How convenient... since it seems impossible to find any of these models (or any other new stand-alone ATSC set-top box, for that matter) for sale anywhere, in person or on the internet. Maybe that's the idea? People will quickly snap up all the coupons, before any of the models are available. Once the models are for sale, no more coupons will be left and all the existing coupons will be expired, hence, the gov't needs pay out no actual money! Brilliant!
Not to mention that I'm sure none of the STBs will cost anywhere near as low as $40.
I agree that as the tech expert many of my family, friends and co-workers go to for advice, I've also been counseling people to wait for inexpensive dual-format players.
In addition to those who appearantly can barely tell the difference between DVD and HD quality, there are many more who don't really care much, even if they can see a difference. Yes, many large-screen HD TVs have been sold in the last few years, but most, appearantly, only because they are LARGE and FLAT, not because they are high-definition.
Last, those who are waiting for ripping capability from BluRay may have a long wait. If I got to vote for which format would die a quick death, it would definitely be BluRay. Just more of the same anti-consumer shenanigans that we've come to expect from Sony (excessive DRM and copy control, fewer options for "fair use" of content, and lots more incompatibilities, non-working features, etc., of which we've only seen the beginning, on top of higher manufacturing costs for both hardware [complex laser assembly, high patent royalties] and content, which would keep the prices for BluRay discs and maybe players higher in the long term compared to HD DVD).
I think you have encountered a phenomenon that some people find very mysterious. It is usually referred to, by those who profess to understand its meaning, as a "conversation starter".
I think that in 30 years, today's college students will still have the even greater insight that if you give people something really cool that they like and want, people will almost THROW money at you (and they'll tell all their friends, too). If you create products that people don't want, or worse yet PO your customers, people will do anything to avoid giving you money (and they'll tell all their friends...)
I thought the Director's Cut was WAY better than the original theatrical release. I have not seen this final cut, but I'd expect from the description that it's the best of all.
The voiceover didn't add anything. I can barely remember anything that it said (which is all in a droning, deadpan voice). I never thought it helped make the movie more understandable even BEFORE the Director's Cut came out. And the Director's Cut made the most intersting plot point very clearly - in a way I had really not got even from repeated viewings of the theatrical release. So I don't agree with the others that it's worthwhile to watch this version first. I think it's a waste of time
If you break software up into little pieces with different people working on each, you need to (a) give them explicit instructions as to what that software should do so it can integrate with the rest of the project and (b) be able to verify that it does exactly that.
As others have pointed out, code review and testing is difficult and time-consuming. In order to ensure correctness EFFICIENTLY, you probably need to automate the verification proces. That is, you need to write a proper technical spec up front, then have software that can automatically verify submitted code to the spec afterward (or exhaustively test it). But if it can automatically verify correctness in a formal and automatic manner, maybe it could generate proper code itself, too? If you don't automate it, then with the quality of programmers you'd need to do inspection of submitted code (particularly considering there might be far more submitted code to review than will actually be used), they probably could have written the code themselves in far less time.
As also pointed out elsewhere, you need some minumum number of participants to have a high likelihood of receiving consistently good submissions to choose from. But there are only a finite number of programmers out there (and especially a finite number of good ones that can make positive contributions). If very many projects started doing this, the price the companies would need to pay people to get them to participate would eliminate any cost advantages of the process. You'd have bidding wars to get people to work on your project instead of the next one that's promising to pay more. From the other side, if only one out of some number of submissions (say four) is selected, that means 3/4 of the programming work is for naught (other than practice, I suppose). How is this efficient for the programmers? If only one out of four of your submissions is ever accepted, you'd probably stop bothering unless they offered 4x the rate per submission.
Then there are all the issues of maintainability, where the people who wrote the code know it best, and someone who wrote much of the code on a project can be a real expert at it. If enough people worked on small parts, NOBODY is an expert on it, and even if one or more people are, they don't stay with the company after the project is complete (and probably never see the overall scope of the project, so they aren't so much of an expert after all).
Also, programmers want to be able to take credit for their work (and/or get paid for it). Obviously it's quite easy for a company to cheat by using submissions, parts of submissions, good ideas embodied in submissions, etc. without giving credit or paying. Even if they don't cheat, is such software going to start having credit screens listing hundreds of programmers, each of whom may have only contributed one simple subroutine? If so, how will that help people get their next job? And are submitters going to be given year-end bonuses, profit sharing, stock options etc. if the resulting software makes the company rich?
Perhaps the best use of this sort of process is as a screen to find potential full-time employees...
