In all seriousness, the total hardware cost of two gamepads, a TV out connector and a laptop graphics card needed to run the latest games will more than likely overrun the cost of just buying a PS2 or a Wii, Your spouse's tastes scream console gaming. No strategy games or RPGs? What does that leave? FPSes? Good luck finding a co-op FPS title.
For Co-op play, console is King. There are a myriad of two player titles out there to cater for all tastes, and co-op is something that even gets included in some oneplayer titles, owing to its popularity.
PCs are not designed for what you're looking for. Consoles are, and they are cheaper, faster, easier and offer a better selection of titles. Just buy the damn Wii.
Re:Here's the only two things you need to know
on
ISP Sued By Irish RIAA
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The ISP has no obligation and the *AA can't seem to "educate" themselves out of their problem.
This is Ireland. We don't so much have laws here as we have sort of "tribal customs". Over here, even if a law is struck down as unconstitutional, the supreme court has ruled that you can still be imprisoned under it. It used to be illegal for Irish ISPs to hold certain types of data for more than about six months, I believe. It was at one time discovered that Eircom, the ISP mentioned in this article (effectively the Irish AT&T), was retaining this information for three years, the government passed a bill making it mandatory to store it for at least three years.
That's how things work in this country. We're kind of a one party state meets banana republic meets laissez faire capitalism. Basically, laws here are universally subject to interpretation and arbitrary revision. That's when they're not being ignored outright. If Eircom agrees to the censoring and monitoring, then it will become legal. If it doesn't, it won't. I doubt the IRMA is anywhere near as well connected or influential as Eircom representatives, so unless they're willing to pay up, in either bribes or in financing the system, this surveillance simply isn't happening. Anyway, we're all under surveillance anyway, so this entire issue is rather moot.
This only screws the little guy over and ensures that bigger corporations will keep patenting. 300k to a Microsoft, IBM or pharmaceutical company is small fries. To a small business owner or full-time dreamer like me, it breaks the bank.
Should we even care about small time dreamers anymore? Should the entire process of patent reform have to grind to a halt in order to allow "Joe Inventor", if he exists or indeed ever existed, to still play the patent lottery game? $300,000 dollars per patent seems just fine by me.
Better yet, simply implement a patent tax. It's intellectual "property" after all, so why not tax it?
If you let the balance of power fall too far to the state, it's grossly naive to think it wont lead to use of that power over you, your friends and your children.
The question is, is this really true.
Consider for a moment. Do the supporters of oppressive regimes actually suffer under them? Is it not the case that those who tacitly or overtly support this kind of power imbalance actually benefit? Certainly a minority of top supporters do, but what about the silent and not so silent majority that prop up the regime? Does their support not in fact, pay off?
Are registered Republican voters who attend church every sunday, protest against abortion, call for lower taxes and "family values" really going to suffer under these DHS policies? I invoke Godwin because it is inevitable. Look at 1930's Germany. If you weren't communist or jewish, then you, as a german, probably did rather well under the Nazi's. Why wouldn't you support them? It's not like you valued abstract concepts like "freedom" and "democracy" now did you?
Most americans, no, most people in the western world, do not value these concepts. They support internment, executions, secret trials. I'm not being rhetorical here. As long as you mention the right groups; terrorists, pedophiles, minorities, lower classes, etc, the average joe will not see their freedoms as something worth valuing anymore. People do not believe in universal rights for all, only in rights for the right people, which of course includes themselves. It's sad, but that's the way it is.
The results are not as realistic with raster. Shadows don't look right.
As John Carmack mentioned in a recent interview, this is in fact a bonus, for shadows as well as other things.
The fact is that "artificial" raster shadows, lighting and reflections typically look more impressive than the "more realistic" results of ray tracing. This alone explains why raster will maintain its dominance, and why ray tracing will not catch on.
It couldn't possibly be that someone's son or daughter was killed whilst jaywalking and made it their life quest to have a law passed "for our own protection".
