Somehow, that doesn't add up too well. If only 5% of the country's 2 million people (that's 100,000 to you and me) have internet, how is software piracy rampant? Wouldn't it only effect... umm... 5% of the population, MAX? Probably less than half of those are even capable enough to find places to download hacked software/keygens, so we're down to 50k people, 2.5%, max.
Or does that suggest that bootlegging, not illegal downloading, that is the piracy problem? Because, if people without internet are using pirated software, then they've bootlegged it from black markets/friends most likely. Maybe that's a good bit of information to refute the RIAA/MPAA's so called "facts" about internet piracy of their products, to help get them off bittorrent's back.
Apple has NOT taken over the P2P market. It is still as strong as ever. Apple captured the 95% of the population that wanted an easy legal way to get music that was compatible with what they currently had. Any other device will do the same when combined with another music service, apple simply marketed better than they had. Notice that the ipod didn't become popular until you could get itunes on a windows box and the tv commercials came out. The people that used to get music illegally still are.
Given the choice between paying $400 for a device and $2 a program and paying just $400 for a device and hooking it up to their PVR, people will take the cheaper road. Dish already has such a device and Comcast is on its way, so people that use those services (probably at least 50% of the population combined, if not more) will buy devices that are compatible with what they have. I'm sure there are people out there that will think "oooh shiny!", but when Dish sends you an advertisement or runs commercials saying "hey look! we have a device you can just plug right up and get TV on the go! And you don't have to PAY for the programs you take with you!", which the WILL do, then its a no brainer.
Supersonic long range air travel SHOULD be the way we are heading, but everyone's so freaking scared of them now because of the concorde crash, which was only fault of that airplane in a miniscule way. Seriously, I don't get what people are so scared of. The thing flew for over 30 years with only one crash that wasn't really its fault (re: debris on the runway flattened a tire which ruptured a fuel tank). Hell, in that time, how many passenger jets have gone down? dozens. And people still fly on those.
Engine tech is what made it so expensive. Above mach 1, turbojets get horridly inefficient and hard to maintain. What we need to do is progress to ramjet technology for the cruise, and turbojets for take off and landing. Rams will get you up to mach 5 if you want to push that far. And the whole thing could be hydrogen powered (required for higher machs and decent efficiency doing it). Mach 3 or 4 would be pretty ideal.
Everyone on slashdot has always whined about microsoft's monopoly. Now you all, and I'm speaking to all you who bought an ipod, bought right into another monopoly. Where's the logic? Its the same business model! Hell it may be worse! At least you can use firefox instead of IE, but you sure as hell can't get your songs from anywhere else, can you? (I'm talking about conveniently, which is what 95% of ipod owners would use, not some hack-and-slash conversion that the other 5% have the knowledge to do).
This is about taking the parents' ability to blame the video game manufacturers and putting the blame squarly on themselves for NOT BEING PARENTS! The sooner video game companies stop getting sued because stupid parents won't actually be parents and police what their children do, the sooner video game companies can spend less money defending shit like that and start making more games for less money.
It doesn't cost the retailers more, all they have to do is look at the back of the freakin box! And if some 12 year old is trying to buy GTA, well, don't let them! If mom buys it for them, then its mom's fault, not the retailer or the game maker. Mom can't try to cash in on the game company because her child shot someone.
Reguardless of whether or not the kids end up with the games anyway, it will now be the responsibility of the parents, and they won't be able to get out of it anymore. It IS a good thing.
And, ironically, parents seem to ignore the stickers and buy their kids these games/let their kids play these games anyway. And somehow its the game companies' fault.....come on people, why don't you try being parents huh? You know, actually RAISE your kids, instead of sitting them in front of the TV and doing your own thing, then getting pissed because you don't like what's on TV, where YOU PUT THEM!
According to the article, 62% of gamers are over 18. That's a decent majority, and you can't tell the game companies to stop making games for these people, that's against the constitution. All you can really do is.... umm... actually GET INVOLVED in your kids' lives and know what they are doing.
Sure, you sometimes have to do that. Now that you own a PS2, your wife wants a game that is only on Xbox or Nintendo and you simply have to tell her no, it won't work, and you can't have it. Does that make it better? No.
