For me Halloween absolutely does not mean little smiling kids saying trick or treat. For me halloween invariably means bands, no mobs of teenagers throwing eggs, launching firecrackers, assaulting my friends and neighbours, and law enforcement generally allowing the night, and the surrounding week, to become a sort of suburbian version of biblical anarchy. Great.
The IQ of a mob is that of its lowest member divided by the number of people in a mob. teenagers tend to become even more reckless, vindictive and violent when they have an audience of their peers. Teenagers are largely minors, and thus are granted huge lienience in the eyes of the law. Add all this up and you essentially get what we had around here last Halloween. Namely, assaults, property damage, vandalism and not a few people in hospital, and not one prosecution.
I'm a liberal person. I believe in personal freedoms. So it really gets my goat when a bunch of parents, put my liberties in jeopardy but giving their offspring carte blanc to run riot because of some old pagan festival. If there was a curfew on Halloween, I would be a lot more outraged than relieved.
Forget geek party gadgets! I need an article explaining how to set up concealed wireless night vision and infrared cameras all over my house and neighbourhood so on November the 1st I can, with the biggest of smiles on my face, walk into the local police stations( and newspaper offices) with high definition pictures of the 'carte blanc' brigades' little angels, engaged gleefully in criminal acts.
I'd like to see what the pro-nuke side has to say about dealing with the environmental effects of this part of the system.
They'll insist, insist mind you, that the harmful effects due to the waste are exaggerated. "It's all Hype!" they'll say. "Oil and Coal are worse" they'll say.
I'll wait to hear what Greenpeace have to say. They mightn't be the most neutral organisation in the world, but it'll be interesting to see which they think is worse.
I'm reading a lot about countries, Britan, Finland the US etc, pushing nuclear energy as a "safer", "cleaner" alternative. It's a PR stunt.
Nuclear energy is cheap. That's about all you can say for it.
As to safety. Well relative to single other form of electricity generation, nuclear power is the most dangerous. A coal plant's worst case scenario is a giant smog cloud. A nuclear plants worst case scenario is the permanent evacuation of the highly populated region surrounding Chernobyl, and a significant rise in lukemia rates, etc, etc. "That'll NEVER happen" I hear them say already. "Not with modern technology and computeeeerssss....". Oh Dear.
Cleaner? Coal and gas give off Carbon oxides and other nasties. Yes this is a problem. But nuclear power gives us all that lovely radioactive waste which quite simply has to be thrown in big holes and the lid sealed up for over 40,000 years!
40,000 years is just the half life of uranium! Is the UK even going to be around in 40,000 years. Offtopic, don't answer that. But riddle me this. How many engineering firms can build a nuclear waste disposal site that can be guaranteed to contain the radioactivity for 40,000 years. If you can find one, I've got this bridge...
Oh, but oil and gas are contributing to the greenhouse effect! Well yes they are, but does that justify building more reactors, generating more nuclear waste, AND more nuclear warheads? There' this thing called the sun. Provides loads of energy. The Wind! Water? Is nothing else viable? Well they work..... but Nuclear are much cheaper!
And nuclear plants ARE cheap. No question about it. Yes. Very cheap. No more oil importing. Cost reductions. Balence of Trade. What's a few nuclear drums? Yes. Very, very cheap.
Let's not forget that any rollout of IPv6 aware devices is going to be plauged by patent litigation. Turns out that just before its release, and lot of "Intellectual Property" "Firms" simply guessed the IPv6 standard, or parts of it, and bought^H^H^H^H^H^Happlied for corresponding patents from the USPTO rubber stamping office.
That means for around the next 20 years we'll have the whole RSA debaucle played all over again in the IPv6 sphere. Expect to see "Innovative Ideas" lawsuits gouging money from OS makers and especially makers of routers(esp consumer grade) and other networking devices.
Look on the bright side thought. With any luck, we'll run out of IPv4 addresses before the litigation finishes, and then someone really WILL have to do something about it!
The messanger [sic] in this case asserted his authority with his "I'm 99.9% certain" business and didn't give anything in the way of actual evidence.
I was giving my opinion, not exerting my authority. I can see no reason that anyone, anyone, would have considered my post to have been anything other than a lone, personal statement.
I would also note, that I did give my reasons for my opinion by referring to the SARS outbreak, and the media hype surrounding that.
