Like most strange things about the moon landing video, it's the result of a complete lack of atmosphere. There's no resistance on the dust. When we kick up dust on Earth, most of it goes up into the air as the amount of force air movement provides is more than the pull of gravity. Remove the air, and it just goes plop.
The odds that the moon landing was faked are about as high as my not submitting this post. And the odds that the American government is successfully running a conspiracy are about as high as the odds that the American government can run anything else competently.
Which appears to be an apology from Slashdot for being strongarmed, and how to find the comment, plus lots of other 'Scientology are evil pricks' links. On the balance, I don't see the problem.
That was true five years ago, but no longer. With the amount of competitive alternate browsers out there, and the new rise of the iMac, the standard is the W3C. While most web developers will put in extra effort to work around IE's bugs, they're starting from W3C-standard webpages and kludging in IE support, not (as it worked years ago) building pages that worked in IE first then trying to make them work on Netscape later if at all.
Does anyone find it really, really odd how much of a sensation Ron Paul has been on the internet considering that he's completely against net neutrality?
I remember reading an article where various consumer devices were put through their paces, including the original Game Boy Advance. Apparently they ran a car over the GBA and it still booted up. They had to shotgun it in the face to kill it completely.
I've heard people having considerable success with wiring up devices to be used as a new 'sense' - for instance, a belt that placed pressure on the northern-most part of the body, used to give the wearer a rock-solid sense of direction. I can imagine that it's really the same thing going on for tool users.
"So, like what, if you are about the art, the only value your art can have is along monetary lines?"
Not exactly, but if you're making money from art, it's natural enough to assume that art that is 'better' will sell better. Most of these types of executives know that pap that has a large audience will likely do better than a great film for a limited audience, but the problem here is that people are saying that it's the artists themselves, and not what they create, that is the valuable thing, and that's so against their thinking, that it's the quality of the art that makes it valuable. It's a perfectly understandable position - I mean, how many actors and artists do you see mouthing off against subjects they know nothing about, and these cokeheads are supposed to be the valuable ones?
It took the RIAA members about ten years to get from music being shared on the Net to condoning some kind of online store. It's taken the MPAA members, what, about four? Assuming, of course, that iTunes is the first online store to get some kind of wide approval from the various copyright holders for both examples.
Admittedly the root cause is not that the RIAA/MPAA is inherently evil - they're just PR people, mostly (which negates the whole 'they're not the evil ones' argument but bear with me for a second) - it's the member corporations that have the lawyers that are doing the suing and refuse to change their business model to respond to the market. The root cause of the problem here is that it absolutely blindsided the executives, and they had no-one at any kind of level who could tell them what was going on and what they needed to do about it to respond sensibly to the challenges the Internet posed. These executives didn't give a toss about computers, and frankly who could blame them, they're executives of music and movie companies and actually giving a toss about the industry they're in was seen as being revolutionary.
Instead, they reasoned that they'd be inevitably be reeled in by some kind of conman who came in and spoke big words about Internet at them if they tried doing something, and bunkered down and fought like old men. It's a big paradigm shift to think of one's product as essentially a PR stunt to sell peripheral stuff like concerts and DVDs, and for both those who are about the money and didn't want to experiment with new business models, and those who are about the art and didn't want their 'product' becoming essentially worthless, it's a challenge they aren't up to facing.
So as long as you don't claim a copyright, someone else can take your work that you've not claimed as yours - those that can afford to become copyright holders - and copyright what is essentially your work? And then make money off it?
I'm not sure what the objection to implicit copyright is in the first place. Perhaps it's to stop people from being able to sign their copyrights over to holders (like a movie studio), but that kills the concept of work-for-hire. Most Hollywood writers don't work-for-hire anyway, they sign over their rights when they sell the work so they're no longer involved in the process.
Nice thought, but frankly it doesn't solve the issue at hand and impacts lots of people who don't need to be.
That's how we started - we've been successful enough that we can have part-time employees, and we're not far away from the two lead developers being able to quit their day jobs and live the dream. (I'm one of the part-timers.)
I guess that's what it's all about, really - being able to make a living doing something you love. It's hard not to take it personally when others don't see it the same way.
You bring up the 360 - I'm not entirely convinced that'll work out, as it's expensive to get on the 360 and get an ESRB rating. We'd love to do it, but it just doesn't make sense for the sorts of sales we'd get from the 360 audience. I remember that Space Giraffe didn't sell all that well, being a fairly niche game, and we're kind of in the same boat (although I don't think we're nearly as weird).