Forget about those idiots! What about the misfortunate drivers who've had a grown adult throw itself at their cars. Why should motorists be subjected to people using their bodies as lethal projectiles?
ICANN is the root problem here, and in many other issues. Specifically, ICANNs complete lack oversight over registrars. This in itself would not be so bad, but coupled with ICANN's refusal to consider behavior and ethics when accrediting registrars. Incidents like this are eroding peoples faith in the current system, and if it goes on like this other countries will have a very substantial case for removing internet control from US hands.
Ultimately, internet registrars need to have a code of ethics, which they can be held to account over. Some people might call this woolly thinking. However doctors, engineers and yes, even lawyers and estate agents, have codes of practice that they are supposed to abide by and can in theory be held to account over. Registrars need only amass monopolies of scale and pay off ICANN with cold hard cash. Naturally, such a system attracts the most unscrupulous type of practices.
Only two things can break the net as it currently stands. ICANN, and the telecoms. The latter is dubious. If this mismanagement continues ICANN could literally bring about its own demise, and possibly the free internet along with it.
If it comes to the point where I supposedly have to take drugs of any kind to "remain competitive" in my field, I'll leave that field. I'll leave it for a number of reasons, but foremost amongst them will be because I won't like it anymore. If you're having to go to absurd lengths to keep your job, such as sacrificing your family life, free time, pay, holidays and having to put your health in jeopardy, you need to quit your job. Yes it might be hard, but it'll be a lot harder for you if stay.
I doubt those who take cognitive enhancing drugs will get very far in academia anyway. It's not about pulling all nighters to scribble out a paper. That's for undergraduates. It's about really thinking about things, which requires deep reflection and to some extent, zoning out. If you're frying your brains on Ritalin trying to compute various fourier transforms, you're unlikely to stumble across something like parsevals theorem. Jorge Cham, who writes the PHD webcomic, says that there's a lot to be said for the "The Power of Procrastination", and I can see what he's getting at.
I could be wrong. If I am, I'll find another line of work. And yes, I will do that before I tell other people what they can and can't do with their own minds and bodies.
I thought they were responsible for assigning IP blocks and deciding that ".museum" was a good idea. When did that become "overseeing the internet"?
And DNS. Please, please don't forget DNS.
"Overseeing the internet" is a good description. A very good one in fact. ICANN, despite its problems, keeps the system from splintering into separate, nation block controlled areas.
It's also a good description in another sense. When they eventually do get down to censoring the web (for the children), ICANN will be the organisation that shall oversee the great purge of online freedom.
* This is in contrast to mathematical logic, where you can indeed make statements about provability, both negative (there does not exist...) and positive(there exists...).
Actually, by Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, there are statements in mathematics which are either true or false, but cannot be proved.
However, what distinguishes mathematics here is that those statements are clear, unambiguous and definite in their truth value, even if it is unknown to us. In any religion, all statements are opaque, vague, and have their truth values, and even meaning, subject to interpretation.
It's like a kind of anti-mathematics, which is surprising considering the number of mathematicians that have left their stamp on the field.
Every day now, and I really mean every single day, I read another news story about some psychological/biometric/neurological/... study from which some spurious result is obtained. These "studies" are often done on first year university student volunteers, under dubious conditions with little controls. The results are apparently "statistically significant", a quality which, nowadays, is not itself very statistically significant. Very often, a precisely conflicting "study" will be seen a few weeks later.
I'm concerned that these junk studies are doing real harm to science as a whole. It's becoming increasingly difficult to see quality studies amid all the noise, and even when you do, you may be too jaded to investigate further. This effect is I suspect, magnified enormously in the public at large, which may explain the modern public cynicism and even dismissal of scientists as a whole.
