I'm curious, why choose Halo with it's obvious theme of killing? There is a HUGE selection of party, racing, sports, puzzle and adventure/action games that are much more appropriate. Of course, Halo is the big news these days so maybe it's JUST the popularity of the game they seem concerned with.
Interesting that many churches won't compromise on some of the rules that are keeping so many people away, like birth control, gay-rights, molester-priests getting a slap on the wrist, and oh, the Harry Potter books are Pure Evil (but Halo is harmless fun). *sigh*
Should we just rename Earth to Rapture right now and get it over with?
Seriously though, I think if we get into these waters we may end up triggering some kind of genetic arms race- I can't even imagine.
I also agree with some other posters- don't we have bigger medical crises to spend money on? How about clean drinking water and fighting malaria in Africa?
I feel sorry for students who paid big dollars in tuition money to go to this school and take those courses... because now I can get the same knowledge for free. Borrow the textbook from the library and bam, I'm now Berkeley-Educated. Ha.
Good for us, bad idea for Berkeley. This should have been put in a secure area accessible to registered students only.
Ok, so let's pretend I'm a big Sony fanboi (do these even exist?) and I want to listen to my Sony produced music 'legally'. I have a Sony stereo system, Sony mp3 player and a Sony laptop. Oh, and I want to pop it on a memory stick and listen to it on my Sony PS3. Now, suppose I bought a whole CD but I really only like 5 songs on the CD. Suppose I paid $15 for it. That's $3 per song since I don't care about the other crappy filler songs.
I have 4 music playing devices (all Sony brand 'cause remember I'm pretending to be a big Sony fan), so I'll have to re-buy the songs online for each device.
So, the CD for my stereo is $3/song, and to buy online let's say $1 per song times 3. That's $6 per song to listen to that song on all the devices I have. Oh, but I have 5 songs from that album I like so that's $30 of music for 5 songs.
Now, someone please name even ONE song that's worth that price? I can listen to the radio for FREE and hear most songs eventually.
This is a joke. Sony, please show me where the awesome musical masterpieces that are worth $6 per song are. I'm dying to know... cause what's out these days isn't worth a few quarters.
I never understood how this is even possible. Like vulnerabilities in image formats or video formats. How does this work? The media player, or image viewer, should be reading the bits in the file and display it as an image, or as video. Why do these bytes of data get executed? Who writes an application which opens an image file, reads the bits from the file and then EXECUTES it ?!?!?
I just don't get it. I'd love an explanation. Maybe it's like a website that takes user input and runs it as server side code... or some such. Just seems stupid to me. It should be impossible to have your video file executed...
Buddhist monks are non-violent. You may get some of the citizens using those, but not the monks. In fact, the monks have been urging citizens to stay out of it.
When will they realize, graphics are at a point where tweaking the reflectivity of the water, or the wispy-ness of the smoke won't change my mind about whether a game is fun. I'd trade less-shiny water for better AI any day. Or hell, maybe even just a better story. Stop stressing my PC to the limit! The fact that my new(ish) PC can't run Bioshock makes me want to cry. Well, there's $50 of my money they won't be getting.
Exactly. I wish my family would would think like this. My brother bought one of those "Chocolate" cell phones, when they were new and expensive, only to learn it blows as an MP3 player and is fragile as a phone. Woops, should have read some reviews eh bro?;)
I agree. If I can add/remove programs to the list myself, then this is just fine. If a program tries to run, it should pop up a dialog asking me if I want to add the program to the list. I should also be able to get details like path/executable file name if I want to learn more about the app that's trying to run itself.
Let's help these poor souls and tell them what it will take to get at least some of us to buy music legally.
1. Offer a huge selection of music on a very easy to use website. Accessible to Canadians too! 2. Offer it in a variety of high quality formats as well as mp3s. 3. Offer it without DRM, tracking bytes, or my name embedded in the file. 4. Offer it for no more than 25 cents per song (approx $5 per album). 99 cents is way too high considering I'm not getting a physical CD, case, booklet, lossless format, etc. 5. Offer ways that loyal customers can earn points for free songs. Allow me have my family buy me credits. Make less popular/older songs cheaper. 6. Allow me to listen to a song or half of a song, before I buy it.