Amid all the attacks on my credentials, and misuse of the term "antibiotics", everyone seems to have forgotten that my primary point was that the threat and outcome of any pandemic, has been greatly exaggerated and hyped by the media. So many people have jumped on the hype bandwagon, that people have had to urged to calm down, as stated in the linked article.
I remain skeptical of the pessimistic predictions of the possibilty of the outbreak. And I remain especially contemptuous of the current reckless and unjustified media scaremongering surrounding this issue, which is being motivated by ratings based profit. And unless I can see concrete evidence to the contrary, I consider a highly lethal pandemic in _western_ society, relatively improbable.
Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!!! There's a slight possibilty that this virus could mutate to pass from a bird to a human. And if that happens there's a slight possibilty that the virus could then mutate to pass from human to human. And if that happens there's a slight chance of a pandemic along the lines of the 1918 spanish influenza occuring, which had nothing to do with Spain, and the fact that it achieved such a high death count in the very year WWI ended was entirely coincidental. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN JUST AS DEADLY REGARDLESS!!
I call bull on the bird flu hype. It's likely this disease has been around for a much longer time that it has been fashionable to run frantic news reports on it.
Take a Lemsip, chicken soup(no pun intended), some antibiotics, get a lot of rest and you'll be fine. I'm 99.9% certain. Remember SARS? Yeah, it's kind of hard to trust the doomsayers after that paticular fiasco.
Bird Flu. Give me a break. Fatal Traffic Accidentitus. Now THERE'S a killer. 40,000 every year in the US alone. Are you scared to sit into your car every morning? You aren't!?!
It's all about vendor lock in, no connectivity, squeezing out the competition and screaming for regulation when you competitors get too far ahead. Each of these companies would like nothing better than every IM user on earth using their networks, and anyone who might dare choose a competing product will be forever locked out of their private club. Of course as the article states, as soon as they become that competing product they kick and scream for government regulation.
And don't think Google is a shining paragon of interconnectivity and open standards either. Yes, Google talk uses open protocals, but as far as I'm aware, their servers still don't talk with the othre jabber servers.
Basically for me, all this underhanded locking out and incompatable standards has made IM unusable. For tweens and teens with close knit groups who can all arrange to use the same client, this is a reasonable approach. However I'm sticking to email.
With email, I know that if I have an email address, I can send an email to any other email address on the planet. With IM, if I have an IM account, I can only send an IM to those on the same network as me. I've already excluded the majority of IM users, simply by signing on.
Does this mean that 60% of the population HAS broadband access in their homes? Or that they could have it installed if they want? It means 60% of the population has the potential to get broadband. It's debateable as to whether 60% of the US population is on the internet, let alone has broadband.
You can equate the sentence to something like "Anyone can live the American Dream(TM)!"
As someone who has played games since before I could ride a bicycle, I can tell you flat out that the reason for the decline in player's interest has nothing to do with other distractions, competing media or new health fads. It's all down to the simple fact that games are simply not as good as they used to be.
I might sound like an old coot, but believe me the signal to noise ration on game store shelves had been consistently declining year on year for the past five years.
There was a time ~1999-2000, when at every month at least one new innovative, fresh and enjoyable masterpiece of a game was guaranteed to come out. These days, your lucky if such a game comes around every six months, or even a year. Last summers drought of halfway decent games was indicative of this malaise.
I couldn't figure out the reason for this decline, paticularly given the abundance of new hardware power to play with. I would say that there is no one reason for this. A big factor is simply that too much time is being spent meeting some arbitrary graphics standard, which is always going up, instead of coding something that is fun. Another factor is the big publishers like EA, who consistently turn out basically fairly awful games which make money due to marketing campaigns.
Then there's increasing budgets(most spent on graphics), fixation on online play(for more revenue), fixation on releasing uninnovate sequels(Madden, FIFA, Burnout , etc, etc), increased sexual selling(this has gotten worse), higher prices(across the board), fixed prices(all games are not of equal value), insistence on realism(in a game?), pandering to the lowest common denominator(people who hardly play games at all), and a genuine adversion to taking risk(the destroyer of innovative markets).
