Appropriate for the situation means not killing too many people. For example, if you want to take out a couple terrorists, minimize casualties by carpet-bombing a wedding they're attending in the country, instead of nuking an entire city when they're in it.
What you're missing here is that the robots built for war won't be built to kill other machines - they'll be built to penetrate deep beyond enemy defense and inflict the maximum possible casualties appropriate for the situation, all without putting a human pilot in danger.
"As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected."
Anyone who has ever played an online game knows that this cannot be true, because most American players do not have a good enough grasp of written english to pass the test!
"- Will Windows or Linux be ported to these new MacTel boxes first? - Which OS will support 90% of the hardware on one of these boxes first?"
Neither OS needs to be ported over - the new Macs are built from components that Windows and Linux already support. Aside from the sound chips and possibly some oddball motherboard features , Windows and Linux drivers for the hardware already exist. Still, Linux will probably win the race, as there's likely to be an existing Linux sound driver that can be tweaked to work with the new Macs.
"Wait, if it's "impossible" for us to regulate the environment, doesn't it logically follow it is equally impossible for us to change it?? He seems to be saying "We've destroyed it, but we don't have the power to fix it." That's completely inconsistent."
It makes perfect sense - seen as a whole, the earth is a very complex ecosystem that developed over billions of years. There are a huge number of connections between various life forms, and those life forms are connected to global climate conditions. It was really easy for us to destroy or dramatically change the state of life on earth, severing countless connections and throwing things out of balance. It will be a hell of a lot harder for us to reconnect and rebalance things, because we're still mostly ignorant of how it all works. Sure we might eventually work it via trial-and-error, but most of the population might be wiped out in the process.
The situation is very similar to someone with tools and no knowledge being able to take a car engine apart piece by piece, and then not being able to reassemble it because he never knew how it went together in the first place.
by 2010, 50% of American households will have an HDTV. Microsoft and Sony will still be fighting over HDTV and media formats, while most major third party developers will have scrapped HDTV in favor of working with NTSC Resolution on Nintendo's consoles, and there will be a lot of unemployed texture artists pissed off that they listened to all those loudmouths at Epic who keep whinging about needing more artists.
PC gaming will no longer exist. Instead of buying high-end graphics cards, gamers decided to just let Congress subsidize Nvidia's development efforts with another trillion dollars in National debt, ensuring that we can get next-gen video chipsets in our consoles for a lot less than the cost of a new Nvidia card.
I think you're probably right about this all being a marketing ploy - Microsoft probably knew all-along what it could do, and set a higher number so it could issue press releases about missing it, convincing people that the hardware is just so badass it's hard to even make it, and keeping the hype machine running.
I also think you're right about systems tied up, although it isn't just bundles. Microsoft has a whole lot of systems tied up in Japan, where nobody gives a shit - I could have a Japanese Xbox 360 sent via airmail and it would be here by Friday, because the Japanese can see what a joke the 360 launch is.
Maybe the reason they aren't releasing classics yet is that they don't have full confidence in their ability to properly reproduce movies on Blu-Ray. If a movie company botches a release of "The Fifth Element nobody pays attention, much less cares. Releasing botched versions of Casablanca or The Godfather, OTOH, could get enough attention to be a real embarassment - and the last thing a bunch of Japanese business execs want is to be embarassed at the start of a format war. Remember when The Matrix was the first dual-layer disc, and what an embarassment all the incompatibilites were to Warner Bros? That kind of shit can end careers in Japan.
It always amazes me how many people assume that because some harmless idiots use the internet, the truly harmful idiots don't use the internet. There is no shortage of moronic subversives and terrorists in the world, and they use the internet just like everyone else. The reason that the governments of the world have thousands of analysts poking around chat rooms and message forums is that stupid people do stupid things, assuming that their special forum is a secret, or that their special codes are secret, or that shortage of arabic linguists in the US means that there are no arabic linquists, and so on. I've heard tales from intelligence professionals about all the middle east contacts they lose simply because the people are so stupid they assume that cellular phones cannot be tapped because there isn't a phone line. I know a woman who routinely catches terrorists by watching middle east banking transactions for any large transaction in a woman's name, because the terrorists are so stupid that they try to launder money through their wives, not thinking that in nations where women are slaves, women with millions of dollars floating around might stand out.