There problem solved. There's no way in hell I'm paying 99cents for DRMed crap. But, if it was easy, friendly and affordable then I'd be all over it.
My city is as blue-collar automotive as you can get. Unfortunately the local university churns out hundreds and hundreds of CS grads every year. The market is saturated and a $20/h job is rare and coveted. I'm thankful for my current job doing online software in a niche market, but I've not quite broken the $40K/yr barrier yet... and I'm actually a very skilled and experienced developer. I just have no local options. So, I'm learning new skills and pushing my career toward a project management direction as fast as I can... to give myself more options as far as salary, and industries I can work in. If you aren't in the executive/management team, you're out of luck and at risk of being outsourced. At least if I was an experience project manager I wouldn't have to stay in the sofware/web development market.
The thing is, that people who have a public website out on the 'net are doing the same thing as radio, tv, newspaper, etc. They are broadcasting information for people to consume in their homes. If I were to cut ads out of the newspaper, plug my ears during radio commercials... or channel surf during TV commercials... it amounts to the same thing. Adblock and the like just makes it easier- complimentary to the fact that the web makes it easier to get that information. These complainers will have to accept it as a cost of providing web content. If they don't like it, they can slap a password on the content and charge a subscription fee. What makes me laugh is they are worrying about losing the attention of visitors who are in the demographic less likely to be attracted by annoying ads in the first place. They should be hoping their content is good enough that the adblock using visitors will spread the word to other non-adblock-using people.
I sincerely hope that Wii FPS and other shooter games like the upcoming resident evil will support the gamecube controller in addition to the remote.
Why?
The remote blows for shooters. Say you are holding the remote in your right hand- index finger on the trigger, thumb on the A button. Left hand has the nunchuck.
Ok, your left hand can move you, and access 2 buttons.
Your right hand can access the trigger, a button, and down arrow on the pad without moving. but if you want to hit the (+), (-) or other arrow buttons you have to shift your hand up the remote- screwing up your aim and taking you out of the game immersion. This is not good at all. So, with your limited access to weapons, how are you supposed to: jump, crouch, change weapons, bring up binoculars, flashlight, menu, throw a grenade/punch/knife/alternate weapon, etc, etc. Games these days needs lots of controls. Even the GC controller was pushing it.
I like the Wii, and I love Nintendo, but the wii mote is not my first choice for shooters. Others may love it. That's why I want CHOICE.
The Patriot Act can and will not stop something like 9/11. Why? Simple - the groups who are planning and doing these types of terrorist acts are serious, and know what they're doing. It's not very hard to stay off the grid- to communicate privately and to pay for everything with cash.
Do you think that some guy planning another attack is emailing his buddies in plain text, buying his supplies with a credit card, and talking about his plans in plain language on the phone? Puh-lease.
It's not average Americans who need to be 'monitored' here.
I might also help if Amercia would stop being the agressor around the globe. When has Iraq every attacked America? Where's the mass genocide that you see in Darfur or the Congo? But you don't see Bush trumpeting the cause of freeing the people in these nations do you?
I think that the 'Western world' should be a force for peace. Defend your country, retaliate swiftly and severely for attacks, and help out in countries where there is mass slaughter of civilians (like Darfur) and that's it. If you discover a country that is being openly hostile toward you or others, then use sanctions, stop trading, and stop sending money, weapons, supplies to those countries. But these 'preemptive strikes' are bogus. We aren't psychic and it just makes us into the bad guys.
We can start by patrolling our own borders properly- there's an idea.
You are bang on when it comes to the volume in movies. I was watching Constantine recently and had to have the subtitles on for a quarter of the film in order to understand what they were saying- the background music was too loud compared to the voices. Why do film-makers forget that background music is supposed to be in the BACKGROUND?
