I was of the opinion that charges were not necessary, because this has its own punishment, so thank you for pointing out point number 1. No matter what, this guy has to have some legal consequences to ensure he's lost all privileges to own a gun. That's an absolute must in my mind.
I'm not sure I agree with the rest, at least without knowing more facts about the case. He certainly appears to be too stupid to raise children, but I'd have to be certain of a lot more before I would try to make that happen legally and I certainly wouldn't bring charges to increase media coverage alone. Still, if this man doesn't lose all gun ownership privileges because of this then something is very wrong. I agree that any punishment can't come close to what this family has already had to bear, but they do need to be protected from themselves for the future as well.
There are larger uses of the term that do end up with the limitations you're talking about and I'm all for calling that out, but I do think there is a place in culture to choose to use new definitions for groups/ideas/whatever that try to peel away hurtful histories that make free and open discussion more difficult, specifically for the historically denigrated groups/ideas.
Having an unpopular opinion is not un-PC, even when it's crazy racist or bigotted. We have words that define those things already. PC is simply about acknowledging that language has history and there are times, if for nothing else than for expediency, when certain terms have to be collectively chosen which allow people to reference things without immediate negative connotations. Now, my PC definition may not be what you were talking about at all, but I wanted to point out there is a concept of PC that does not limit what you can talk about it. Its intention is merely to create a framework whereby everyone feels comfortable participating. I would call this Democratically Correct rather than political, as its intention is to give access to every individual to a larger discourse, but Political is fine. This too can be taken too far and I'm the first one to point that out 'cause my language choices are not always unoffensive to everyone (I'll say fuck as much as I like god damn it!). Stll, where there is an extremely sensitive subject, I am more than willing to at least attempt to find the terms that no group involved will be instantly put-off by so that everyone can access the ideas.
Now this has nothing to do with college kids or any kids making fun of each other, so I'll shut up now.
It seems to me that apart from the headline the only objectionable sentence is this:
The key to this new battery turned out to be an often bothersome green algae known as Cladophora.
The rest of TFA is speculative and, to my mind anyway, worth the 30 seconds it took to read. Without this one definitive sentence claiming this as more than a new thread to follow, it's just a piece about a potential new avenue into cellulose batteries.
While I definitely agree that bold claims do hurt their industries with unreal expectations, I know I usually am more forgiving than I would be to large industries like pharma or oil. It's not a fair or educated position, but I often attribute that kind of overzealousness in these articles to optimism and enthusiasm, whereas if it's a press release from a huge corp. I see it as manipulative and marketed. That's probably an unfair ideological position and I try to stay aware that I have that bias, but I don't feel I'm totally out to lunch feeling that way in general.
I always appreciate it when people point out these discrepancies, but I think there is a legitimate reason why it occurs. We should make note where it happens, but I don't feel like getting angry at the people who may have overstated how far along they are in achieving some of these goals. If it takes an outlook that makes them feel they're closer than they are to keep plugging away so they, or the scientists after them finally do make a breakthrough, I'm more than willing to tolerate the fact they tend to minimize the difficulties between where they currently are and where they claim they are heading.
My answer to this is it's time to re-think your scale. Absolutely everything that goes sub 6 on your current scale should get an automatic 0. 0 means too far below industry standards to be considered a viable option. After that re-orient your 6-10 on a 1-10 scale. Nobody reading reviews gives a crap about the differences between a current 1 and a current 4. they are both equally unbuyable products and I see no reason for a reviewer to differentiate between them. However, there are lots of reasons to make small distinctions between a 6, a 6.5, and a 7 and I'd much rather have those difference given more weight so they exist on a 3-6 or 3-7 plane. It's all the little things reviewers know about that would help people make decisions. Are there other similar titles that do it better? Graphics subtleties, small control issues, bugs etc...
Now it's frustrating because if you're the only one using a scale like this your reviews sound incredibly harsh, but to me there's no reason to give a spectrum at the bottom of the scale where the threshold for even considering buying it is way more like 4-5 at the lowest. To me a 1 should be the generic genre game that super fanboys will play and enjoy, but if you don't play like 20 games of the same style every year, then buy a different one. Then work your way up from there. There's no reason anything lower on the scale deserves it's own spot. It shouldn't be paid for under any circumstances and the fact that people can make games even worse than it doesn't mean the've accomplished anything either.
