Not to mention how real threats get almost no news time. SARS killed 800 people, 800. Now compare that to the number of car crash fatalities in the US last year(and for many years before that): roughly 40,000. 50 times the number of people worldwide that died from SARS. 13 times the number of people that died in September 11th. How much news coverage do car crashes get in the national media? Very little, in fact usually its only mentioned when a particularly bad crash happens or when the NTSB releases their annual numbers, and even then it's more of a blurb(oh yeah, 40,000 people died last year in car crashes, now lets get back to today's scare tactic)
is not releasing higher def content. I realize that putting higher def content on the video iPod which cannot display it is dumb, but Apple already solved the "differenet resolutions for different devices" problem with the iPod photo. Obviously it would be pointless to put your 5 megapixel pictures on the iPod photo which cannot display it, it would waste space and more importantly, it would waste power because you have to spin the hard drive more just to load data that you will end up not really even using anyway. But at the same time you want to keep all those 5 megapixel pictures on your computer where you can use that kind of resolution. How did Apple solve the problem? Simple, when you first set up your iPod photo for pictures, iTunes automatically converts your photo library into a size that is usable on your iPod. Not the quickest of processes, but if you let it run in the background it shouldn't matter. I don't understand why they couldn't do this with the video content either. I bought a music video just to see what it would look like, and while it wasn't HORRIBLE I can find better looking content through other sources...
video, and just "downgrade" it when you send it to your iPod, much like they do with your photos on the iPod photo. It's pointless to have 3 megapixel pictures on your iPod photo(unless you are using it as a storage device) since it wastes so much power in loading, so iTunes will convert your entire photo library to iPod size, while still leaving the higher quality pictures on your machine. Why can't they do this with video?
Hmm....my score seemed to go from +5 funny to 1 with a lot of offtopic mods, my guess is that the slashdot editors themselves weren't too happy with the comment....
I think the government really does need to look at #2 and your last statement seriously. Not every kid is bound for college, and yet high school seems to be geared towards putting the most there. I really think we could combine the 2 suggestions:
Let kids who probably aren't college material take a GED-type equivalency test in 10th grade, if they pass the school will pay for them to go to an approved trade school their last 2 years after which they can go out and be a professional plumber/mechanic/whatever and they can still play on the football team/go to the prom etc while they are in the trade school. Be honest with the kids in 6th or 7th grade, show them the benefits and drawbacks of trade school. For instance, say someone enters this program and by the time they are 18 they are out making 30k a year, while a classmate spends $100k to go to colleged, then earns $50k a year. They will be 33 before the college educated person starts to have made more money; even later if the trade school student learns how to be smart with their money.
There is no need for a plumber to go to high school till they are 18, we are doing both us and them a huge dis-service by forcing them to go...
feasible for students to study in the science and engineering fields. As it is now, a student double majoring in chemistry and CS gets the same amount of aid as a student studying comparitive literature. It would be alright if there were enough scholarships targeted towards science and engineering, but then again, the number of scholarships targeted towards only those areas are comparable with the numbers in other fields. Making it even more difficult is the practice of not considering financial need in scholarships anymore....
I had to work my own way through college, and in some regards that taught me some hard, but very valuable lessons. However, while I was working I also felt that I was missing out on some interesting research opportunities etc. I just didn't have time for them between my schoolwork and work. I also got into a lot of debt which is why I am now working instead of in grad school were I could be doing something a bit more productive than my current job.
If they want more students to study math and science, then make it more financialy feasible for them to do so, or students will start looking at other majors that allow them to you know, sleep.......
You might want to check out the new iMac G5, they added some seriously interesting features that weren't covered in the slashdot blurb. You can buy them today if you'd like, just head on over to apple's page....though a lot of people do share your pain about no new portables...
Uh, on the apple main page it shows how you can put your home movies on the new iPod...
Also, the iPod supported mp3 and non-drm AAC since day 1, why wouldn't they support the same with the video iPod....
