I bet you can find it in the "Small Business" section. I managed to get a 15" WUXGA matte from Dell, but it's from the Latitude line rather than XPS line. It's up to you whether you're willing to trade the gaming-directed features to get the matte display. But if you're interested, check out the Dell Latitude D820. WUXGA is not one of the defaults, but if you customize, you should be able to pick it. And unless they changed the offerings since June, only matte displays are available for this model.
But like I said, it's not designed primarily for gaming. So the Geforce line of Nvidia cards are not an option. Only the Quadro line.
Anyway, it's a real shame WUXGA is so hard to come by. Especially in matte finish. And of course it's even rarer to find a desktop-style display of that resolution without going up to 23" inches. If Dell can do it in 15" for a laptop, why the heck can't Samsung do it in 19" for a desktop?
The obvious response to such injustice is to start a Leftorium. =)
Seriously though, frustrating though it may be, the reason that left-handers are left out in the cold is the same reason that that Nintendo had to mirror the whole game, rather than just the character models: practicality, and marketing. The reason given in the article is essentially that there was no time to playtest the game with selectable handedness. It's very possible that certain places in the game are restrictive on sword-swinging, and the position of an enemy or item could make something overly difficult or impossible if the sword swings from the opposite side.
But why wasn't there enough time for more playtesting? Because Twilight Princess was designed for Gamecube, and only later was it decided that it would be released as a Wii launch game. Pushing out the release date of the game to allow more playtesting would mean missing the Wii launch. And that would mean they wasted all the money and resources it took to port it to the Wii. It's doubtful they ever would have taken that path anyway though, because this game will be what sells a large percentage of Wiis at launch. After all, it's the only action title that will be available at launch containing any of Nintendo's biggest character brands. There's no Mario, no Metroid, no DK. Just Link.
Er... I hesitate to take you seriously, but... Refresh rate and fps aren't the same thing.
You can run a game rendering at 15fps, but have a refresh rate of 90Hz and get no flicker. In between frame refreshes, each screen refresh will just have the same image again.
In my understanging, the key attribute of Gaia theory that distinguishes it from others is that it promotes the viewpoint that any interrelated system of organisms (or system of systems of organisms, etc.) can be considered to be an organism when taken as a whole.
It is a panspermist theory. But there are others that don't emphasize this.
I tend to agree with the concepts of that idea. I.e. life systems, not just individual life forms, do what it takes to continue living, and that may or may not involve evolving a "new" lifeform, rather than just propogation of core DNA.
I don't agree with what borders on anthropomorphization of Earth as a whole that some Gaia-ists will promote. That moves beyond science and into philosophy/religion.
Because, in my understanding jihad already has a word for that: fatwah.
I could very well be wrong on that, but I thought I came across that in reading recently.
Anyone with real-life knowledge of Arabic, please correct me!
I don't think the people who coined that term intend it to be any such thing, considering its recent usage. It was inspired by the old "war on drugs" terminology, which certainly was an analogy. However, when Bush and the Republicans in general insist on using "we are at war" as a defense for side-stepping the Bill of Rights, it is obvious that they don't consider it "only an analogy".
The problem is, as has been eloquently expressed, it's not a war. And so that defense needs to be scrutinized at least, and I would suggest rejected altogether. We need to establish a new set of rules for this new type of engagement. And carrying them all over from traditional war I would suggest is a violation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
And not only that, but treating this as a war also isn't working very well as a strategy.
If it's in everyone's interest for fair and just ratings applied to media, it should be a government institution.
Why should it be a government institution? If parents are so upset about it, they can just not buy games that are unrated. Or insist on refunds for games that are mis-rated. And eventually, when the game industry has lost enough money due to their poor rating system, they will improve it until everyone is satisfied enough that they aren't losing money anymore.
Isn't this pretty much what happened with movie ratings?
I'm not against government regulation on industry, when economic power is being abused. But this is not an abuse of anything on the part of the game companies. It is the shirking of responsibility, both on the part of parents, and on the part of industry. And if parents were doing their due dilligence as parents, they would be insisting the industry take responsibility for properly classifying their product.
If you don't like how something is rated, take it up with the company, and with the ESRB. If you can't get enough support behind you to change things, then I guess that most of the population disagrees with you. And if that's the case, since there's no freedom that's being abridged, then I guess that's just too bad. That's democracy for you. Sometimes you don't get what you want.
From the article: A rare cosmological coincidence allowed Schild and his colleagues to probe the structure of the quasar in much finer detail than is normally possible.
I take this to mean one or both of two things:
1) Previous black hole sightings revealed no evidence of magnetic fields possibly only because they couldn't be probed as deeply.