The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.
Why do people assume the teacher quit because he thought he'd get fired? If I had a boss come to me at the end of the day and say the IT department has spent all day stalking someone who anonymously used the word "p*ssy" as a joke about eating and now it's been discovered that I am the culprit with any kind of incriminating tone I would quit too.
Not if you're trying to pass a bill they aren't. Uses technology (including the wheel, the stick, or straw) in any way to carry out your daily activities: that's high tech jobs for the economy!
I think there's a very strange attitude towards FOSS with some business managers or small business owners. I have mentioned these alternatives to people (it's not my job, but you meet people in these situations) who complain about the cost of upgrading windows software and always encountered a weird resistance. They don't usually say flat out no, but they always hedge around it so you get the idea they aren't the slightest bit interested. I think it's about a fear for their image (at least that's the only way I can make sense of it). They're imagining having to call a client and ask for a word document saved in some weird format, basically outing them as too cheap for "professional" applications. Maybe that's not it, but it's certainly the impression I've gotten over the years whenever I try to broach the subject. IMO saving a couple grand (at least, the larger the company the larger the savings) annually on readily available free software without any concerns for piracy makes such incredible sense for so many small business, it's really a shame people aren't willing to do the hour or two of research finding out about the alternatives and getting rid of their own misperceptions.
Having a place for comments is good. If it's moderated effectively that's even better. Turning your comments into a significant portion of your on-air broadcasts for a news network is terrible. The only reason is if you're too lazy to generate content, or your trying to pump up your website's traffic. Either way it's not worthy of being on the air, CNN knows it, but does it anyway 'cause they're working on revenue generation, not news delivery.
If there was a once a week, heavily edited and researched half-hour show finding the most insightful stuff posted on their comments, that might be an interesting show, but using the comments section in every news story for a "here's what you have to say" moment is beyond atrocious.
Totally on point. Obviously, a move like this leads/. to assume the worst of the police, and that's fine, but now it's on the Swedish police to present a case showing why they went after tpb for child porn. If it's being used for that and tpb is doing nothing to stop it, then by all means, byebye tpb and good riddance. However, they are innocent until proven guilty (I'm just assuming that's true in Sweden as well) and this does reek of a misuse of power. Hopefully, we'll get to find out in the end, but I'm guessing it'll all be rumors and some jokey tpb posted correspondence.
You should watch the movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated . It's about the movie ratings and how NC-17 works. Basically, the ESRB just ripped off that system and are using it in seemingly an identical fashion. NC-17 was basically created so the people who run the ratings can keep their movies in and other movies out. Sure, porn is the largest section, but it's also for all the indie movies that distributors don't want in their theatres, 'cause they don't want the potential blowback from disquieting themes/scenes. I think after GTA IV the game industry is sending R* a little message. You're games are too much; scale back and play nice or you'll never see the inside of a walmart again.
The AO or NC-17 rating has nothing to do with keeping children from games, they have R and M ratings for that, it's about keeping games those industries don't want from consumers. Yes, you can still rent NC-17, but not at blockbuster. The studio movies that have a couple extra titty scenes might still play, but the original NC-17 movies are still chopped up if they're gonna get any shelf space in blockbuster. And even that's b.s. The unrated versions are very often re-edited by blockbuster. They make sanitized unrated versions of movies for sale at walmart as well. They aren't the NC-17 equivalents. It's a 3rd version of the movie; there's theatrical, unrated, and unrated/sanitized. This last category being the most horrendous of them all, 'cause they're basically trying to steal their customers money by preying on their desire for more graphic sex/violence and then not giving it to them, because they deem it morally corrupting. Now, that's the movies way of having their cake and eating it too.
IMO, R* has been trying to show the games industry for years that there are grown-ups who want to play grown-up games. Sure they're happy to make money off teenagers too, but R* could have a sick niche if they were allowed to really make good adult games and there was actually a way to make them buyable only by adults without the straight store ban that AO entails, but the entire game industry (at least the parts where the money comes from) have absolutely no desire to make a single parent start questioning whether their child might get subjected to inappopriate material playing their shiny new ps3/360/wii. Hence, warning shot across the bow for R*. The probably better make their next game a Harry Potter port or something.
