I know, I know. I'm just saying - they're obviously not limiting themselves to the games that are "worth playing." Which means they have an even HUGER library to choose from.
I'm not a fan of the artificial scarcity scalpers. I collect Barbies, and this was a big problem in the late 90s when Barbie collecting was somewhat trendy (it's fallen out of fashion a bit since then, although the quality of the dolls has gone way way up).
Back then, the problem was the people who actually worked at places like Target - a new doll would come in, they'd buy as many as their store would let them (often all of them), usually at below retail with an employee discount or something, and then put them on eBay. Now, even the collector editions of Barbie dolls are often not rare. For other doll companies, a Limited Edition is 10,000 or even 5,000 - for Mattel at that time, I believe Limited Edition was 50,000 and Special Edition was 100,000. Collector dolls without a designation might be made in the millions. So there was no scarcity, but the first few weeks a doll came out you could not find it in the stores due to these people, and they'd often make a nice profit on eBay, especially on new collectors who didn't realize there would be a glut of the doll on clearance in six months.
Generally, on the Barbie forums I went to, anyone who admitted to or was "caught" doing this was pretty much shunned. And yes, eventually people wised up, got more patient, realized that these dolls are more likely to go down in value than up, and the scalping dropped off.
I'm with you - as much as I want a Wii, I doubt I'll get one until the price has dropped to $150 tops.
Assuming they only put up games that were actually worth playing
I've got Tennis and Baseball for free via Animal Crossing. Maybe they're worth playing for free for a few minutes now and then, but I can't say I'd pay $5 each for them. In fact, I can emphatically say that I wouldn't. Especially with Wii Sports right there.
Yeah, yeah, nostalgia - but there are games on that list that are actually worth playing through in addition to reminding you of your childhood (aside from the obvious ones, I also have Wario's Woods via AC and if I suddenly couldn't have it there anymore I'd shell out $5 in an instant for it). And those aren't two of them.
My dad collects toy cars, and also happens to be a stocker at Wal-Mart, who sells toy cars. It's not exactly camping, but other collectors (well, not so much the collectors as the profiteers who hope to resell on eBay) will show up an hour before the store opens or more if they think there will be anything rare in the day's shipment. Often there will be "special edition" models that come only one to a whole crate of Hot Wheels, and these guys want to be in first to grab that one special edition so they can sell it to the people who didn't get there first. Which, of course, is what a lot of the people first in line for the PS3 are planning.
This is at my school/office computer (grad student). My home computer probably usually has less. Both are OS X. I have five in one desktop, and four in another, for a total of nine. Three of those are Firefox, with a grand total of 14 tabs open between them. I'd say this is fairly normal, although if I'm in the middle of a literature search I can easily have 10-15 PDFs alone open in preview at once.
Oh! Look at that! I had iCal minimized and didn't realize it. So that's 10 right now. This is why I prefer windowshading to minimization, because I always forget that I minimized something. But I haven't installed WindowshadeX on my school 'puter yet.
Of course, I also have various things running that don't require an open window. Virtual Desktops is one, as well as a To Do program called Check Off that stays in my menubar. And the dashboard widgets, of course; how do you classify those?
Yes, and I agree with that. I was just saying that if you include the class year in the subdomain as you suggested (which is a good idea), then there's no reason to tell students what to use as their username. (Actually, I don't think there's any reason to ever, but your solution bypasses the problem of multiple people years apart taking the same username by making the subdomains unique.) I was just pointing out that your suggested email format specified a username based on real name that isn't necessary. And, in fact, is *less* necessary than ever with your idea of year-based subdomains.
But if your email address doesn't include your last name (as mine doesn't unless the school has silly required emails like that) then it isn't an issue. There's no good reason to force an email address upon someone.
But what counts as "taking"? What falls under fair use and what doesn't? How many people do I have to invite to my showing of a movie such that it is no longer a private viewing? When can I make copies for educational purposes without paying fees?
Just because you're ignoring the complexities doesn't mean they're not there.
You should really read the Wired article from a couple of years ago, when this was just starting and the lab diamonds weren't on the retail market yet.