Forget what people choose to do to themselves... I'm more concerned about all this crap ending up in our lakes, rivers and oceans. I think we need to beef up our water treatment processes.
And come on, do we really want to put Jaws on speed?
I assume you're talking about the book Wizard's First Rule? That's a GREAT book, it's nice to read fantasy geared to adults for a change. But, it is something to consider that books like that don't have ratings, and any 10 year old can walk into a book store and buy it, or even read it in the store. I think the key is to balance ratings and restrictions on selling to minors with the responsibility of parents to know just what the hell their kids are doing.
Considerate web developers will use a cron to cache the google urchin.js file and then serve it up locally. This way their website won't be stuck waiting to load it from google's overworked servers.
So you don't want people reading your website content for 'free'? Then slap it behind a paid login, or hell, don't put it on the freakin Internet at all.
While they're at it, they need to block text only browsers, audio browsers for the hearing impaired, many mobile/PDA browsers, oh, and all the people who don't read or click on advertising. Idiots.
I think that how humanity handles this issue will be one of the greatest measures of our species in our entire civilization's existence so far. I just hope we don't embarrass ourselves by bickering about this until it's too late.
I don't see a chess playing computer as being remotely close to AI. Chess has a finite number of possible moves and scenarios. The faster a computer can churn through the possibilities and the more moves ahead it can look (deeper recursion) the better it will be. Eventually we will have a computer that can churn through every single possibility in real time. This proves nothing.
Now, lets look at a strategic scenario in the real world- like a field of battle. Here, not only are the possible moves and situations endless, humans will always be able to creatively invent something that the computer wasn't even considering, or even knew existed. For example, the computer is churning through possible moves of troops and allocations of weaponry and possible ways it could be attacked.... and then bam- the humans do something totally out there like digging a pit and covering it with leaves, and woops the computer didn't 'know' it was supposed to watch the ground for suspicious foliage.
Let's start dealing with this issue by having the computer and human play a game of chess where you can design your own pieces that have their own movement patterns that are not told to the competitor ahead of time. On a chess board that has no borders. That would be much more interesting. Maybe something like those table-top miniature games.
They still don't get it. Don't dangle DRM free music out like it's a limited time gift to us lowly music lovers who should be grateful for the opportunity. And don't make it hard to find on your website. Make it DRM free period. And for god's sake make it cheap. 99 cents per song?? Are you kidding me? In my city a newer CD costs about $15-18. And usually contains 10 to 20 songs. So if I buy the actual CD it's close to a dollar a song. How is 99 cent mp3s a deal? HA! I'd rather buy the CD at that price and get a case, disk, and little booklet with the package. Or... wait.... many people (cough certianly not me cough) will just grab torrents of DRM free ripped mp3 and build their own album without the crappy songs.
But, finding torrents that are working, good quality, and free of junk is time consuming and a pain in the but (or so I've heard cough). If I could go to a user-friendly website, download legal, high quality DRM free songs for no more than 25 cents each, I would do that in a heartbeat. But come on, 99 cents? Where's the savings from not getting a physical product? I'm not getting a CD, plastic case or full-colour printed booklet, so where's my savings? 99 cents is a joke. And these half-hearted attempts at DRM free options are an insult.
I think this is a real concern... I know most of my family and friends would have Java enabled, and would not know how to make the popup "go away". Most would just click on it. I think this is a real concern.
Firefox for example, in addition to being able to disable Java completely should have an option "Ask me before running any Java". Because sometimes you need it but can't tell from the site why the site doesn't work.
Also, why the hell doesn't the little Java icon that appears in my system tray, not have an Exit JVM option that would kill all running Java apps and exit the VM/console? That should be a no-brainer option for Sun to include on the right-click menu for that icon.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious, why choose Halo with it's obvious theme of killing? There is a HUGE selection of party, racing, sports, puzzle and adventure/action games that are much more appropriate. Of course, Halo is the big news these days so maybe it's JUST the popularity of the game they seem concerned with. Interesting that many churches won't compromise on some of the rules that are keeping so many people away, like birth control, gay-rights, molester-priests getting a slap on the wrist, and oh, the Harry Potter books are Pure Evil (but Halo is harmless fun). *sigh*
Should we just rename Earth to Rapture right now and get it over with?