A cannon A 60, and I had some of the same problems described in the article. IE when I took a picture all I saw was black(some gray lines). However, I seemed to have "fixed" the problem by giving my camera a good, hard smack on the side. That was about a month ago, and while I don't use my camer everyday, it seems to be working fine, just took it to Prague and got some amazing shots from the castle.
Yes that Kevin Murphy, and while he does criticize a lot of the Hollywood tripe that is put out there, the bigger criticism is really the whole corporate moviegoing experience, not just the films themselves. About how the employees of these megachains just don't care, how uncomfortable the seating is just so they can squeeze a few more people in there, how manufactured the whole experience seems, and of course he compares this to many interesting independent cinemas as well as going to various film festivals(including Cannes and one in a very remote part of Finland)
moviegoing experience, read Kevin Murphy's hilarious and insightful book, "A Year at the Movies"
He is a self-professed cinephile, but he seems to really hate the whole corporate moviegoing experience, but loves some of the interesting independent places he has found. Ones that actually offer a REASON(a good environment) for going to the cinema
Plus he smuggles a whole Thanksgiving dinner into a theatre!
Though unpopular, I agree with the parent on this one, the whole piracy debate is a battle between the asshats and the asshats, the people that lose are people who are willing to support entertainment they enjoy(at a reasonable price) but also want to be able to use it on their terms.
The movie industry is a bunch of asshats because they demand all this really annoying restrictions and extend copyright way beyond where it should be(Citizen Kane should be public domain...geez, you studios abused the poor guy, make tons of money off of him, and yet still want more!) They also constantly try to re-sell us the same stuff on a gazillion different formats
The pirates are asshats because they seem to think that they somehow have an innate "right" to entertainment, that the rest of us subsidize, and then of course complain about the quality of the stuff they pirate...
One was Greek and one was German. They were communicating in English, which they both probably spoke reasonably well when not under pressure, but in an emergency I imagine their ability to communicate dropped significantly since they both were not speaking in their native tongues....
First sentence of the article:VIENNA -- Ever since the Mangans gave up their comfortable house in Kansas City, Kan., and moved here a year ago, the family has been living in a kind of suspended animation.
Yeah.....
Apparently in their home country of Japan rentals and resale are illegal (without permission, presumably).
Nope, wrong on both counts. Even in the little town I stayed in(which had the highest prostitute to resident ratio of any place in the world I think, but I digress) there was a place where you could actually rent cds and a really awesome used/new video game store. You could buy used games on any system imaginable, they even had a (suprisingly) large collection of famicom games and a HUGE collection of Dreamcast games(almost bought a dreamcast just to try a few of them out). You could get used hentai PC games if that is what you really wanted.........
I've used Japanese phones, and they can be quick, but there are also quick ways of writing English for example. On my old phone there was a method called quicktype or something, and it worked like this: suppose you wanted to type "cat", now ordinarily you would have to hit the 2 button 3 times, move the cursor off of it, hit it again, then hit 8 once, a total of 6 keystrokes. However, the quicktype method uses a dictionary to determine what word you are typing, you have to hit 2 twice then hit 8 and it will suggest cat(no other valid word exists for those 3 keystrokes) of course when you have ambiguities you can use the down button to scroll between words, just like you can when you have multiple kanji with the same reading. Now try comparing this with the word "neko", you have to hit the n(don't have a japanese phone in front of me) 4(na,ni,nu,ne) and then the k 5 times(ka,ki,ku,ke,ko) for a total of 9 strokes(though granted only 2 keys)
Just because Japanese phones don't implement them doesn't mean there aren't quick ways to type western languages.
The reason that Japanese and Korean are both considered "isolates" and not related to each other is more political than anything else. Koreans are still a bit sore about that whole subjugation thing, and (especially older) Koreans really do hate the Japanese. The older generation of Japanese aren't too fond of Koreans either, so they both refuse to admit that their languages(which is much more a part of cultural identity than in the west I think) are related purely on political grounds. Koreans especially don't want to relate the languages because the Japanese tried to destroy the Korean language(classes were all in Japanese, all published material was in Japanese etc), so by saying the languages are related they feel that it would be justifying Japan's cultural imperialism.