Here's the rub: back in 1994, Bungie put out a Macintosh 1ps game called Marathon. Now this game Marathon had rudimentary "round robin" LAN networking (AppleTalk-based, not IP). While there was a "gathering" machine, there wasn't one authoritative server - each copy of the game ran its own simulation of the world, and passed some information about what keys its player had pressed on to the next machine in the circle, and you just hoped they were all concluding the same things were happening at the same time. The problem was that if they got out of sync due to any excessive delays, packet loss, etc. (imagine two players think they have killed each other, before each receives the message that the other may have killed them first), or even internal bugs where they each calculated and randomly came up with different results, the game would be irretrievable - one player would think they were kicking ass, while the others would wonder why that player was facing a wall at point blank range, repeatedly suiciding with the rocket launcher. Nothing to do but abandon the game and start over. This happened quite a lot. It also precluded Internet play entirely. (Incidentally, since the "film/demo" recording feature used the same technology, it also happened sometimes that films would get "out of sync" with the playback machine relative to the machine that recorded it, and thus not make any sense either.)
Naturally, this was such a successfull network model, Bungie chose to use it again in Marathon 2: Durandal. And again in Marathon: Infinity. As well as Myth: the Fallen Lords, Myth 2: Soulblighter, and Halo: Combat Evolved (the code having been worked over somewhat by this time, without really fixing its fundamental flaws). This despite the fact that id had shown a superior way with Quake (specifically QuakeWorld) since 1996, and that others, such as Epic, had struggled (and eventually succeeded) to create similarly-good networking in games like Unreal Tournament soon afterward. It wasn't until Halo 2 that Bungie finally decided that having crappy 10-year old networking code wasn't really the best idea. More to the point, the game had to run on Xbox Live, and the old networking simply DOES NOT WORK (or at least provide a playable game) for a 1ps game on the internet, though it marginally worked in the RTS Myth series. So they HAD to fix the networking, if they wanted any Xbox Live networking at all.
So yes, as of Halo 2, they have fairly modern networking with decent prediction (borrowing liberally from community-developed ideas that were applied to Counterstrike etc., for instance with each client not only asserting what controls were affected by the player, but what actions it believes should have been taken in the world, which the server will only override if it doesn't fit with its own model), but it sure took them long enough to get there.
You left out the word "plurality", as in "a plurality of intra-body cavities". "Getting rid of" is also too colloquial, so perhaps "expelling" or (that being too obvious) better yet "disposing of carbon dioxide and a plurality of other waste gasses by dispersal into the surrounding gaseous medium after being physically expelled, by force of periodic, autonomic exertion of a curved muscular structure underlying the plurality of intra-body cavities, via a flexible biological tube". (etc.)
Also, the whole should be broken down into multiple separate claims.
There are several differences. For one thing, the car is still private property. Do the police have the right to just start messing with and essentially modifying your car without permission (from you or a judge)? I mean, if someone ELSE crawled under your car and attached a GPS to it and started tracking your location, should that be legal? If not, why would we let the police do it without a warrant?
In addition, the tracking does not somehow automatically stop when the car EXITS public streets and enters private property. This is pretty much the equivalent of tagging someone's actual body with a nano-GPS device. Sure, the police could physically walk behind you when you're in public, but should they have the right to know what room you are in inside your house, at all times? And should they be able to know your location 24x7, from the comfort of their office chair, without even needing to convince a judge you're a likely suspect in a crime?
I also do think the fact that this makes it much cheaper and easier to do IS significant. It's kind of like privacy on the Internet: lots of things that have always been "public knowledge" have in actually tended to be fairly private due to obscurity. Now, they can suddenly be instantly accessible to anyone in the world, often showing up unbidden in unrelated searches. Such changes in ease of access do indeed call for changes in laws regarding accessibility and privacy of information.
banning it at workplaces and airplanes and other areas where people effectively have to go. But bars and restaurants are private property and entirely optional
Videogame music and classical music are two entirely different things. Just because both use the same instruments doesn't mean that they're the same.
True, but video game music is meant to accompany video games. Why go listen to it on its own, other than out of nostalgia? A lot of this discussion seems to be about trying to turn people onto game music for the music's sake. But why, when there is so much better music out there?
Besides, all the classical music I've heard has been very boring, unlike videogame music.
