I also know, despite being a dumb amerikkkan, that none of those places are in Russia. Snowden will absolutely be captured if he appears in any of these places and would be a great fool to testify there.
I dunno, he might just use the phone, or a videoconference tool over the internet (not like he's discussing state secrets (well, not anymore really)). You might not be that dumb of an "amerikkkan", but you're not the most practical person in the US of A either. I'd urge you to become more practical before turning into an enemy of the state, should the thought ever cross your (or your governments) mind.
The former US National Security Agency worker would testify by interactive video link from Russia, where he has been granted temporary asylum.
Right there in the article even.
Anyway, we'll see what happens. The article mentions that people are divided about having him talk, keeping US-EU relations in mind, which by itself in my opinion speaks tales about "how concerned" these people really are by the whole ordeal. In the end it remains politics, and even if most people were terribly upset they'll still shake hands and sign agreements as if there isn't a care in the world. I can see the merit of asking Snowden a few questions or clarifications, but if I understand it correctly he's already released his documents he had to share. I also vaguely remember his terms for his asylum being "not to further embarrass our American partners", and I would be extremely cautious if I were him about what those terms exactly mean. Putin may enjoy his little prank on the US, but he doesn't like it when people don't dance to his tune.
I think that if you read between the lines of all of this, the EU isn't even all that concerned about its citizens, but rather about its political and economical agenda. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many countries in the EU currently have their intelligence services cooperatively lobbying their politicians to do the very same. Hell, I would be surprised if they already haven't done such a thing on a smaller scale in the first place, considering how much some of the EU nations are investing in their own "anti-terror" efforts, although much more low profile and with considerably less impact. In reality, all nations across the globe are engaged in political and economical espionage, but it's their efficiency that you should be concerned about.
I would say this is nothing but a lot of grandstanding for political reasons, but I am a cynic when it comes to politics. Many European politicians although they emit an air of indifference when it comes to the US, are very big fans of the US as has been made obvious by the cable leaks released by wikileaks in the past. There's decades of treaties and agreements between most EU nations and the US, and few are willing to risk the long-term benefits of those.
The Belgians recently spend a year without a government because the sub-frenchies and the sub-dutchies hated each others guts.
No we don't... We have several movements which at best are able to fool the general populace that one side is getting benefits the other side isn't, together with some very "charismatic" people who use simplified logic to explain it all, including the example of a Flemish person bringing a case of beer to a Walloon person every week.
The problem that happened in Belgium was that we had a prime minister from a party stupid enough to play with Mr Populars party, and played right into their hand. The height of comedy was reached that during one of the impasses the (then future) prime minister sang the wrong national anthem (the marseillaise) on purpose (although he claims it was an honest mistake) to both provoke the flemish nationalist sentiment and the walloon nationalist sentiment.
The impasse has a lot to do with infighting on both sides of the linguistic border. To give a few such examples: the liberal democrats on the french side of the country no longer agreeing with the socialist party (the traditional winner of the elections on that side), the liberal party on the dutch side removing its support for the plans of reformation for the Brussels electorate... Then there was the complicated affair of the sale of the Fortis bank (now BNP Parisbax), which was commonly believed to be the most stable bank in Belgium, where the seperation of powers was violated which caused the government to fall. On top of it all, many of the parties have fragmented into smaller parties which see the impasse as a way to boost their own Mr Populars (and fail miserably at that).
The story is terribly complicated because of how our government works, and I doubt over half of the population even knows how our government works, let alone a casual outside observer. It's all too easy to assume that Belgian politics reached the impasse because of the further federalization and the Flemish nationalists. In truth the political climate here at the moment leans so far to the nationalist parties because the traditional parties fail to make good compromises, which is reinforcing the idea that we need to federalize even further up to the point of cessation.
Think of it like this: the french side is scared that the dutch side will try to become independent (like the flemish nationalists want), so they play hardball. The flemish nationalists use this as evidence to show "Look, they want to play rough. They're taking all the money we're earning.", which makes them more popular to the general public on the dutch side. The french side is typically socialist, and the flemish nationalists are pretty much anything but socialist. So when the two parties with the most votes meet to make a government, it's bound to fail because of the completely opposite ideals. This leads to reinfornce the idea that the french are playing hardball, and the flemish nationalists aren't playing hard enough. That cycle continued until the flemish nationalists withdrew when the public opinion was about to sway on them, and gets to sit in the opposition pointing out just how terrible the federal government is now that the traditional parties are in the majority. The next elections will determine if that strategy worked, but polls indicated it didn't.
When the two most popular parties don't have any common ground, and are unwilling to meet eachother halfway you end up in a situation where it's impossible form a government. During that impasse, our prime minister who sang the wrong national anthem, failed miserably at keeping two governments in place for a term and is in part responsible for the popularization of the flemish nationalists had the most uneventful reign as prime minister during his entire career. After all, the government wasn't allowed to undertake new things, just maintaining the running stuff and signing a running budget.
tl;dr version: Belgium is more complicated than the linguistic border, it's just the most obvious and easily explainable issue in this country.
Steam has made the concept of a perpetual, one-time rental service palatable.
It's convenient... REALLY convenient, and it was the first in the market. That should explain the success. Nobody really cares about the whole "you don't own your games" thing, since they haven't been screwed over yet. Valve already won the battle with steam, especially if you consider the other forms of DRM out there. Valve's DRM is least intrusive, up to the point where Steams users are for the most part blissfully unaware that it is there. Origin is a bad joke where the audience refuses to laugh and owned by a company which has a terrible reputation, and the others are so insignificant that it's hardly worth mentioning them (Stardocks Impulse, if that still exists, springs to mind).
I cannot get Dishonored DRM-free - it's Steam or bust
That is in the end the choice of the developer/publisher to pick what platform they want to use. Don't get me wrong, if you're taking the stance where you won't install games with DRM, I tip my hat to you for sticking to your principles. Don't blame Valve for building a successful platform, but blame the publisher/developers for not picking multiple options. In the end, nobody is forcing the developers to use Steam. There are plenty of games that have both a Steam and a non-steam release. Go look on gog.com for the more recent releases and lookup the games there on Steam. Plenty of indie publishers choose both options as well.