2) We had no reason to expect previous black holes were MECOs because the assumption of an unseen magnetic field was a violation of Occam's Razor. (Even though the alternative to the unseen magnetic field is a unseen singularity... I know which I would prefer under Occam.)
In short, if this magnetic field is confirmed, we are far more certain this is a MECO than we are that all the others are not (and hence are black holes instead).... So if we must give one up, it will be the black holes.
That's just my understanding. Certainly I will be following this story closely in the coming months.
Governments can always create more soldiers via conscription.
American culture would have to undergo huge transformations before conscription would be accepted by the American citizenry. It used to be a fact of life. But after decades without it, it's just no longer an option.
A first-term president who proposed re-enacting conscription laws would have a truly difficult time getting re-elected unless maybe he enjoyed wide bipartisan support in other ways. And a congressman who proposed or voted for re-enacting conscription laws would find himself tossed out of office in his district as soon as the next vote came around. The simple fact is, Americans do not want a draft. Period. That sentiment has more cross-party support than most things I can think of. And as much spite as we have for the rich politicians whose kids never "join up", it's not enough to override the distaste for a draft.
If it were tried, we'd have riots like the U.S. hasn't seen in decades.
For that to be a viable option, the citizenry needs fair access to equipment equaling that of the military.
I definitely understand your argument. It's one thing for a government to turn oppressive and then outlaw guns: it's too late, because the revolters already have the weapons they need. It's another for the citizenry to accept the removal of arms rights in the name of collective safety, and the government to turn oppressive only after the citizens are de-armed. (And yes I realize that the outlawing of armed citizenry is considered oppressive itself by many people, but I'm thinking more of truly unconscionable abuses of power.)
But on the flip side, military-grade weapons of today are much more powerful and destructive than the were then. Are we, as a society, prepared to accept the additional day-to-day risk that would be necessitated by the potentiality of anyone off the street to be able to get their hands on this stuff?
It's a complicated debate. There are a lot of good, reasonable, and honorable points on both sides.
Thanks very much for the link and case names. I will certianly look into them.
Have to admit this bothers me a bit. I've never really thought of the police as a simple cleanup squad, but it certainly seems the court is leaning that way.
The argument about self defense and bearing arms is compelling... But I would hasten to add that even if people were more legally empowered to defend themselves, I wouldn't say that absolves the police from that responsibility when there is immediate danger.
Not saying that's what you meant, just anticipating that line of thought on someone's part. It leads far too readily to leaving blame for a violent crime at the feat of the victim, for not undertaking due diligence to defend himself. That's a little too close to "the law of the jungle" for my taste.
You can't expect them to always be there in advance to defend you from it. That's what the SCOTUS meant by "protect."
Of course. That's basically what I meant by "bodyguard". Not a reasonable expectation, IMHO.
Any debate about the right to bear arms must, of course, include discussion of the difference between commonly available weapons today, compared to the past. As well as society's willingness to accept a shift in attitude toward violence as a more reasonable/acceptable course of action in emergencies.
I won't go any further into that discussion though. I don't know where I stand, because I just haven't thought deeply about it. And obviously the argument requires deep thought, because there is more to it than just securing my own personal safety from the "baser elements".
SCOTUS has ruled twice recently that the police have no legal obligation to protect you.
This doesn't sound right. Do you by chance have links to any info on these rulings? Or case names at least?
I suppose it depends on the definition of protection... I mean, the police aren't legally obligated to basically be a bodyguarding service. But a sufficiently immediate threat of harm can be ruled as "battery", and therefore a criminal offense, obliging the police to do something about it. Similarly, an attempt at serious harm (even if it fails) is a criminal offense as well. I would think that a police officer standing by while this kind of thing happens would be a dereliction of duty (which I realize is a military term, but there's also civilian dereliction).
There are a lot of young people who listen to NPR. There are a lot of young people who play games. Granted, the intersection of those two sets is likely to be much smaller than either of the groups alone. However, that's what makes it perfect for a podcast. Podcasts are notoriously cheap to produce, though considering the talent this one is likely to cost more than many others. But it's still way cheaper than even a 15 chunk of time on a radio network.
I think it's a great idea. And if they "get it right", I can see it becoming popular among the geek gaming crowd. (But not the pop gaming crowd.) I, for one, will definitely give it a shot.
That still doesn't provide for medieval settings though, such as what we see in fantasy RPGs. What type of advertising can they embed within a game such as WoW, or NWN, or Fable? My mind is filled with disturbing images such as the parody ads that were all over the place in the movie Shrek 2. If I ever pick up an RPG with that kind of advertising it in, unless parody is the central theme you can be sure that's the last game I ever buy from that publisher.