IMO Civ 4 went a long way to helping people who don't like the mm side of turn based strategy games (note not real-time, how that slides by whoever's in charge up there is beyond me).
If you want to beat the game playing on Prince/Emperor or higher you're gonna need to keep control over everything to exploit your intelligence vs. the AI's overall bonuses, but if that stuff bores you, then play at a lower difficulty and you can automate away and focus on the parts you enjoy. IMO the automation still needs more work. It could use general worker strategy options, like cottage spam or city specific strategies that you could click on and the citizen automation sucks too, but if you're playing any of the lower difficulties you can still automate and enjoy the parts of a strategy game that you signed up for.
Also, based on the direction they've gone with this series specifically, I think the developers are already pretty aware of how much this can turn off some gamers and are already trying to fix the problem without alienating those who enjoy the micromanagement aspects of these games. I'd much rather complain about how these companies still think it's okay to ship products that are not ready and let their consumers wait for 2-3 or more patches before a significant minority can even play the game in the first place.
They got fired 'cause Apple does not want their retail employees talking about or answering questions on products until Apple says they should. I'd bet Apple tells retail employees, that if asked about Leopard to say you don't know anything. Apple has people who decide when to start divulging information about it's releases and any retail employee who disagrees with any corporate policy can expect to get canned the moment they can be heard disagreeing, let alone if they actively go out and try to go against the policy. I'm not saying any of this is right or nice, Apple is a corporation like and other and treats it's lower level employees like cogs in the machine. If a widget isn't 100% fully within tolerances it's disgarded, that's how these employees were dealt with.
This doesn't even account for the fact that by Apple's standards, these employees stole from them. Getting fired without prosecution is the benefit of confessing instead of stonewalling. If all they'd done is openly discuss details of Leopard while working in the store, they could probably have been fired if it took corporate's notice. Even if when asked they just said they were repeating what they'd heard about Leopard and never admitting to actually having downloaded a copy. IMO once the rumor was out there from talking at the store their jobs were over, even if nothing could have been proven.
Whoops. You're right, don't know how I dropped that one. Even if you double the number of households in Australia to 5million and assume the 2500 square kilometres number accounts for efficiency you're still left with 500 square metres per household (that's the optimistic number). That just ain't gonna cut it, although IMO in a place like Australia it could play a significant role.
There was a great "nature of things" about the oil sands. It seems especially pertinent when discussing how biofuel will create water shortages since the oil sands extracts oil by pumping steam. They use so much freshwater for this it's crazy. Estimates for future production see them using as much water as Toronto in the not too distant future (can't remember the dates). Also, because of the massive investment Shell is trying to get as much out of the ground as quick as possible so instead of creating a very long term project they could dry it up in 30-50 years. Not to mention most of this oil is going to the US and Canada will end up using up an enormous natural resource for entirely short-term non-replaceable gain. See that in comparison to the Saudi NOC, which is only drilling 10 of 80 odd fields and barely ever bothers to look for new oil 'cause they have the next 70 years locked up easy without harming their reserves or fields all that much (that was in last week's economist I think).
I don't think we're running out of oil any time soon, but the costs of that oil are becoming too rich, not in terms of at the pump prices, but it uses too many of our other natural resources (water, air, land). All this talk of desalinisation seems to be totally missing the point to me. We're gonna use our freshwater to get fuel so we can make saltwater into freshwater and have some left over? Wouldn't some investment in the alternative sources be reasonable instead? You'd (I would anyway) think with a few technological innovations they could account for more than the remainder between those two processes and present far less in terms of environmental impact and general externals that we, or our children, or however many generations from now are gonna have to pay?
I'm curious, did the doc say it had to be all together? If not, 5000 square kilometres of solar panels to power Australia doesn't sound like a task too far out there to me as long as you're not trying to block off the whole thing in one place. How about 2 square metres per household? 2.5 million households would do the trick and although I know nothing about Australian population demographics there ought to be that many. Certainly large cities with apartments and such would need small solar farms around the city to make up for a lack of roof space, but these wouldn't need to be huge. The redoing the powergrid for this kind of system seems like a much larger job than the actual solar panels themselves, although both seem like there'd have to be a fairly enormous commitment on behalf of the Australian government.