They had a Belgian diamond expert examine one of them, and he was fooled. The industry had to create new types of testing just so that experts can pick these out. There's no uncanny valley here. They're real diamonds, just mass-produced.
If you're going to put the graduation year as a subdomain, why the hell make people use a specific username like that? Just let them pick their own username for pete's sake. One major problem with assigned usernames that whoever decides these things doesn't seem to think about is that female students (particularly grad students) tend to get married and often change their names, leaving them with email addresses that no longer make any sense if they're based on the last name.
If you are as susceptible as you claim, you probably have a difficult time watching first-persone views of car chases, roller coaster riding, airplane stunts, etc.
When I was a kid, I loved those, because I was too chicken to go on real roller coasters and they gave me enough of an effect by themselves.:) They definitely make me dizzier now than they did then.
Personally, I know that part of *my* problem is that I'm not so good at navigation in real 3D space anyhow. You ever notice that when you go up a stairwell, you're often facing a different direction at the end than when you started? I do, because it always screws me up. I have to think very, very hard about navigational tasks. So trying to do it on the screen, controlling both the character and the camera, drives me nuts. But I know that most people aren't like that. The dizziness I *have* read is more of a common issue with women and older people.
Maybe the Wii will help, if I have to move around to play it.:) I'll try moving my head along with it in the meantime. I doubt I'll ever be able to play that Sonic game, though....
This isn't going to happen in this generation, and I can tell you why. 3D makes me sick. Literally. I play 3D games and they leave me feeling disoriented at best, nauseous at worst (gah, there's some super-fast sonic game that I absolutely can't even watch, let alone play).
And from what I've read, this is a common problem for women. Probably related to the fact that women see more detail than men do, on average - we can differentiate between more colors, we notice more of the objects surrounding us. It's also an issue for older people, who tend to get vertigo much more easily than people in their early 20s. That adds up to only a minor problem for the producers of 3D games, but a MAJOR roadblock for anyone trying to sell a 3D web browser.
Maybe in a generation or two, as people grow up more and more immersed in technology, the differences will fade. But not in the next couple decades.
What exactly made us smart enough to come up with various medical treatments, if not nature? Aren't evolution and natural selection natural processes, and within those processes, isn't a being's main goal to stay alive long enough to produce (and raise to maturity) as many progeny as possible? So isn't it only natural for us to try and cure our illnesses? (As an aside, we aren't the only species to think of this. Not just other primates, but dogs and even rats have been observed to eat or drink specific substances when they have specific things wrong with them.)
You're not very familiar with the US Education system, are you? Public schools are mainly funded and run locally, secondarily by the state. Some public schools get some federal funding, but when they do, it's a very tiny percentage of their total budget. In fact, some states are now entirely eschewing federal funding so that they do not have to abide by the No Child Left Behind requirements. So how can you claim that a teacher in a school that is receiving no federal funding, and does not answer to the federal government, only state and local governments, counts as "Congress"?
But the amendment is interpreted as meaning that it applies to anyone at any level of government. Interpretation vs exact wording is the whole point of this thread.
I have a friend who recently finished two years in Morocco for the peace corps.
She said that when she first got there, she thought that it was a shame that they were trying to teach these kids English, Arabic and French. They had their tribal languages, and it was horrible that people would come in and claim that those languages were "better" than the tribal language, destroy tribal culture, etc etc.
You know what she realized after a few months? People who only know the tribal language can only get a job within their little village. And often there weren't enough jobs to go around. Kids who knew the languages spoken in the cities had a much better chance at a higher-paying job, and with luck could eventually give back more to the village they grew up in than they ever could by staying home.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Well, that takes care of separation of church and Congress. So why is it unconstitutional for a school to force all students to say a Christian prayer - or to keep students from saying one if they want to? The principal isn't Congress.
As the OP said, it's the interpretation, not the exact wording.
Actually, the virtual closet was pretty cool. I liked it better than Atmosphere, that's for sure.
There's definitely a bias as far as audience goes... I submitted an idea based on an organizational system used by over 300,000 people - and that's just the # subscribed to the yahoo group for it. But 275,000 of those are white, Christian, conservative, stay-at-home moms. Okay, so maybe 100,000 of the moms work. And of the other 25,000, they're still 95% women and 60-70% moms. So of course no one looking at the MDA site would have ever heard of this organizational system.