The next console generation does not excite me AT ALL. It's rather shocking. Basically all I see is higher resolution texture versions of the crud I'm getting now, with shadow and lighting effects, new physics engines, "movie-like" soundtracks, voice acting and cut scenes, peppered about in an effort to sell me a game that simply at its most basic level, isn't very good to play. There's only so many times I can get burned before I simply stop buying. Developers seem to have forgotten amid all the cruft and crome that they are making something which is to be played, not watched.
I shocked myself last week when I realised that I haven't bought a game in over eight months. Quite a shock to me considering I had previously been an avid gamer. Whwnever I walk into a store these days, all I see is basically shelf upon shelf of rubbish. The chances of finding that diamond in the rough are decreasing all the time.
Time was you could rely on the "Big release", usually some in house development, as being a guarateed bang for your buck. Those days are gone. Nowadays nothing is guaranteed, except perhaps some lighting effects and a CGI into sequence. Whoop de do.
The game industry is getting more like the movie industry every day. As you can guess, I'm not a cinema going man myself.
Toshiba might well make HD-DVD region free, but don't expect Sony and Co to do the same with Blu-Ray. Sony will never implement a totally region free video format. I think even the UMD discs have region encoding.
I was rooting for Blu-Ray, on the simple basis of higher technical standards. But now HD-DVD is offering me a lot more choice, and most likely lower cost imports. I've just been converted to the HD-DVD camp and all it took was one press release.
See Sony. Consumers like it when you don't cripple their hardware with restrictions.
The Russians practically did win the war single handedly. They were largely alone on the Eurasian continent from 1941 to 1944, and managed single handedly to turn back the Germans at Moscow, Volgograd(Stalingrad) and Saint Petersburg(Leningrad). This was done with little assistance from the other allies, largely for political reasons. Many felt facism was a lesser evil than communism.
Due to the larger volume of western television and movies on the War, many in the west are under the mistaken impression that the western allies did as much, if not most, of the fighting, and that the Russians were at best, fighting "half" of the war. This is untrue. the saying goes, "for every one [German] division in the west, there were ten in the east."
This page tells you what you need to know. The higest death toll during the war was in Soviet Russia, with an estimated 20 million dead, this is followed by the Chinese casualties of the Sino-japanese conflict at 11 million. Then follows german deaths at 6.3 million, and then Polish deaths at 5.8 million.
Between them, the three regions, Russia, Germany and Poland account for ~32 million of the total ~50 million dead. This is 64% of the total deaths. It is a good a measure as any for great a portion of the fighting took place on the eastern front. Taking only the war in Europe into account, these deaths account for more than 80% of the total.
The Second World War was primarily a conflict between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, certainly as far as Europe is concerned. Most of us have been raised to believe otherwise, but the fact is the western front was a minor theatre of war.
I don't get what the big deal is. It would seem only prudent that the UN, the worlds formost international body, should perform whatever administration functions that the internet requires. It's not as if the DoC is heavily involved in the day to day runnings of ICANN is it?
Is this a prestiege thing? I can't see any real benefit for any country controlling the root DNS servers. Beyond being able to say "Boo! We're not listing your countries sites anymore!", which would be pointless anyway as then the root level servers would quickly cease being root level servers as admins the world over quickly stopped trusting them.
The UN is quite a competant body when it comes to a lot of things. Don't let its military incompetance in Darfur or Kosovo distract you too much. Consider the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, UNESCO or the like. Yes they are not perfect, but try and imagine the world without them. You'll find that when it comes to things big countries don't have a vested reason to oppose, the UN is quite a useful organisation for the world to have.
Ask yourself this. Who is more likely to abuse the root servers, for ANY reason? And remember, once the root servers are abused once, that's it. No more centralised DNS.
the Russians saved our collective arses by bogging down the German army so much that it gave the Allies a chance to fight back.
Correction. The Russians won the war in Europe. The Allies mearly heckled the German army for about 12 months on the western front, while racing to beat the Soviets to Berlin.
I don't understand this obsession with turning anything sucessful into a movie. Books, TV Shows, Games. Halo was a perfectly good game and was good because it was a game. It was entertaining as a game? Why make a movie? Isn't this just simply Hollywood scrambling to milk a cash cow?
It's worth noting that every project like this runs the risk of becoming another Super Mario Brothers fiasco.
The list of charges is quite long, and not a few will stick, most importantly the trespass to chattels and quite possibly barratry.