I'm not saying with the current mindset any of this seems feasible, and concerns about the process of making solar panels does scare me a bit (again something I don't know enough about). I'm only commenting that even if they're skewing the situation to make it look way easier, that seems like an incredibly worthwhile long-term project for a country. Imagine only having to pay for maintenance of a power system 25-50 years from now and not having to worry about the fuel for the energy at all. Not to mention the savings from the externalities that go into conventional power production now.
The earlier example was better for me. Some big corporation got infiltrated over a year and then cleaned out and they complain about all the time and energy it took them to build their group?
they exacted the ruination of a particular player and the corporation she headed, Ubiqua Seraph. Spending more than a year infiltrating Ubiqua Seraph and gaining the trust of its higher members, the Guiding Hand enacted an elaborate heist that resulted in the destruction of the organisation's limited edition flagship and the looting of its considerable funds.
That sounds like absolutely awesome tactics to me. If I thought me and 10,000 other people could infiltrate Sony or something and in a year or so take everything they had, I'd get on it right now. Having a video game character funeral is retarded, but moaning about a group that came up with a master long term strategy and pulled it on you is so sad. Be proud they chose you to bring down. Sure it sucks, but if you've invested enough in the game that it really effects your reality life, then you just learned a very important lesson: videogames are for playing, not living.
I wish this was a point the people at MS would get your point through their head, 'cause I bet they would do a way better job if they didn't think what they were doing had to be earthshattering. If the common perspective was, "let's figure out exactly what a 2007-2012 end-user is gonna want out of their computer and design an OS that does that as efficiently as possible" instead of "let's build THE OS OF ALL TIME!!!11!!1"
If at the same time they tried to build a base that the next OS could be built on without spending as much time fixing as it would take just to start over, they might actually make a good product by now, instead of just a popular one.
But isn't this simply a matter of implementation and utilization as well? I haven't read those books and I do agree that current public education IS debilitating to growing analytical minds. However, this does not mean that young people should not be educated, just like violations and lack of aesthetics on myspace doesn't mean that children should be kept from social interaction. I believe both are essential parts of child development. If we, as a society, are doing a bad job of controlling or implementing these things, then we have to figure out how to fix them, not ask whether they should be done at all. Well, analyzing the role and function of our fundamental social precepts is always a good idea, but I think in both cases here (education and social interaction) most people would quickly come to the conclusion that they are not a priori bad things for young developing people (for any people for that matter) it is simply a question of how we shall try to construct a space wherein these activities have the highest possible benefit (meaning they achieve the goals we as a culture desire our young people to accomplish). Unfortunately, since the current goals of the western world seem to focus on gratification over all else, this leads to wealth creation strategies in education (job training) over thinking skills. In interaction this leads to sex and drugs over more complicated, but perhaps healthier forms of joint activities , especially for still developing physical bodies.
No, this is like going to the Vatican for a Pope show, then yelling out to the whole crowd, "Hey everybody, I've found some heathens that don't believe yet and I was wondering whether it would be a good idea to try and convert them. I don't know too much about this Christianity thing, but that doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for being a member, so what do you guys think, what's the best way to convert them?"
And the cacophony that ensued guaranteed that nothing was done.
All in all, what good is a game if you can't play it? At 50 bucks, and 4 to 5 hours just to install it, this game is a serious waste of money. And poorly designed to boot.
The game was made for newer retail technology. If you don't want to pay for the newest gadgets then don't expect to play the newest games without complications. You can play it in two years and it'll still be a great game then. I don't have a super great computer but it didn't take 4 or 5 hours to load and played just fine (albeit at a fairly low res to keep the frame rate up, but that's exactly what I was expecting).
JENNINGS: What would you do if you were away for an entire day and you had no access to technology.
GATES: I would take a bag of books with me and have a fantastic day.
I know I'm being petty about this, but books ARE technology
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I was of the opinion that charges were not necessary, because this has its own punishment, so thank you for pointing out point number 1. No matter what, this guy has to have some legal consequences to ensure he's lost all privileges to own a gun. That's an absolute must in my mind.