My response:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e13bC2Gk2A
OK, this may seem the least exciting of the clips to you, the most typically "classical music" with pretty meoldies and all, but I think it is beautiful and (to me) thrilling enough to include. No, it doesn't start off with a bang (in fact, the opening bit is quite trivial, kind of a canard, as the rest of the work isn't really based on it), but it's worth listening to, and the soloist certainly is worth hearing (and seeing). (You may find in life that a bit of patience is required to realize what you've been missing. This isn't overtly fast or exciting music, but... don't give up on it; try to watch the whole thing, including part 2 where most of the violin fireworks are, before going to the "exciting stuff":-).) This is the first half of the 1st movement of Tchakovsky's Violin Concerto (it continues in part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ym8KpznV08), played by Midori with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (Claudio Abbado conducting).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrYVnSPRoAE
This is an old (early-mid 60s?) video of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony (in one of the iconic, cinematic, somewhat megalomaniac videos they used to make of him - and since when do you use 8 horns in Beethoven 5??? Or 11 basses? But it is glorious, if hardly as "classical" as when the piece was written). This music may be familiar to you, at least in a superficial sense, but you have to get past the first 10 seconds: the point isn't the opening idea so much as what Beethoven does with that idea for the next 7 minutes. (Which is one of the main points about classical music - the development, not the initial idea, is what makes it great.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqGJUeEZ80I
This is a portion of Bruckner's 9th Symphony, played by the Vienna Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting. As someone points out in the comments: "(what's the) point (of) posting a minute from an hour long symphony"?, but you should be able to get some of the idea. (And yes, it is as loud as it seems. In a hall like the Musikvereinsaal it would be practically deafening, no amplification required.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_1XSVs9crc
This is Leonard Bernsteinn again, conducting part of the finale of Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony (with the Boston Symphony? Not in their usual concert hall though.). Bernstein has always been a little over the top (in very different ways from Karajan), but the effect can be incredible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dlpPzM6OC4
Some people might think the beginning of this clip seems a little "gay". But (you guessed it:) keep listening. Just a small bit from the end of a glorious, incredible 90-minute symphony: Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham (UK) Symphony and Chorus in Mahler's 2nd Symphony. (And yes, in response to some of the comments: I always cry.)
Michael Metti (Libertarian), Todd Chretien (Green), or Marsha Feinland (Peace and Freedom).
And no, voting for a third-party candidate is not "throwing your vote away" or "letting the Republicans win" or any such. It is voting for who you believe in (assuming you do) and exerting pressure on your second choice to become more in line with your wishes. If you just keep voting for them even though you hate their guts, you give them no reason to change. That's how we got in this mess in the first place.
Of course I would: the only way for a DRM system to determine whether a usage is fair or illegal would be to unduly invade the user's privacy. So I wouldn't object to such a hypothetical DRM system per se, but I would object to the privacy invasions that would be required for it to work.
The problem with your argument is that much of the funding for the R&D *is* paid for with public funds already. And the drug corporations still get the monopoly, and resulting profits.
What's more, they continuously spend millions to try to convince people like you that they are doing it all for the public good, spending their money wisely to create new, needed treatments, etc.
I think you kind of miss the point. This happens all the time. If a potentially-healing substance (such as an herb or nutritional supplement) isn't or can't be patented, it will not likely receive FDA approval. This, then, means that such products can be routinely denigrated as "ineffective" (when even scientists and other professionals who should know better fail to see the difference between "lack of proof of effectiveness" and "proof of ineffectiveness", when strenuously arguing against the use of such "unproven" treatments, even if there is copious evidence of effectiveness from Europe and elsewhere).
What makes this worse is that during the last 5-10 years, FDA approval has become largely meaningless: we no longer have much confidence that FDA-approved drugs are either safe or effective, because the studies are now almost entirely funded and run by the pharmaceutical companies trying to sell the drugs, and such industry-run studies have been shown to claim benefits and safety at something like 5x the rate of independent studies. So the claims that thus-and-such new drug is "safer and more effective than older drugs" (or even just "safe and effective") is generally hogwash (or at least unknown).
The FDA recognizes that a major part of its mission is to protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies, and has explicitly admitted that such considerations are taken into account in its decision-making process. They also make much of their funding from user fees. Thus they happily go along with this state of affairs.
In fact, the FDA has banned natural substances that threatened to compete with lucrative (but much more expensive) pharmaceuticals. For instance, did you know that it is illegal to sell tryptophan, one of the essential amino acids, in the USA without a prescription?
In the late '80s there was a major health scare from some tryptophan supplements due to contamination in the production process from one Japanese supplier, stemming from an untested change in process - including that the bacteria used to make it were genetically engineered - combined with an untested reduction in filtering of the product compared to the normal process. Even though not too long after this occurred it was determined that the problem was only one regarding contamination from that one supplier, and that tryptophan itself in its natual form was, not surprisingly, safe, tryptophan still, to this day, is only allowed to be sold by prescription.
Tryptophan, you see, is a biochemical precursor of serotonin, the boosting of which is considered useful in treating depression (and tryptophan supplements had long been used - safely, I might add - as treatments for depression, anxiety, insomnia, etc.). It also turns out to be difficult to boost tryptophan levels in the brain by ordinary dietary means, due to competition in the body with tyrosine (which tends to be found in the same foods as tryptophan but in much greater quantities), hence the usefulness of tryptophan supplements. Now the strange coincidence is that the FDA banned tryptophan just days before approving Prozac for sale (a then-patented drug whose primary function is to boost serotonin levels).