So if I have a problem with Steam's EULA or ToS, I'm basically unable to play the extreme majority of top-tier titles, and only some of the indie titles out there.
Well, yes, that is how you should stick to your principles. You get over that fairly quickly though. I for one refuse to buy consoles, and I miss out on a lot of very nice console exclusives that I'd like to give a spin. But hey, look here, other games I can play,... There are more interesting games out there than I can play in my lifetime, especially if I take my other hobbies into consideration.
However, this in turn might reduce the motivation to make a DRM-free Linux (or Windows) games if Steam is there and us minority fellows aren't worth the trouble.
Publishers/developers are rarely going to release games without copy protection. The first few weeks after release are far too critical for their sales to go without trivial copy protection, and with the ease they can implement one of the DRM schemes these days they'd be foolish not to implement one, no matter which platform you're talking about. It's just the way it is, and even if Steam were to stop existing tomorrow there'll be another platform to fill that void before you can say "Oh wow, who'd've thought". DRM has become so much part of that industry that you'll either have to accept it or learn to do without those who implement it. The rare few cases where a publisher changes their mind are because they're getting terrible PR and fear they'll lose their sales, but with DRM being so widely present in games today you have to implement something nasty or be dealing with the wrong audience to even get that reaction.
it means DRM will never leave us because too many gamers cannot stand on principle, or simply don't care
You can raise awareness, but there are always going to be people who don't care. And to be honest, out of all the forms of DRM, Steam is the most widely accepted one, which in my opinion is because Valve all in all has a pretty decent reputation as a company and it's very convenient.
As for the whole gaming on linux thing, I would really like to see it happen, even if it comes with the DRM from Steam and what not. It would certainly be interesting, and more attention to Linux as an OS is in my opinion a good thing. In the best case it could make developers consider Linux as a viable platform for release, in the worst case you'd at least get th
Except that when your own company develops video games, gaming is more like researching a competitor's product or service.
Nah, in Notches case it's just a lack of attention span. Don't get me wrong, he's an okay guy, but just follow his twitter account for a month or two. He hops from idea to idea, would rather be working on something else once he starts, drops everything for a 7-day FPS competition, etc. The old joke used to be that notch codes a few lines in between his vacations.
I think his attention span problem comes from a lack of incentive to work on something from start to finish. With minecraft his incentive was that it was making him a millionaire, but then at some point (when it went from "ludicrously popular" to "proposterously popular") he delegated that to someone else.
Having said that, he got lucky and he seems a guy with a right mindset at times. So he failed this time, as do many. They just don't have a billion followers wolfing down every word they utter.
Kahn was quoting Melville; Kirk was his whale. And Star Trek is more known to most slashdotters than Melville.
If anything, I'm surprised that a person who watched Wrath of Khan or First Contact wouldn't recognize the quotes and parallels immediately. Even if your native language is not English and you weren't forced to read these classics, this is classic literature that's pretty hard to ignore. If anything I'd say that next to Shakespeare's work, Melville's right up there as "most quoted classical author in sci-fi".
And, just to play devil's advocate, at what age did you start using the internet? Were you already old enough to have some context, or still quite young?
I'm old enough to remember what it was like before the Internet. We had access to magazines, videocasettes, and hell every now and then some kid at school would hand you a floppy with some erotic game on it. Now, you're going to argue "But that's pretty tame, compared to the stuff on the Internet", but really... Some of the things in those magazines is not the usual way people enjoy themselves, nor were those games, nor what was on the videocasettes. It went far above and beyond what was necessary for reproduction.
It's not sent me on some downward spiral in search of evermore degrading fornication, nor do I feel the need to objectify the other sex or to start namecalling those of a different sexual orientation. The ever-degrading moral standard of our kids is the illusion we like to believe when we are at the age that we have our own kids, and it's a trap you can easily fall for. All you need is one anecdote (true or not) and you immediately forget 6 years of high school rumours ("who's doing who?") not to mention the amount of hormones coursing through your veins at the time. The only effect it's really had on me in the long term is that I've become more understanding of other people having different preferences than me.
But if 11 year olds are growing up thinking bukkake, gang bangs and fisting are just part of 'normal'(*) sexuality and what's expected from them, they might be somewhat at risk for risky behavior or never learning how to date and hang out.
And that's the part where as a parent you're supposed to fulfill your part. I mean, of course you're not going to be 100% aware of what your kids are up to. Hell, if my parents knew at the time... But in the end I feel my parents gave me enough guidance in the field to determine what I was to expect and what not... And we had our fair share of urban legends rivaling your "Rainbow Parties", some of which would put Roman orgies to shame, and as it turned out like everyone expected : none of it was true. Everyone who talked about those always "knew a guy who knows this guy" etc...
I don't agree that the censorship is a good idea, but I can see how people growing up on the weird stuff you see on the internet can lead to a very messed up outlook and set of expectations about later in life.
At the age of 9 I watched horror flicks, gruesome horror flicks that scared the bejeebus out of me. My parents didn't know (oh, who am I kidding, I never rewound that tape...). These days I have to restrain myself from grabbing a chainsaw in the middle of the night and heading out into town to go on rampage. I suggest we ban those too. Obviously my expectations of what is acceptable in life have been completely warped by chainsaw wielding antagonists.
Oh, if this Internet thing only was a physical object, we could've long burned it... Like we used to do with books. Man... Those were the days
First of all, don't feed the trolls. Second, since the discussion is basically an ad hominem or a personal attack on the guy:
His name has been put up for the Nobel Peace Prize as of today
Which puts him in the same category as Adolf Hitler. Man, did he bring some peace, or what? (Sorry for Godwin'ing the conversation, but you have to admit that it's funny to point that out)
Nobel peace price (nomination) means nothing. Barack Obama has one, which was to be called premature at best, but undeserved would be more appropriate. Then again, at the time people were still expecting him to start walking on water in the coming weeks.