I'm not sure I agree with the rest, at least without knowing more facts about the case. He certainly appears to be too stupid to raise children, but I'd have to be certain of a lot more before I would try to make that happen legally and I certainly wouldn't bring charges to increase media coverage alone. Still, if this man doesn't lose all gun ownership privileges because of this then something is very wrong. I agree that any punishment can't come close to what this family has already had to bear, but they do need to be protected from themselves for the future as well.
There are larger uses of the term that do end up with the limitations you're talking about and I'm all for calling that out, but I do think there is a place in culture to choose to use new definitions for groups/ideas/whatever that try to peel away hurtful histories that make free and open discussion more difficult, specifically for the historically denigrated groups/ideas.
Having an unpopular opinion is not un-PC, even when it's crazy racist or bigotted. We have words that define those things already. PC is simply about acknowledging that language has history and there are times, if for nothing else than for expediency, when certain terms have to be collectively chosen which allow people to reference things without immediate negative connotations. Now, my PC definition may not be what you were talking about at all, but I wanted to point out there is a concept of PC that does not limit what you can talk about it. Its intention is merely to create a framework whereby everyone feels comfortable participating. I would call this Democratically Correct rather than political, as its intention is to give access to every individual to a larger discourse, but Political is fine. This too can be taken too far and I'm the first one to point that out 'cause my language choices are not always unoffensive to everyone (I'll say fuck as much as I like god damn it!). Stll, where there is an extremely sensitive subject, I am more than willing to at least attempt to find the terms that no group involved will be instantly put-off by so that everyone can access the ideas.
Now this has nothing to do with college kids or any kids making fun of each other, so I'll shut up now.
The key to this new battery turned out to be an often bothersome green algae known as Cladophora.
The rest of TFA is speculative and, to my mind anyway, worth the 30 seconds it took to read. Without this one definitive sentence claiming this as more than a new thread to follow, it's just a piece about a potential new avenue into cellulose batteries.
While I definitely agree that bold claims do hurt their industries with unreal expectations, I know I usually am more forgiving than I would be to large industries like pharma or oil. It's not a fair or educated position, but I often attribute that kind of overzealousness in these articles to optimism and enthusiasm, whereas if it's a press release from a huge corp. I see it as manipulative and marketed. That's probably an unfair ideological position and I try to stay aware that I have that bias, but I don't feel I'm totally out to lunch feeling that way in general.
I always appreciate it when people point out these discrepancies, but I think there is a legitimate reason why it occurs. We should make note where it happens, but I don't feel like getting angry at the people who may have overstated how far along they are in achieving some of these goals. If it takes an outlook that makes them feel they're closer than they are to keep plugging away so they, or the scientists after them finally do make a breakthrough, I'm more than willing to tolerate the fact they tend to minimize the difficulties between where they currently are and where they claim they are heading.
My answer to this is it's time to re-think your scale. Absolutely everything that goes sub 6 on your current scale should get an automatic 0. 0 means too far below industry standards to be considered a viable option. After that re-orient your 6-10 on a 1-10 scale. Nobody reading reviews gives a crap about the differences between a current 1 and a current 4. they are both equally unbuyable products and I see no reason for a reviewer to differentiate between them. However, there are lots of reasons to make small distinctions between a 6, a 6.5, and a 7 and I'd much rather have those difference given more weight so they exist on a 3-6 or 3-7 plane. It's all the little things reviewers know about that would help people make decisions. Are there other similar titles that do it better? Graphics subtleties, small control issues, bugs etc...
Now it's frustrating because if you're the only one using a scale like this your reviews sound incredibly harsh, but to me there's no reason to give a spectrum at the bottom of the scale where the threshold for even considering buying it is way more like 4-5 at the lowest. To me a 1 should be the generic genre game that super fanboys will play and enjoy, but if you don't play like 20 games of the same style every year, then buy a different one. Then work your way up from there. There's no reason anything lower on the scale deserves it's own spot. It shouldn't be paid for under any circumstances and the fact that people can make games even worse than it doesn't mean the've accomplished anything either.
The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.