This is the sole statement regarding intellectual property found in the US Constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
So... unless I flunked 6th grade English, the only reason to have patents and copyrights is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
There is nothing there about "inventor's rights". In fact, from what I know about the thinking of the time (and over the next 150 years or so, as re-iterated consistently by courts and the legislature), the whole idea of intellectual "property" was considered fairly odious. The exclusive rights are a necessary evil in order to encourage dissemination of ideas. They are not intended as an inherent right of ownership.
Of course, this all changed in the last 30 years or so as Congress became little more than a PR firm owned as a joint subsidiary by our largest corporations.
Your last comment disturbs me more than any of the others however as it is extremely defeatist in tone. Oh we are hopeless so we can never hope to compete with not even the slightest consideration that perhaps... just perhaps we could make changes in how we operate to BE that country.
I was going to enclose it in "sarcasm" tags or somesuch, but somehow I didn't think it was necessary...
Out of curiosity why is it that you think Zubrin's approach is something which should take decades? We effectively went to the moon with slide rules in one decade once we set it as a goal. The initial space program had less computational power in the entire program than sits on the average worker bee's desk these days.
The problem isn't computational power. We can't calculate our way around the laws of physics no matter how fast the CPU.
We have the last 30 years of experience in living in space (Mir and ISS together have logged close to 2 decades of human presence in micro G already). Is Mars really that more difficult a goal in your eyes?
Yes, by several orders of magnitude. But not necessarily due to human phsyiology (though it could still be a big problem, since Spacelab, Mir and ISS have all been sheltered by the Earth's magnetic field). And don't forget that even with all the billions spent on it, the ISS hasn't really done any science yet, as it takes all of NASA's available resources just to keep the thing from falling apart. And it is in very accessible near Earth orbit.
If you really think so then methinks you have not really read Zubrin yet. Feel free to provide a bit more in depth argument if you have. I do agree that the guy is a bit optimistic regarding cost but he is certainly right that current costs are severely bloated by the atrocity that is cost plus contracting.
Then I'm sure some other country with a more efficient government will beat us to it.
I'm sorry, but the idea of a "colony" on Mars is a pipe dream. It would take at least 100 years to even get to the point where we are in Antarctica (but cost at least 10,000 times more), and almost certainly not progress past that for several hundred more years. The laws of physics aren't going away anytime soon: Mars is an extremely unhospitable place and getting there is going to remain extremely expensive. And no, I don't believe that people being there will be able to accomplish more science than spending 1/10th as much on robotic probes would.
Many space exploration boosters think that manned exploration is more exciting than unmanned. It's not.
When we were going to the moon before, we hadn't really seen any pictures from the surface of the moon, let alone videos. Similarly, at that time, we were seeing many other places up close for the first time, such as Mars. In fact, we were really reaching beyond the Earth's atmosphere for the first time.
But after the novelty wore off, who cared? Who cares (or is more than peripherally aware) that there are people on the ISS right now? Who really follows each shuttle launch or landing (now much more interesting due to the perceived very high chance of catostrophic failure)? Even going back, after the first few Apollo missions, how many people continued to be excited about watching people go to the moon?
What's more, we hadn't yet realized how idiotic the idea of people LIVING in space or on other worlds was, at least as other than a stunt/research experiment. (Which we now realize. Or should. It would be as easy for people to live on the bottom of the ocean. There is a reason there are no hotels or amusement parks or settlements in Antarctica.) Going to other planets is NOT like travelling across the ocean to the New World.
I believe that space exploration is still interesting - I think many people, even from younger generations, found the imagery from the Mars rovers fascinating, as well as perhaps the new images of Titan from Huygens (though they were pretty difficult to make out). I just think that adding "manned" into the mix doesn't make it much more interesting, unless you're going to put a bunch of dysfunctional folks together with a video camera to create a reality TV show.
If they have that, why do they need this new system? In fact, if the primary concern is stopping/releasing someone on a minor infringement that is wanted elsewhere for something more serious, isn't that already covered by the NCIC?
So, contrary to your argument, that makes this new system so much worse. Knowing about the NCIC only makes me MORE paranoid about OneDOJ.
Whatever we do to sex offenders today, we will likely one day do to EVERYONE (even you).
Oh, it will start with sex offenders, and arsonists, and meth dealers, then all felons, and eventually all other criminals. Maybe even people with too many traffic citations - wouldn't it be useful for your car to recognize the cars of bad drivers, and tell you to keep your distance? What about people that are known to go around neighborhoods knocking on doors and scamming seniors? Or holding up people at knifepoint for their purses and wallets? Shouldn't we know about them? And what about people who haven't committed a crime - YET: wouldn't it be useful to be able to catch them right away when they DO commit one? (And, presumably, being watched at all times serves as a great deterrent, right?) So, when it becomes cheap and easy enough (and we've crossed enough lines in the sand that it's the "logical next step"), EVERYONE will be required to have their chip implanted at birth and be tracked everywhere they go, fingerprint/retinal scanners will be required for all computer hardware capable of connecting to a network, and omniscient cameras feeding into AI computers will be watching your every move once you step out of your house (and maybe, eventually, inside your house too - after all, no privacy concerns, nobody is watching except the computer, right?).