Seriously though, I think if we get into these waters we may end up triggering some kind of genetic arms race- I can't even imagine.
I also agree with some other posters- don't we have bigger medical crises to spend money on? How about clean drinking water and fighting malaria in Africa?
I feel sorry for students who paid big dollars in tuition money to go to this school and take those courses... because now I can get the same knowledge for free. Borrow the textbook from the library and bam, I'm now Berkeley-Educated. Ha.
Good for us, bad idea for Berkeley. This should have been put in a secure area accessible to registered students only.
Ok, so let's pretend I'm a big Sony fanboi (do these even exist?) and I want to listen to my Sony produced music 'legally'. I have a Sony stereo system, Sony mp3 player and a Sony laptop. Oh, and I want to pop it on a memory stick and listen to it on my Sony PS3. Now, suppose I bought a whole CD but I really only like 5 songs on the CD. Suppose I paid $15 for it. That's $3 per song since I don't care about the other crappy filler songs.
/song, and to buy online let's say $1 per song times 3. That's $6 per song to listen to that song on all the devices I have. Oh, but I have 5 songs from that album I like so that's $30 of music for 5 songs.
I have 4 music playing devices (all Sony brand 'cause remember I'm pretending to be a big Sony fan), so I'll have to re-buy the songs online for each device.
So, the CD for my stereo is $3
Now, someone please name even ONE song that's worth that price? I can listen to the radio for FREE and hear most songs eventually.
This is a joke. Sony, please show me where the awesome musical masterpieces that are worth $6 per song are. I'm dying to know... cause what's out these days isn't worth a few quarters.
Idiots.
Thank you so much for that example!!
I never understood how this is even possible. Like vulnerabilities in image formats or video formats. How does this work? The media player, or image viewer, should be reading the bits in the file and display it as an image, or as video. Why do these bytes of data get executed? Who writes an application which opens an image file, reads the bits from the file and then EXECUTES it ?!?!?
I just don't get it. I'd love an explanation. Maybe it's like a website that takes user input and runs it as server side code... or some such. Just seems stupid to me. It should be impossible to have your video file executed...
Buddhist monks are non-violent. You may get some of the citizens using those, but not the monks. In fact, the monks have been urging citizens to stay out of it.
When will they realize, graphics are at a point where tweaking the reflectivity of the water, or the wispy-ness of the smoke won't change my mind about whether a game is fun. I'd trade less-shiny water for better AI any day. Or hell, maybe even just a better story. Stop stressing my PC to the limit! The fact that my new(ish) PC can't run Bioshock makes me want to cry. Well, there's $50 of my money they won't be getting.
Exactly. I wish my family would would think like this. My brother bought one of those "Chocolate" cell phones, when they were new and expensive, only to learn it blows as an MP3 player and is fragile as a phone. Woops, should have read some reviews eh bro? ;)
I agree. If I can add/remove programs to the list myself, then this is just fine. If a program tries to run, it should pop up a dialog asking me if I want to add the program to the list. I should also be able to get details like path/executable file name if I want to learn more about the app that's trying to run itself.
Let's help these poor souls and tell them what it will take to get at least some of us to buy music legally.
1. Offer a huge selection of music on a very easy to use website. Accessible to Canadians too!
2. Offer it in a variety of high quality formats as well as mp3s.
3. Offer it without DRM, tracking bytes, or my name embedded in the file.
4. Offer it for no more than 25 cents per song (approx $5 per album). 99 cents is way too high considering I'm not getting a physical CD, case, booklet, lossless format, etc.