I personally don't care about Snowden and his Russian airport antics or "criminal status". I'm far more interested in the message and the consequences of the lid being blown off that whole thing. Hell, everyone seems more interested in his IRC logs, forum comments and pictures of his girlfriend. Bread and circuses, I guess...
discord5 reports that slashdot is attempting to provide articles specifically designed for geek and while many people report that their geeks completely ignore what is visible on slashdot, with modern HTML5 and AJAX, more geeks have become potential slashdot readers.
The increase in geek readership is primarily attributed to the way the geek's eye works. The buildup of a standard webpage is updated once per click and since a human's maximum clicking frequency is only 55 Hz, the webpage appears continuous and the gradually changing webpages give us the illusion of content. However geeks can discern content at up to 80 Hz so with the increased availability of highly dynamic AJAX webpages that are refreshed at a much higher rate, the content is less likely to appear to be interesting to the geeks eye.
Presentation factors are also an issue. Geeks are most likely to respond to images that have been captured at the eye level of a geek with a low camera angle from the basement where there are moving things like das Blinkenlichte. But even if that requirement is fulfilled, most geeks do not read slashdot because the website has become devoid of actual content despite it's high rate AJAX updates and rounded corners.
And now, an article about the Dog Network, as irrelevant to geeks as sharks are to the Fonz... Eyyyyyy.
Now if you'll excuse me, my compiling is done, and I'm not even going to bother reading the article which at best can only be described as interesting... no wait, the other one... TEDIOUS
Student show an iota of initiative and wants to program computers? Father lectures the child that is a way to be a failure.
Anything that deviates from the norm as it is, is considered to be bad. There is a saying there: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.". I think the expression speaks for itself to be honest.
If I could, I would try to convince the Romans of the past to stop building roads. The reason for this is that I've discovered that since the advent of roads, there has been such a phenomenon as road-side bandits, highway robberies, and even standing armies using this newly found infrastructure to lay siege to our vast empire.
Ever since the Romans came along and deprecated our glorious and superior dirt infrastructure, we've been carelessly hooking up critical systems to this "road"-system: tax-collection, food transportation, even up to the point where we are now moving cattle over these infernal cobblestones instead of using the much safer glorious dirt infrastructure. We've hooked up entire towns, cities, even castles and palaces to this infrastructure we can barely contain and are surprised when those of malicious intent use it to our disadvantage.
Back in the good old days of our vastly superiour dirt infrastructure we had no such troubles with malcontents, criminals and foreign armies. It was a pleasant land of peasants toiling about in our magnificent dirt.
In conclusion, the Roman empire was a detriment to all of society. While seemingly introducing a convenient mode of transportation, and making all of our society dependant on our infrastucture, they clearly have introduced this concept with the intent of ending civilization as we know it. I therefor call out to you, citizens, fellow countrymen: Tear down these "roads" that threaten us all! Go back to rolling around in our glorious dirt, and burn down anything even remotely Roman (even if it contains water, such as aquaducts, don't even get me started on those).
Unfortunately, I have to side with NHTSA since I'd rather have my personal space invaded by a law than I would have it invaded by someone's ton and a half SUV because they were texting some cat picture instead of driving.
I don't have much faith in solutions like this because it's one of those problems which are social problems, not technological ones. If we disregard the technological feasibility of this, for the sake of argument, we're going to have people who are going to look for ways to circumvent this measure (and they will find it, have no worries about that). On top of that, any car and phone which isn't equipped with such a system still allows for people to call/text while driving.
A much better solution to this type of problem in my opinion is to raise awareness, make the whole thing punishable with a fine and for repeat offenders include a revocation of the drivers license, and actively enforce it. In the beginning you'll have people who will blatantly ignore these measures, but once they start getting hit with fines most of them will stop. And just like with parking fines, you'll have people who blatantly ignore the law, as with any other kind of restriction they feel that doesn't apply to them, which is where the revocation of the license comes into place.
On my morning commute which often involves 20km/h freeway "happiness", I've seen plenty of people use non-technological means to distract them from the task at hand. People reading the newspaper while driving, doing crossword puzzles, having breakfast, doing their make-up, etc etc etc. Hell, I've even seen someone miss a green light because they were too busy playing with their kids (an admirable feat, just not in traffic). You don't solve those kinds of things with a bit of electronics in the dashboard.
It's not the calling and texting that is the problem, that's just a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that people aren't paying attention as they're hurtling down the road at breakneck speeds. There's no chip you can place in the dashboard that makes people pay attention to what they're doing.
"If we call our platform 'open,' that means we don't have to worry when it takes developers far longer to deliver far worse software than on competing platforms, right?"
Meanwhile in Redmond on the end of an infinitely superior phone: "Oh hey there Steve, how's that windows phone thing working out for you? Got any market chairs to throw around latelty? Man, I'd love to chat on the phone all night but I've got this successful mobile OS to play with."
They're caught between ultra-cheap (but mostly crap) mobile offerings and slightly-cheaper, more technically impressive PC releases of the same games (with even a basic home PC now easily able to outperform the consoles and the level of tech-savvy required lower than ever)
The problem is that releasing new hardware isn't going to change anything. Sure, the first few months the consoles will have that edge over the PC in the price point, but as new CPUs and GPUs are released the point for a PC to be competitive in price quickly arrives. Look at the XBox One specs: 8 cores and 8GB of RAM with 500G of HDD. I can get an 8-core Bulldozer for a decent price. Finding 8GB of RAM is not all that uncommon with the average PC gamer. What's left is the resolution (4K) and 7.1 surround, which all in all is not that impressive since most people sit on 1080i TVs and 5.1 or better sound systems are a bit of a rarity for TVs (at least here, unless you're one of those home entertainment system guys/girls). The focus on the whole reveal seemed to be on the services: integrating it with cable, kinect and voice control, DVR features (to be discussed with the networks). All things considering that's a bit disappointing, because most people interested in such features have a DVR solution already, and the whole kinect/voice thing seems so pointless... Top it off with the heavy focus on DRM (required internet, the whole used games thing) and the console caters more to publishers than its owners. The same applies to what's know about the PS4: it has similar hardware to what's found on the market today in PC-land.