Of course, another issue is that those moms mostly probably use Windows... But that can be said about the total possible audience for CookBook, too.
(Btw, this is totally not an "I'm bitter my idea wasn't chosen" post - like.1% of the ideas posted were chosen, I know my odds were next to nothing and I didn't put any time into mockups or anything. But a contest like this *is* going to represent some sections of the whole Mac userbase more than others.)
What is in the public domain may be Shakespeare's original text... But in many cases there are up to five different possible versions of what he originally wrote (first folio, quarto, etc). Unless you want to read every original version of a play and decide for yourself which is the "best" or what he "really intended," you need a good editor to sort that out for you.
In high school, I bought a cheapo $20 Barnes & Noble brand "Complete Works." I wound up being a theater major and a member of my campus Shakespeare Ensemble, and discovered that this version was a total waste of my money. I've since bought many of the plays in well-edited versions for $8-10 each, and I would never go back to the crappily-edited "cheap public domain" versions. (That's not to say I wouldn't like a complete works with all the original editions of all the plays - but mostly for curiosity's sake. If you're going to perform them, you're either going to want a well-edited version or have a specific reason for using a specific original version.)
And, of course, once an editor has done their job, the result is copyrighted.
Many textbooks are revised every year not because the content needs to be updated (when was the last time there was a breakthrough in single-variable calculus?), but to make the textbook companies more money by preventing students from buying used books.
And even in fields where there is rapid progress, not everything is instantly outdated. Here is an intro computer science textbook whose most recent edition is a decade old (and has only been updated once in about 20 years), and is still widely used and respected. And available for free online, so it doesn't really need to be covered by this project, but you get the point.
You can already get the full lecture notes, problem sets, etc for a world-class education for free online. In fact, in some cases they even offer the copyrighted textbooks. (It helps when the textbook authors work in the department/used to teach the course.)
Of course, you need a decent K-12 education first to make any use of this, but it's a start.
If internet access is as trivial as you say, why do their governments spend time and energy making sure they can't have it? (Or, at least, can't have it all, in China?) If the internet were nothing but mindless YouTube, why would Kim Jong Il or Hu Jintao give two shits about it?
But I'd imagine that if Apple started making it official and marketing them as such, MS would have some real fun with their notorious OEM licensing. Other manufacturers can't even sell another OS on other computers without facing restrictions. Sure, both OSes on one computer takes them out of direct sales competition... But then MS has to worry about the user realizing how great OS X is and abandoning Windows on their next purchase. They don't want that. They don't want it to be easy for people to run Windows and OS X on their Mac.
Charlie Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co., who believes the next big seller for Apple will be a Mac computer preinstalled with Windows operating software.
Well, now that we've established that this guy knows what he's talking about...
There are some good suggestions above. The one thing I'd say is make sure what you offer is always compatible with various OSes and web browsers. I want to bang my head when I come across a web-based service at a University that says it will only run on IE (and harder when I tell Safari to pretend it's IE, and the page works perfectly).
Also, I thought web space was standard but I guess not. It certainly was at my undergrad and even where I got my Master's (which is not a techie school like ugrad was). But I get here for my PhD - a top ten research university - and I find that students no longer get web space. Because the damn undergrads are all on myspace now or whatever. I have some workarounds via my department, but unfortunately my only option for a full website seems to be serving it on my office iMac, with an ungodly long URL.
Slashdot Mirror
I know, I know. I'm just saying - they're obviously not limiting themselves to the games that are "worth playing." Which means they have an even HUGER library to choose from.
Back then, the problem was the people who actually worked at places like Target - a new doll would come in, they'd buy as many as their store would let them (often all of them), usually at below retail with an employee discount or something, and then put them on eBay. Now, even the collector editions of Barbie dolls are often not rare. For other doll companies, a Limited Edition is 10,000 or even 5,000 - for Mattel at that time, I believe Limited Edition was 50,000 and Special Edition was 100,000. Collector dolls without a designation might be made in the millions. So there was no scarcity, but the first few weeks a doll came out you could not find it in the stores due to these people, and they'd often make a nice profit on eBay, especially on new collectors who didn't realize there would be a glut of the doll on clearance in six months.