It's easy to blame the media, and in fact I do. But part of the blame lies with the scientific community. There are a lot of people running around calling themselves scientists, and their investigations experiments, when neither are anything of the kind. Scientists, and others, need to tackle theses people. Politeness be damned.
it all fits into the statistical patterns. In the case of fires, it doesn't matter if it's lightning, arson, or volcanic eruption, the pattens still hold.
It leads one to wonder whether being statistically significant, is itself statistically significant?
There is a massive margin around comments section now, for some unbeknown reason. I cannot fathom why anyone would pad the entire comment thread in this way. Here's what appears to be the offending CSS, from the comments.css sheet. #commentlisting (line 110) { padding-top: 2em; padding-right: 2em; padding-bottom: 2em; padding-left: 2em; }
There's more padding on the comments section than an asylum isolation cell. This is an abomination on Firefox 2.0.0.8, and I imagine everything else. Worse than the Big Grey Buttons by far.
Does Taco even run these designs past anyone before they're rolled out. Wait, I'm guessing they get marketroids and graphics artists to run "surveys" on 15 year old Myspace users first.
The big redesign was actually fine. This isn't. Seriously.
what a charming, naive notion that a bunch of whack jobs with pop-guns would be able to stand up against the might of the best funded military in the world:)
You get your grave for people to remember you, and your organs are put to good use.
Your organs will be given to rich, unhealthy people to keep them alive for another eighteen months. In addition, doctors will be far less willing to save your life if their hospital can earn more money by selling your liver.
People who support organ donation always forget that todays organ donation "industry" is fueled by dead Chinese prisoners, poor kidney donors, and yes, people robbing graves. It's funny, I can trace the beef I eat back to the farm, but not the organ I receive back to the person. Why is that? Because if people could trace organs, they'd become so disgusted their bodies would immediately reject the ill gotten tissue.
Some, in response to this, call for mandatory organ donation. Fuck, that. The government, no matter how many needy orphans need them, does not own my organs. People are not walking spare parts storage, and any society with a shred of respect for its citizens will treat their bodies as they would wish it after their death. Arguments along the lines of "They're dead. They don't care." don't hold much weight with me. I'm alive, and I happen to care about their final wishes.
I'm not donating my organs, not in the current climate. Despite the fact that this makes me "an evil person", I don't want to risk bits of me ending up in complete jerks, whose only reason for getting those organs was because they could pay for them. The thought of this happening is rather depressing. No doubt I will be labeled as selfish and short sighted for not helping all the needy people in private healthcare.
What I find most offensive is the obscene profits reaped by those who traffic in stolen organs. The fraud, the secrecy, and the lies are all enough to show how these people really feel about what they're doing. Any empty rhetorical arguments are unneeded. Come back to me with a fully transparent, universal healthcare system, then we'll talk about my organ donation card.
Body snatching for profit? Why don't we just take peoples naked bodies out of the ground for school children to throw rock at? It's about as dignified, if not more so.
Slashdot Mirror
In all seriousness, the total hardware cost of two gamepads, a TV out connector and a laptop graphics card needed to run the latest games will more than likely overrun the cost of just buying a PS2 or a Wii, Your spouse's tastes scream console gaming. No strategy games or RPGs? What does that leave? FPSes? Good luck finding a co-op FPS title.
For Co-op play, console is King. There are a myriad of two player titles out there to cater for all tastes, and co-op is something that even gets included in some one player titles, owing to its popularity.
PCs are not designed for what you're looking for. Consoles are, and they are cheaper, faster, easier and offer a better selection of titles. Just buy the damn Wii.
This is Ireland. We don't so much have laws here as we have sort of "tribal customs". Over here, even if a law is struck down as unconstitutional, the supreme court has ruled that you can still be imprisoned under it. It used to be illegal for Irish ISPs to hold certain types of data for more than about six months, I believe. It was at one time discovered that Eircom, the ISP mentioned in this article (effectively the Irish AT&T), was retaining this information for three years, the government passed a bill making it mandatory to store it for at least three years.