PC gaming represents a universal solution. If the game is developed properly, it can be played on almost any PC OS with a little work from the game company. Console makers won't do that because it takes away from their own console sales if they make it so they can run it on anything. PC game makers SHOULD do it because it opens up their customer base to people running Windows, Linux and Mac.
Granted there is a lot of difference in hardware for PCs out there that they have to work around sometimes, but the same can be said (at least partially) about having three different console platforms with completely different ways to do something. In contrast, with say a given graphics library, ANY video card can translate that into stuff happening on screen, even cross-platform. The same cannot be said about consoles.
Oh yeah, they'll give them all the money they need to get to space, USING THE SAME TECHNOLOGY AS THE APOLLO MISSIONS! I worked directly with a professor who had his hands on the X-43 project, and he told me that they were literally taking things out of museums to figure out how they did it back then. We lost all that knowledge when they canned/signifigantly cut the space program a long time ago. So NOW, they're canning ALL of their aeronautics stuff (the atmospheric experiments like the X-43, among others) to do this space bit. THEN, in 20 years when they want to start the aeronautics stuff back up, they'll be doing the same thing, like bureaucratic idiots. Anyone remember the almost Trillion dollar X-43 program they SOLD FOR SCRAP! Yeah, they're THAT stupid.
There is no reason to get in a hurry to go to mars, or even the moon for that matter. Neither of them are going to disappear in the next 100 years. What they need to do is steadily work towards anything that will help improve space travel, like programs such as the X-43 program. The more we know, the easier and cheaper it will get. But no, Bush gets a bug up his ass to go to mars, more than likely to take the public's mind off what's happening with the war, and oil, and the economic shitstorm we are in, just to name a few.
Apparently, some people didn't even bother to look at the aforementioned patent:
Scoring based upon goals achieved and subjective elements
Abstract
A scoring method and system for determining points in a game. Goal-based points are determined as a function of a player achieving a goal set by the player that is not predefined by the game and are used to determine the player's status in the game, such as whether the player advances to a next level. Subjective style points are awarded if the player performs feats of style that are not necessary tasks of the game, depend upon the type of game, and may include sliding, spinning, jumping, blocking an opponent, passing an opponent, and avoiding obstacles. Objective skill points may be combined with subjective style points and goal-based points. Alternatively, one of these three types of points may be modified as a function of one or both of the other two types of points.
This is used in tonds of games, and it's the stupidest patent ever granted. Patent Law like this cripples the gaming industry, making them pay fees for the smallest things if it were enforced. Now, patenting a rendering engine, that makes sense, but this? I don't think so.
It is really about liability. The idea that kids will be better off not playing violent video games is only a side-effect.
If little Timmy goes and kills his friend with a shovel because he saw it in a game he played, a game that he wasn't old enough to be playing, then its not the game company's fault, its the parent's fault for not policing what he is doing and/or whoever's fault who got him the game in the first place. Thus, people are forced to actually parent their children at least for the sake of being right in the eyes of the law.
I praise it, and hope it goes through for all states, because then game companies don't have to waste money defending themselves on stupid court cases that the parents don't want to take responsibility for, when it is in fact their fault. Then the game companies can continue to supply us with good games at a price that hasn't changed in 15 years.
I like the idea of paying say an extra 15, and getting 10 back when you recycle it. It's incentive for people to do it, just like with old soda bottles they used to take back and get 5 cents on. And they could test the monitors to see if they work ok and resell them for cheap. BUT, 10 is a lot of money to add to a monitor, close to 10% for a CRT and 5% for an LCD. And the other obvious question is are LCDs less waste than CRTs?
Wait, who throws this stuff away? I stockpile it. But I do agree that it should be prorated on the size/amount of PCB and whatnot in it. Maybe everything that comes out gets a recycling index number imprinted on the back, depending on how much waste it is and that number determines what you have to pay extra/what you get back when you recycle it.
I wonder if this has anything to do with a pole shift? I know the aurora are caused by solar wind particles coming down the tops of the magnetic field lines of the earth, and there have been theories for years about certain times in the history of the earth the poles flipped.
That's a fine idea, but until the other ~50% of the people with decent video cards, the ATi crowd, gets some reasonable linux driver support they won't buy them.