The mobile market does what Nintendo did with the Wii and the DS. Games don't need to have that much hardware available as long as they're well presented and have average to decent gameplay they'll sell. A lot of people are just interested in a quick casual diversion, and mobile taps that market pretty well, and it becomes more of a pricepoint issue where people decide on buying a game. Few people flinch at dumping $2.99 into some casual puzzle game. While the mobile gaming and the AAA title demographics overlap a little bit, I doubt that it will affect the bottom line much. Mass Effect and Angry Birds are two different beasts with two different types of consumers, and while some will play both, they serve a different "function". Angry Birds is what you play in 10 minutes of idle time (waiting for a appointment, sitting on the train, etc) while Mass Effect is something you play at home. Mobile is more likely to eat away at Nintendo with its relatively large casual games compared to MS and Sony.
A significant portion of the Japanese games industry has already given up (or is in the process of giving up) the ghost and pulling out of any meaningful participation in the international market, in favour of their more forgiving (and heavily kids-and-otaku-driven) domestic market.
When has that never been the case? The only exception to that rule are the fighting games and most of the Square Enix titles. For the most part Japanese publishers have always catered to Japan first, and the western market has for the most part been second. This is not exactly a new trend.
At the same time, development costs for games have risen and are rising still further. Early in this console cycle, the rule of thumb was that an "AAA" console game needed to sell 1 million copies to break even. That figure is closer to 3 million now.
That's kind of the problem with AAA titles, isn't it? If you want the damn thing to shine like nothing else available today you're throwing in a lot of skilled labor: programmers, artists, (voice) acting, and the list goes on and on... Yet over the years I've found AAA games to be providing less and less content or depth and more superficial shine, and to me this shows especially in RPGs because that is a genre where content really is king in my opinion. In MMOs the lack of content is made up for by delaying the p
Ah fuck off. It's actually a good and interesting question to see what the various specialists come up with.
Nah, it's called getting a set of basic user requirements and then looking through a set of products to see which match the list. This just reeks of laziness and namedropping on slashdot so someone will post the solution for you.
By the way, I'm looking for a toaster on linux, it needs to be able to have 6 settings, usuable by many people (including students). I need to be able to develop toast on it, but it also needs to run an operational toasting environment, preferably on the same hardware. I would like it to be fully scriptable, and I need to be able to hook it up to an LDAP. It would be nice if it came included with a coffeemachine, which should also be fully scriptable. I've found the Coffee HOWTO, but haven't bothered reading it. Could you guys give me an opinion on how to adapt this to my toaster project? I've looked at relays, resistors and capacitors... They all seem very nice.
Please spend a little more time reading the manuals and typing in a few requests in Google before posting this to Ask Slashdot: be a bit more professional.
If each one of those people e-mailed me every time they had a photo to share of their lunch, or some cause they wanted to support, or some other piece of datum they felt like sharing with the world, it would be chaos.
If people I knew started e-mailing me pictures of their cats I'd be most obliged to redirect their mail to/dev/null. However, if people ran their own website or blog or whatever I would happily subscribe to their RSS feed and ignore the junk I didn't care about. And the best part of it is that there's no middle man, making money from it, datamining it, or whatever.
None of the features facebook/Google+/whatever offers wasn't available before all of this "social networking" craze took hold. Somehow I was able to attend BBQs, see pictures from people's holidays (and cats), discuss stuff that mattered to groups of people (and with less inane bullshit in between on how the kids just puked on the carpet, including a video on youtube). Somehow people seemed to be more aware of the fact that when they put things on a website it's there for the world at large to see, but instead now we get people complaining "My privacy options".
I get the feeling eternal september got upped to a whole new level, where "Me too" has been replaced with +1 or "Like".
There was not one game from that era that could install without spending a day trying to tweak config.sys files and autoexec.bat
I remember it well, and it was the first steps for me into the dark art of understanding how computers work. I can only thank videogames of that era for making me start a voyage into a new realm. Understanding memory, learning about DMA and IRQs, getting a modem to work, setting up a LAN, trying my hand at programming,... I learned a great deal from all that and it got me interested in a subject I had little interest in before.
Thanks DOS games! You've set me onto a career which I enjoy tremendously (despite becoming such a cynic).
The launch aside, it's yet another terrible incarnation of a great series. I've been peeking at a few videos on youtube because I was hoping for something with a little depth to it, but it's even below my worst expectations (and given Simcity Societies, the expectations were already pretty low).
Simcity 4 with NAM installed still beats this game gameplay-wise hands down from what I can see. It's one of the few games that get reinstalled every X years on my computer. It's ridiculously in-depth if you want it to be, and you can add plenty of mods to make your roads curvy/circular with overpasses and underpasses and however the hell you please.
This has nothing to do with "bill of rights", it's just a bad game with stupid DRM. No need to write a longwinded document nobody's going to read, which will immediately get dismissed with the word "entitled". Just don't buy it.
In fact, don't buy games that use a mechanism you don't agree with, if that be day 1 DLC, the form of DRM they're using, or if you expect them of eating babies. Play another game and have fun. Take those 60 bucks and buy something else.
Oh great, we've just taken the first step into creating Cranium Rats. Bring enough of those together and there'll be talk about overthrowing the bonds human opression.
Slashdot Mirror
I also know, despite being a dumb amerikkkan, that none of those places are in Russia. Snowden will absolutely be captured if he appears in any of these places and would be a great fool to testify there.
I dunno, he might just use the phone, or a videoconference tool over the internet (not like he's discussing state secrets (well, not anymore really)). You might not be that dumb of an "amerikkkan", but you're not the most practical person in the US of A either. I'd urge you to become more practical before turning into an enemy of the state, should the thought ever cross your (or your governments) mind.
The former US National Security Agency worker would testify by interactive video link from Russia, where he has been granted temporary asylum.