After all, you don't have anything to hide, do you? And it would make your children SO MUCH SAFER!!!
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How convenient... since it seems impossible to find any of these models (or any other new stand-alone ATSC set-top box, for that matter) for sale anywhere, in person or on the internet. Maybe that's the idea? People will quickly snap up all the coupons, before any of the models are available. Once the models are for sale, no more coupons will be left and all the existing coupons will be expired, hence, the gov't needs pay out no actual money! Brilliant!
Not to mention that I'm sure none of the STBs will cost anywhere near as low as $40.
The whole thing feels like a scam.
I agree that as the tech expert many of my family, friends and co-workers go to for advice, I've also been counseling people to wait for inexpensive dual-format players.
In addition to those who appearantly can barely tell the difference between DVD and HD quality, there are many more who don't really care much, even if they can see a difference. Yes, many large-screen HD TVs have been sold in the last few years, but most, appearantly, only because they are LARGE and FLAT, not because they are high-definition.
Last, those who are waiting for ripping capability from BluRay may have a long wait. If I got to vote for which format would die a quick death, it would definitely be BluRay. Just more of the same anti-consumer shenanigans that we've come to expect from Sony (excessive DRM and copy control, fewer options for "fair use" of content, and lots more incompatibilities, non-working features, etc., of which we've only seen the beginning, on top of higher manufacturing costs for both hardware [complex laser assembly, high patent royalties] and content, which would keep the prices for BluRay discs and maybe players higher in the long term compared to HD DVD).
We have some speakers connected to a computer at work, and every time certain cell phones are ABOUT to ring, it makes this clikety-clickety noise.
I think you have encountered a phenomenon that some people find very mysterious. It is usually referred to, by those who profess to understand its meaning, as a "conversation starter".
I think that in 30 years, today's college students will still have the even greater insight that if you give people something really cool that they like and want, people will almost THROW money at you (and they'll tell all their friends, too). If you create products that people don't want, or worse yet PO your customers, people will do anything to avoid giving you money (and they'll tell all their friends...)
I thought the Director's Cut was WAY better than the original theatrical release. I have not seen this final cut, but I'd expect from the description that it's the best of all.
The voiceover didn't add anything. I can barely remember anything that it said (which is all in a droning, deadpan voice). I never thought it helped make the movie more understandable even BEFORE the Director's Cut came out. And the Director's Cut made the most intersting plot point very clearly - in a way I had really not got even from repeated viewings of the theatrical release. So I don't agree with the others that it's worthwhile to watch this version first. I think it's a waste of time
Here are some problems I see with this.
If you break software up into little pieces with different people working on each, you need to (a) give them explicit instructions as to what that software should do so it can integrate with the rest of the project and (b) be able to verify that it does exactly that.
As others have pointed out, code review and testing is difficult and time-consuming. In order to ensure correctness EFFICIENTLY, you probably need to automate the verification proces. That is, you need to write a proper technical spec up front, then have software that can automatically verify submitted code to the spec afterward (or exhaustively test it). But if it can automatically verify correctness in a formal and automatic manner, maybe it could generate proper code itself, too? If you don't automate it, then with the quality of programmers you'd need to do inspection of submitted code (particularly considering there might be far more submitted code to review than will actually be used), they probably could have written the code themselves in far less time.
As also pointed out elsewhere, you need some minumum number of participants to have a high likelihood of receiving consistently good submissions to choose from. But there are only a finite number of programmers out there (and especially a finite number of good ones that can make positive contributions). If very many projects started doing this, the price the companies would need to pay people to get them to participate would eliminate any cost advantages of the process. You'd have bidding wars to get people to work on your project instead of the next one that's promising to pay more. From the other side, if only one out of some number of submissions (say four) is selected, that means 3/4 of the programming work is for naught (other than practice, I suppose). How is this efficient for the programmers? If only one out of four of your submissions is ever accepted, you'd probably stop bothering unless they offered 4x the rate per submission.
Then there are all the issues of maintainability, where the people who wrote the code know it best, and someone who wrote much of the code on a project can be a real expert at it. If enough people worked on small parts, NOBODY is an expert on it, and even if one or more people are, they don't stay with the company after the project is complete (and probably never see the overall scope of the project, so they aren't so much of an expert after all).