There are some attempts outside of that sphere to relate the language, but it's difficult considering that most experts on the 2 languages are in either Korea or Japan.
Heh, thats something I didn't understand in the scenario mentioned in the summary, why would someone create a paper explaining a document on a cd, but then not bother to print out the document itself? Seems a bit weird to be combining "formats" like that if you will. More than likely what would happen is that the grandchildren would find a spindle of cds that may contain old family photographs and throw them out not knowing what they contained(priceless family memories or they could just be leisure suit larry games)
And really out of touch with reality here, from the summary: While Western development teams try to one-up each other in terms of how big their guns are, how interactive their environments can be, how urban their attitude is, and how much their X-treme soundtracks rock, Ueda's studio is cutting its game from an entirely different cloth.
Um, first of all, there are many western companies making interesting and innovative games. Secondly, there are also Japanese companies that are churning out crap(as well as good games)... That just seems like a pointless slight made to make the submitter feel superior to other people....
If you only use one computer to check email it is, but I suspect there is a very good reason(from google's perspective) not to support IMAP. Say you check your email using pop3 at home on your desktop using your favorite email client. Google doesn't get to display any ads. But now suppose you are on the road with your laptop. If you had an IMAP mail account, then you could just get the same messages on the other machine, however since gmail doesn't support IMAP, you have to use the webmail interface thus generating ads. Plus, you can always use gmail to check mail at work(of course depending on your company's policies!) They would rather you use the web client for half your email checking rather than not use gmail at all.
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Not to mention how real threats get almost no news time. SARS killed 800 people, 800. Now compare that to the number of car crash fatalities in the US last year(and for many years before that): roughly 40,000. 50 times the number of people worldwide that died from SARS. 13 times the number of people that died in September 11th. How much news coverage do car crashes get in the national media? Very little, in fact usually its only mentioned when a particularly bad crash happens or when the NTSB releases their annual numbers, and even then it's more of a blurb(oh yeah, 40,000 people died last year in car crashes, now lets get back to today's scare tactic)
is not releasing higher def content. I realize that putting higher def content on the video iPod which cannot display it is dumb, but Apple already solved the "differenet resolutions for different devices" problem with the iPod photo. Obviously it would be pointless to put your 5 megapixel pictures on the iPod photo which cannot display it, it would waste space and more importantly, it would waste power because you have to spin the hard drive more just to load data that you will end up not really even using anyway. But at the same time you want to keep all those 5 megapixel pictures on your computer where you can use that kind of resolution. How did Apple solve the problem? Simple, when you first set up your iPod photo for pictures, iTunes automatically converts your photo library into a size that is usable on your iPod. Not the quickest of processes, but if you let it run in the background it shouldn't matter. I don't understand why they couldn't do this with the video content either. I bought a music video just to see what it would look like, and while it wasn't HORRIBLE I can find better looking content through other sources...
Now all we need is Jack Thompson to shout "SPOON!" to complete the metaphor.
video, and just "downgrade" it when you send it to your iPod, much like they do with your photos on the iPod photo. It's pointless to have 3 megapixel pictures on your iPod photo(unless you are using it as a storage device) since it wastes so much power in loading, so iTunes will convert your entire photo library to iPod size, while still leaving the higher quality pictures on your machine. Why can't they do this with video?
Hmm....my score seemed to go from +5 funny to 1 with a lot of offtopic mods, my guess is that the slashdot editors themselves weren't too happy with the comment....
Dinosaurs rumored to have had superior grammar skills when compared to slashdot editors!