But even if fantasy genre games were kept "clean" of such intrusive noise while everything else piles it on, wouldn't that just mean they'd be doomed to be low-budget hacks compared to everything else?
This method is being pioneered by the computer software industry: you don't buy programs, you "license" them, with terms subject to change anytime the licensor wants to change them. Don't like it? Too bad, some people are saying that shrink-wrap license agreements "are" binding (as though this is a done matter, but for those that believe it's a "done deal", it is.
While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the software licensing system, there are differences between songs, videos, and broadband access, comapared to software, that make this particular comparison a poor one.
A song doesn't inherently require patches in order to work properly, or upgrades to expand its relevancy to the ever-changing musical landscape. Nor do they inherently require technical support to keep working when you change to a new media player or platform. Nothing about the raw digital transcription of a song prevents us from copying it, backing it up, or playing it on any number of different devices.
A broadband pipe is built to support a particular throughput. The division of that throughput is being monetized in a way similar to the content industry, despite the fact that X million bits has no inherent value to the user. It's the source, the producer of those bits (which could legitimately be the media publishesr, in fact) that provides the value. Yet, you can pay a little for a trickle of data, pay more for a good stream of it, or really shell out for nearly limitless access.
The support issues are inherent in software. But the content and access companies are and want to artificially create similar limitations on media and access, so that they can charge customers to provide a way around them. Free market ideologies would dictate that if people are willing to pay for it, the providers of these services are justified in charging for it. But in the case of the access providers, their service is becoming more akin to a necessary utility like electricity than to an entertainment luxury like music/movies.
In light of all that, I think the media publishing companies' tactics are more nefarious than the software companies, and broadband access companies' tactics are more nefarious still than that. The software companies are capitalizing on pre-existing limitations of technology. I'm fine with that, because surmounting or circumventing these limitations often takes a much larger investment on their part. But the media publishers and access providers are actually re-creating limitations that technology has already solved, for the express purpose of getting back the monetization they lost when the market evolved to a new level with that technology.
Now for Google this might not be such a grand idea, but imagine it was your bank, or your insurance agency, that would put me in a mood to switch ISP's very quickly.
If it's so easy to switch ISP's, you are very fortunate. I have a choice between two broadband providers, both nationwide corporations. I think we can agree that the nationwide conglomerates are the ones more likely to get greedy for more revenue via a tiered internet. So, basically, if this thing goes through, both my ISP options will probably sieze on it, and I'll be screwed. Either I take the throttling, or I go to dialup (and maybe still have to deal with throttling).
While not the most elegant solution, I still DO NOT believe that the government of the United States, or any nation for that matter, has any right to legislate what can or cannot be done with regards to the internet. THAT is true net neutrality.
Let me see if I can transport this logic to a more evocative scenario... Basic human rights are more evocative than internet access. More important, most would argue. So would you say that no government has the right to legislate what is and is not legal treatment of a human being? I would hope not.
We need laws to criminalize inhumane treatment of other human beings. Why would we not need laws to criminalize the subversion of the free (as in speech) network of information that is the internet?
The only person who should have the right to charge me more for access to site X than to site Y is the person who runs site X and produces its content.
The possible abuses of tiered internet as currently formulated are ridiculous. Imagine a pressure sensor underneath the entrance driveway to your favorite supermarket, counting the number of cars going in. Now imagine that the government declared that the supermarket had to pay a special tax proportional to the number of cars entering their parking lot, to cover the usage of the road to the supermarket by its customers. Would that be fair in any sort of way? Both the customers and the businesses already pay taxes that, in part, pay for the road systems. So why should the business be charged a per-customer fee on top of that.
Its not everyday the government asks us to do dangerous things outside our work time especially doing things with hydrogen. I wonder if the other departments have been notified of this homework assignment?
That's not what they're saying at all. They are basically just saying that work already paid for by the government is not eligible for the prize. But any work done outside of that time is fair game. That's actually more lenient than most contests out there, where employees (and their families!) of the company holding the contest are completely ineligible regardless whether they make the attempt on company time or not.
It is perfectly fair for a non-government company to start R&D, on company time, toward the goal of producing a product that satisfies the contest requirements. They will be eligible for the prize. Only government work is not.
Who's going to do the tedious work for no compensation?
People with a BS in Technical Communications, particularly specializing in Computers/IT? My engineering school had a degree program for BS in TC. Very few people were in that program though.