However you can firget about a case defining trial. The RIAA will simply settle, as they have forced others to settle, therby bypassing the entire justice system and leaving P2P eternally ambiguous.
"As soon as support ends for XP, we will look at moving to Linux [desktops]," Babhoota said, adding the back-end switch to open source had cost 17 percent of what a proprietary upgrade had been costed at, with the agency doubling the amount of business it processed in the same 12-month period.
Whither now the Yankee group with their magic statistics and Excel sheets which show that in fact Babhoota real TCO is over fives times what it would have been if he'd switched to Server 2003, with a shiny new fade in comboboxes.
I'm really sick of this. Why are we being subjected to this ignorent free registration again and again? The New York Times (insert witty pun on free registration) articles are a rotten egg in the Slashdot omelette. It stinks!
Please stop posting links to the new york times eds. For the amount of ad click they'll get, the NYT should be begging us to come in free of registration.
And no, I don't think I should have to go to the trouble of using bugmenot.
It won't be until it's too late that the public will come to their senses and realize the Constitutional attrocities that have been committed under their noses all these years.
Will this be before or after hell reaches absolute zero?
do we still hate GIF's even if the patent has expired? GIF was forever tainted by the unisys patent. The legacy of the whole debaucle will live on in the memories of disgruntled techs for a long, long time. To this day, gifsicle for one still has the unisys patented code as an optional compiler flag.
GIF has bad karma. Just like public private encryption. The difference with public private encryption is that it was just so useful that it couldn't sit unused. GIF however, is as computer software goes, largely a luxury item, and so just about any mud makes people shy away from it.
Imagine for a moment, if you were going to buy a new leather sofa that someone had once urinated on. It's leather, it washed off. Technically there is NOTHING wrong with the sofa. Are you going to buy it? Probably not.
GIF is nothing like this at all of course as computer software analogies suck, but hopefully you see my point.
Please, don't jump to the conclusion that I want oppressive governments or dictators. All I'm saying is that China can be (IS) the next economic superpower without the civil liberties or political models of the West. Most people don't know what real freedom is, nor do they care if they have enough 'freedom' to have fun and live a 'no worries' life.
I've got to say that you're really hitting the nail on the head here. For years I thought that only through democracy and personal freedoms could a state advance itself, socially and technologically. I would have cited the migrations of academics and scientists from facist regimes in the 30s and 40s, as well as the general social decline of these regiemes as evidence of this.
However, at a glance, China appears to be advancing without democracy and civil rights. It's a frightening thought that the chinese communist party may have found a way to have their cake and eat it too, by becoming an economic superpower while still maintaining authoritarianism. It is worth noting that ~800 million chinese are not benefiting from this growth. Still china is advancing in leaps and bounds in nearly every sphere but civil rights.
If the party's model proves successful, how long before industrialists and polititians in the west begin pioneering this new approach, and we all begin to slide back into unashamed plutocracy? I worry that the values of the enlightenment are in danger of being rolled back by the very technologies they have help to create. I'm not a luddite by any manner or means, but I think a lot of modern technology has made tyranny a much easier business.
I also never signed an agreement when I bought a book that I wouldn't scan and reprint it. Sure, there are copyright notices on it, but I didn't sign anything. I also never signed anything where I said I would follow any criminal law. I'm sure I have signed stuff that binds me to follow civil agreements.
TOTALLY different kettle of fish altogether. In this case there are specific laws and regulations preventing you from doing what you suggest. There is no requirement for you to read specif passages of the book, or the forward, or the advertisements on the inside covers.
In the first case there are no laws, regulations, civil or crimal codes, contracts or obligations on anyone who watches television to watch advertisements as well. There is not even an implied suggestion to do so. No one has signed anything. No one has even purchased the television program. It's being beamed for free into their homes, after which they may do as they wish with it within the house(in theory).
We are bound by the laws of the land. I've yet to see one that requires me to watch televised advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
Humbug!!
For me Halloween absolutely does not mean little smiling kids saying trick or treat. For me halloween invariably means bands, no mobs of teenagers throwing eggs, launching firecrackers, assaulting my friends and neighbours, and law enforcement generally allowing the night, and the surrounding week, to become a sort of suburbian version of biblical anarchy. Great.