I think the government really does need to look at #2 and your last statement seriously. Not every kid is bound for college, and yet high school seems to be geared towards putting the most there. I really think we could combine the 2 suggestions:
Let kids who probably aren't college material take a GED-type equivalency test in 10th grade, if they pass the school will pay for them to go to an approved trade school their last 2 years after which they can go out and be a professional plumber/mechanic/whatever and they can still play on the football team/go to the prom etc while they are in the trade school. Be honest with the kids in 6th or 7th grade, show them the benefits and drawbacks of trade school. For instance, say someone enters this program and by the time they are 18 they are out making 30k a year, while a classmate spends $100k to go to colleged, then earns $50k a year. They will be 33 before the college educated person starts to have made more money; even later if the trade school student learns how to be smart with their money.
There is no need for a plumber to go to high school till they are 18, we are doing both us and them a huge dis-service by forcing them to go...
feasible for students to study in the science and engineering fields. As it is now, a student double majoring in chemistry and CS gets the same amount of aid as a student studying comparitive literature. It would be alright if there were enough scholarships targeted towards science and engineering, but then again, the number of scholarships targeted towards only those areas are comparable with the numbers in other fields. Making it even more difficult is the practice of not considering financial need in scholarships anymore....
I had to work my own way through college, and in some regards that taught me some hard, but very valuable lessons. However, while I was working I also felt that I was missing out on some interesting research opportunities etc. I just didn't have time for them between my schoolwork and work. I also got into a lot of debt which is why I am now working instead of in grad school were I could be doing something a bit more productive than my current job.
If they want more students to study math and science, then make it more financialy feasible for them to do so, or students will start looking at other majors that allow them to you know, sleep.......
You might want to check out the new iMac G5, they added some seriously interesting features that weren't covered in the slashdot blurb. You can buy them today if you'd like, just head on over to apple's page....though a lot of people do share your pain about no new portables...
Uh, on the apple main page it shows how you can put your home movies on the new iPod... Also, the iPod supported mp3 and non-drm AAC since day 1, why wouldn't they support the same with the video iPod....
A cannon A 60, and I had some of the same problems described in the article. IE when I took a picture all I saw was black(some gray lines). However, I seemed to have "fixed" the problem by giving my camera a good, hard smack on the side. That was about a month ago, and while I don't use my camer everyday, it seems to be working fine, just took it to Prague and got some amazing shots from the castle.
Yes that Kevin Murphy, and while he does criticize a lot of the Hollywood tripe that is put out there, the bigger criticism is really the whole corporate moviegoing experience, not just the films themselves. About how the employees of these megachains just don't care, how uncomfortable the seating is just so they can squeeze a few more people in there, how manufactured the whole experience seems, and of course he compares this to many interesting independent cinemas as well as going to various film festivals(including Cannes and one in a very remote part of Finland)
moviegoing experience, read Kevin Murphy's hilarious and insightful book, "A Year at the Movies"
He is a self-professed cinephile, but he seems to really hate the whole corporate moviegoing experience, but loves some of the interesting independent places he has found. Ones that actually offer a REASON(a good environment) for going to the cinema
Plus he smuggles a whole Thanksgiving dinner into a theatre!
Though unpopular, I agree with the parent on this one, the whole piracy debate is a battle between the asshats and the asshats, the people that lose are people who are willing to support entertainment they enjoy(at a reasonable price) but also want to be able to use it on their terms.
The movie industry is a bunch of asshats because they demand all this really annoying restrictions and extend copyright way beyond where it should be(Citizen Kane should be public domain...geez, you studios abused the poor guy, make tons of money off of him, and yet still want more!) They also constantly try to re-sell us the same stuff on a gazillion different formats
The pirates are asshats because they seem to think that they somehow have an innate "right" to entertainment, that the rest of us subsidize, and then of course complain about the quality of the stuff they pirate...
One was Greek and one was German. They were communicating in English, which they both probably spoke reasonably well when not under pressure, but in an emergency I imagine their ability to communicate dropped significantly since they both were not speaking in their native tongues....
First sentence of the article:VIENNA -- Ever since the Mangans gave up their comfortable house in Kansas City, Kan., and moved here a year ago, the family has been living in a kind of suspended animation.