Why do people assume the teacher quit because he thought he'd get fired? If I had a boss come to me at the end of the day and say the IT department has spent all day stalking someone who anonymously used the word "p*ssy" as a joke about eating and now it's been discovered that I am the culprit with any kind of incriminating tone I would quit too.
Not if you're trying to pass a bill they aren't. Uses technology (including the wheel, the stick, or straw) in any way to carry out your daily activities: that's high tech jobs for the economy!
That's 75 new high tech jobs created just in surveillance using existing infrastructure. Vote for the big brother stimulus package today!
I think there's a very strange attitude towards FOSS with some business managers or small business owners. I have mentioned these alternatives to people (it's not my job, but you meet people in these situations) who complain about the cost of upgrading windows software and always encountered a weird resistance. They don't usually say flat out no, but they always hedge around it so you get the idea they aren't the slightest bit interested. I think it's about a fear for their image (at least that's the only way I can make sense of it). They're imagining having to call a client and ask for a word document saved in some weird format, basically outing them as too cheap for "professional" applications. Maybe that's not it, but it's certainly the impression I've gotten over the years whenever I try to broach the subject. IMO saving a couple grand (at least, the larger the company the larger the savings) annually on readily available free software without any concerns for piracy makes such incredible sense for so many small business, it's really a shame people aren't willing to do the hour or two of research finding out about the alternatives and getting rid of their own misperceptions.
Having a place for comments is good. If it's moderated effectively that's even better. Turning your comments into a significant portion of your on-air broadcasts for a news network is terrible. The only reason is if you're too lazy to generate content, or your trying to pump up your website's traffic. Either way it's not worthy of being on the air, CNN knows it, but does it anyway 'cause they're working on revenue generation, not news delivery. If there was a once a week, heavily edited and researched half-hour show finding the most insightful stuff posted on their comments, that might be an interesting show, but using the comments section in every news story for a "here's what you have to say" moment is beyond atrocious.
Totally on point. Obviously, a move like this leads /. to assume the worst of the police, and that's fine, but now it's on the Swedish police to present a case showing why they went after tpb for child porn. If it's being used for that and tpb is doing nothing to stop it, then by all means, byebye tpb and good riddance. However, they are innocent until proven guilty (I'm just assuming that's true in Sweden as well) and this does reek of a misuse of power. Hopefully, we'll get to find out in the end, but I'm guessing it'll all be rumors and some jokey tpb posted correspondence.
You should watch the movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated . It's about the movie ratings and how NC-17 works. Basically, the ESRB just ripped off that system and are using it in seemingly an identical fashion. NC-17 was basically created so the people who run the ratings can keep their movies in and other movies out. Sure, porn is the largest section, but it's also for all the indie movies that distributors don't want in their theatres, 'cause they don't want the potential blowback from disquieting themes/scenes. I think after GTA IV the game industry is sending R* a little message. You're games are too much; scale back and play nice or you'll never see the inside of a walmart again.
The AO or NC-17 rating has nothing to do with keeping children from games, they have R and M ratings for that, it's about keeping games those industries don't want from consumers. Yes, you can still rent NC-17, but not at blockbuster. The studio movies that have a couple extra titty scenes might still play, but the original NC-17 movies are still chopped up if they're gonna get any shelf space in blockbuster. And even that's b.s. The unrated versions are very often re-edited by blockbuster. They make sanitized unrated versions of movies for sale at walmart as well. They aren't the NC-17 equivalents. It's a 3rd version of the movie; there's theatrical, unrated, and unrated/sanitized. This last category being the most horrendous of them all, 'cause they're basically trying to steal their customers money by preying on their desire for more graphic sex/violence and then not giving it to them, because they deem it morally corrupting. Now, that's the movies way of having their cake and eating it too.
IMO, R* has been trying to show the games industry for years that there are grown-ups who want to play grown-up games. Sure they're happy to make money off teenagers too, but R* could have a sick niche if they were allowed to really make good adult games and there was actually a way to make them buyable only by adults without the straight store ban that AO entails, but the entire game industry (at least the parts where the money comes from) have absolutely no desire to make a single parent start questioning whether their child might get subjected to inappopriate material playing their shiny new ps3/360/wii. Hence, warning shot across the bow for R*. The probably better make their next game a Harry Potter port or something.