That's how things work in this country. We're kind of a one party state meets banana republic meets laissez faire capitalism. Basically, laws here are universally subject to interpretation and arbitrary revision. That's when they're not being ignored outright. If Eircom agrees to the censoring and monitoring, then it will become legal. If it doesn't, it won't. I doubt the IRMA is anywhere near as well connected or influential as Eircom representatives, so unless they're willing to pay up, in either bribes or in financing the system, this surveillance simply isn't happening. Anyway, we're all under surveillance anyway, so this entire issue is rather moot.
Should we even care about small time dreamers anymore? Should the entire process of patent reform have to grind to a halt in order to allow "Joe Inventor", if he exists or indeed ever existed, to still play the patent lottery game? $300,000 dollars per patent seems just fine by me.
Better yet, simply implement a patent tax. It's intellectual "property" after all, so why not tax it?
Consider for a moment. Do the supporters of oppressive regimes actually suffer under them? Is it not the case that those who tacitly or overtly support this kind of power imbalance actually benefit? Certainly a minority of top supporters do, but what about the silent and not so silent majority that prop up the regime? Does their support not in fact, pay off?
Are registered Republican voters who attend church every sunday, protest against abortion, call for lower taxes and "family values" really going to suffer under these DHS policies? I invoke Godwin because it is inevitable. Look at 1930's Germany. If you weren't communist or jewish, then you, as a german, probably did rather well under the Nazi's. Why wouldn't you support them? It's not like you valued abstract concepts like "freedom" and "democracy" now did you?
Most americans, no, most people in the western world, do not value these concepts. They support internment, executions, secret trials. I'm not being rhetorical here. As long as you mention the right groups; terrorists, pedophiles, minorities, lower classes, etc, the average joe will not see their freedoms as something worth valuing anymore. People do not believe in universal rights for all, only in rights for the right people, which of course includes themselves. It's sad, but that's the way it is.
The fact is that "artificial" raster shadows, lighting and reflections typically look more impressive than the "more realistic" results of ray tracing. This alone explains why raster will maintain its dominance, and why ray tracing will not catch on.
ICANN is the root problem here, and in many other issues. Specifically, ICANNs complete lack oversight over registrars. This in itself would not be so bad, but coupled with ICANN's refusal to consider behavior and ethics when accrediting registrars. Incidents like this are eroding peoples faith in the current system, and if it goes on like this other countries will have a very substantial case for removing internet control from US hands.
Ultimately, internet registrars need to have a code of ethics, which they can be held to account over. Some people might call this woolly thinking. However doctors, engineers and yes, even lawyers and estate agents, have codes of practice that they are supposed to abide by and can in theory be held to account over. Registrars need only amass monopolies of scale and pay off ICANN with cold hard cash. Naturally, such a system attracts the most unscrupulous type of practices.
Only two things can break the net as it currently stands. ICANN, and the telecoms. The latter is dubious. If this mismanagement continues ICANN could literally bring about its own demise, and possibly the free internet along with it.
If it comes to the point where I supposedly have to take drugs of any kind to "remain competitive" in my field, I'll leave that field. I'll leave it for a number of reasons, but foremost amongst them will be because I won't like it anymore. If you're having to go to absurd lengths to keep your job, such as sacrificing your family life, free time, pay, holidays and having to put your health in jeopardy, you need to quit your job. Yes it might be hard, but it'll be a lot harder for you if stay.
I doubt those who take cognitive enhancing drugs will get very far in academia anyway. It's not about pulling all nighters to scribble out a paper. That's for undergraduates. It's about really thinking about things, which requires deep reflection and to some extent, zoning out. If you're frying your brains on Ritalin trying to compute various fourier transforms, you're unlikely to stumble across something like parsevals theorem. Jorge Cham, who writes the PHD webcomic, says that there's a lot to be said for the "The Power of Procrastination", and I can see what he's getting at.