I had a 9600XT that would never, and I mean NEVER work right in Mandrake. I sold it and bought a Geforce FX 5900XT so I could actually use my Linux install to play games, and now I'm gonna try this out on it! Should be cool!
This game is what was missing in Freelancer, even though it was "open-ended" there was only so much you could do that was fun, it got old fast.
What needs to be done is to take all this new technology that is being used to build cheaper and better telescopes and put another one into orbit. Something that can replace the Hubble. Then we'd have hella good images and be able to see ALL forms of radiation.
Fact is, ground based telescopes are always going to be cheaper. But with this new and cheaper access to space tech maybe we can put something new up for a lot less money than a shuttle launch. And it can be bigger and better than hubble, so we can let that thing burn up and not have to maintain it anymore.
FWIW, it seems that NO2 is primary produced by cars. Moving to the hydrogen vehicles of the future may help stop almost all NO2 production.
except for the fact that even with hydrogen powered vehicles you're still burning air unless you're talking about fuel cell technology, which is still too young to be widely useful. So even if we switch to burning hydrogen, you've still gotta burn it with air, which is something like 70% nitrogen, so it won't make a difference.
anyway russia's regulations probably aren't as strict as they are here. I know that's an odd thing to say, that someone else is worse than us but it's true in a lot of places.
Ok the kid's claim is bullshit anyway, and we all know that. He's trying to pawn off responsibility, and the claim probably came from his parents or some shit anyway.
Fact 1: The game has an MA rating, so any kid under 17 or 18 is not able to buy it (ideally). So how could he even get such a game? Well in all probability his parent's bought it for him, so even if this was some derranged world where his claim was true, it's the fault and responsibility of the parents for knowing what this kid is playing and making sure he isn't playing things he's not supposed to.
Fact 2: The average age of a video game player is 28. You cannot tell a 28 year old what they can or can't play, so they can't get rid of these games. It's not our fault that stores and parents don't enforce the rating system, it's their responsibility.
I've got a great idea. What if we keep the electorial college, but they only get 50% of the total vote. The other 50% is determined by the popular vote.
So say a president gets 56% of the electorial college vote and 47% of the popular vote. That totals to 51.1% of the total vote and he wins. That way the vote can't be completely overpowered by the popular vote (they only control half) and at the same time gives the American people half the say in who gets to be president, instead of none of the say like right now.
I think the point has been made that that is not the case. Antarctica provides the best seeing conditions (minus the weather, which may be better or worse than ours). BUT earth built telescopes need to be set on solid, unmoving ground and Antarctica is covered in at least a few thousand feet of snow which would probably be the most unperdictable surface you could try to build on.
Added to that the fact that you can only see half the sky. This is why the Keck array is built in Hawaii, you get ALL of the sky. And we can't build one in the south and one in the north, because the arctic circle is even more unpredictable than Antarctica. Space telescopes are the best solution, we just need a stronger presence in space i.e. lunar bases or even lunar based telescopes.
Sounds like complete BS, but on the other hand if it even works reasonably well it would be a step up from anything we've got now.
Say it took 10% of your resources to run this thing, and the rest could be devoted to the program, that's only a big deal in the most absolutely recent high load games and programs. The rest of the midrange stuff where we normally work would run great. So it is possible that this could be a great thing, some will just have to try it and report back.
a lot of people believe that the 65m impact was centered over land NOT covered by ice and snow, as in the central point in which all current continents used to be connected (pangea).
That impact would have crushed mountains and created enormous amounts of dust from them. The 780k impact hit a huge block of ice and snow, i.e. no dust to scatter in the first place. I really doubt it would have affected any land life at all, antarctica being so far from land inhabited by anything more than penguins and stuff. Ocean life probably got pretty roughed up at least close to the impact.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, that doesn't add up too well. If only 5% of the country's 2 million people (that's 100,000 to you and me) have internet, how is software piracy rampant? Wouldn't it only effect ... umm ... 5% of the population, MAX? Probably less than half of those are even capable enough to find places to download hacked software/keygens, so we're down to 50k people, 2.5%, max.