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were caught because they rented a truck using their real names and drivers licenses, right before using it to blow up a building. Those morons never thought to take the license plates off and strip out the VIN numbers beforehand. If internet datamining had been around back then, the FBI may have been able to spot that pair of morons by looking through things like Amazon wish lists and forum posts.
"Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached."
How exacltly do the scientists find the right dimension for FTL travel in the first place? Trial-and-error? I'm sure that method would work really well, especially every time the ship ended up in a dimension where those crazy new laws of physics ripped it apart.
Nintendo's decision isn't just good for kids - it's also good for adults as well. I wish Microsoft had similar options for Live, so I could play popular games without the endless stream of racist and homophobic perjoratives spewed out by the players.
Why the hell would anyone make a watercooling unit for the Xbox 360 when the built-in cooling system does the job just fine? The problem with the 360 is that the external power supply overheats - not the system itself - and even that problem doesn't require anything as complicated as watercooling, it just needs to be located somewhere air can move under it.
Chemical analysis of wine flavors is (and has been for several years) used mostly to determine how to process the grape juices to get a certain flavor, not if the wine is drinkable. Manipulating grapes according to these computer-derived formulas has increased the ratings - and thus popularity - of a lot of California wines by allowing the creation of wines custom-tailored for the palettes of critics Robert Parker and James Laube. Because the company that does it keeps its list of customers confidential, this isn't much of a news story anywhere but France, where strict traditionalists are constantly railing against it.
So if you like really fruity wines with soft tannins, this sort of thing is a boon, assuming you have the money to buy the hot wines. If you don't, you're still in luck, because the popularity of high-scoring wines pushes down the prices of wines with less fashionable flavors. And once the current trend of buying anything the two big critics give a great review has passed, vintners will be able to use it to do a better job with just about about any wine, preventing a lot of crappy batches from going out.
Any user important enough to need root is important enough to have access to development machines where he or she can fuck things up with impunity. But on live systems, only a moron gives root to users - especially if those users are developers!
From the (lame) article: "While a scant few players do support lossless compression formats (mostly FLAC), lossless formats are generally unavailable for portable players."
iTunes and the iPod support lossless AAC encoding, which is comparable in size to FLAC. Given iPod's status as the market leader ever since its introduction, it seems like a safe assumption that many, if not the majority of digital media player owners have the option of using lossless compression.
"Laptop and home users also have the right to run an insecure PC."
And what about the right of an ISP not to play host to a myriad of spam-sending, DDOSing zombies because users refuse into install Windows service packs? Internet access is not a right, it is a privilege. If a user cannot be bothered to let automatic updates run on his Windows box, it should be entirely within the rights of said user's ISP to restrict said user to only accessing the internet on TCP ports 80 and 443.
The really sad part is that these companies have now wasted millions of dollars and months, if not years bickering about a DRM system that will be cracked by bootleggers within months of its public release.
Blockbuster still has one ace up its sleeve - porn. Most of the mom-and-pop shops that survived Blockbusters intense expansion did so by renting and selling hard-core porn. That option is certainly a tough one for Blockbuster, as many franchise owners will object, but for the corporate locations it may be the only option to keep them open.
Of course, this wouldn't kill Netflix - it would just turn Blockbuster into the world's largest chain of sex shops. But being a chain of sex shops is a better option than going bankrupt.
"...then the services that the taxes pay for get reduced."
And that's the big problem with lowering taxes. People demand lots of services from the US Government. Poor people want services like free healthcare and school lunches. Rich people want the SEC to keep an eye on their bankers and brokers. Neocons want the government to overrun every nondemocratic government on Earth and install democratic ones. Environmentalists want the government regulating oil companies, oil companies want the government to subsidize them. And taking money away from just about anybody's pet programs is often career suicide for politicians.