Generally, on the Barbie forums I went to, anyone who admitted to or was "caught" doing this was pretty much shunned. And yes, eventually people wised up, got more patient, realized that these dolls are more likely to go down in value than up, and the scalping dropped off.
I'm with you - as much as I want a Wii, I doubt I'll get one until the price has dropped to $150 tops.
I've got Tennis and Baseball for free via Animal Crossing. Maybe they're worth playing for free for a few minutes now and then, but I can't say I'd pay $5 each for them. In fact, I can emphatically say that I wouldn't. Especially with Wii Sports right there.
Yeah, yeah, nostalgia - but there are games on that list that are actually worth playing through in addition to reminding you of your childhood (aside from the obvious ones, I also have Wario's Woods via AC and if I suddenly couldn't have it there anymore I'd shell out $5 in an instant for it). And those aren't two of them.
My dad collects toy cars, and also happens to be a stocker at Wal-Mart, who sells toy cars. It's not exactly camping, but other collectors (well, not so much the collectors as the profiteers who hope to resell on eBay) will show up an hour before the store opens or more if they think there will be anything rare in the day's shipment. Often there will be "special edition" models that come only one to a whole crate of Hot Wheels, and these guys want to be in first to grab that one special edition so they can sell it to the people who didn't get there first. Which, of course, is what a lot of the people first in line for the PS3 are planning.
Oh! Look at that! I had iCal minimized and didn't realize it. So that's 10 right now. This is why I prefer windowshading to minimization, because I always forget that I minimized something. But I haven't installed WindowshadeX on my school 'puter yet.
Of course, I also have various things running that don't require an open window. Virtual Desktops is one, as well as a To Do program called Check Off that stays in my menubar. And the dashboard widgets, of course; how do you classify those?
Yes, and I agree with that. I was just saying that if you include the class year in the subdomain as you suggested (which is a good idea), then there's no reason to tell students what to use as their username. (Actually, I don't think there's any reason to ever, but your solution bypasses the problem of multiple people years apart taking the same username by making the subdomains unique.) I was just pointing out that your suggested email format specified a username based on real name that isn't necessary. And, in fact, is *less* necessary than ever with your idea of year-based subdomains.
But if your email address doesn't include your last name (as mine doesn't unless the school has silly required emails like that) then it isn't an issue. There's no good reason to force an email address upon someone.
Just because you're ignoring the complexities doesn't mean they're not there.
They had a Belgian diamond expert examine one of them, and he was fooled. The industry had to create new types of testing just so that experts can pick these out. There's no uncanny valley here. They're real diamonds, just mass-produced.
If you're going to put the graduation year as a subdomain, why the hell make people use a specific username like that? Just let them pick their own username for pete's sake. One major problem with assigned usernames that whoever decides these things doesn't seem to think about is that female students (particularly grad students) tend to get married and often change their names, leaving them with email addresses that no longer make any sense if they're based on the last name.
When I was a kid, I loved those, because I was too chicken to go on real roller coasters and they gave me enough of an effect by themselves. :) They definitely make me dizzier now than they did then.
Personally, I know that part of *my* problem is that I'm not so good at navigation in real 3D space anyhow. You ever notice that when you go up a stairwell, you're often facing a different direction at the end than when you started? I do, because it always screws me up. I have to think very, very hard about navigational tasks. So trying to do it on the screen, controlling both the character and the camera, drives me nuts. But I know that most people aren't like that. The dizziness I *have* read is more of a common issue with women and older people.
Maybe the Wii will help, if I have to move around to play it. :) I'll try moving my head along with it in the meantime. I doubt I'll ever be able to play that Sonic game, though....
And from what I've read, this is a common problem for women. Probably related to the fact that women see more detail than men do, on average - we can differentiate between more colors, we notice more of the objects surrounding us. It's also an issue for older people, who tend to get vertigo much more easily than people in their early 20s. That adds up to only a minor problem for the producers of 3D games, but a MAJOR roadblock for anyone trying to sell a 3D web browser.
Maybe in a generation or two, as people grow up more and more immersed in technology, the differences will fade. But not in the next couple decades.
