Based on the trailer, Wario will already be joining the cast for SSBB. (W00t -- my favorite character ever since playing him in Mario Kart 64 battle mode.)
You realize many concerts sell out large venues at $50, right? These are artists who play concerts every day or every other day when they are on tour, so don't say "play more concerts." If tickets went for $10, they would all go to scalpers, who would resell them for the proper market value anyway. The artist may as well sell them for the market value in the first place, so the benefit goes to them rather than scalpers who happen to be first in line. Your use of the word "inflated" is unjustified and makes no sense.
Your point is interesting for selling CDs, which are of potentially unlimited quantity. The producers (having a monopoly on production of that specific CD) can effectively control the price exactly, by producing whatever quantity corresponds to their desired market price.
Concert tickets, however, are a finite resource: There are only so many tickets available. (Barring playing more concerts, which I said above is impossible for many artists.) This, plus the demand in whatever location the concert is held, determines market price. The artists and labels have no control over the market price... Their only choice to who gets the benefit of the market price: the artist and everyone involved (label, workers, etc.), or the scalpers.
If you don't think concerts by major artists are worth more than $10, you'll have to accept that there's a stadium full of people who want to see that artist much more than you do, so the "right" way to ration the tickets is not to give you one: you clearly don't value it as much as they do.
By the way, there are concerts that cost $10 or less. The trick is to find musicians on your own, rather than relying on "pop culture" (music industry hype), because that way fewer other people will be interested in competing for those concert tickets. When the demand is lower, so is the price. Check out your local music scene if you actually want to attend concerts with reasonable prices.
Hey, your post sounds very knowledgable and whatnot... as if you're involved in the process, and have an inside info about how the NSA operates... but you missed something.
Qwest DID refuse to cooperate, because they thought it was illegal. Nobody was arrested. The NSA never got data on Qwest's customers.
Empirical evidence is a bitch when you're trying to win mod points with a fancy speech, now isn't it?
Have you ever heard someone say the following: "Look at this really old [thing]! It's still in great condition, whereas my new [thing] broke already! They sure don't make things like they used to..."
When you look at all the old things you have that have lasted 30 years and work great, compared to the things that break easily, you're comparing the worksmanship of the set {things that were built 30+ years ago and are still working} to {things that were built a few years ago}... of course all the older things you see around you are better-made, even if the worksmanship standards haven't actually changed over the years, because of the natural filter that they're still working, or else they wouldn't be around for you to compare.
Similarly, the set {movies I remember from more than a few years ago} will clearly be better than {movies from this year}, simply by virtue of the fact that you remember the better ones and forget the worse. Comparing today's Hollywood crap to yesterday's cream of the crop is unintentional, but it's exactly what's going on everytime someone rehashes this "story" every few months.
Your post is a good explanation of why the IGN article is stupid, but I feel I have to correct the numbers.
1024x768 is not a standard "HD" resolution. HD is typically 1920x1080 (e.g. 1080i), which you'll note is a 16x9 widescreen ratio rather than 1024x768's 4x3 standard ratio. The other standard HD resolution, 1280x720 (e.g. 720p), also has more pixels than 1024x768. So, the Wiimote's sensing is not per-pixel accurate in HD... however, the Wii is not outputting an HD signal anyway. I believe the SD signal is 640x480, which means the Wiimote actually has sub-pixel accuracy on any SD television you happen to be playing it on.
That's pretty impressive, and I'm sure they went as low as they could before jitter means it's pointless to give it any more resolution. Someone earlier in the thread said they recommend developers do some sort of brief averaging to smooth out the jitters anyway.
Long story short: the Wiimote's accuracy, once calibrated (and we don't know how this works yet), will only be limited by how well you can physically point it.
That depends whether the person would have even clicked the unobtrusive ads to begin with.
As I understand it, most (good) ad blockers don't even download or request the ads from the server. For people who wouldn't have clicked them anyway, running an ad blocker just increases the perceived "click percent" for the site. Since almost everyone pays for ads per-click (rather than per-view), blocking them without downloading them also doesn't cost the site anything, and in fact saves the advertiser bandwidth. It's not as clear-cut as you make it sound.