Right there in the article even.
Anyway, we'll see what happens. The article mentions that people are divided about having him talk, keeping US-EU relations in mind, which by itself in my opinion speaks tales about "how concerned" these people really are by the whole ordeal. In the end it remains politics, and even if most people were terribly upset they'll still shake hands and sign agreements as if there isn't a care in the world. I can see the merit of asking Snowden a few questions or clarifications, but if I understand it correctly he's already released his documents he had to share. I also vaguely remember his terms for his asylum being "not to further embarrass our American partners", and I would be extremely cautious if I were him about what those terms exactly mean. Putin may enjoy his little prank on the US, but he doesn't like it when people don't dance to his tune.
I think that if you read between the lines of all of this, the EU isn't even all that concerned about its citizens, but rather about its political and economical agenda. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many countries in the EU currently have their intelligence services cooperatively lobbying their politicians to do the very same. Hell, I would be surprised if they already haven't done such a thing on a smaller scale in the first place, considering how much some of the EU nations are investing in their own "anti-terror" efforts, although much more low profile and with considerably less impact. In reality, all nations across the globe are engaged in political and economical espionage, but it's their efficiency that you should be concerned about.
I would say this is nothing but a lot of grandstanding for political reasons, but I am a cynic when it comes to politics. Many European politicians although they emit an air of indifference when it comes to the US, are very big fans of the US as has been made obvious by the cable leaks released by wikileaks in the past. There's decades of treaties and agreements between most EU nations and the US, and few are willing to risk the long-term benefits of those.
What's surprising is that nobody here thinks this is an inherently sexist device.
In before the great bra-burning of 2014.
What color do you want your sushi to glow tonight?
There, fixed that for you.
At least fix the damn typo while you're improving the content.
Please become a stand-up comedian... No, even better, run for president. The world needs more fine comedy like this.
The Belgians recently spend a year without a government because the sub-frenchies and the sub-dutchies hated each others guts.
No we don't... We have several movements which at best are able to fool the general populace that one side is getting benefits the other side isn't, together with some very "charismatic" people who use simplified logic to explain it all, including the example of a Flemish person bringing a case of beer to a Walloon person every week.
The problem that happened in Belgium was that we had a prime minister from a party stupid enough to play with Mr Populars party, and played right into their hand. The height of comedy was reached that during one of the impasses the (then future) prime minister sang the wrong national anthem (the marseillaise) on purpose (although he claims it was an honest mistake) to both provoke the flemish nationalist sentiment and the walloon nationalist sentiment.
The impasse has a lot to do with infighting on both sides of the linguistic border. To give a few such examples: the liberal democrats on the french side of the country no longer agreeing with the socialist party (the traditional winner of the elections on that side), the liberal party on the dutch side removing its support for the plans of reformation for the Brussels electorate... Then there was the complicated affair of the sale of the Fortis bank (now BNP Parisbax), which was commonly believed to be the most stable bank in Belgium, where the seperation of powers was violated which caused the government to fall. On top of it all, many of the parties have fragmented into smaller parties which see the impasse as a way to boost their own Mr Populars (and fail miserably at that).
The story is terribly complicated because of how our government works, and I doubt over half of the population even knows how our government works, let alone a casual outside observer. It's all too easy to assume that Belgian politics reached the impasse because of the further federalization and the Flemish nationalists. In truth the political climate here at the moment leans so far to the nationalist parties because the traditional parties fail to make good compromises, which is reinforcing the idea that we need to federalize even further up to the point of cessation.
Think of it like this: the french side is scared that the dutch side will try to become independent (like the flemish nationalists want), so they play hardball. The flemish nationalists use this as evidence to show "Look, they want to play rough. They're taking all the money we're earning.", which makes them more popular to the general public on the dutch side. The french side is typically socialist, and the flemish nationalists are pretty much anything but socialist. So when the two parties with the most votes meet to make a government, it's bound to fail because of the completely opposite ideals. This leads to reinfornce the idea that the french are playing hardball, and the flemish nationalists aren't playing hard enough. That cycle continued until the flemish nationalists withdrew when the public opinion was about to sway on them, and gets to sit in the opposition pointing out just how terrible the federal government is now that the traditional parties are in the majority. The next elections will determine if that strategy worked, but polls indicated it didn't.
When the two most popular parties don't have any common ground, and are unwilling to meet eachother halfway you end up in a situation where it's impossible form a government. During that impasse, our prime minister who sang the wrong national anthem, failed miserably at keeping two governments in place for a term and is in part responsible for the popularization of the flemish nationalists had the most uneventful reign as prime minister during his entire career. After all, the government wasn't allowed to undertake new things, just maintaining the running stuff and signing a running budget.
tl;dr version: Belgium is more complicated than the linguistic border, it's just the most obvious and easily explainable issue in this country.
All these leaks have shown is the general public is the real enemy of the state.
Only terrorists use the bold tag twice! GET HIM!
You guys *really* need something with with a "3" in it for a launch.
Holy shit! Left3Dead! Hat Fortress 3! DOTA3! Portal 3! CounterStr... Nevermind, nobody wants yet another counterstrike.
Steam has made the concept of a perpetual, one-time rental service palatable.
It's convenient... REALLY convenient, and it was the first in the market. That should explain the success. Nobody really cares about the whole "you don't own your games" thing, since they haven't been screwed over yet. Valve already won the battle with steam, especially if you consider the other forms of DRM out there. Valve's DRM is least intrusive, up to the point where Steams users are for the most part blissfully unaware that it is there. Origin is a bad joke where the audience refuses to laugh and owned by a company which has a terrible reputation, and the others are so insignificant that it's hardly worth mentioning them (Stardocks Impulse, if that still exists, springs to mind).