There must be people out there who like doing this stuff. Otherwise the degree wouldn't exist. But the thing is, usually it's cheaper/easier/faster for a software group (either in-house or commercial) to force developers to do the documentation themselves. Yes they find it tedious, no it won't be "high quality" documentation. But it's cheaper, and it works "well enough".
I think part of the problem here is that what passes for "Computer Science" in a lot of American colleges these days, and what you are talking about there, is not science. It's engineering at best, and tradework skills at worst.
You want to know what "real" computer science is? Read up on the work of people like Knuth, and Turing, and von Neumann". Look at the course programs for computer science at places like Caltech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Harvey Mudd. That's "real" science.
The people graduating from public universities with a BS in CS are about as much involved in computer science as a gardener is in botany.
A gardener grows little plants according to the same classic recipes over and over again. If they're good, they'll be able to find better recipes as they gain experience, enhancing their productivity, getting more and better plants. But they don't make groundbreaking discoveries that change the way gardening is done. They're just growing the same old plants over and over again.
Similarly, a programmer with a BS in CS solves little problems according to the same classic recipes over and over again. If they're good, they'll refine and tailor the recipes to their own style and app domain, enhancing their productivity, solving bigger problems faster. But they don't make groundbreaking advances in computer or programming technology that change the way programming is done. They're just solving the same problems everyone else in the industry is solving, with trivial variations.
Computer science, like botanical science, is about roots. It's about theory. It's about devising new solutions to problems both new and old, that both butress and enhance past accomplishments, and provide a framework for future development, not just for themselves and their company, but for the entire industry.
Demand for computer engineering, and computer tradework (programming) may be growing. But this is not "high-tech" work anymore. What we should be concerned about is our computer research industry. Where is the new research being done? Who are the doctorates going to? Who's contributing to computing theory?
The answer is: fewer and fewer Americans every year. And that's a problem for the nation that claims to have the most advanced research industry in the world.
I mean, most of the characters were decent, but Billy Bob Thorton in the place of the bounty-hunting monk was just absurd. It's not like they couldn't have gotten some lesser known actor whose voice wouldn't have seemed totally absurd coming out of such a face.
Oh gosh, that annoyed the piss out of me. For the first half of the movie, every time he spoke, I was yanked out of my immersion in the story by his ridiculously mismatched and overly recognizable voice.
But it wasn't just the absurd voice that bothered me. I thought his voice-acting itself was absolutely terrible. Even after I got past the voice, there was the dead, line-reading style of his speech that kept pulling me right back out of the story. Maybe he was going for that "uncaring, emotionless bounty-hunter" effect, but instead he achieved the "I'm just reading these lines for the paycheck" effect. IIRC, I was really pissed that his character didn't die. I was hoping for some payback for the miserable performance.
Even VII had a good chunk of real gameplay (mini-games, chocobo raising, etc)
Mini-games are the absolutely most annoying part of RPGs for me. I'm playing for story, for drama, for the strange new world I get to explore with each new game (and ideally, though less often these days, for the ability to make decisions that affect the story in serious ways).
I don't want to have to deal with reflex or memory challenges when I'm playing an RPG. I'm not here to hone my twitch skills, or test my patience. If I wanted that I could play any of thousands of other games that have been created since the dawn of video-gaming. I want to experience a new story in a way that film doesn't allow. And I don't think its fair to lock away portions of story contingent upon my ability to enter 30 5-button combos in the correct order in less than a second each, or to figure out which of the trees in the Forest-of-a-Thousand-Oaks the last golden crest is hidden in.
Give me role-playing, not glorified Speed or Concentration.
Which isn't to say I don't enjoy action-based games, or search-and-retrieve missions. But I'll play Metroid or Zelda for that, where the mechanics of those challenges are well-developed and (usually) fully integrated into the story.
once you get every character past level 40 and do all the extra side quests to get the rest of the good gear and spells, you can pretty much stomp over all enemies in the game
Well, yeah, once you do all that. But not everyone finds all the secrets, or cares about all the sidequests. And the bosses on the "critical path" of the storyline shouldn't be impossible for them.
The only way to keep both groups happy would be to scale up boss difficulty with party strength. I am actually pretty convinced some games actually did this. For example, in "Chrono Trigger", you could beat the end boss without doing too much of the extra junk. But even after 2 or 3 play-throughs on new-game-plus to get alternate endings, the end boss was still challenging. I remember screaming at my TV on my 3rd play-through, after getting annihilated by a super-strong spell that Lavos hadn't used even once in all the previous times I'd battled him.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet you can find it in the "Small Business" section. I managed to get a 15" WUXGA matte from Dell, but it's from the Latitude line rather than XPS line. It's up to you whether you're willing to trade the gaming-directed features to get the matte display. But if you're interested, check out the Dell Latitude D820. WUXGA is not one of the defaults, but if you customize, you should be able to pick it. And unless they changed the offerings since June, only matte displays are available for this model.