"They can call when they get home, the way kids have done for 50 years."
Unless they can't get home for some reason. Miss the bus; wallet was stolen; need parent to pick them up from an alternate location than usual; etc.
Not to mention that cell phones can actually help kids avoid getting in trouble at school, by letting them call their parents if they're in a situation where they don't know what to do, like if a school admin is (hypothetically) trying to get them to waive their rights to privacy, etc.
The phone is a tool, and if you teach your kids well, it can dramatically improve their experience and your peace of mind.
Not a single dictionary.com result allows redneck to refer to a non-white.
redneck n. Offensive Slang
1. Used as a disparaging term for a member of the white rural laboring class, especially in the southern United States.
2. A white person regarded as having a provincial, conservative, often bigoted attitude.
redneck n : a poor white person in the southern United States [syn: cracker]
Furthermore, I have never heard it refer to a non-white, so don't claim that the definitions are out of date with actual usage... The original poster clearly intended to refer to the stereotypical ignorance of southern whites with his jab at the Bush administration.
You can't just make up definitions to words in order to win an argument. Since I was defending the point that "redneck is a racist term," I think the evidence stands quite clear.
"Personally, I think its a bit much you complaining about something for free which is obviously being paid for by someone else, but there you go."
Except the students themselves ultimately pay for it through tuition, so the underlying criticism is "this is a waste of my money." Unless you think Colleges print money? Or maybe you think these services are provided as a gift from the friendly music companies?
"Worst around ponds are deer flies, which I used to refer to as Flying Bastards."
I'll have to agree here. I used to think mosquitos were the worst thing up here in the Minnesota/Wisconsin are, but that changed when I was swimming at my cabin and a spot on my back suddenly hurt like hell. Not only do the bites sting for a while, but the deer flies seem to bite for no particular reason, and they are incredibly persistent! Dive underwater for a while... don't worry, it'll wait for you to surface. What the hell is their problem anyway? Oh, and being the size of a house fly, it's considerably faster and more difficult to swat than a mosquito.
I have to throw in my two cents and agree that GTA2 was a stellar game. GTA3 was actually a let-down for me in comparison, since it was basically the same thing in 3d.
GTA2 had so much replay value... the top-level missions in the third city were INSANELY difficult. The best feature may have been the deathmatch multiplayer though. The interactions between the different weapons were quite well-balanced, which is pretty surprising since the multiplayer in general felt somewhat unpolished, and many weapons were 1-shot kills (car run-down, landmine, rocket)... but it was fun as hell. The only two multiplayer games we never got bored of in college were SSB:M and GTA2.
Definitely one of the most underrated games ever, given how forgotten it is compared to GTA3.
Re:Reasons for corporate setups
on
Freedb.org Ending
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The reason that FreeDB stopped is because those in the lead couldn't come to a decision. This would almost never happen in a corporate environment. Any dispute would go up the chain until it hit the CEO or board of directors, where a firm decision one way or another would be made.
Did you even read the postings by any of the involved parties? Nothing would have been different in a "corporate" environment. What basically happened is a CEO-equivalent (someone who had control over the physical assets) DID make a firm decision. Then two people quit because they disagreed with the decision. It turned out these two people were the keys to the continued operation and development of the organization, so it closed down after they left. What exactly about this situation couldn't have happened in a corporation? The real heart of the problem was that the organization was so small that certain individuals were irreplacable, so maybe you were just confusing "corporation" with "large operation."
Hierarchy does not prevent disagreement. If a disagreement is small enough that nobody is willing to quit over it, then hierarchy can make a decision that would otherwise bog them down in debate and waste time... but this was obviously not such a case.
Unlike you, I won't claim to know the reasons why this happened, since I don't have all the details. I will only lament the death of an extremely useful project, and thank everyone involved for all the time, work and money they put into it. We can only hope a similar (and similarly free and open) project can rise to take its place.