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The only reason they'd go and pirate our game is because that's where they're used to going to get things. They can play for free and no-one'll look down on them - heck, it's been a pretty good business model so far - so honestly I doubt we can make it any more attractive. Sometimes people are dicks, I guess.
We do have stuff in place so that we can tell who is actually supporting us, and we sell online services as well so we're not completely out when people grab the media for free, but still.
I note that our game's up on The Pirate Bay for people to download (http://www.caravelgames.com). So, uh, it's not just the big bad RIAA that they're thumbing their nose at, it's everyone who tries to make some kind of money from content. They don't care who they hurt.
I mean, it's not like we're even being that unreasonable. The engine's open source under the MPL (http://www.caravelgames.com/sourcecode.html), and the 'demo' has no time-limit, contains the game's editor and can export and import the hundreds of free levels the game's fans have created. The only thing we're selling is the media we've actually created to sell, 'premium content' if you will. Really, the only reason you'd have to pirate the game is to take away a sale from a bunch of guys who wanted to make the sort of game they don't really make any more. It's a dick move.
It's a shame that the Pirate Bay are being set up as these renegade folk heroes, but I guess that's what happens when a smaller villain tweaks the nose of a larger one.
But see, incompetence would attempt to avoid having to do any unnecessary work. Clearly someone at WoTC had some kind of vision that suggested that a talent tree was the way to go and I wanted to know the story behind that.
Speaking of World of Dungeons of Warcraft - we've seen from Blizzard's use of the talent trees in Diablo II and World of Warcraft that talent trees are notoriously difficult to balance. It's an exercise in balancing power in three dimensions - making sure a talent is appropriate when compared to other talents in its tree, to other talents in the same place for other trees the player has access to, and to other talents the player doesn't have access to. It's taken years for Blizzard to get the talent trees in World of Warcraft to a somewhat balanced state for many of its classes, and they've broken some of the balanced trees along the way.
How do WotC plan to deal with this, seeing as they don't have the luxury of issuing a patch every couple of months to fix issues that come up in playtesting? What made them decide that a talent tree was the way to go over more traditional methods of character advancement in tabletop roleplaying?
Just so long as you're forced to laugh at my black joke. After all, if you won't join in making fun of black people, you're just a stick-in-the-mud, right?
As my sibling comment says, solar, wind, geothermal and hydro simply aren't ready for prime-time. They can't generate enough energy to support a developed country; moreover, most of these technologies are developing, so any large investments in them will end up being seriously dated in as little as twenty years, maybe even ten. Hardly as forward-thinking as some suggest.
Besides, both solar and geothermal are nuclear reactions anyway.
"These laptops give them the opportunity to learn, and to share good ideas amongst themselves, ideas that may help them run their farm at a greater profit, or save time and labor."
So do textbooks, except that the textbooks also have the benefit of being useful fertiliser.
Frankly, I can't see these laptops being particularly useful in third-world countries at all. Now, developing countries, on the other hand - South America, North Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia, I can see an extremely cheap computer being useful, because people there have the luxury of time that the third world does not have.
"rigged phone polls, microphone amplified ridicule at debates, online poll result skewing..."...his insane Fortress America policies...
"Also he seems to be one of the ONLY candidates who is for radically smaller government, something all the other politicians and corporate sponsors definitely don't want..."
The politicians might, but the corporate sponsors definitely want smaller government. I mean, smaller government inevitably means less powerful government, which means power vaccuum, and guess who's going to fill that power vaccuum?
I'd like to see efficient government, personally. In some cases this means smaller government, in others, larger. Almost universally it means that strongarming and spying on regular citizens is a waste of resources.
Well, I'm sure that your heart monitoring software is far more complex than an operating system that has to deal with thousands of possible computer configurations and marshall memory and files to boot. How hard can it be to write an operating system, right? I mean, those Lunix guys did it in a couple of days, and it works absolutely flawlessly!
Slashdot Mirror
Like most strange things about the moon landing video, it's the result of a complete lack of atmosphere. There's no resistance on the dust. When we kick up dust on Earth, most of it goes up into the air as the amount of force air movement provides is more than the pull of gravity. Remove the air, and it just goes plop.
oh geez not this shit again.