But like I said, it's not designed primarily for gaming. So the Geforce line of Nvidia cards are not an option. Only the Quadro line.
Anyway, it's a real shame WUXGA is so hard to come by. Especially in matte finish. And of course it's even rarer to find a desktop-style display of that resolution without going up to 23" inches. If Dell can do it in 15" for a laptop, why the heck can't Samsung do it in 19" for a desktop?
With due respect to the lefty plight...
The obvious response to such injustice is to start a Leftorium. =)
Seriously though, frustrating though it may be, the reason that left-handers are left out in the cold is the same reason that that Nintendo had to mirror the whole game, rather than just the character models: practicality, and marketing. The reason given in the article is essentially that there was no time to playtest the game with selectable handedness. It's very possible that certain places in the game are restrictive on sword-swinging, and the position of an enemy or item could make something overly difficult or impossible if the sword swings from the opposite side.
But why wasn't there enough time for more playtesting? Because Twilight Princess was designed for Gamecube, and only later was it decided that it would be released as a Wii launch game. Pushing out the release date of the game to allow more playtesting would mean missing the Wii launch. And that would mean they wasted all the money and resources it took to port it to the Wii. It's doubtful they ever would have taken that path anyway though, because this game will be what sells a large percentage of Wiis at launch. After all, it's the only action title that will be available at launch containing any of Nintendo's biggest character brands. There's no Mario, no Metroid, no DK. Just Link.
Er... I hesitate to take you seriously, but... Refresh rate and fps aren't the same thing.
You can run a game rendering at 15fps, but have a refresh rate of 90Hz and get no flicker. In between frame refreshes, each screen refresh will just have the same image again.
No flicker. Just "chunkiness" of motion.
In my understanging, the key attribute of Gaia theory that distinguishes it from others is that it promotes the viewpoint that any interrelated system of organisms (or system of systems of organisms, etc.) can be considered to be an organism when taken as a whole.
It is a panspermist theory. But there are others that don't emphasize this.
I tend to agree with the concepts of that idea. I.e. life systems, not just individual life forms, do what it takes to continue living, and that may or may not involve evolving a "new" lifeform, rather than just propogation of core DNA.
I don't agree with what borders on anthropomorphization of Earth as a whole that some Gaia-ists will promote. That moves beyond science and into philosophy/religion.
Because, in my understanding jihad already has a word for that: fatwah. I could very well be wrong on that, but I thought I came across that in reading recently. Anyone with real-life knowledge of Arabic, please correct me!
I don't think the people who coined that term intend it to be any such thing, considering its recent usage. It was inspired by the old "war on drugs" terminology, which certainly was an analogy. However, when Bush and the Republicans in general insist on using "we are at war" as a defense for side-stepping the Bill of Rights, it is obvious that they don't consider it "only an analogy".
The problem is, as has been eloquently expressed, it's not a war. And so that defense needs to be scrutinized at least, and I would suggest rejected altogether. We need to establish a new set of rules for this new type of engagement. And carrying them all over from traditional war I would suggest is a violation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
And not only that, but treating this as a war also isn't working very well as a strategy.
If it's in everyone's interest for fair and just ratings applied to media, it should be a government institution.
Why should it be a government institution? If parents are so upset about it, they can just not buy games that are unrated. Or insist on refunds for games that are mis-rated. And eventually, when the game industry has lost enough money due to their poor rating system, they will improve it until everyone is satisfied enough that they aren't losing money anymore.
Isn't this pretty much what happened with movie ratings?
I'm not against government regulation on industry, when economic power is being abused. But this is not an abuse of anything on the part of the game companies. It is the shirking of responsibility, both on the part of parents, and on the part of industry. And if parents were doing their due dilligence as parents, they would be insisting the industry take responsibility for properly classifying their product.
If you don't like how something is rated, take it up with the company, and with the ESRB. If you can't get enough support behind you to change things, then I guess that most of the population disagrees with you. And if that's the case, since there's no freedom that's being abridged, then I guess that's just too bad. That's democracy for you. Sometimes you don't get what you want.
From the article:
A rare cosmological coincidence allowed Schild and his colleagues to probe the structure of the quasar in much finer detail than is normally possible.
I take this to mean one or both of two things:
1) Previous black hole sightings revealed no evidence of magnetic fields possibly only because they couldn't be probed as deeply.