I could be wrong. If I am, I'll find another line of work. And yes, I will do that before I tell other people what they can and can't do with their own minds and bodies.
"Overseeing the internet" is a good description. A very good one in fact. ICANN, despite its problems, keeps the system from splintering into separate, nation block controlled areas.
It's also a good description in another sense. When they eventually do get down to censoring the web (for the children), ICANN will be the organisation that shall oversee the great purge of online freedom.
However, what distinguishes mathematics here is that those statements are clear, unambiguous and definite in their truth value, even if it is unknown to us. In any religion, all statements are opaque, vague, and have their truth values, and even meaning, subject to interpretation.
It's like a kind of anti-mathematics, which is surprising considering the number of mathematicians that have left their stamp on the field.
I post on a teletype you insensitive clod!
Every day now, and I really mean every single day, I read another news story about some psychological/biometric/neurological/... study from which some spurious result is obtained. These "studies" are often done on first year university student volunteers, under dubious conditions with little controls. The results are apparently "statistically significant", a quality which, nowadays, is not itself very statistically significant. Very often, a precisely conflicting "study" will be seen a few weeks later.
I'm concerned that these junk studies are doing real harm to science as a whole. It's becoming increasingly difficult to see quality studies amid all the noise, and even when you do, you may be too jaded to investigate further. This effect is I suspect, magnified enormously in the public at large, which may explain the modern public cynicism and even dismissal of scientists as a whole.
It's easy to blame the media, and in fact I do. But part of the blame lies with the scientific community. There are a lot of people running around calling themselves scientists, and their investigations experiments, when neither are anything of the kind. Scientists, and others, need to tackle theses people. Politeness be damned.
To conclude, I link once again to the Cargo Cult Science speech.
There is a massive margin around comments section now, for some unbeknown reason. I cannot fathom why anyone would pad the entire comment thread in this way. Here's what appears to be the offending CSS, from the comments.css sheet.
#commentlisting (line 110)
{
padding-top: 2em;
padding-right: 2em;
padding-bottom: 2em;
padding-left: 2em;
}
There's more padding on the comments section than an asylum isolation cell. This is an abomination on Firefox 2.0.0.8, and I imagine everything else. Worse than the Big Grey Buttons by far.
Does Taco even run these designs past anyone before they're rolled out. Wait, I'm guessing they get marketroids and graphics artists to run "surveys" on 15 year old Myspace users first.
The big redesign was actually fine. This isn't. Seriously.
Become affordable?
Lie, or Sex It Up.
People who support organ donation always forget that todays organ donation "industry" is fueled by dead Chinese prisoners, poor kidney donors, and yes, people robbing graves. It's funny, I can trace the beef I eat back to the farm, but not the organ I receive back to the person. Why is that? Because if people could trace organs, they'd become so disgusted their bodies would immediately reject the ill gotten tissue.
Some, in response to this, call for mandatory organ donation. Fuck, that. The government, no matter how many needy orphans need them, does not own my organs. People are not walking spare parts storage, and any society with a shred of respect for its citizens will treat their bodies as they would wish it after their death. Arguments along the lines of "They're dead. They don't care." don't hold much weight with me. I'm alive, and I happen to care about their final wishes.
I'm not donating my organs, not in the current climate. Despite the fact that this makes me "an evil person", I don't want to risk bits of me ending up in complete jerks, whose only reason for getting those organs was because they could pay for them. The thought of this happening is rather depressing. No doubt I will be labeled as selfish and short sighted for not helping all the needy people in private healthcare.
What I find most offensive is the obscene profits reaped by those who traffic in stolen organs. The fraud, the secrecy, and the lies are all enough to show how these people really feel about what they're doing. Any empty rhetorical arguments are unneeded. Come back to me with a fully transparent, universal healthcare system, then we'll talk about my organ donation card.
Body snatching for profit? Why don't we just take peoples naked bodies out of the ground for school children to throw rock at? It's about as dignified, if not more so.