That's a good idea... what I've done is similar: when typing in the password, use the mouse to move the cursor around to different spots in the password field a few times as you type it. Also, delete a few characters so they don't know exactly which ones are in your password and which aren't.
It's a good idea to do this the same way every time, so a determined person with lots of logs of your attempts won't be able to figure it out by comparing all the different ways you've typed it.
Your post, when viewed alone, looks nothing like a +4 funny. I got to read the joke after the punchline because the parent wasn't modded as high, but I think it actually turned out funnier that way! Well done.:)
If the moon crashed into the earth head-on at 17km/s, which is actually a high estimate since the earth's gravity well only causes things to get to 11km/s on its own and the moon only orbits at 1km/s, it would still only slow the earth's orbital velocity by <1%. (This is from conservation of momentum, with the earth's current orbital velocity at 29km/s and the moon having a little over 1% of the earth's mass.) I guess it depends what you mean by "significant," but the orbit wouldn't really have a noticable change. This is especially true since the moon is currently orbiting the Sun as a system with the Earth anyway, so if the force that caused it to collide with the earth came from within our closed system, it would have *zero* effect on the orbit.
Of course, the part of science fiction that is most evocative about the moon (or other large things) crashing into the earth is usually the surface destruction anyway, which is pretty well covered when they simulator says over 5% of the earth's surface melts on impact. The consequences of that alone would doom most planetary life, to say nothing of the shock waves and dust clouds.
I call "not bullshit," at least from this example.
That small of an object (only 10 inches diameter?) would burn up in our atmosphere. It only struck so hard on the moon because there's nothing slowing it down before it hits the surface. I went over to the trusty Asteroid Impact Simulator for a quick comparison. The smallest size you can select is 1 meter in diameter, but here's what it has to say about a fairly average 1m projectile "hitting" earth:
Energy before atmospheric entry: 2.27 x 10^11 Joules = 0.54 x 10-4 MegaTons TNT [note: the one that hit the moon only had 1.7 x 10^10 Joules of energy... less than one tenth of this hypothetical.] The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is less than 1 month.
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 49200 meters
No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.
We only need to be worried about meteors a few orders of magnitude larger.
(Hell, TFA even explained that it would burn up, but I guess I can't expect anyone around here to know that...)
"And then the march in the street waiving foreign flags on American soil, telling you that the US owes them citizenship."
So what you're saying is, after all that comparison, they would still rather be in your shoes as a citizen, taxes and insurances and everything. That's a pretty profound point, but not exactly the one you were trying to make.
Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." I think those words ring just as redundant today as they did the other billion times they were posted on Slashdot.
Fixed.
I agree with the sentiment, but I get tired of seeing it posted (and modded up) in every single remotely related discussion.
Fantastic! I am very excited about this development. Will there be an ergonomic model released to prevent me from getting RSI, too? Perhaps a cancer-resistant trackball is in order.
I'm curious what makes you think OpenOffice has worse math support than Word. I used Word for a year in college, and then OpenOffice for a year after that, to submit all my math homework. I found OOo to be much faster to enter formulae AND that the result looked nicer. OOo "Math" objects have a concise markup language so you can go all-keyboard (for speed) once you learn it, but also a simple mouse-based menu system for finding markup or special characters you haven't used before.
Here's a screenshot of someone just working on a standalone math object, but it's trivial to edit them inline from a regular document in OOo Writer, which is how I used it.
Hell, I didn't figure out any other meaning until I read your post, and went back up to the GP to think about it some more. I assumed emacs was some weird pun with Mac.
Is there, like, a support group we can go to or something?
I suppose it is using flash, but I have no problems with flash on any other sites.
It probably uses Flash 8, when the latest version Macromedia has seen fit to release for Linux is 7. If they don't take the time to put a manual version check in their Flash component, it silently fails on the new features, leaving you wondering what the heck is wrong. Great, huh? I have run into this at a few sites as well, and the mindless answer I always get after doing some digging or posting on a forum is "your version of flash player is too old. Please update to the current version." Good luck getting anything more out of them.