2) We had no reason to expect previous black holes were MECOs because the assumption of an unseen magnetic field was a violation of Occam's Razor. (Even though the alternative to the unseen magnetic field is a unseen singularity... I know which I would prefer under Occam.)
In short, if this magnetic field is confirmed, we are far more certain this is a MECO than we are that all the others are not (and hence are black holes instead).... So if we must give one up, it will be the black holes.
That's just my understanding. Certainly I will be following this story closely in the coming months.
Governments can always create more soldiers via conscription.
American culture would have to undergo huge transformations before conscription would be accepted by the American citizenry. It used to be a fact of life. But after decades without it, it's just no longer an option.
A first-term president who proposed re-enacting conscription laws would have a truly difficult time getting re-elected unless maybe he enjoyed wide bipartisan support in other ways. And a congressman who proposed or voted for re-enacting conscription laws would find himself tossed out of office in his district as soon as the next vote came around. The simple fact is, Americans do not want a draft. Period. That sentiment has more cross-party support than most things I can think of. And as much spite as we have for the rich politicians whose kids never "join up", it's not enough to override the distaste for a draft.
If it were tried, we'd have riots like the U.S. hasn't seen in decades.
For that to be a viable option, the citizenry needs fair access to equipment equaling that of the military.
I definitely understand your argument. It's one thing for a government to turn oppressive and then outlaw guns: it's too late, because the revolters already have the weapons they need. It's another for the citizenry to accept the removal of arms rights in the name of collective safety, and the government to turn oppressive only after the citizens are de-armed. (And yes I realize that the outlawing of armed citizenry is considered oppressive itself by many people, but I'm thinking more of truly unconscionable abuses of power.)
But on the flip side, military-grade weapons of today are much more powerful and destructive than the were then. Are we, as a society, prepared to accept the additional day-to-day risk that would be necessitated by the potentiality of anyone off the street to be able to get their hands on this stuff?
It's a complicated debate. There are a lot of good, reasonable, and honorable points on both sides.
Thanks very much for the link and case names. I will certianly look into them. Have to admit this bothers me a bit. I've never really thought of the police as a simple cleanup squad, but it certainly seems the court is leaning that way. The argument about self defense and bearing arms is compelling... But I would hasten to add that even if people were more legally empowered to defend themselves, I wouldn't say that absolves the police from that responsibility when there is immediate danger. Not saying that's what you meant, just anticipating that line of thought on someone's part. It leads far too readily to leaving blame for a violent crime at the feat of the victim, for not undertaking due diligence to defend himself. That's a little too close to "the law of the jungle" for my taste.
You can't expect them to always be there in advance to defend you from it. That's what the SCOTUS meant by "protect."
Of course. That's basically what I meant by "bodyguard". Not a reasonable expectation, IMHO.
Any debate about the right to bear arms must, of course, include discussion of the difference between commonly available weapons today, compared to the past. As well as society's willingness to accept a shift in attitude toward violence as a more reasonable/acceptable course of action in emergencies.
I won't go any further into that discussion though. I don't know where I stand, because I just haven't thought deeply about it. And obviously the argument requires deep thought, because there is more to it than just securing my own personal safety from the "baser elements".
SCOTUS has ruled twice recently that the police have no legal obligation to protect you.
This doesn't sound right. Do you by chance have links to any info on these rulings? Or case names at least?
I suppose it depends on the definition of protection... I mean, the police aren't legally obligated to basically be a bodyguarding service. But a sufficiently immediate threat of harm can be ruled as "battery", and therefore a criminal offense, obliging the police to do something about it. Similarly, an attempt at serious harm (even if it fails) is a criminal offense as well. I would think that a police officer standing by while this kind of thing happens would be a dereliction of duty (which I realize is a military term, but there's also civilian dereliction).
Very clever. =)
How about a bumper sticker saying that. Except instead of lowercase and uppercase, it could all be uppercase, but different colors.
There are a lot of young people who listen to NPR. There are a lot of young people who play games. Granted, the intersection of those two sets is likely to be much smaller than either of the groups alone. However, that's what makes it perfect for a podcast. Podcasts are notoriously cheap to produce, though considering the talent this one is likely to cost more than many others. But it's still way cheaper than even a 15 chunk of time on a radio network.
I think it's a great idea. And if they "get it right", I can see it becoming popular among the geek gaming crowd. (But not the pop gaming crowd.) I, for one, will definitely give it a shot.