The IQ of a mob is that of its lowest member divided by the number of people in a mob. teenagers tend to become even more reckless, vindictive and violent when they have an audience of their peers. Teenagers are largely minors, and thus are granted huge lienience in the eyes of the law. Add all this up and you essentially get what we had around here last Halloween. Namely, assaults, property damage, vandalism and not a few people in hospital, and not one prosecution.
I'm a liberal person. I believe in personal freedoms. So it really gets my goat when a bunch of parents, put my liberties in jeopardy but giving their offspring carte blanc to run riot because of some old pagan festival. If there was a curfew on Halloween, I would be a lot more outraged than relieved.
Forget geek party gadgets! I need an article explaining how to set up concealed wireless night vision and infrared cameras all over my house and neighbourhood so on November the 1st I can, with the biggest of smiles on my face, walk into the local police stations( and newspaper offices) with high definition pictures of the 'carte blanc' brigades' little angels, engaged gleefully in criminal acts.
Ahh! Sweet Geeky Justice.
I'd like to see what the pro-nuke side has to say about dealing with the environmental effects of this part of the system.
They'll insist, insist mind you, that the harmful effects due to the waste are exaggerated. "It's all Hype!" they'll say. "Oil and Coal are worse" they'll say.
I'll wait to hear what Greenpeace have to say. They mightn't be the most neutral organisation in the world, but it'll be interesting to see which they think is worse.
I'm reading a lot about countries, Britan, Finland the US etc, pushing nuclear energy as a "safer", "cleaner" alternative. It's a PR stunt.
Nuclear energy is cheap. That's about all you can say for it.
As to safety. Well relative to single other form of electricity generation, nuclear power is the most dangerous. A coal plant's worst case scenario is a giant smog cloud. A nuclear plants worst case scenario is the permanent evacuation of the highly populated region surrounding Chernobyl, and a significant rise in lukemia rates, etc, etc. "That'll NEVER happen" I hear them say already. "Not with modern technology and computeeeerssss....". Oh Dear.
Cleaner? Coal and gas give off Carbon oxides and other nasties. Yes this is a problem. But nuclear power gives us all that lovely radioactive waste which quite simply has to be thrown in big holes and the lid sealed up for over 40,000 years!
40,000 years is just the half life of uranium! Is the UK even going to be around in 40,000 years. Offtopic, don't answer that. But riddle me this. How many engineering firms can build a nuclear waste disposal site that can be guaranteed to contain the radioactivity for 40,000 years. If you can find one, I've got this bridge...
Oh, but oil and gas are contributing to the greenhouse effect! Well yes they are, but does that justify building more reactors, generating more nuclear waste, AND more nuclear warheads? There' this thing called the sun. Provides loads of energy. The Wind! Water? Is nothing else viable? Well they work..... but Nuclear are much cheaper!
And nuclear plants ARE cheap. No question about it. Yes. Very cheap. No more oil importing. Cost reductions. Balence of Trade. What's a few nuclear drums? Yes. Very, very cheap.
Let's not forget that any rollout of IPv6 aware devices is going to be plauged by patent litigation. Turns out that just before its release, and lot of "Intellectual Property" "Firms" simply guessed the IPv6 standard, or parts of it, and bought^H^H^H^H^H^Happlied for corresponding patents from the USPTO rubber stamping office.
That means for around the next 20 years we'll have the whole RSA debaucle played all over again in the IPv6 sphere. Expect to see "Innovative Ideas" lawsuits gouging money from OS makers and especially makers of routers(esp consumer grade) and other networking devices.
Look on the bright side thought. With any luck, we'll run out of IPv4 addresses before the litigation finishes, and then someone really WILL have to do something about it!
The messanger [sic] in this case asserted his authority with his "I'm 99.9% certain" business and didn't give anything in the way of actual evidence.
I was giving my opinion, not exerting my authority. I can see no reason that anyone, anyone, would have considered my post to have been anything other than a lone, personal statement.
I would also note, that I did give my reasons for my opinion by referring to the SARS outbreak, and the media hype surrounding that.
Amid all the attacks on my credentials, and misuse of the term "antibiotics", everyone seems to have forgotten that my primary point was that the threat and outcome of any pandemic, has been greatly exaggerated and hyped by the media. So many people have jumped on the hype bandwagon, that people have had to urged to calm down, as stated in the linked article.