I cannot get Dishonored DRM-free - it's Steam or bust
That is in the end the choice of the developer/publisher to pick what platform they want to use. Don't get me wrong, if you're taking the stance where you won't install games with DRM, I tip my hat to you for sticking to your principles. Don't blame Valve for building a successful platform, but blame the publisher/developers for not picking multiple options. In the end, nobody is forcing the developers to use Steam. There are plenty of games that have both a Steam and a non-steam release. Go look on gog.com for the more recent releases and lookup the games there on Steam. Plenty of indie publishers choose both options as well.
So if I have a problem with Steam's EULA or ToS, I'm basically unable to play the extreme majority of top-tier titles, and only some of the indie titles out there.
Well, yes, that is how you should stick to your principles. You get over that fairly quickly though. I for one refuse to buy consoles, and I miss out on a lot of very nice console exclusives that I'd like to give a spin. But hey, look here, other games I can play,... There are more interesting games out there than I can play in my lifetime, especially if I take my other hobbies into consideration.
However, this in turn might reduce the motivation to make a DRM-free Linux (or Windows) games if Steam is there and us minority fellows aren't worth the trouble.
Publishers/developers are rarely going to release games without copy protection. The first few weeks after release are far too critical for their sales to go without trivial copy protection, and with the ease they can implement one of the DRM schemes these days they'd be foolish not to implement one, no matter which platform you're talking about. It's just the way it is, and even if Steam were to stop existing tomorrow there'll be another platform to fill that void before you can say "Oh wow, who'd've thought". DRM has become so much part of that industry that you'll either have to accept it or learn to do without those who implement it. The rare few cases where a publisher changes their mind are because they're getting terrible PR and fear they'll lose their sales, but with DRM being so widely present in games today you have to implement something nasty or be dealing with the wrong audience to even get that reaction.
it means DRM will never leave us because too many gamers cannot stand on principle, or simply don't care
You can raise awareness, but there are always going to be people who don't care. And to be honest, out of all the forms of DRM, Steam is the most widely accepted one, which in my opinion is because Valve all in all has a pretty decent reputation as a company and it's very convenient.
As for the whole gaming on linux thing, I would really like to see it happen, even if it comes with the DRM from Steam and what not. It would certainly be interesting, and more attention to Linux as an OS is in my opinion a good thing. In the best case it could make developers consider Linux as a viable platform for release, in the worst case you'd at least get th
Except that when your own company develops video games, gaming is more like researching a competitor's product or service.
Nah, in Notches case it's just a lack of attention span. Don't get me wrong, he's an okay guy, but just follow his twitter account for a month or two. He hops from idea to idea, would rather be working on something else once he starts, drops everything for a 7-day FPS competition, etc. The old joke used to be that notch codes a few lines in between his vacations.
I think his attention span problem comes from a lack of incentive to work on something from start to finish. With minecraft his incentive was that it was making him a millionaire, but then at some point (when it went from "ludicrously popular" to "proposterously popular") he delegated that to someone else.
Having said that, he got lucky and he seems a guy with a right mindset at times. So he failed this time, as do many. They just don't have a billion followers wolfing down every word they utter.
Kahn was quoting Melville; Kirk was his whale. And Star Trek is more known to most slashdotters than Melville.
If anything, I'm surprised that a person who watched Wrath of Khan or First Contact wouldn't recognize the quotes and parallels immediately. Even if your native language is not English and you weren't forced to read these classics, this is classic literature that's pretty hard to ignore. If anything I'd say that next to Shakespeare's work, Melville's right up there as "most quoted classical author in sci-fi".
And, just to play devil's advocate, at what age did you start using the internet? Were you already old enough to have some context, or still quite young?
I'm old enough to remember what it was like before the Internet. We had access to magazines, videocasettes, and hell every now and then some kid at school would hand you a floppy with some erotic game on it. Now, you're going to argue "But that's pretty tame, compared to the stuff on the Internet", but really... Some of the things in those magazines is not the usual way people enjoy themselves, nor were those games, nor what was on the videocasettes. It went far above and beyond what was necessary for reproduction.
It's not sent me on some downward spiral in search of evermore degrading fornication, nor do I feel the need to objectify the other sex or to start namecalling those of a different sexual orientation. The ever-degrading moral standard of our kids is the illusion we like to believe when we are at the age that we have our own kids, and it's a trap you can easily fall for. All you need is one anecdote (true or not) and you immediately forget 6 years of high school rumours ("who's doing who?") not to mention the amount of hormones coursing through your veins at the time. The only effect it's really had on me in the long term is that I've become more understanding of other people having different preferences than me.
But if 11 year olds are growing up thinking bukkake, gang bangs and fisting are just part of 'normal'(*) sexuality and what's expected from them, they might be somewhat at risk for risky behavior or never learning how to date and hang out.
And that's the part where as a parent you're supposed to fulfill your part. I mean, of course you're not going to be 100% aware of what your kids are up to. Hell, if my parents knew at the time... But in the end I feel my parents gave me enough guidance in the field to determine what I was to expect and what not... And we had our fair share of urban legends rivaling your "Rainbow Parties", some of which would put Roman orgies to shame, and as it turned out like everyone expected : none of it was true. Everyone who talked about those always "knew a guy who knows this guy" etc...
I don't agree that the censorship is a good idea, but I can see how people growing up on the weird stuff you see on the internet can lead to a very messed up outlook and set of expectations about later in life.
At the age of 9 I watched horror flicks, gruesome horror flicks that scared the bejeebus out of me. My parents didn't know (oh, who am I kidding, I never rewound that tape...). These days I have to restrain myself from grabbing a chainsaw in the middle of the night and heading out into town to go on rampage. I suggest we ban those too. Obviously my expectations of what is acceptable in life have been completely warped by chainsaw wielding antagonists.
Oh, if this Internet thing only was a physical object, we could've long burned it... Like we used to do with books. Man... Those were the days
First of all, don't feed the trolls. Second, since the discussion is basically an ad hominem or a personal attack on the guy:
His name has been put up for the Nobel Peace Prize as of today
Which puts him in the same category as Adolf Hitler. Man, did he bring some peace, or what? (Sorry for Godwin'ing the conversation, but you have to admit that it's funny to point that out)
Nobel peace price (nomination) means nothing. Barack Obama has one, which was to be called premature at best, but undeserved would be more appropriate. Then again, at the time people were still expecting him to start walking on water in the coming weeks.