Or does that suggest that bootlegging, not illegal downloading, that is the piracy problem? Because, if people without internet are using pirated software, then they've bootlegged it from black markets/friends most likely. Maybe that's a good bit of information to refute the RIAA/MPAA's so called "facts" about internet piracy of their products, to help get them off bittorrent's back.
I'm not counting on that though....
Apple has NOT taken over the P2P market. It is still as strong as ever. Apple captured the 95% of the population that wanted an easy legal way to get music that was compatible with what they currently had. Any other device will do the same when combined with another music service, apple simply marketed better than they had. Notice that the ipod didn't become popular until you could get itunes on a windows box and the tv commercials came out. The people that used to get music illegally still are.
Given the choice between paying $400 for a device and $2 a program and paying just $400 for a device and hooking it up to their PVR, people will take the cheaper road. Dish already has such a device and Comcast is on its way, so people that use those services (probably at least 50% of the population combined, if not more) will buy devices that are compatible with what they have. I'm sure there are people out there that will think "oooh shiny!", but when Dish sends you an advertisement or runs commercials saying "hey look! we have a device you can just plug right up and get TV on the go! And you don't have to PAY for the programs you take with you!", which the WILL do, then its a no brainer.
Supersonic long range air travel SHOULD be the way we are heading, but everyone's so freaking scared of them now because of the concorde crash, which was only fault of that airplane in a miniscule way. Seriously, I don't get what people are so scared of. The thing flew for over 30 years with only one crash that wasn't really its fault (re: debris on the runway flattened a tire which ruptured a fuel tank). Hell, in that time, how many passenger jets have gone down? dozens. And people still fly on those.
Engine tech is what made it so expensive. Above mach 1, turbojets get horridly inefficient and hard to maintain. What we need to do is progress to ramjet technology for the cruise, and turbojets for take off and landing. Rams will get you up to mach 5 if you want to push that far. And the whole thing could be hydrogen powered (required for higher machs and decent efficiency doing it). Mach 3 or 4 would be pretty ideal.
Am I the only one that read this as "No one has created the market so that we can come in and steal it with our massive marketing power"?
Creative has two video-capable portable players already. This one:o ry=210&subcategory=&product=12985&nav=technicalSpe cifications
g ory=213&subcategory=215&product=14067
http://us.creative.com/products/product.asp?categ
has a nice set of supporting video file types and is similar in size and price to the bigger ipods that are already out. Then there's this one:
http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?cate
that is a smaller, flash-based player.
Everyone on slashdot has always whined about microsoft's monopoly. Now you all, and I'm speaking to all you who bought an ipod, bought right into another monopoly. Where's the logic? Its the same business model! Hell it may be worse! At least you can use firefox instead of IE, but you sure as hell can't get your songs from anywhere else, can you? (I'm talking about conveniently, which is what 95% of ipod owners would use, not some hack-and-slash conversion that the other 5% have the knowledge to do).
That's not what this is about.
This is about taking the parents' ability to blame the video game manufacturers and putting the blame squarly on themselves for NOT BEING PARENTS! The sooner video game companies stop getting sued because stupid parents won't actually be parents and police what their children do, the sooner video game companies can spend less money defending shit like that and start making more games for less money.
It doesn't cost the retailers more, all they have to do is look at the back of the freakin box! And if some 12 year old is trying to buy GTA, well, don't let them! If mom buys it for them, then its mom's fault, not the retailer or the game maker. Mom can't try to cash in on the game company because her child shot someone.
Reguardless of whether or not the kids end up with the games anyway, it will now be the responsibility of the parents, and they won't be able to get out of it anymore. It IS a good thing.
And, ironically, parents seem to ignore the stickers and buy their kids these games/let their kids play these games anyway. And somehow its the game companies' fault.....come on people, why don't you try being parents huh? You know, actually RAISE your kids, instead of sitting them in front of the TV and doing your own thing, then getting pissed because you don't like what's on TV, where YOU PUT THEM!
.... umm ... actually GET INVOLVED in your kids' lives and know what they are doing.
According to the article, 62% of gamers are over 18. That's a decent majority, and you can't tell the game companies to stop making games for these people, that's against the constitution. All you can really do is
Sure, you sometimes have to do that. Now that you own a PS2, your wife wants a game that is only on Xbox or Nintendo and you simply have to tell her no, it won't work, and you can't have it. Does that make it better? No.