That still doesn't provide for medieval settings though, such as what we see in fantasy RPGs. What type of advertising can they embed within a game such as WoW, or NWN, or Fable? My mind is filled with disturbing images such as the parody ads that were all over the place in the movie Shrek 2. If I ever pick up an RPG with that kind of advertising it in, unless parody is the central theme you can be sure that's the last game I ever buy from that publisher.
But even if fantasy genre games were kept "clean" of such intrusive noise while everything else piles it on, wouldn't that just mean they'd be doomed to be low-budget hacks compared to everything else?
Now I'm depressed.
This method is being pioneered by the computer software industry: you don't buy programs, you "license" them, with terms subject to change anytime the licensor wants to change them. Don't like it? Too bad, some people are saying that shrink-wrap license agreements "are" binding (as though this is a done matter, but for those that believe it's a "done deal", it is.
While there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the software licensing system, there are differences between songs, videos, and broadband access, comapared to software, that make this particular comparison a poor one.
A song doesn't inherently require patches in order to work properly, or upgrades to expand its relevancy to the ever-changing musical landscape. Nor do they inherently require technical support to keep working when you change to a new media player or platform. Nothing about the raw digital transcription of a song prevents us from copying it, backing it up, or playing it on any number of different devices.
A broadband pipe is built to support a particular throughput. The division of that throughput is being monetized in a way similar to the content industry, despite the fact that X million bits has no inherent value to the user. It's the source, the producer of those bits (which could legitimately be the media publishesr, in fact) that provides the value. Yet, you can pay a little for a trickle of data, pay more for a good stream of it, or really shell out for nearly limitless access.
The support issues are inherent in software. But the content and access companies are and want to artificially create similar limitations on media and access, so that they can charge customers to provide a way around them. Free market ideologies would dictate that if people are willing to pay for it, the providers of these services are justified in charging for it. But in the case of the access providers, their service is becoming more akin to a necessary utility like electricity than to an entertainment luxury like music/movies.
In light of all that, I think the media publishing companies' tactics are more nefarious than the software companies, and broadband access companies' tactics are more nefarious still than that. The software companies are capitalizing on pre-existing limitations of technology. I'm fine with that, because surmounting or circumventing these limitations often takes a much larger investment on their part. But the media publishers and access providers are actually re-creating limitations that technology has already solved, for the express purpose of getting back the monetization they lost when the market evolved to a new level with that technology.
Now for Google this might not be such a grand idea, but imagine it was your bank, or your insurance agency, that would put me in a mood to switch ISP's very quickly.
If it's so easy to switch ISP's, you are very fortunate. I have a choice between two broadband providers, both nationwide corporations. I think we can agree that the nationwide conglomerates are the ones more likely to get greedy for more revenue via a tiered internet. So, basically, if this thing goes through, both my ISP options will probably sieze on it, and I'll be screwed. Either I take the throttling, or I go to dialup (and maybe still have to deal with throttling).
While not the most elegant solution, I still DO NOT believe that the government of the United States, or any nation for that matter, has any right to legislate what can or cannot be done with regards to the internet. THAT is true net neutrality.
Let me see if I can transport this logic to a more evocative scenario... Basic human rights are more evocative than internet access. More important, most would argue. So would you say that no government has the right to legislate what is and is not legal treatment of a human being? I would hope not.
We need laws to criminalize inhumane treatment of other human beings. Why would we not need laws to criminalize the subversion of the free (as in speech) network of information that is the internet?
The only person who should have the right to charge me more for access to site X than to site Y is the person who runs site X and produces its content.
The possible abuses of tiered internet as currently formulated are ridiculous. Imagine a pressure sensor underneath the entrance driveway to your favorite supermarket, counting the number of cars going in. Now imagine that the government declared that the supermarket had to pay a special tax proportional to the number of cars entering their parking lot, to cover the usage of the road to the supermarket by its customers. Would that be fair in any sort of way? Both the customers and the businesses already pay taxes that, in part, pay for the road systems. So why should the business be charged a per-customer fee on top of that.
Its not everyday the government asks us to do dangerous things outside our work time especially doing things with hydrogen. I wonder if the other departments have been notified of this homework assignment?
That's not what they're saying at all. They are basically just saying that work already paid for by the government is not eligible for the prize. But any work done outside of that time is fair game. That's actually more lenient than most contests out there, where employees (and their families!) of the company holding the contest are completely ineligible regardless whether they make the attempt on company time or not.
It is perfectly fair for a non-government company to start R&D, on company time, toward the goal of producing a product that satisfies the contest requirements. They will be eligible for the prize. Only government work is not.
Who's going to do the tedious work for no compensation?
People with a BS in Technical Communications, particularly specializing in Computers/IT? My engineering school had a degree program for BS in TC. Very few people were in that program though.