IMO Civ 4 went a long way to helping people who don't like the mm side of turn based strategy games (note not real-time, how that slides by whoever's in charge up there is beyond me). If you want to beat the game playing on Prince/Emperor or higher you're gonna need to keep control over everything to exploit your intelligence vs. the AI's overall bonuses, but if that stuff bores you, then play at a lower difficulty and you can automate away and focus on the parts you enjoy. IMO the automation still needs more work. It could use general worker strategy options, like cottage spam or city specific strategies that you could click on and the citizen automation sucks too, but if you're playing any of the lower difficulties you can still automate and enjoy the parts of a strategy game that you signed up for. Also, based on the direction they've gone with this series specifically, I think the developers are already pretty aware of how much this can turn off some gamers and are already trying to fix the problem without alienating those who enjoy the micromanagement aspects of these games. I'd much rather complain about how these companies still think it's okay to ship products that are not ready and let their consumers wait for 2-3 or more patches before a significant minority can even play the game in the first place.
They got fired 'cause Apple does not want their retail employees talking about or answering questions on products until Apple says they should. I'd bet Apple tells retail employees, that if asked about Leopard to say you don't know anything. Apple has people who decide when to start divulging information about it's releases and any retail employee who disagrees with any corporate policy can expect to get canned the moment they can be heard disagreeing, let alone if they actively go out and try to go against the policy. I'm not saying any of this is right or nice, Apple is a corporation like and other and treats it's lower level employees like cogs in the machine. If a widget isn't 100% fully within tolerances it's disgarded, that's how these employees were dealt with. This doesn't even account for the fact that by Apple's standards, these employees stole from them. Getting fired without prosecution is the benefit of confessing instead of stonewalling. If all they'd done is openly discuss details of Leopard while working in the store, they could probably have been fired if it took corporate's notice. Even if when asked they just said they were repeating what they'd heard about Leopard and never admitting to actually having downloaded a copy. IMO once the rumor was out there from talking at the store their jobs were over, even if nothing could have been proven.
Whoops. You're right, don't know how I dropped that one. Even if you double the number of households in Australia to 5million and assume the 2500 square kilometres number accounts for efficiency you're still left with 500 square metres per household (that's the optimistic number). That just ain't gonna cut it, although IMO in a place like Australia it could play a significant role.
There was a great "nature of things" about the oil sands. It seems especially pertinent when discussing how biofuel will create water shortages since the oil sands extracts oil by pumping steam. They use so much freshwater for this it's crazy. Estimates for future production see them using as much water as Toronto in the not too distant future (can't remember the dates). Also, because of the massive investment Shell is trying to get as much out of the ground as quick as possible so instead of creating a very long term project they could dry it up in 30-50 years. Not to mention most of this oil is going to the US and Canada will end up using up an enormous natural resource for entirely short-term non-replaceable gain. See that in comparison to the Saudi NOC, which is only drilling 10 of 80 odd fields and barely ever bothers to look for new oil 'cause they have the next 70 years locked up easy without harming their reserves or fields all that much (that was in last week's economist I think).
I don't think we're running out of oil any time soon, but the costs of that oil are becoming too rich, not in terms of at the pump prices, but it uses too many of our other natural resources (water, air, land). All this talk of desalinisation seems to be totally missing the point to me. We're gonna use our freshwater to get fuel so we can make saltwater into freshwater and have some left over? Wouldn't some investment in the alternative sources be reasonable instead? You'd (I would anyway) think with a few technological innovations they could account for more than the remainder between those two processes and present far less in terms of environmental impact and general externals that we, or our children, or however many generations from now are gonna have to pay?