I remain skeptical of the pessimistic predictions of the possibilty of the outbreak. And I remain especially contemptuous of the current reckless and unjustified media scaremongering surrounding this issue, which is being motivated by ratings based profit. And unless I can see concrete evidence to the contrary, I consider a highly lethal pandemic in _western_ society, relatively improbable.
Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!!! There's a slight possibilty that this virus could mutate to pass from a bird to a human. And if that happens there's a slight possibilty that the virus could then mutate to pass from human to human. And if that happens there's a slight chance of a pandemic along the lines of the 1918 spanish influenza occuring, which had nothing to do with Spain, and the fact that it achieved such a high death count in the very year WWI ended was entirely coincidental. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN JUST AS DEADLY REGARDLESS!!
I call bull on the bird flu hype. It's likely this disease has been around for a much longer time that it has been fashionable to run frantic news reports on it.
You know the hype is overblown just a wee bit when the government has to tell people to calm down.
Take a Lemsip, chicken soup(no pun intended), some antibiotics, get a lot of rest and you'll be fine. I'm 99.9% certain. Remember SARS? Yeah, it's kind of hard to trust the doomsayers after that paticular fiasco.
Bird Flu. Give me a break. Fatal Traffic Accidentitus. Now THERE'S a killer. 40,000 every year in the US alone. Are you scared to sit into your car every morning? You aren't!?!
i submitted this 2 weeks ago but i didn't use "stillgoogling" as my name....
I don't know what you're complaining about. The Slashdot editors' random submission selection system is totally and completely unbiased.
Because IRC is "hard" to use. You have to join "channels" etc, etc, etc. IM is fairly idiot proof. That must be why I can't use it.
It's all about vendor lock in, no connectivity, squeezing out the competition and screaming for regulation when you competitors get too far ahead. Each of these companies would like nothing better than every IM user on earth using their networks, and anyone who might dare choose a competing product will be forever locked out of their private club. Of course as the article states, as soon as they become that competing product they kick and scream for government regulation.
And don't think Google is a shining paragon of interconnectivity and open standards either. Yes, Google talk uses open protocals, but as far as I'm aware, their servers still don't talk with the othre jabber servers.
Basically for me, all this underhanded locking out and incompatable standards has made IM unusable. For tweens and teens with close knit groups who can all arrange to use the same client, this is a reasonable approach. However I'm sticking to email.
With email, I know that if I have an email address, I can send an email to any other email address on the planet.
With IM, if I have an IM account, I can only send an IM to those on the same network as me. I've already excluded the majority of IM users, simply by signing on.
Sorry IM, you're less than usless to me.
Does this mean that 60% of the population HAS broadband access in their homes? Or that they could have it installed if they want?
It means 60% of the population has the potential to get broadband. It's debateable as to whether 60% of the US population is on the internet, let alone has broadband.
You can equate the sentence to something like "Anyone can live the American Dream(TM)!"
As someone who has played games since before I could ride a bicycle, I can tell you flat out that the reason for the decline in player's interest has nothing to do with other distractions, competing media or new health fads. It's all down to the simple fact that games are simply not as good as they used to be.
I might sound like an old coot, but believe me the signal to noise ration on game store shelves had been consistently declining year on year for the past five years.
There was a time ~1999-2000, when at every month at least one new innovative, fresh and enjoyable masterpiece of a game was guaranteed to come out. These days, your lucky if such a game comes around every six months, or even a year. Last summers drought of halfway decent games was indicative of this malaise.
I couldn't figure out the reason for this decline, paticularly given the abundance of new hardware power to play with. I would say that there is no one reason for this. A big factor is simply that too much time is being spent meeting some arbitrary graphics standard, which is always going up, instead of coding something that is fun. Another factor is the big publishers like EA, who consistently turn out basically fairly awful games which make money due to marketing campaigns.
Then there's increasing budgets(most spent on graphics), fixation on online play(for more revenue), fixation on releasing uninnovate sequels(Madden, FIFA, Burnout , etc, etc), increased sexual selling(this has gotten worse), higher prices(across the board), fixed prices(all games are not of equal value), insistence on realism(in a game?), pandering to the lowest common denominator(people who hardly play games at all), and a genuine adversion to taking risk(the destroyer of innovative markets).