Also, programmers want to be able to take credit for their work (and/or get paid for it). Obviously it's quite easy for a company to cheat by using submissions, parts of submissions, good ideas embodied in submissions, etc. without giving credit or paying. Even if they don't cheat, is such software going to start having credit screens listing hundreds of programmers, each of whom may have only contributed one simple subroutine? If so, how will that help people get their next job? And are submitters going to be given year-end bonuses, profit sharing, stock options etc. if the resulting software makes the company rich?
Perhaps the best use of this sort of process is as a screen to find potential full-time employees...
Here's the rub: back in 1994, Bungie put out a Macintosh 1ps game called Marathon. Now this game Marathon had rudimentary "round robin" LAN networking (AppleTalk-based, not IP). While there was a "gathering" machine, there wasn't one authoritative server - each copy of the game ran its own simulation of the world, and passed some information about what keys its player had pressed on to the next machine in the circle, and you just hoped they were all concluding the same things were happening at the same time. The problem was that if they got out of sync due to any excessive delays, packet loss, etc. (imagine two players think they have killed each other, before each receives the message that the other may have killed them first), or even internal bugs where they each calculated and randomly came up with different results, the game would be irretrievable - one player would think they were kicking ass, while the others would wonder why that player was facing a wall at point blank range, repeatedly suiciding with the rocket launcher. Nothing to do but abandon the game and start over. This happened quite a lot. It also precluded Internet play entirely. (Incidentally, since the "film/demo" recording feature used the same technology, it also happened sometimes that films would get "out of sync" with the playback machine relative to the machine that recorded it, and thus not make any sense either.)
Naturally, this was such a successfull network model, Bungie chose to use it again in Marathon 2: Durandal. And again in Marathon: Infinity. As well as Myth: the Fallen Lords, Myth 2: Soulblighter, and Halo: Combat Evolved (the code having been worked over somewhat by this time, without really fixing its fundamental flaws). This despite the fact that id had shown a superior way with Quake (specifically QuakeWorld) since 1996, and that others, such as Epic, had struggled (and eventually succeeded) to create similarly-good networking in games like Unreal Tournament soon afterward. It wasn't until Halo 2 that Bungie finally decided that having crappy 10-year old networking code wasn't really the best idea. More to the point, the game had to run on Xbox Live, and the old networking simply DOES NOT WORK (or at least provide a playable game) for a 1ps game on the internet, though it marginally worked in the RTS Myth series. So they HAD to fix the networking, if they wanted any Xbox Live networking at all.
So yes, as of Halo 2, they have fairly modern networking with decent prediction (borrowing liberally from community-developed ideas that were applied to Counterstrike etc., for instance with each client not only asserting what controls were affected by the player, but what actions it believes should have been taken in the world, which the server will only override if it doesn't fit with its own model), but it sure took them long enough to get there.
You left out the word "plurality", as in "a plurality of intra-body cavities". "Getting rid of" is also too colloquial, so perhaps "expelling" or (that being too obvious) better yet "disposing of carbon dioxide and a plurality of other waste gasses by dispersal into the surrounding gaseous medium after being physically expelled, by force of periodic, autonomic exertion of a curved muscular structure underlying the plurality of intra-body cavities, via a flexible biological tube". (etc.)
Also, the whole should be broken down into multiple separate claims.
Did anyone not think the leaks might be at least somewhat in response to this?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/31/1334245
There are several differences. For one thing, the car is still private property. Do the police have the right to just start messing with and essentially modifying your car without permission (from you or a judge)? I mean, if someone ELSE crawled under your car and attached a GPS to it and started tracking your location, should that be legal? If not, why would we let the police do it without a warrant?
In addition, the tracking does not somehow automatically stop when the car EXITS public streets and enters private property. This is pretty much the equivalent of tagging someone's actual body with a nano-GPS device. Sure, the police could physically walk behind you when you're in public, but should they have the right to know what room you are in inside your house, at all times? And should they be able to know your location 24x7, from the comfort of their office chair, without even needing to convince a judge you're a likely suspect in a crime?
I also do think the fact that this makes it much cheaper and easier to do IS significant. It's kind of like privacy on the Internet: lots of things that have always been "public knowledge" have in actually tended to be fairly private due to obscurity. Now, they can suddenly be instantly accessible to anyone in the world, often showing up unbidden in unrelated searches. Such changes in ease of access do indeed call for changes in laws regarding accessibility and privacy of information.
True, but video game music is meant to accompany video games. Why go listen to it on its own, other than out of nostalgia? A lot of this discussion seems to be about trying to turn people onto game music for the music's sake. But why, when there is so much better music out there?