The odds that the moon landing was faked are about as high as my not submitting this post. And the odds that the American government is successfully running a conspiracy are about as high as the odds that the American government can run anything else competently.
"In the face of widespread, escalating online piracy, music sales dropped to $11.5 billion in 2006 from a peak in 1999 of nearly $15 billion."
This has got less to do with piracy and more to do with Amy Winehouse's crack bill.
It's like the Jetsons in article form.
I see this: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/16/1256226
Which appears to be an apology from Slashdot for being strongarmed, and how to find the comment, plus lots of other 'Scientology are evil pricks' links. On the balance, I don't see the problem.
That was true five years ago, but no longer. With the amount of competitive alternate browsers out there, and the new rise of the iMac, the standard is the W3C. While most web developers will put in extra effort to work around IE's bugs, they're starting from W3C-standard webpages and kludging in IE support, not (as it worked years ago) building pages that worked in IE first then trying to make them work on Netscape later if at all.
Does anyone find it really, really odd how much of a sensation Ron Paul has been on the internet considering that he's completely against net neutrality?
I remember reading an article where various consumer devices were put through their paces, including the original Game Boy Advance. Apparently they ran a car over the GBA and it still booted up. They had to shotgun it in the face to kill it completely.
I've heard people having considerable success with wiring up devices to be used as a new 'sense' - for instance, a belt that placed pressure on the northern-most part of the body, used to give the wearer a rock-solid sense of direction. I can imagine that it's really the same thing going on for tool users.
"So, like what, if you are about the art, the only value your art can have is along monetary lines?"
Not exactly, but if you're making money from art, it's natural enough to assume that art that is 'better' will sell better. Most of these types of executives know that pap that has a large audience will likely do better than a great film for a limited audience, but the problem here is that people are saying that it's the artists themselves, and not what they create, that is the valuable thing, and that's so against their thinking, that it's the quality of the art that makes it valuable. It's a perfectly understandable position - I mean, how many actors and artists do you see mouthing off against subjects they know nothing about, and these cokeheads are supposed to be the valuable ones?
It took the RIAA members about ten years to get from music being shared on the Net to condoning some kind of online store. It's taken the MPAA members, what, about four? Assuming, of course, that iTunes is the first online store to get some kind of wide approval from the various copyright holders for both examples.
Admittedly the root cause is not that the RIAA/MPAA is inherently evil - they're just PR people, mostly (which negates the whole 'they're not the evil ones' argument but bear with me for a second) - it's the member corporations that have the lawyers that are doing the suing and refuse to change their business model to respond to the market. The root cause of the problem here is that it absolutely blindsided the executives, and they had no-one at any kind of level who could tell them what was going on and what they needed to do about it to respond sensibly to the challenges the Internet posed. These executives didn't give a toss about computers, and frankly who could blame them, they're executives of music and movie companies and actually giving a toss about the industry they're in was seen as being revolutionary.
Instead, they reasoned that they'd be inevitably be reeled in by some kind of conman who came in and spoke big words about Internet at them if they tried doing something, and bunkered down and fought like old men. It's a big paradigm shift to think of one's product as essentially a PR stunt to sell peripheral stuff like concerts and DVDs, and for both those who are about the money and didn't want to experiment with new business models, and those who are about the art and didn't want their 'product' becoming essentially worthless, it's a challenge they aren't up to facing.
So as long as you don't claim a copyright, someone else can take your work that you've not claimed as yours - those that can afford to become copyright holders - and copyright what is essentially your work? And then make money off it?
I'm not sure what the objection to implicit copyright is in the first place. Perhaps it's to stop people from being able to sign their copyrights over to holders (like a movie studio), but that kills the concept of work-for-hire. Most Hollywood writers don't work-for-hire anyway, they sign over their rights when they sell the work so they're no longer involved in the process.
Nice thought, but frankly it doesn't solve the issue at hand and impacts lots of people who don't need to be.
That's how we started - we've been successful enough that we can have part-time employees, and we're not far away from the two lead developers being able to quit their day jobs and live the dream. (I'm one of the part-timers.)
I guess that's what it's all about, really - being able to make a living doing something you love. It's hard not to take it personally when others don't see it the same way.
You bring up the 360 - I'm not entirely convinced that'll work out, as it's expensive to get on the 360 and get an ESRB rating. We'd love to do it, but it just doesn't make sense for the sorts of sales we'd get from the 360 audience. I remember that Space Giraffe didn't sell all that well, being a fairly niche game, and we're kind of in the same boat (although I don't think we're nearly as weird).