I personally don't care about Snowden and his Russian airport antics or "criminal status". I'm far more interested in the message and the consequences of the lid being blown off that whole thing. Hell, everyone seems more interested in his IRC logs, forum comments and pictures of his girlfriend. Bread and circuses, I guess...
discord5 reports that slashdot is attempting to provide articles specifically designed for geek and while many people report that their geeks completely ignore what is visible on slashdot, with modern HTML5 and AJAX, more geeks have become potential slashdot readers.
The increase in geek readership is primarily attributed to the way the geek's eye works. The buildup of a standard webpage is updated once per click and since a human's maximum clicking frequency is only 55 Hz, the webpage appears continuous and the gradually changing webpages give us the illusion of content. However geeks can discern content at up to 80 Hz so with the increased availability of highly dynamic AJAX webpages that are refreshed at a much higher rate, the content is less likely to appear to be interesting to the geeks eye.
Presentation factors are also an issue. Geeks are most likely to respond to images that have been captured at the eye level of a geek with a low camera angle from the basement where there are moving things like das Blinkenlichte. But even if that requirement is fulfilled, most geeks do not read slashdot because the website has become devoid of actual content despite it's high rate AJAX updates and rounded corners.
And now, an article about the Dog Network, as irrelevant to geeks as sharks are to the Fonz... Eyyyyyy.
Now if you'll excuse me, my compiling is done, and I'm not even going to bother reading the article which at best can only be described as interesting... no wait, the other one... TEDIOUS
Student show an iota of initiative and wants to program computers? Father lectures the child that is a way to be a failure.
Anything that deviates from the norm as it is, is considered to be bad. There is a saying there: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.". I think the expression speaks for itself to be honest.
If I could, I would try to convince the Romans of the past to stop building roads. The reason for this is that I've discovered that since the advent of roads, there has been such a phenomenon as road-side bandits, highway robberies, and even standing armies using this newly found infrastructure to lay siege to our vast empire.
Ever since the Romans came along and deprecated our glorious and superior dirt infrastructure, we've been carelessly hooking up critical systems to this "road"-system: tax-collection, food transportation, even up to the point where we are now moving cattle over these infernal cobblestones instead of using the much safer glorious dirt infrastructure. We've hooked up entire towns, cities, even castles and palaces to this infrastructure we can barely contain and are surprised when those of malicious intent use it to our disadvantage.
Back in the good old days of our vastly superiour dirt infrastructure we had no such troubles with malcontents, criminals and foreign armies. It was a pleasant land of peasants toiling about in our magnificent dirt.
In conclusion, the Roman empire was a detriment to all of society. While seemingly introducing a convenient mode of transportation, and making all of our society dependant on our infrastucture, they clearly have introduced this concept with the intent of ending civilization as we know it. I therefor call out to you, citizens, fellow countrymen: Tear down these "roads" that threaten us all! Go back to rolling around in our glorious dirt, and burn down anything even remotely Roman (even if it contains water, such as aquaducts, don't even get me started on those).
Unfortunately, I have to side with NHTSA since I'd rather have my personal space invaded by a law than I would have it invaded by someone's ton and a half SUV because they were texting some cat picture instead of driving.
I don't have much faith in solutions like this because it's one of those problems which are social problems, not technological ones. If we disregard the technological feasibility of this, for the sake of argument, we're going to have people who are going to look for ways to circumvent this measure (and they will find it, have no worries about that). On top of that, any car and phone which isn't equipped with such a system still allows for people to call/text while driving.
A much better solution to this type of problem in my opinion is to raise awareness, make the whole thing punishable with a fine and for repeat offenders include a revocation of the drivers license, and actively enforce it. In the beginning you'll have people who will blatantly ignore these measures, but once they start getting hit with fines most of them will stop. And just like with parking fines, you'll have people who blatantly ignore the law, as with any other kind of restriction they feel that doesn't apply to them, which is where the revocation of the license comes into place.
On my morning commute which often involves 20km/h freeway "happiness", I've seen plenty of people use non-technological means to distract them from the task at hand. People reading the newspaper while driving, doing crossword puzzles, having breakfast, doing their make-up, etc etc etc. Hell, I've even seen someone miss a green light because they were too busy playing with their kids (an admirable feat, just not in traffic). You don't solve those kinds of things with a bit of electronics in the dashboard.
It's not the calling and texting that is the problem, that's just a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that people aren't paying attention as they're hurtling down the road at breakneck speeds. There's no chip you can place in the dashboard that makes people pay attention to what they're doing.
"If we call our platform 'open,' that means we don't have to worry when it takes developers far longer to deliver far worse software than on competing platforms, right?"
Meanwhile in Redmond on the end of an infinitely superior phone: "Oh hey there Steve, how's that windows phone thing working out for you? Got any market chairs to throw around latelty? Man, I'd love to chat on the phone all night but I've got this successful mobile OS to play with."
I hope there's no Ikea shop nearby.
They're caught between ultra-cheap (but mostly crap) mobile offerings and slightly-cheaper, more technically impressive PC releases of the same games (with even a basic home PC now easily able to outperform the consoles and the level of tech-savvy required lower than ever)
The problem is that releasing new hardware isn't going to change anything. Sure, the first few months the consoles will have that edge over the PC in the price point, but as new CPUs and GPUs are released the point for a PC to be competitive in price quickly arrives. Look at the XBox One specs: 8 cores and 8GB of RAM with 500G of HDD. I can get an 8-core Bulldozer for a decent price. Finding 8GB of RAM is not all that uncommon with the average PC gamer. What's left is the resolution (4K) and 7.1 surround, which all in all is not that impressive since most people sit on 1080i TVs and 5.1 or better sound systems are a bit of a rarity for TVs (at least here, unless you're one of those home entertainment system guys/girls). The focus on the whole reveal seemed to be on the services: integrating it with cable, kinect and voice control, DVR features (to be discussed with the networks). All things considering that's a bit disappointing, because most people interested in such features have a DVR solution already, and the whole kinect/voice thing seems so pointless... Top it off with the heavy focus on DRM (required internet, the whole used games thing) and the console caters more to publishers than its owners. The same applies to what's know about the PS4: it has similar hardware to what's found on the market today in PC-land.