My response:
:-).) This is the first half of the 1st movement of Tchakovsky's Violin Concerto (it continues in part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ym8KpznV08), played by Midori with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (Claudio Abbado conducting).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e13bC2Gk2A
OK, this may seem the least exciting of the clips to you, the most typically "classical music" with pretty meoldies and all, but I think it is beautiful and (to me) thrilling enough to include. No, it doesn't start off with a bang (in fact, the opening bit is quite trivial, kind of a canard, as the rest of the work isn't really based on it), but it's worth listening to, and the soloist certainly is worth hearing (and seeing). (You may find in life that a bit of patience is required to realize what you've been missing. This isn't overtly fast or exciting music, but... don't give up on it; try to watch the whole thing, including part 2 where most of the violin fireworks are, before going to the "exciting stuff"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrYVnSPRoAE
This is an old (early-mid 60s?) video of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony (in one of the iconic, cinematic, somewhat megalomaniac videos they used to make of him - and since when do you use 8 horns in Beethoven 5??? Or 11 basses? But it is glorious, if hardly as "classical" as when the piece was written). This music may be familiar to you, at least in a superficial sense, but you have to get past the first 10 seconds: the point isn't the opening idea so much as what Beethoven does with that idea for the next 7 minutes. (Which is one of the main points about classical music - the development, not the initial idea, is what makes it great.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqGJUeEZ80I
This is a portion of Bruckner's 9th Symphony, played by the Vienna Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein conducting. As someone points out in the comments: "(what's the) point (of) posting a minute from an hour long symphony"?, but you should be able to get some of the idea. (And yes, it is as loud as it seems. In a hall like the Musikvereinsaal it would be practically deafening, no amplification required.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_1XSVs9crc
This is Leonard Bernsteinn again, conducting part of the finale of Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony (with the Boston Symphony? Not in their usual concert hall though.). Bernstein has always been a little over the top (in very different ways from Karajan), but the effect can be incredible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dlpPzM6OC4
Some people might think the beginning of this clip seems a little "gay". But (you guessed it:) keep listening. Just a small bit from the end of a glorious, incredible 90-minute symphony: Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham (UK) Symphony and Chorus in Mahler's 2nd Symphony. (And yes, in response to some of the comments: I always cry.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ13hgvQWaI
T
You could have voted for:
Michael Metti (Libertarian), Todd Chretien (Green), or Marsha Feinland (Peace and Freedom).
And no, voting for a third-party candidate is not "throwing your vote away" or "letting the Republicans win" or any such. It is voting for who you believe in (assuming you do) and exerting pressure on your second choice to become more in line with your wishes. If you just keep voting for them even though you hate their guts, you give them no reason to change. That's how we got in this mess in the first place.
Of course I would: the only way for a DRM system to determine whether a usage is fair or illegal would be to unduly invade the user's privacy. So I wouldn't object to such a hypothetical DRM system per se, but I would object to the privacy invasions that would be required for it to work.
The problem with your argument is that much of the funding for the R&D *is* paid for with public funds already. And the drug corporations still get the monopoly, and resulting profits.
What's more, they continuously spend millions to try to convince people like you that they are doing it all for the public good, spending their money wisely to create new, needed treatments, etc.
I think you kind of miss the point. This happens all the time. If a potentially-healing substance (such as an herb or nutritional supplement) isn't or can't be patented, it will not likely receive FDA approval. This, then, means that such products can be routinely denigrated as "ineffective" (when even scientists and other professionals who should know better fail to see the difference between "lack of proof of effectiveness" and "proof of ineffectiveness", when strenuously arguing against the use of such "unproven" treatments, even if there is copious evidence of effectiveness from Europe and elsewhere).
What makes this worse is that during the last 5-10 years, FDA approval has become largely meaningless: we no longer have much confidence that FDA-approved drugs are either safe or effective, because the studies are now almost entirely funded and run by the pharmaceutical companies trying to sell the drugs, and such industry-run studies have been shown to claim benefits and safety at something like 5x the rate of independent studies. So the claims that thus-and-such new drug is "safer and more effective than older drugs" (or even just "safe and effective") is generally hogwash (or at least unknown).
The FDA recognizes that a major part of its mission is to protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies, and has explicitly admitted that such considerations are taken into account in its decision-making process. They also make much of their funding from user fees. Thus they happily go along with this state of affairs.
In fact, the FDA has banned natural substances that threatened to compete with lucrative (but much more expensive) pharmaceuticals. For instance, did you know that it is illegal to sell tryptophan, one of the essential amino acids, in the USA without a prescription?
In the late '80s there was a major health scare from some tryptophan supplements due to contamination in the production process from one Japanese supplier, stemming from an untested change in process - including that the bacteria used to make it were genetically engineered - combined with an untested reduction in filtering of the product compared to the normal process. Even though not too long after this occurred it was determined that the problem was only one regarding contamination from that one supplier, and that tryptophan itself in its natual form was, not surprisingly, safe, tryptophan still, to this day, is only allowed to be sold by prescription.