The next console generation does not excite me AT ALL. It's rather shocking. Basically all I see is higher resolution texture versions of the crud I'm getting now, with shadow and lighting effects, new physics engines, "movie-like" soundtracks, voice acting and cut scenes, peppered about in an effort to sell me a game that simply at its most basic level, isn't very good to play. There's only so many times I can get burned before I simply stop buying. Developers seem to have forgotten amid all the cruft and crome that they are making something which is to be played, not watched.
I shocked myself last week when I realised that I haven't bought a game in over eight months. Quite a shock to me considering I had previously been an avid gamer. Whwnever I walk into a store these days, all I see is basically shelf upon shelf of rubbish. The chances of finding that diamond in the rough are decreasing all the time.
Time was you could rely on the "Big release", usually some in house development, as being a guarateed bang for your buck. Those days are gone. Nowadays nothing is guaranteed, except perhaps some lighting effects and a CGI into sequence. Whoop de do.
The game industry is getting more like the movie industry every day. As you can guess, I'm not a cinema going man myself.
Toshiba might well make HD-DVD region free, but don't expect Sony and Co to do the same with Blu-Ray. Sony will never implement a totally region free video format. I think even the UMD discs have region encoding.
I was rooting for Blu-Ray, on the simple basis of higher technical standards. But now HD-DVD is offering me a lot more choice, and most likely lower cost imports. I've just been converted to the HD-DVD camp and all it took was one press release.
See Sony. Consumers like it when you don't cripple their hardware with restrictions.
The Russians practically did win the war single handedly. They were largely alone on the Eurasian continent from 1941 to 1944, and managed single handedly to turn back the Germans at Moscow, Volgograd(Stalingrad) and Saint Petersburg(Leningrad). This was done with little assistance from the other allies, largely for political reasons. Many felt facism was a lesser evil than communism.
Due to the larger volume of western television and movies on the War, many in the west are under the mistaken impression that the western allies did as much, if not most, of the fighting, and that the Russians were at best, fighting "half" of the war. This is untrue. the saying goes, "for every one [German] division in the west, there were ten in the east."
This page tells you what you need to know. The higest death toll during the war was in Soviet Russia, with an estimated 20 million dead, this is followed by the Chinese casualties of the Sino-japanese conflict at 11 million. Then follows german deaths at 6.3 million, and then Polish deaths at 5.8 million.
Between them, the three regions, Russia, Germany and Poland account for ~32 million of the total ~50 million dead. This is 64% of the total deaths. It is a good a measure as any for great a portion of the fighting took place on the eastern front. Taking only the war in Europe into account, these deaths account for more than 80% of the total.
The Second World War was primarily a conflict between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, certainly as far as Europe is concerned. Most of us have been raised to believe otherwise, but the fact is the western front was a minor theatre of war.
I don't get what the big deal is. It would seem only prudent that the UN, the worlds formost international body, should perform whatever administration functions that the internet requires. It's not as if the DoC is heavily involved in the day to day runnings of ICANN is it?
Is this a prestiege thing? I can't see any real benefit for any country controlling the root DNS servers. Beyond being able to say "Boo! We're not listing your countries sites anymore!", which would be pointless anyway as then the root level servers would quickly cease being root level servers as admins the world over quickly stopped trusting them.
The UN is quite a competant body when it comes to a lot of things. Don't let its military incompetance in Darfur or Kosovo distract you too much. Consider the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, UNESCO or the like. Yes they are not perfect, but try and imagine the world without them. You'll find that when it comes to things big countries don't have a vested reason to oppose, the UN is quite a useful organisation for the world to have.
Ask yourself this. Who is more likely to abuse the root servers, for ANY reason? And remember, once the root servers are abused once, that's it. No more centralised DNS.
the Russians saved our collective arses by bogging down the German army so much that it gave the Allies a chance to fight back.
Correction. The Russians won the war in Europe. The Allies mearly heckled the German army for about 12 months on the western front, while racing to beat the Soviets to Berlin.
I don't understand this obsession with turning anything sucessful into a movie. Books, TV Shows, Games. Halo was a perfectly good game and was good because it was a game. It was entertaining as a game? Why make a movie? Isn't this just simply Hollywood scrambling to milk a cash cow?
It's worth noting that every project like this runs the risk of becoming another Super Mario Brothers fiasco.