Yeah.....
Apparently in their home country of Japan rentals and resale are illegal (without permission, presumably).
Nope, wrong on both counts. Even in the little town I stayed in(which had the highest prostitute to resident ratio of any place in the world I think, but I digress) there was a place where you could actually rent cds and a really awesome used/new video game store. You could buy used games on any system imaginable, they even had a (suprisingly) large collection of famicom games and a HUGE collection of Dreamcast games(almost bought a dreamcast just to try a few of them out). You could get used hentai PC games if that is what you really wanted.........
You are telling me there is no aftermarket for herpes?! Man, I REALLY got fleeced!
I've used Japanese phones, and they can be quick, but there are also quick ways of writing English for example. On my old phone there was a method called quicktype or something, and it worked like this: suppose you wanted to type "cat", now ordinarily you would have to hit the 2 button 3 times, move the cursor off of it, hit it again, then hit 8 once, a total of 6 keystrokes. However, the quicktype method uses a dictionary to determine what word you are typing, you have to hit 2 twice then hit 8 and it will suggest cat(no other valid word exists for those 3 keystrokes) of course when you have ambiguities you can use the down button to scroll between words, just like you can when you have multiple kanji with the same reading. Now try comparing this with the word "neko", you have to hit the n(don't have a japanese phone in front of me) 4(na,ni,nu,ne) and then the k 5 times(ka,ki,ku,ke,ko) for a total of 9 strokes(though granted only 2 keys)
Just because Japanese phones don't implement them doesn't mean there aren't quick ways to type western languages.
The reason that Japanese and Korean are both considered "isolates" and not related to each other is more political than anything else. Koreans are still a bit sore about that whole subjugation thing, and (especially older) Koreans really do hate the Japanese. The older generation of Japanese aren't too fond of Koreans either, so they both refuse to admit that their languages(which is much more a part of cultural identity than in the west I think) are related purely on political grounds. Koreans especially don't want to relate the languages because the Japanese tried to destroy the Korean language(classes were all in Japanese, all published material was in Japanese etc), so by saying the languages are related they feel that it would be justifying Japan's cultural imperialism.
There are some attempts outside of that sphere to relate the language, but it's difficult considering that most experts on the 2 languages are in either Korea or Japan.
Sorry, juvenile comment alert:
Gotta love any sentence with both the word "missionary" and "pulling out"
Heh, thats something I didn't understand in the scenario mentioned in the summary, why would someone create a paper explaining a document on a cd, but then not bother to print out the document itself? Seems a bit weird to be combining "formats" like that if you will. More than likely what would happen is that the grandchildren would find a spindle of cds that may contain old family photographs and throw them out not knowing what they contained(priceless family memories or they could just be leisure suit larry games)
And really out of touch with reality here, from the summary:
While Western development teams try to one-up each other in terms of how big their guns are, how interactive their environments can be, how urban their attitude is, and how much their X-treme soundtracks rock, Ueda's studio is cutting its game from an entirely different cloth.
Um, first of all, there are many western companies making interesting and innovative games. Secondly, there are also Japanese companies that are churning out crap(as well as good games)... That just seems like a pointless slight made to make the submitter feel superior to other people....
If you only use one computer to check email it is, but I suspect there is a very good reason(from google's perspective) not to support IMAP. Say you check your email using pop3 at home on your desktop using your favorite email client. Google doesn't get to display any ads. But now suppose you are on the road with your laptop. If you had an IMAP mail account, then you could just get the same messages on the other machine, however since gmail doesn't support IMAP, you have to use the webmail interface thus generating ads. Plus, you can always use gmail to check mail at work(of course depending on your company's policies!) They would rather you use the web client for half your email checking rather than not use gmail at all.
It being the "Sims" and supposed to simulate real life, you would also have to throw in "SimHerpes" to the hot coffee
Always a good day when you can use the word "herpes" on slashdot...