5. Offer ways that loyal customers can earn points for free songs. Allow me have my family buy me credits. Make less popular/older songs cheaper.
6. Allow me to listen to a song or half of a song, before I buy it.
There problem solved. There's no way in hell I'm paying 99cents for DRMed crap. But, if it was easy, friendly and affordable then I'd be all over it.
My city is as blue-collar automotive as you can get. Unfortunately the local university churns out hundreds and hundreds of CS grads every year. The market is saturated and a $20/h job is rare and coveted. I'm thankful for my current job doing online software in a niche market, but I've not quite broken the $40K/yr barrier yet... and I'm actually a very skilled and experienced developer. I just have no local options. So, I'm learning new skills and pushing my career toward a project management direction as fast as I can... to give myself more options as far as salary, and industries I can work in. If you aren't in the executive/management team, you're out of luck and at risk of being outsourced. At least if I was an experience project manager I wouldn't have to stay in the sofware/web development market.
The thing is, that people who have a public website out on the 'net are doing the same thing as radio, tv, newspaper, etc. They are broadcasting information for people to consume in their homes. If I were to cut ads out of the newspaper, plug my ears during radio commercials... or channel surf during TV commercials... it amounts to the same thing. Adblock and the like just makes it easier- complimentary to the fact that the web makes it easier to get that information. These complainers will have to accept it as a cost of providing web content. If they don't like it, they can slap a password on the content and charge a subscription fee.
What makes me laugh is they are worrying about losing the attention of visitors who are in the demographic less likely to be attracted by annoying ads in the first place. They should be hoping their content is good enough that the adblock using visitors will spread the word to other non-adblock-using people.
I sincerely hope that Wii FPS and other shooter games like the upcoming resident evil will support the gamecube controller in addition to the remote.
Why?
The remote blows for shooters. Say you are holding the remote in your right hand- index finger on the trigger, thumb on the A button. Left hand has the nunchuck.
Ok, your left hand can move you, and access 2 buttons.
Your right hand can access the trigger, a button, and down arrow on the pad without moving. but if you want to hit the (+), (-) or other arrow buttons you have to shift your hand up the remote- screwing up your aim and taking you out of the game immersion. This is not good at all. So, with your limited access to weapons, how are you supposed to: jump, crouch, change weapons, bring up binoculars, flashlight, menu, throw a grenade/punch/knife/alternate weapon, etc, etc. Games these days needs lots of controls. Even the GC controller was pushing it.
I like the Wii, and I love Nintendo, but the wii mote is not my first choice for shooters. Others may love it. That's why I want CHOICE.
The Patriot Act can and will not stop something like 9/11. Why? Simple - the groups who are planning and doing these types of terrorist acts are serious, and know what they're doing. It's not very hard to stay off the grid- to communicate privately and to pay for everything with cash.
Do you think that some guy planning another attack is emailing his buddies in plain text, buying his supplies with a credit card, and talking about his plans in plain language on the phone? Puh-lease.
It's not average Americans who need to be 'monitored' here.
I might also help if Amercia would stop being the agressor around the globe. When has Iraq every attacked America? Where's the mass genocide that you see in Darfur or the Congo? But you don't see Bush trumpeting the cause of freeing the people in these nations do you?
I think that the 'Western world' should be a force for peace. Defend your country, retaliate swiftly and severely for attacks, and help out in countries where there is mass slaughter of civilians (like Darfur) and that's it. If you discover a country that is being openly hostile toward you or others, then use sanctions, stop trading, and stop sending money, weapons, supplies to those countries. But these 'preemptive strikes' are bogus. We aren't psychic and it just makes us into the bad guys.
We can start by patrolling our own borders properly- there's an idea.
You are bang on when it comes to the volume in movies. I was watching Constantine recently and had to have the subtitles on for a quarter of the film in order to understand what they were saying- the background music was too loud compared to the voices. Why do film-makers forget that background music is supposed to be in the BACKGROUND?