Slightly OT, but I was amused the other day when I put "ounces in a shot" into Google and it gave me a Calculator result of "1 shot = 1.5 ounces".
What exactly made us smart enough to come up with various medical treatments, if not nature? Aren't evolution and natural selection natural processes, and within those processes, isn't a being's main goal to stay alive long enough to produce (and raise to maturity) as many progeny as possible? So isn't it only natural for us to try and cure our illnesses? (As an aside, we aren't the only species to think of this. Not just other primates, but dogs and even rats have been observed to eat or drink specific substances when they have specific things wrong with them.)
But the amendment is interpreted as meaning that it applies to anyone at any level of government. Interpretation vs exact wording is the whole point of this thread.
She said that when she first got there, she thought that it was a shame that they were trying to teach these kids English, Arabic and French. They had their tribal languages, and it was horrible that people would come in and claim that those languages were "better" than the tribal language, destroy tribal culture, etc etc.
You know what she realized after a few months? People who only know the tribal language can only get a job within their little village. And often there weren't enough jobs to go around. Kids who knew the languages spoken in the cities had a much better chance at a higher-paying job, and with luck could eventually give back more to the village they grew up in than they ever could by staying home.
Well, that takes care of separation of church and Congress. So why is it unconstitutional for a school to force all students to say a Christian prayer - or to keep students from saying one if they want to? The principal isn't Congress.
As the OP said, it's the interpretation, not the exact wording.
There's definitely a bias as far as audience goes... I submitted an idea based on an organizational system used by over 300,000 people - and that's just the # subscribed to the yahoo group for it. But 275,000 of those are white, Christian, conservative, stay-at-home moms. Okay, so maybe 100,000 of the moms work. And of the other 25,000, they're still 95% women and 60-70% moms. So of course no one looking at the MDA site would have ever heard of this organizational system.
Of course, another issue is that those moms mostly probably use Windows... But that can be said about the total possible audience for CookBook, too.
(Btw, this is totally not an "I'm bitter my idea wasn't chosen" post - like .1% of the ideas posted were chosen, I know my odds were next to nothing and I didn't put any time into mockups or anything. But a contest like this *is* going to represent some sections of the whole Mac userbase more than others.)
In high school, I bought a cheapo $20 Barnes & Noble brand "Complete Works." I wound up being a theater major and a member of my campus Shakespeare Ensemble, and discovered that this version was a total waste of my money. I've since bought many of the plays in well-edited versions for $8-10 each, and I would never go back to the crappily-edited "cheap public domain" versions. (That's not to say I wouldn't like a complete works with all the original editions of all the plays - but mostly for curiosity's sake. If you're going to perform them, you're either going to want a well-edited version or have a specific reason for using a specific original version.)
And, of course, once an editor has done their job, the result is copyrighted.
And even in fields where there is rapid progress, not everything is instantly outdated. Here is an intro computer science textbook whose most recent edition is a decade old (and has only been updated once in about 20 years), and is still widely used and respected. And available for free online, so it doesn't really need to be covered by this project, but you get the point.
Of course, you need a decent K-12 education first to make any use of this, but it's a start.
If internet access is as trivial as you say, why do their governments spend time and energy making sure they can't have it? (Or, at least, can't have it all, in China?) If the internet were nothing but mindless YouTube, why would Kim Jong Il or Hu Jintao give two shits about it?
But I'd imagine that if Apple started making it official and marketing them as such, MS would have some real fun with their notorious OEM licensing. Other manufacturers can't even sell another OS on other computers without facing restrictions. Sure, both OSes on one computer takes them out of direct sales competition... But then MS has to worry about the user realizing how great OS X is and abandoning Windows on their next purchase. They don't want that. They don't want it to be easy for people to run Windows and OS X on their Mac.
Well, now that we've established that this guy knows what he's talking about...
Also, I thought web space was standard but I guess not. It certainly was at my undergrad and even where I got my Master's (which is not a techie school like ugrad was). But I get here for my PhD - a top ten research university - and I find that students no longer get web space. Because the damn undergrads are all on myspace now or whatever. I have some workarounds via my department, but unfortunately my only option for a full website seems to be serving it on my office iMac, with an ungodly long URL.