PC gaming represents a universal solution. If the game is developed properly, it can be played on almost any PC OS with a little work from the game company. Console makers won't do that because it takes away from their own console sales if they make it so they can run it on anything. PC game makers SHOULD do it because it opens up their customer base to people running Windows, Linux and Mac.
Granted there is a lot of difference in hardware for PCs out there that they have to work around sometimes, but the same can be said (at least partially) about having three different console platforms with completely different ways to do something. In contrast, with say a given graphics library, ANY video card can translate that into stuff happening on screen, even cross-platform. The same cannot be said about consoles.
Oh yeah, they'll give them all the money they need to get to space, USING THE SAME TECHNOLOGY AS THE APOLLO MISSIONS! I worked directly with a professor who had his hands on the X-43 project, and he told me that they were literally taking things out of museums to figure out how they did it back then. We lost all that knowledge when they canned/signifigantly cut the space program a long time ago. So NOW, they're canning ALL of their aeronautics stuff (the atmospheric experiments like the X-43, among others) to do this space bit. THEN, in 20 years when they want to start the aeronautics stuff back up, they'll be doing the same thing, like bureaucratic idiots. Anyone remember the almost Trillion dollar X-43 program they SOLD FOR SCRAP! Yeah, they're THAT stupid.
There is no reason to get in a hurry to go to mars, or even the moon for that matter. Neither of them are going to disappear in the next 100 years. What they need to do is steadily work towards anything that will help improve space travel, like programs such as the X-43 program. The more we know, the easier and cheaper it will get. But no, Bush gets a bug up his ass to go to mars, more than likely to take the public's mind off what's happening with the war, and oil, and the economic shitstorm we are in, just to name a few.
Apparently, some people didn't even bother to look at the aforementioned patent:
Scoring based upon goals achieved and subjective elements
Abstract
A scoring method and system for determining points in a game. Goal-based points are determined as a function of a player achieving a goal set by the player that is not predefined by the game and are used to determine the player's status in the game, such as whether the player advances to a next level. Subjective style points are awarded if the player performs feats of style that are not necessary tasks of the game, depend upon the type of game, and may include sliding, spinning, jumping, blocking an opponent, passing an opponent, and avoiding obstacles. Objective skill points may be combined with subjective style points and goal-based points. Alternatively, one of these three types of points may be modified as a function of one or both of the other two types of points.
This is used in tonds of games, and it's the stupidest patent ever granted. Patent Law like this cripples the gaming industry, making them pay fees for the smallest things if it were enforced. Now, patenting a rendering engine, that makes sense, but this? I don't think so.
They're speed holes, they make the computer go faster....
EFF lawyer Wendy Seltzer
"The broadcast flag bears about as much relation to the FCC's mandate as dishwashers."
first it was washing machines, now its dishwashers.....
It is really about liability. The idea that kids will be better off not playing violent video games is only a side-effect.
If little Timmy goes and kills his friend with a shovel because he saw it in a game he played, a game that he wasn't old enough to be playing, then its not the game company's fault, its the parent's fault for not policing what he is doing and/or whoever's fault who got him the game in the first place. Thus, people are forced to actually parent their children at least for the sake of being right in the eyes of the law.
I praise it, and hope it goes through for all states, because then game companies don't have to waste money defending themselves on stupid court cases that the parents don't want to take responsibility for, when it is in fact their fault. Then the game companies can continue to supply us with good games at a price that hasn't changed in 15 years.
I like the idea of paying say an extra 15, and getting 10 back when you recycle it. It's incentive for people to do it, just like with old soda bottles they used to take back and get 5 cents on. And they could test the monitors to see if they work ok and resell them for cheap. BUT, 10 is a lot of money to add to a monitor, close to 10% for a CRT and 5% for an LCD. And the other obvious question is are LCDs less waste than CRTs?
Wait, who throws this stuff away? I stockpile it. But I do agree that it should be prorated on the size/amount of PCB and whatnot in it. Maybe everything that comes out gets a recycling index number imprinted on the back, depending on how much waste it is and that number determines what you have to pay extra/what you get back when you recycle it.