Fortunately I can usually live without the type of sites that use Flash, and this one sounds like no exception.
Slashdot Mirror
Based on the trailer, Wario will already be joining the cast for SSBB. (W00t -- my favorite character ever since playing him in Mario Kart 64 battle mode.)
Yeah, that and the lawsuits. :)
You realize many concerts sell out large venues at $50, right? These are artists who play concerts every day or every other day when they are on tour, so don't say "play more concerts." If tickets went for $10, they would all go to scalpers, who would resell them for the proper market value anyway. The artist may as well sell them for the market value in the first place, so the benefit goes to them rather than scalpers who happen to be first in line. Your use of the word "inflated" is unjustified and makes no sense.
Your point is interesting for selling CDs, which are of potentially unlimited quantity. The producers (having a monopoly on production of that specific CD) can effectively control the price exactly, by producing whatever quantity corresponds to their desired market price.
Concert tickets, however, are a finite resource: There are only so many tickets available. (Barring playing more concerts, which I said above is impossible for many artists.) This, plus the demand in whatever location the concert is held, determines market price. The artists and labels have no control over the market price... Their only choice to who gets the benefit of the market price: the artist and everyone involved (label, workers, etc.), or the scalpers.
If you don't think concerts by major artists are worth more than $10, you'll have to accept that there's a stadium full of people who want to see that artist much more than you do, so the "right" way to ration the tickets is not to give you one: you clearly don't value it as much as they do.
By the way, there are concerts that cost $10 or less. The trick is to find musicians on your own, rather than relying on "pop culture" (music industry hype), because that way fewer other people will be interested in competing for those concert tickets. When the demand is lower, so is the price. Check out your local music scene if you actually want to attend concerts with reasonable prices.
Hey, your post sounds very knowledgable and whatnot... as if you're involved in the process, and have an inside info about how the NSA operates... but you missed something.
Qwest DID refuse to cooperate, because they thought it was illegal. Nobody was arrested. The NSA never got data on Qwest's customers.
Empirical evidence is a bitch when you're trying to win mod points with a fancy speech, now isn't it?
Have you ever heard someone say the following: "Look at this really old [thing]! It's still in great condition, whereas my new [thing] broke already! They sure don't make things like they used to..."
When you look at all the old things you have that have lasted 30 years and work great, compared to the things that break easily, you're comparing the worksmanship of the set {things that were built 30+ years ago and are still working} to {things that were built a few years ago}... of course all the older things you see around you are better-made, even if the worksmanship standards haven't actually changed over the years, because of the natural filter that they're still working, or else they wouldn't be around for you to compare.
Similarly, the set {movies I remember from more than a few years ago} will clearly be better than {movies from this year}, simply by virtue of the fact that you remember the better ones and forget the worse. Comparing today's Hollywood crap to yesterday's cream of the crop is unintentional, but it's exactly what's going on everytime someone rehashes this "story" every few months.
Your post is a good explanation of why the IGN article is stupid, but I feel I have to correct the numbers.
1024x768 is not a standard "HD" resolution. HD is typically 1920x1080 (e.g. 1080i), which you'll note is a 16x9 widescreen ratio rather than 1024x768's 4x3 standard ratio. The other standard HD resolution, 1280x720 (e.g. 720p), also has more pixels than 1024x768. So, the Wiimote's sensing is not per-pixel accurate in HD... however, the Wii is not outputting an HD signal anyway. I believe the SD signal is 640x480, which means the Wiimote actually has sub-pixel accuracy on any SD television you happen to be playing it on.
That's pretty impressive, and I'm sure they went as low as they could before jitter means it's pointless to give it any more resolution. Someone earlier in the thread said they recommend developers do some sort of brief averaging to smooth out the jitters anyway.
Long story short: the Wiimote's accuracy, once calibrated (and we don't know how this works yet), will only be limited by how well you can physically point it.
And it sure as hell isn't a camera.
That depends whether the person would have even clicked the unobtrusive ads to begin with.