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The only reason they'd go and pirate our game is because that's where they're used to going to get things. They can play for free and no-one'll look down on them - heck, it's been a pretty good business model so far - so honestly I doubt we can make it any more attractive. Sometimes people are dicks, I guess.
We do have stuff in place so that we can tell who is actually supporting us, and we sell online services as well so we're not completely out when people grab the media for free, but still.
We've actually done this before. Sometimes it works, other times we get told to take a hike, fatcats, information wants to be freeeeeeeee
Man, I wish that being mistaken for RIAA lawyers meant that I got paid the same as them.
I note that our game's up on The Pirate Bay for people to download (http://www.caravelgames.com). So, uh, it's not just the big bad RIAA that they're thumbing their nose at, it's everyone who tries to make some kind of money from content. They don't care who they hurt.
I mean, it's not like we're even being that unreasonable. The engine's open source under the MPL (http://www.caravelgames.com/sourcecode.html), and the 'demo' has no time-limit, contains the game's editor and can export and import the hundreds of free levels the game's fans have created. The only thing we're selling is the media we've actually created to sell, 'premium content' if you will. Really, the only reason you'd have to pirate the game is to take away a sale from a bunch of guys who wanted to make the sort of game they don't really make any more. It's a dick move.
It's a shame that the Pirate Bay are being set up as these renegade folk heroes, but I guess that's what happens when a smaller villain tweaks the nose of a larger one.
But see, incompetence would attempt to avoid having to do any unnecessary work. Clearly someone at WoTC had some kind of vision that suggested that a talent tree was the way to go and I wanted to know the story behind that.
Speaking of World of Dungeons of Warcraft - we've seen from Blizzard's use of the talent trees in Diablo II and World of Warcraft that talent trees are notoriously difficult to balance. It's an exercise in balancing power in three dimensions - making sure a talent is appropriate when compared to other talents in its tree, to other talents in the same place for other trees the player has access to, and to other talents the player doesn't have access to. It's taken years for Blizzard to get the talent trees in World of Warcraft to a somewhat balanced state for many of its classes, and they've broken some of the balanced trees along the way.
How do WotC plan to deal with this, seeing as they don't have the luxury of issuing a patch every couple of months to fix issues that come up in playtesting? What made them decide that a talent tree was the way to go over more traditional methods of character advancement in tabletop roleplaying?
Just so long as you're forced to laugh at my black joke. After all, if you won't join in making fun of black people, you're just a stick-in-the-mud, right?
As my sibling comment says, solar, wind, geothermal and hydro simply aren't ready for prime-time. They can't generate enough energy to support a developed country; moreover, most of these technologies are developing, so any large investments in them will end up being seriously dated in as little as twenty years, maybe even ten. Hardly as forward-thinking as some suggest.
Besides, both solar and geothermal are nuclear reactions anyway.
"These laptops give them the opportunity to learn, and to share good ideas amongst themselves, ideas that may help them run their farm at a greater profit, or save time and labor."
So do textbooks, except that the textbooks also have the benefit of being useful fertiliser.
Frankly, I can't see these laptops being particularly useful in third-world countries at all. Now, developing countries, on the other hand - South America, North Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia, I can see an extremely cheap computer being useful, because people there have the luxury of time that the third world does not have.
"rigged phone polls, microphone amplified ridicule at debates, online poll result skewing..." ...his insane Fortress America policies...
"Also he seems to be one of the ONLY candidates who is for radically smaller government, something all the other politicians and corporate sponsors definitely don't want..."
The politicians might, but the corporate sponsors definitely want smaller government. I mean, smaller government inevitably means less powerful government, which means power vaccuum, and guess who's going to fill that power vaccuum?
I'd like to see efficient government, personally. In some cases this means smaller government, in others, larger. Almost universally it means that strongarming and spying on regular citizens is a waste of resources.
I don't think there's been much of an increase, feels like it's been going on since the Crusades.
Personally, I'm looking forward to MP3.11 for Workgroups.
Well, I'm sure that your heart monitoring software is far more complex than an operating system that has to deal with thousands of possible computer configurations and marshall memory and files to boot. How hard can it be to write an operating system, right? I mean, those Lunix guys did it in a couple of days, and it works absolutely flawlessly!