I wonder if this has anything to do with a pole shift? I know the aurora are caused by solar wind particles coming down the tops of the magnetic field lines of the earth, and there have been theories for years about certain times in the history of the earth the poles flipped.
I guess it's possible anyway......
That's a fine idea, but until the other ~50% of the people with decent video cards, the ATi crowd, gets some reasonable linux driver support they won't buy them.
I had a 9600XT that would never, and I mean NEVER work right in Mandrake. I sold it and bought a Geforce FX 5900XT so I could actually use my Linux install to play games, and now I'm gonna try this out on it! Should be cool!
This game is what was missing in Freelancer, even though it was "open-ended" there was only so much you could do that was fun, it got old fast.
What needs to be done is to take all this new technology that is being used to build cheaper and better telescopes and put another one into orbit. Something that can replace the Hubble. Then we'd have hella good images and be able to see ALL forms of radiation.
Fact is, ground based telescopes are always going to be cheaper. But with this new and cheaper access to space tech maybe we can put something new up for a lot less money than a shuttle launch. And it can be bigger and better than hubble, so we can let that thing burn up and not have to maintain it anymore.
FWIW, it seems that NO2 is primary produced by cars. Moving to the hydrogen vehicles of the future may help stop almost all NO2 production.
except for the fact that even with hydrogen powered vehicles you're still burning air unless you're talking about fuel cell technology, which is still too young to be widely useful. So even if we switch to burning hydrogen, you've still gotta burn it with air, which is something like 70% nitrogen, so it won't make a difference.
already killed it!
anyway russia's regulations probably aren't as strict as they are here. I know that's an odd thing to say, that someone else is worse than us but it's true in a lot of places.
Ok the kid's claim is bullshit anyway, and we all know that. He's trying to pawn off responsibility, and the claim probably came from his parents or some shit anyway.
Fact 1: The game has an MA rating, so any kid under 17 or 18 is not able to buy it (ideally). So how could he even get such a game? Well in all probability his parent's bought it for him, so even if this was some derranged world where his claim was true, it's the fault and responsibility of the parents for knowing what this kid is playing and making sure he isn't playing things he's not supposed to.
Fact 2: The average age of a video game player is 28. You cannot tell a 28 year old what they can or can't play, so they can't get rid of these games. It's not our fault that stores and parents don't enforce the rating system, it's their responsibility.
I've got a great idea. What if we keep the electorial college, but they only get 50% of the total vote. The other 50% is determined by the popular vote.
So say a president gets 56% of the electorial college vote and 47% of the popular vote. That totals to 51.1% of the total vote and he wins. That way the vote can't be completely overpowered by the popular vote (they only control half) and at the same time gives the American people half the say in who gets to be president, instead of none of the say like right now.
I think the point has been made that that is not the case. Antarctica provides the best seeing conditions (minus the weather, which may be better or worse than ours). BUT earth built telescopes need to be set on solid, unmoving ground and Antarctica is covered in at least a few thousand feet of snow which would probably be the most unperdictable surface you could try to build on.
Added to that the fact that you can only see half the sky. This is why the Keck array is built in Hawaii, you get ALL of the sky. And we can't build one in the south and one in the north, because the arctic circle is even more unpredictable than Antarctica. Space telescopes are the best solution, we just need a stronger presence in space i.e. lunar bases or even lunar based telescopes.
Sounds like complete BS, but on the other hand if it even works reasonably well it would be a step up from anything we've got now.
Say it took 10% of your resources to run this thing, and the rest could be devoted to the program, that's only a big deal in the most absolutely recent high load games and programs. The rest of the midrange stuff where we normally work would run great. So it is possible that this could be a great thing, some will just have to try it and report back.
a lot of people believe that the 65m impact was centered over land NOT covered by ice and snow, as in the central point in which all current continents used to be connected (pangea).
That impact would have crushed mountains and created enormous amounts of dust from them. The 780k impact hit a huge block of ice and snow, i.e. no dust to scatter in the first place. I really doubt it would have affected any land life at all, antarctica being so far from land inhabited by anything more than penguins and stuff. Ocean life probably got pretty roughed up at least close to the impact.