplay the smartest/strongest guy around, or you can abuse the rule system to become the strongest/smartest guy around. When your level 5 character has godly powers to influence the game through some clever min/maxing, it really ruins the experience for others.
It's a broken system where in order to be an non-cliche character you have to be disadvantaged mechanically, because the game is build on archetype enforcement, that's the problem.
I'll give you this one. The upside, you can use min/maxing to offset your mechanical flaws. So my martial adept, Gravedigger, used a shovel as a weapon. He had a penalty to fight with it, but I was still able to game the system to still be overpowered.
On a side note, there were enough base classes in 3.5 that you could almost make whatever character you wanted by dipping into them a la carte. See my rogue/scout/ranger/fighter.
Under a joint drug enforcement task force that includes the DEA and Amtrakâ(TM)s own police agency, the task force can obtain Amtrak confidential passenger reservation information at no cost, the inspector generalâ(TM)s report said. Under an agreement, Amtrak police would receive a share of any money seized as a result of such drug task force investigations, and Amtrakâ(TM)s inspector general concluded that DEAâ(TM)s purchase of the passenger information deprived the Amtrak Police Department of money it would have received from resulting drug arrests.
So it may simply be that there was a lot of money to be made by screwing Amtrak out of it.