Existing in a weird balance between capitalism and socialism seems to be an important step in the advancement of civilization. The problem is doing it without the governments all collapsing under the weight of their own debts before the economies of the world adjust to support all the entitlement programs.
"So what's the point? This type of restriction is ridiculous."
This type of restriction is great politics. It gives all those Senators and Congresscritters something to take back home to the bible belt and show off. Do you really think that all the people out there stupid enough to believe that an invisible man in the sky wished the universe into being, simply because a collection of fairy tales says so, are going to rationalize that crypto export restrictions are good for anything other than hampering the ability of American businesses to compete with foreign businesses?
My point with the 9/11 reference is that appropriate timing can get any bill through. The Patriot act got passed because at that time people were obsessed with the belief that the government had to do more to prevent terrorism that they didn't think about the possibility that our government failed to prevent the attacks because of simple ineptitude. All it takes to get a crazy agenda put into law a good opening to exploit, and that may be what the *AAs are doing here - pushing a nasty law when all the wonks are too busy worrying about a plague of bigger stories.
"We should be glad that it is so ridiculous that it has no chance of passing, rather than only being semi-crazy like the DMCA."
On September 10, 2001, almost everyone in Washington would have told you that the Patriot Act was so ridiculous that it had no chance of passing. All it takes to get a despicable law passed in Washington is timing. Wait for voters to stop paying attention to what's really important, and one can slip any crazy law by. News from Washington in January will see the Alito nomination, more Patriot act showdowns, hearings into domestic spying by the DoD and the NSA, and a lot of noise from 2008 presidential hopefulls. Karl Rove is expected to be indicted soon and rumors of the imminent resignation of Donald Rumsfield just keep coming. With all of that noise on top of the bird flu nonsense, continued post-Katrina rebuilding being bungled, and the latest noise from Iraq constantly coming in, do you really think that it would be very hard for the *AAs to grease a few palms, twist a few arms, and sucker in a few morons to get this law passed?
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Appropriate for the situation means not killing too many people. For example, if you want to take out a couple terrorists, minimize casualties by carpet-bombing a wedding they're attending in the country, instead of nuking an entire city when they're in it.
Does anyone else think that this had something to do with intel finally killing off the "intel inside" campaign?
What you're missing here is that the robots built for war won't be built to kill other machines - they'll be built to penetrate deep beyond enemy defense and inflict the maximum possible casualties appropriate for the situation, all without putting a human pilot in danger.
"As a result, players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected."
Anyone who has ever played an online game knows that this cannot be true, because most American players do not have a good enough grasp of written english to pass the test!
"AND it doesn't run Windows...yet..."
So? Who the hell is going to pay Apple's crazy prices just to run Windows?
"- Will Windows or Linux be ported to these new MacTel boxes first?
- Which OS will support 90% of the hardware on one of these boxes first?"
Neither OS needs to be ported over - the new Macs are built from components that Windows and Linux already support. Aside from the sound chips and possibly some oddball motherboard features , Windows and Linux drivers for the hardware already exist. Still, Linux will probably win the race, as there's likely to be an existing Linux sound driver that can be tweaked to work with the new Macs.
"Wait, if it's "impossible" for us to regulate the environment, doesn't it logically follow it is equally impossible for us to change it?? He seems to be saying "We've destroyed it, but we don't have the power to fix it." That's completely inconsistent."
It makes perfect sense - seen as a whole, the earth is a very complex ecosystem that developed over billions of years. There are a huge number of connections between various life forms, and those life forms are connected to global climate conditions. It was really easy for us to destroy or dramatically change the state of life on earth, severing countless connections and throwing things out of balance. It will be a hell of a lot harder for us to reconnect and rebalance things, because we're still mostly ignorant of how it all works. Sure we might eventually work it via trial-and-error, but most of the population might be wiped out in the process.