I'm curious, did the doc say it had to be all together? If not, 5000 square kilometres of solar panels to power Australia doesn't sound like a task too far out there to me as long as you're not trying to block off the whole thing in one place. How about 2 square metres per household? 2.5 million households would do the trick and although I know nothing about Australian population demographics there ought to be that many. Certainly large cities with apartments and such would need small solar farms around the city to make up for a lack of roof space, but these wouldn't need to be huge. The redoing the powergrid for this kind of system seems like a much larger job than the actual solar panels themselves, although both seem like there'd have to be a fairly enormous commitment on behalf of the Australian government. I'm not saying with the current mindset any of this seems feasible, and concerns about the process of making solar panels does scare me a bit (again something I don't know enough about). I'm only commenting that even if they're skewing the situation to make it look way easier, that seems like an incredibly worthwhile long-term project for a country. Imagine only having to pay for maintenance of a power system 25-50 years from now and not having to worry about the fuel for the energy at all. Not to mention the savings from the externalities that go into conventional power production now.
That feature won't be available 'til AJA3.0X (Did I put the version number in the right place?)
The earlier example was better for me. Some big corporation got infiltrated over a year and then cleaned out and they complain about all the time and energy it took them to build their group?
they exacted the ruination of a particular player and the corporation she headed, Ubiqua Seraph. Spending more than a year infiltrating Ubiqua Seraph and gaining the trust of its higher members, the Guiding Hand enacted an elaborate heist that resulted in the destruction of the organisation's limited edition flagship and the looting of its considerable funds.
That sounds like absolutely awesome tactics to me. If I thought me and 10,000 other people could infiltrate Sony or something and in a year or so take everything they had, I'd get on it right now. Having a video game character funeral is retarded, but moaning about a group that came up with a master long term strategy and pulled it on you is so sad. Be proud they chose you to bring down. Sure it sucks, but if you've invested enough in the game that it really effects your reality life, then you just learned a very important lesson: videogames are for playing, not living.
I wish this was a point the people at MS would get your point through their head, 'cause I bet they would do a way better job if they didn't think what they were doing had to be earthshattering. If the common perspective was, "let's figure out exactly what a 2007-2012 end-user is gonna want out of their computer and design an OS that does that as efficiently as possible" instead of "let's build THE OS OF ALL TIME!!!11!!1" If at the same time they tried to build a base that the next OS could be built on without spending as much time fixing as it would take just to start over, they might actually make a good product by now, instead of just a popular one.
But isn't this simply a matter of implementation and utilization as well? I haven't read those books and I do agree that current public education IS debilitating to growing analytical minds. However, this does not mean that young people should not be educated, just like violations and lack of aesthetics on myspace doesn't mean that children should be kept from social interaction. I believe both are essential parts of child development. If we, as a society, are doing a bad job of controlling or implementing these things, then we have to figure out how to fix them, not ask whether they should be done at all. Well, analyzing the role and function of our fundamental social precepts is always a good idea, but I think in both cases here (education and social interaction) most people would quickly come to the conclusion that they are not a priori bad things for young developing people (for any people for that matter) it is simply a question of how we shall try to construct a space wherein these activities have the highest possible benefit (meaning they achieve the goals we as a culture desire our young people to accomplish). Unfortunately, since the current goals of the western world seem to focus on gratification over all else, this leads to wealth creation strategies in education (job training) over thinking skills. In interaction this leads to sex and drugs over more complicated, but perhaps healthier forms of joint activities , especially for still developing physical bodies.
No, this is like going to the Vatican for a Pope show, then yelling out to the whole crowd, "Hey everybody, I've found some heathens that don't believe yet and I was wondering whether it would be a good idea to try and convert them. I don't know too much about this Christianity thing, but that doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for being a member, so what do you guys think, what's the best way to convert them?" And the cacophony that ensued guaranteed that nothing was done.
All in all, what good is a game if you can't play it? At 50 bucks, and 4 to 5 hours just to install it, this game is a serious waste of money. And poorly designed to boot. The game was made for newer retail technology. If you don't want to pay for the newest gadgets then don't expect to play the newest games without complications. You can play it in two years and it'll still be a great game then. I don't have a super great computer but it didn't take 4 or 5 hours to load and played just fine (albeit at a fairly low res to keep the frame rate up, but that's exactly what I was expecting).
That's only 'cause they shelled out so much for the hardware that they couldn't afford windows anymore.
JENNINGS: What would you do if you were away for an entire day and you had no access to technology.
GATES: I would take a bag of books with me and have a fantastic day.
I know I'm being petty about this, but books ARE technology
that's why I'm a thief. no wait sorry... a copyright infringer.