Tryptophan, you see, is a biochemical precursor of serotonin, the boosting of which is considered useful in treating depression (and tryptophan supplements had long been used - safely, I might add - as treatments for depression, anxiety, insomnia, etc.). It also turns out to be difficult to boost tryptophan levels in the brain by ordinary dietary means, due to competition in the body with tyrosine (which tends to be found in the same foods as tryptophan but in much greater quantities), hence the usefulness of tryptophan supplements. Now the strange coincidence is that the FDA banned tryptophan just days before approving Prozac for sale (a then-patented drug whose primary function is to boost serotonin levels).
So... unless I flunked 6th grade English, the only reason to have patents and copyrights is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
There is nothing there about "inventor's rights". In fact, from what I know about the thinking of the time (and over the next 150 years or so, as re-iterated consistently by courts and the legislature), the whole idea of intellectual "property" was considered fairly odious. The exclusive rights are a necessary evil in order to encourage dissemination of ideas. They are not intended as an inherent right of ownership.
Of course, this all changed in the last 30 years or so as Congress became little more than a PR firm owned as a joint subsidiary by our largest corporations.
Yes, by several orders of magnitude. But not necessarily due to human phsyiology (though it could still be a big problem, since Spacelab, Mir and ISS have all been sheltered by the Earth's magnetic field). And don't forget that even with all the billions spent on it, the ISS hasn't really done any science yet, as it takes all of NASA's available resources just to keep the thing from falling apart. And it is in very accessible near Earth orbit.
Then I'm sure some other country with a more efficient government will beat us to it.
I'm sorry, but the idea of a "colony" on Mars is a pipe dream. It would take at least 100 years to even get to the point where we are in Antarctica (but cost at least 10,000 times more), and almost certainly not progress past that for several hundred more years. The laws of physics aren't going away anytime soon: Mars is an extremely unhospitable place and getting there is going to remain extremely expensive. And no, I don't believe that people being there will be able to accomplish more science than spending 1/10th as much on robotic probes would.
Many space exploration boosters think that manned exploration is more exciting than unmanned. It's not.
When we were going to the moon before, we hadn't really seen any pictures from the surface of the moon, let alone videos. Similarly, at that time, we were seeing many other places up close for the first time, such as Mars. In fact, we were really reaching beyond the Earth's atmosphere for the first time.
But after the novelty wore off, who cared? Who cares (or is more than peripherally aware) that there are people on the ISS right now? Who really follows each shuttle launch or landing (now much more interesting due to the perceived very high chance of catostrophic failure)? Even going back, after the first few Apollo missions, how many people continued to be excited about watching people go to the moon?
What's more, we hadn't yet realized how idiotic the idea of people LIVING in space or on other worlds was, at least as other than a stunt/research experiment. (Which we now realize. Or should. It would be as easy for people to live on the bottom of the ocean. There is a reason there are no hotels or amusement parks or settlements in Antarctica.) Going to other planets is NOT like travelling across the ocean to the New World.
I believe that space exploration is still interesting - I think many people, even from younger generations, found the imagery from the Mars rovers fascinating, as well as perhaps the new images of Titan from Huygens (though they were pretty difficult to make out). I just think that adding "manned" into the mix doesn't make it much more interesting, unless you're going to put a bunch of dysfunctional folks together with a video camera to create a reality TV show.
If they have that, why do they need this new system? In fact, if the primary concern is stopping/releasing someone on a minor infringement that is wanted elsewhere for something more serious, isn't that already covered by the NCIC?
So, contrary to your argument, that makes this new system so much worse. Knowing about the NCIC only makes me MORE paranoid about OneDOJ.
Whatever we do to sex offenders today, we will likely one day do to EVERYONE (even you).
Oh, it will start with sex offenders, and arsonists, and meth dealers, then all felons, and eventually all other criminals. Maybe even people with too many traffic citations - wouldn't it be useful for your car to recognize the cars of bad drivers, and tell you to keep your distance? What about people that are known to go around neighborhoods knocking on doors and scamming seniors? Or holding up people at knifepoint for their purses and wallets? Shouldn't we know about them? And what about people who haven't committed a crime - YET: wouldn't it be useful to be able to catch them right away when they DO commit one? (And, presumably, being watched at all times serves as a great deterrent, right?) So, when it becomes cheap and easy enough (and we've crossed enough lines in the sand that it's the "logical next step"), EVERYONE will be required to have their chip implanted at birth and be tracked everywhere they go, fingerprint/retinal scanners will be required for all computer hardware capable of connecting to a network, and omniscient cameras feeding into AI computers will be watching your every move once you step out of your house (and maybe, eventually, inside your house too - after all, no privacy concerns, nobody is watching except the computer, right?).
After all, you don't have anything to hide, do you? And it would make your children SO MUCH SAFER!!!