The list of charges is quite long, and not a few will stick, most importantly the trespass to chattels and quite possibly barratry.
However you can firget about a case defining trial. The RIAA will simply settle, as they have forced others to settle, therby bypassing the entire justice system and leaving P2P eternally ambiguous.
"As soon as support ends for XP, we will look at moving to Linux [desktops]," Babhoota said, adding the back-end switch to open source had cost 17 percent of what a proprietary upgrade had been costed at, with the agency doubling the amount of business it processed in the same 12-month period.
Whither now the Yankee group with their magic statistics and Excel sheets which show that in fact Babhoota real TCO is over fives times what it would have been if he'd switched to Server 2003, with a shiny new fade in comboboxes.
Location based Ad? Do they monitor the connections to their network. What about privacy?
Ahhaahahahaa!! Ha ha ha aha!! Hah, aha, haaaaa..... hoooo
Privacy. Good one.
I'm really sick of this. Why are we being subjected to this ignorent free registration again and again? The New York Times (insert witty pun on free registration) articles are a rotten egg in the Slashdot omelette. It stinks!
Please stop posting links to the new york times eds. For the amount of ad click they'll get, the NYT should be begging us to come in free of registration.
And no, I don't think I should have to go to the trouble of using bugmenot.
It won't be until it's too late that the public will come to their senses and realize the Constitutional attrocities that have been committed under their noses all these years.
Will this be before or after hell reaches absolute zero?
do we still hate GIF's even if the patent has expired?
GIF was forever tainted by the unisys patent. The legacy of the whole debaucle will live on in the memories of disgruntled techs for a long, long time. To this day, gifsicle for one still has the unisys patented code as an optional compiler flag.
GIF has bad karma. Just like public private encryption. The difference with public private encryption is that it was just so useful that it couldn't sit unused. GIF however, is as computer software goes, largely a luxury item, and so just about any mud makes people shy away from it.
Imagine for a moment, if you were going to buy a new leather sofa that someone had once urinated on. It's leather, it washed off. Technically there is NOTHING wrong with the sofa. Are you going to buy it? Probably not.
GIF is nothing like this at all of course as computer software analogies suck, but hopefully you see my point.
Please, don't jump to the conclusion that I want oppressive governments or dictators. All I'm saying is that China can be (IS) the next economic superpower without the civil liberties or political models of the West. Most people don't know what real freedom is, nor do they care if they have enough 'freedom' to have fun and live a 'no worries' life.
I've got to say that you're really hitting the nail on the head here. For years I thought that only through democracy and personal freedoms could a state advance itself, socially and technologically. I would have cited the migrations of academics and scientists from facist regimes in the 30s and 40s, as well as the general social decline of these regiemes as evidence of this.
However, at a glance, China appears to be advancing without democracy and civil rights. It's a frightening thought that the chinese communist party may have found a way to have their cake and eat it too, by becoming an economic superpower while still maintaining authoritarianism. It is worth noting that ~800 million chinese are not benefiting from this growth. Still china is advancing in leaps and bounds in nearly every sphere but civil rights.
If the party's model proves successful, how long before industrialists and polititians in the west begin pioneering this new approach, and we all begin to slide back into unashamed plutocracy? I worry that the values of the enlightenment are in danger of being rolled back by the very technologies they have help to create. I'm not a luddite by any manner or means, but I think a lot of modern technology has made tyranny a much easier business.
I also never signed an agreement when I bought a book that I wouldn't scan and reprint it. Sure, there are copyright notices on it, but I didn't sign anything. I also never signed anything where I said I would follow any criminal law. I'm sure I have signed stuff that binds me to follow civil agreements.
TOTALLY different kettle of fish altogether. In this case there are specific laws and regulations preventing you from doing what you suggest. There is no requirement for you to read specif passages of the book, or the forward, or the advertisements on the inside covers.
In the first case there are no laws, regulations, civil or crimal codes, contracts or obligations on anyone who watches television to watch advertisements as well. There is not even an implied suggestion to do so. No one has signed anything. No one has even purchased the television program. It's being beamed for free into their homes, after which they may do as they wish with it within the house(in theory).
We are bound by the laws of the land. I've yet to see one that requires me to watch televised advertising.
He's a whiney little hypocrate and it's sad that something that poorly done got published on any website, let alone became a headline for Slashdot.
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