As I understand it, most (good) ad blockers don't even download or request the ads from the server. For people who wouldn't have clicked them anyway, running an ad blocker just increases the perceived "click percent" for the site. Since almost everyone pays for ads per-click (rather than per-view), blocking them without downloading them also doesn't cost the site anything, and in fact saves the advertiser bandwidth. It's not as clear-cut as you make it sound.
"They can call when they get home, the way kids have done for 50 years."
Unless they can't get home for some reason. Miss the bus; wallet was stolen; need parent to pick them up from an alternate location than usual; etc.
Not to mention that cell phones can actually help kids avoid getting in trouble at school, by letting them call their parents if they're in a situation where they don't know what to do, like if a school admin is (hypothetically) trying to get them to waive their rights to privacy, etc.
The phone is a tool, and if you teach your kids well, it can dramatically improve their experience and your peace of mind.
Not a single dictionary.com result allows redneck to refer to a non-white.
redneck
n. Offensive Slang
1. Used as a disparaging term for a member of the white rural laboring class, especially in the southern United States.
2. A white person regarded as having a provincial, conservative, often bigoted attitude.
redneck
n : a poor white person in the southern United States [syn: cracker]
Furthermore, I have never heard it refer to a non-white, so don't claim that the definitions are out of date with actual usage... The original poster clearly intended to refer to the stereotypical ignorance of southern whites with his jab at the Bush administration.
You can't just make up definitions to words in order to win an argument. Since I was defending the point that "redneck is a racist term," I think the evidence stands quite clear.
> Redneck is "by definition" NOT racist for the simple reason that there is no race called the "rednecks"
By that logic, neither is "towel-head" racist. After all, anyone could wear a towel on their head, right?
You "only minorities can be discriminated against" people crack me up.
"Personally, I think its a bit much you complaining about something for free which is obviously being paid for by someone else, but there you go."
Except the students themselves ultimately pay for it through tuition, so the underlying criticism is "this is a waste of my money." Unless you think Colleges print money? Or maybe you think these services are provided as a gift from the friendly music companies?
"Worst around ponds are deer flies, which I used to refer to as Flying Bastards."
I'll have to agree here. I used to think mosquitos were the worst thing up here in the Minnesota/Wisconsin are, but that changed when I was swimming at my cabin and a spot on my back suddenly hurt like hell. Not only do the bites sting for a while, but the deer flies seem to bite for no particular reason, and they are incredibly persistent! Dive underwater for a while... don't worry, it'll wait for you to surface. What the hell is their problem anyway? Oh, and being the size of a house fly, it's considerably faster and more difficult to swat than a mosquito.
Good name, I think I'll use it from now on.
I have to throw in my two cents and agree that GTA2 was a stellar game. GTA3 was actually a let-down for me in comparison, since it was basically the same thing in 3d.
... but it was fun as hell. The only two multiplayer games we never got bored of in college were SSB:M and GTA2.
GTA2 had so much replay value... the top-level missions in the third city were INSANELY difficult. The best feature may have been the deathmatch multiplayer though. The interactions between the different weapons were quite well-balanced, which is pretty surprising since the multiplayer in general felt somewhat unpolished, and many weapons were 1-shot kills (car run-down, landmine, rocket)
Definitely one of the most underrated games ever, given how forgotten it is compared to GTA3.
Did you even read the postings by any of the involved parties? Nothing would have been different in a "corporate" environment. What basically happened is a CEO-equivalent (someone who had control over the physical assets) DID make a firm decision. Then two people quit because they disagreed with the decision. It turned out these two people were the keys to the continued operation and development of the organization, so it closed down after they left. What exactly about this situation couldn't have happened in a corporation? The real heart of the problem was that the organization was so small that certain individuals were irreplacable, so maybe you were just confusing "corporation" with "large operation."
Hierarchy does not prevent disagreement. If a disagreement is small enough that nobody is willing to quit over it, then hierarchy can make a decision that would otherwise bog them down in debate and waste time... but this was obviously not such a case.
Unlike you, I won't claim to know the reasons why this happened, since I don't have all the details. I will only lament the death of an extremely useful project, and thank everyone involved for all the time, work and money they put into it. We can only hope a similar (and similarly free and open) project can rise to take its place.