The mobile market does what Nintendo did with the Wii and the DS. Games don't need to have that much hardware available as long as they're well presented and have average to decent gameplay they'll sell. A lot of people are just interested in a quick casual diversion, and mobile taps that market pretty well, and it becomes more of a pricepoint issue where people decide on buying a game. Few people flinch at dumping $2.99 into some casual puzzle game. While the mobile gaming and the AAA title demographics overlap a little bit, I doubt that it will affect the bottom line much. Mass Effect and Angry Birds are two different beasts with two different types of consumers, and while some will play both, they serve a different "function". Angry Birds is what you play in 10 minutes of idle time (waiting for a appointment, sitting on the train, etc) while Mass Effect is something you play at home. Mobile is more likely to eat away at Nintendo with its relatively large casual games compared to MS and Sony.
A significant portion of the Japanese games industry has already given up (or is in the process of giving up) the ghost and pulling out of any meaningful participation in the international market, in favour of their more forgiving (and heavily kids-and-otaku-driven) domestic market.
When has that never been the case? The only exception to that rule are the fighting games and most of the Square Enix titles. For the most part Japanese publishers have always catered to Japan first, and the western market has for the most part been second. This is not exactly a new trend.
At the same time, development costs for games have risen and are rising still further. Early in this console cycle, the rule of thumb was that an "AAA" console game needed to sell 1 million copies to break even. That figure is closer to 3 million now.
That's kind of the problem with AAA titles, isn't it? If you want the damn thing to shine like nothing else available today you're throwing in a lot of skilled labor: programmers, artists, (voice) acting, and the list goes on and on... Yet over the years I've found AAA games to be providing less and less content or depth and more superficial shine, and to me this shows especially in RPGs because that is a genre where content really is king in my opinion. In MMOs the lack of content is made up for by delaying the p
Ah fuck off. It's actually a good and interesting question to see what the various specialists come up with.
Nah, it's called getting a set of basic user requirements and then looking through a set of products to see which match the list. This just reeks of laziness and namedropping on slashdot so someone will post the solution for you.
By the way, I'm looking for a toaster on linux, it needs to be able to have 6 settings, usuable by many people (including students). I need to be able to develop toast on it, but it also needs to run an operational toasting environment, preferably on the same hardware. I would like it to be fully scriptable, and I need to be able to hook it up to an LDAP. It would be nice if it came included with a coffeemachine, which should also be fully scriptable. I've found the Coffee HOWTO, but haven't bothered reading it. Could you guys give me an opinion on how to adapt this to my toaster project? I've looked at relays, resistors and capacitors... They all seem very nice.
Please spend a little more time reading the manuals and typing in a few requests in Google before posting this to Ask Slashdot: be a bit more professional.
Fuck it, karma to burn anyway.
If each one of those people e-mailed me every time they had a photo to share of their lunch, or some cause they wanted to support, or some other piece of datum they felt like sharing with the world, it would be chaos.
If people I knew started e-mailing me pictures of their cats I'd be most obliged to redirect their mail to /dev/null. However, if people ran their own website or blog or whatever I would happily subscribe to their RSS feed and ignore the junk I didn't care about. And the best part of it is that there's no middle man, making money from it, datamining it, or whatever.
None of the features facebook/Google+/whatever offers wasn't available before all of this "social networking" craze took hold. Somehow I was able to attend BBQs, see pictures from people's holidays (and cats), discuss stuff that mattered to groups of people (and with less inane bullshit in between on how the kids just puked on the carpet, including a video on youtube). Somehow people seemed to be more aware of the fact that when they put things on a website it's there for the world at large to see, but instead now we get people complaining "My privacy options".
I get the feeling eternal september got upped to a whole new level, where "Me too" has been replaced with +1 or "Like".
Why are we surprised about this and why is this even news worthy?
Well, given the certain steriotypical stigma ususally applied to fans of Apple products, this is quite a surprising turn of events.
Perhaps it's all a big cock-up?
There was not one game from that era that could install without spending a day trying to tweak config.sys files and autoexec.bat
I remember it well, and it was the first steps for me into the dark art of understanding how computers work. I can only thank videogames of that era for making me start a voyage into a new realm. Understanding memory, learning about DMA and IRQs, getting a modem to work, setting up a LAN, trying my hand at programming, ... I learned a great deal from all that and it got me interested in a subject I had little interest in before.
Thanks DOS games! You've set me onto a career which I enjoy tremendously (despite becoming such a cynic).
You played a part in ending the cold war, in hauling down the wall
And you helped pull a wall down and break up the cold war.
She did it twice? She must've been very thorough.
The SimCity launch debacle
The launch aside, it's yet another terrible incarnation of a great series. I've been peeking at a few videos on youtube because I was hoping for something with a little depth to it, but it's even below my worst expectations (and given Simcity Societies, the expectations were already pretty low).
Simcity 4 with NAM installed still beats this game gameplay-wise hands down from what I can see. It's one of the few games that get reinstalled every X years on my computer. It's ridiculously in-depth if you want it to be, and you can add plenty of mods to make your roads curvy/circular with overpasses and underpasses and however the hell you please.
This has nothing to do with "bill of rights", it's just a bad game with stupid DRM. No need to write a longwinded document nobody's going to read, which will immediately get dismissed with the word "entitled". Just don't buy it.
In fact, don't buy games that use a mechanism you don't agree with, if that be day 1 DLC, the form of DRM they're using, or if you expect them of eating babies. Play another game and have fun. Take those 60 bucks and buy something else.
Oh great, we've just taken the first step into creating Cranium Rats. Bring enough of those together and there'll be talk about overthrowing the bonds human opression.