There must be people out there who like doing this stuff. Otherwise the degree wouldn't exist. But the thing is, usually it's cheaper/easier/faster for a software group (either in-house or commercial) to force developers to do the documentation themselves. Yes they find it tedious, no it won't be "high quality" documentation. But it's cheaper, and it works "well enough".
I think part of the problem here is that what passes for "Computer Science" in a lot of American colleges these days, and what you are talking about there, is not science. It's engineering at best, and tradework skills at worst.
You want to know what "real" computer science is? Read up on the work of people like Knuth, and Turing, and von Neumann". Look at the course programs for computer science at places like Caltech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Harvey Mudd. That's "real" science.
The people graduating from public universities with a BS in CS are about as much involved in computer science as a gardener is in botany.
A gardener grows little plants according to the same classic recipes over and over again. If they're good, they'll be able to find better recipes as they gain experience, enhancing their productivity, getting more and better plants. But they don't make groundbreaking discoveries that change the way gardening is done. They're just growing the same old plants over and over again.
Similarly, a programmer with a BS in CS solves little problems according to the same classic recipes over and over again. If they're good, they'll refine and tailor the recipes to their own style and app domain, enhancing their productivity, solving bigger problems faster. But they don't make groundbreaking advances in computer or programming technology that change the way programming is done. They're just solving the same problems everyone else in the industry is solving, with trivial variations.
Computer science, like botanical science, is about roots. It's about theory. It's about devising new solutions to problems both new and old, that both butress and enhance past accomplishments, and provide a framework for future development, not just for themselves and their company, but for the entire industry.
Demand for computer engineering, and computer tradework (programming) may be growing. But this is not "high-tech" work anymore. What we should be concerned about is our computer research industry. Where is the new research being done? Who are the doctorates going to? Who's contributing to computing theory?
The answer is: fewer and fewer Americans every year. And that's a problem for the nation that claims to have the most advanced research industry in the world.
I mean, most of the characters were decent, but Billy Bob Thorton in the place of the bounty-hunting monk was just absurd. It's not like they couldn't have gotten some lesser known actor whose voice wouldn't have seemed totally absurd coming out of such a face.
Oh gosh, that annoyed the piss out of me. For the first half of the movie, every time he spoke, I was yanked out of my immersion in the story by his ridiculously mismatched and overly recognizable voice.
But it wasn't just the absurd voice that bothered me. I thought his voice-acting itself was absolutely terrible. Even after I got past the voice, there was the dead, line-reading style of his speech that kept pulling me right back out of the story. Maybe he was going for that "uncaring, emotionless bounty-hunter" effect, but instead he achieved the "I'm just reading these lines for the paycheck" effect. IIRC, I was really pissed that his character didn't die. I was hoping for some payback for the miserable performance.
Citation: http://sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-07/fe ature1p/
Not defending the absurd generalizations. Just providing some context.
Mini-games are the absolutely most annoying part of RPGs for me. I'm playing for story, for drama, for the strange new world I get to explore with each new game (and ideally, though less often these days, for the ability to make decisions that affect the story in serious ways).
I don't want to have to deal with reflex or memory challenges when I'm playing an RPG. I'm not here to hone my twitch skills, or test my patience. If I wanted that I could play any of thousands of other games that have been created since the dawn of video-gaming. I want to experience a new story in a way that film doesn't allow. And I don't think its fair to lock away portions of story contingent upon my ability to enter 30 5-button combos in the correct order in less than a second each, or to figure out which of the trees in the Forest-of-a-Thousand-Oaks the last golden crest is hidden in.
Give me role-playing, not glorified Speed or Concentration. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy action-based games, or search-and-retrieve missions. But I'll play Metroid or Zelda for that, where the mechanics of those challenges are well-developed and (usually) fully integrated into the story.
once you get every character past level 40 and do all the extra side quests to get the rest of the good gear and spells, you can pretty much stomp over all enemies in the game
Well, yeah, once you do all that. But not everyone finds all the secrets, or cares about all the sidequests. And the bosses on the "critical path" of the storyline shouldn't be impossible for them.
The only way to keep both groups happy would be to scale up boss difficulty with party strength. I am actually pretty convinced some games actually did this. For example, in "Chrono Trigger", you could beat the end boss without doing too much of the extra junk. But even after 2 or 3 play-throughs on new-game-plus to get alternate endings, the end boss was still challenging. I remember screaming at my TV on my 3rd play-through, after getting annihilated by a super-strong spell that Lavos hadn't used even once in all the previous times I'd battled him.