That's a good idea... what I've done is similar: when typing in the password, use the mouse to move the cursor around to different spots in the password field a few times as you type it. Also, delete a few characters so they don't know exactly which ones are in your password and which aren't.
It's a good idea to do this the same way every time, so a determined person with lots of logs of your attempts won't be able to figure it out by comparing all the different ways you've typed it.
Your post, when viewed alone, looks nothing like a +4 funny. I got to read the joke after the punchline because the parent wasn't modded as high, but I think it actually turned out funnier that way! Well done. :)
Except we do want to compare (one-dimensional) vectors. Unless you don't care whether a company is gaining or losing marketshare?
If the moon crashed into the earth head-on at 17km/s, which is actually a high estimate since the earth's gravity well only causes things to get to 11km/s on its own and the moon only orbits at 1km/s, it would still only slow the earth's orbital velocity by <1%. (This is from conservation of momentum, with the earth's current orbital velocity at 29km/s and the moon having a little over 1% of the earth's mass.) I guess it depends what you mean by "significant," but the orbit wouldn't really have a noticable change. This is especially true since the moon is currently orbiting the Sun as a system with the Earth anyway, so if the force that caused it to collide with the earth came from within our closed system, it would have *zero* effect on the orbit.
Of course, the part of science fiction that is most evocative about the moon (or other large things) crashing into the earth is usually the surface destruction anyway, which is pretty well covered when they simulator says over 5% of the earth's surface melts on impact. The consequences of that alone would doom most planetary life, to say nothing of the shock waves and dust clouds.
I call "not bullshit," at least from this example.
Energy before atmospheric entry: 2.27 x 10^11 Joules = 0.54 x 10-4 MegaTons TNT [note: the one that hit the moon only had 1.7 x 10^10 Joules of energy... less than one tenth of this hypothetical.]
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is less than 1 month.
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 49200 meters
No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.
We only need to be worried about meteors a few orders of magnitude larger.
(Hell, TFA even explained that it would burn up, but I guess I can't expect anyone around here to know that...)
"And then the march in the street waiving foreign flags on American soil, telling you that the US owes them citizenship."
So what you're saying is, after all that comparison, they would still rather be in your shoes as a citizen, taxes and insurances and everything. That's a pretty profound point, but not exactly the one you were trying to make.
Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." I think those words ring just as redundant today as they did the other billion times they were posted on Slashdot.
Fixed.
I agree with the sentiment, but I get tired of seeing it posted (and modded up) in every single remotely related discussion.
Fantastic! I am very excited about this development. Will there be an ergonomic model released to prevent me from getting RSI, too? Perhaps a cancer-resistant trackball is in order.
... oh. Nevermind.
I'm curious what makes you think OpenOffice has worse math support than Word. I used Word for a year in college, and then OpenOffice for a year after that, to submit all my math homework. I found OOo to be much faster to enter formulae AND that the result looked nicer. OOo "Math" objects have a concise markup language so you can go all-keyboard (for speed) once you learn it, but also a simple mouse-based menu system for finding markup or special characters you haven't used before.
Here's a screenshot of someone just working on a standalone math object, but it's trivial to edit them inline from a regular document in OOo Writer, which is how I used it.
Hell, I didn't figure out any other meaning until I read your post, and went back up to the GP to think about it some more. I assumed emacs was some weird pun with Mac.
Is there, like, a support group we can go to or something?
I suppose it is using flash, but I have no problems with flash on any other sites.
It probably uses Flash 8, when the latest version Macromedia has seen fit to release for Linux is 7. If they don't take the time to put a manual version check in their Flash component, it silently fails on the new features, leaving you wondering what the heck is wrong. Great, huh? I have run into this at a few sites as well, and the mindless answer I always get after doing some digging or posting on a forum is "your version of flash player is too old. Please update to the current version." Good luck getting anything more out of them.
Fortunately I can usually live without the type of sites that use Flash, and this one sounds like no exception.