Forget what people choose to do to themselves... I'm more concerned about all this crap ending up in our lakes, rivers and oceans. I think we need to beef up our water treatment processes.
And come on, do we really want to put Jaws on speed?
I assume you're talking about the book Wizard's First Rule? That's a GREAT book, it's nice to read fantasy geared to adults for a change. But, it is something to consider that books like that don't have ratings, and any 10 year old can walk into a book store and buy it, or even read it in the store. I think the key is to balance ratings and restrictions on selling to minors with the responsibility of parents to know just what the hell their kids are doing.
Considerate web developers will use a cron to cache the google urchin.js file and then serve it up locally. This way their website won't be stuck waiting to load it from google's overworked servers.
So you don't want people reading your website content for 'free'? Then slap it behind a paid login, or hell, don't put it on the freakin Internet at all.
While they're at it, they need to block text only browsers, audio browsers for the hearing impaired, many mobile/PDA browsers, oh, and all the people who don't read or click on advertising. Idiots.
Dr. Hansen gets it right on. His 2nd email: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074. pdf is full of facts but most climate change deniers are highly skilled at ignoring those pesky facts.
I think that how humanity handles this issue will be one of the greatest measures of our species in our entire civilization's existence so far. I just hope we don't embarrass ourselves by bickering about this until it's too late.
I don't see a chess playing computer as being remotely close to AI. Chess has a finite number of possible moves and scenarios. The faster a computer can churn through the possibilities and the more moves ahead it can look (deeper recursion) the better it will be. Eventually we will have a computer that can churn through every single possibility in real time. This proves nothing.
Now, lets look at a strategic scenario in the real world- like a field of battle. Here, not only are the possible moves and situations endless, humans will always be able to creatively invent something that the computer wasn't even considering, or even knew existed. For example, the computer is churning through possible moves of troops and allocations of weaponry and possible ways it could be attacked.... and then bam- the humans do something totally out there like digging a pit and covering it with leaves, and woops the computer didn't 'know' it was supposed to watch the ground for suspicious foliage.
Let's start dealing with this issue by having the computer and human play a game of chess where you can design your own pieces that have their own movement patterns that are not told to the competitor ahead of time. On a chess board that has no borders. That would be much more interesting. Maybe something like those table-top miniature games.
They still don't get it. Don't dangle DRM free music out like it's a limited time gift to us lowly music lovers who should be grateful for the opportunity. And don't make it hard to find on your website. Make it DRM free period. And for god's sake make it cheap. 99 cents per song?? Are you kidding me? In my city a newer CD costs about $15-18. And usually contains 10 to 20 songs. So if I buy the actual CD it's close to a dollar a song. How is 99 cent mp3s a deal? HA! I'd rather buy the CD at that price and get a case, disk, and little booklet with the package. Or... wait.... many people (cough certianly not me cough) will just grab torrents of DRM free ripped mp3 and build their own album without the crappy songs.
But, finding torrents that are working, good quality, and free of junk is time consuming and a pain in the but (or so I've heard cough). If I could go to a user-friendly website, download legal, high quality DRM free songs for no more than 25 cents each, I would do that in a heartbeat. But come on, 99 cents? Where's the savings from not getting a physical product? I'm not getting a CD, plastic case or full-colour printed booklet, so where's my savings? 99 cents is a joke. And these half-hearted attempts at DRM free options are an insult.
-A height attribute that actually works?
-Looping
-Smarter Form controls
-Eliminate the need for putting a space in empty table cells.
- ???
- Profit!
I think this is a real concern... I know most of my family and friends would have Java enabled, and would not know how to make the popup "go away". Most would just click on it. I think this is a real concern.
Firefox for example, in addition to being able to disable Java completely should have an option "Ask me before running any Java". Because sometimes you need it but can't tell from the site why the site doesn't work.
Also, why the hell doesn't the little Java icon that appears in my system tray, not have an Exit JVM option that would kill all running Java apps and exit the VM/console? That should be a no-brainer option for Sun to include on the right-click menu for that icon.