The situation is very similar to someone with tools and no knowledge being able to take a car engine apart piece by piece, and then not being able to reassemble it because he never knew how it went together in the first place.
by 2010, 50% of American households will have an HDTV. Microsoft and Sony will still be fighting over HDTV and media formats, while most major third party developers will have scrapped HDTV in favor of working with NTSC Resolution on Nintendo's consoles, and there will be a lot of unemployed texture artists pissed off that they listened to all those loudmouths at Epic who keep whinging about needing more artists.
PC gaming will no longer exist. Instead of buying high-end graphics cards, gamers decided to just let Congress subsidize Nvidia's development efforts with another trillion dollars in National debt, ensuring that we can get next-gen video chipsets in our consoles for a lot less than the cost of a new Nvidia card.
My iPod video sounds a hell of a lot better than my iPod mini ever did, and much better than either of my Creative players.
I think you're probably right about this all being a marketing ploy - Microsoft probably knew all-along what it could do, and set a higher number so it could issue press releases about missing it, convincing people that the hardware is just so badass it's hard to even make it, and keeping the hype machine running.
I also think you're right about systems tied up, although it isn't just bundles. Microsoft has a whole lot of systems tied up in Japan, where nobody gives a shit - I could have a Japanese Xbox 360 sent via airmail and it would be here by Friday, because the Japanese can see what a joke the 360 launch is.
Maybe the reason they aren't releasing classics yet is that they don't have full confidence in their ability to properly reproduce movies on Blu-Ray. If a movie company botches a release of "The Fifth Element nobody pays attention, much less cares. Releasing botched versions of Casablanca or The Godfather, OTOH, could get enough attention to be a real embarassment - and the last thing a bunch of Japanese business execs want is to be embarassed at the start of a format war. Remember when The Matrix was the first dual-layer disc, and what an embarassment all the incompatibilites were to Warner Bros? That kind of shit can end careers in Japan.
It always amazes me how many people assume that because some harmless idiots use the internet, the truly harmful idiots don't use the internet. There is no shortage of moronic subversives and terrorists in the world, and they use the internet just like everyone else. The reason that the governments of the world have thousands of analysts poking around chat rooms and message forums is that stupid people do stupid things, assuming that their special forum is a secret, or that their special codes are secret, or that shortage of arabic linguists in the US means that there are no arabic linquists, and so on. I've heard tales from intelligence professionals about all the middle east contacts they lose simply because the people are so stupid they assume that cellular phones cannot be tapped because there isn't a phone line. I know a woman who routinely catches terrorists by watching middle east banking transactions for any large transaction in a woman's name, because the terrorists are so stupid that they try to launder money through their wives, not thinking that in nations where women are slaves, women with millions of dollars floating around might stand out.
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were caught because they rented a truck using their real names and drivers licenses, right before using it to blow up a building. Those morons never thought to take the license plates off and strip out the VIN numbers beforehand. If internet datamining had been around back then, the FBI may have been able to spot that pair of morons by looking through things like Amazon wish lists and forum posts.
"Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached."
How exacltly do the scientists find the right dimension for FTL travel in the first place? Trial-and-error? I'm sure that method would work really well, especially every time the ship ended up in a dimension where those crazy new laws of physics ripped it apart.
Nintendo's decision isn't just good for kids - it's also good for adults as well. I wish Microsoft had similar options for Live, so I could play popular games without the endless stream of racist and homophobic perjoratives spewed out by the players.
Why the hell would anyone make a watercooling unit for the Xbox 360 when the built-in cooling system does the job just fine? The problem with the 360 is that the external power supply overheats - not the system itself - and even that problem doesn't require anything as complicated as watercooling, it just needs to be located somewhere air can move under it.
Chemical analysis of wine flavors is (and has been for several years) used mostly to determine how to process the grape juices to get a certain flavor, not if the wine is drinkable. Manipulating grapes according to these computer-derived formulas has increased the ratings - and thus popularity - of a lot of California wines by allowing the creation of wines custom-tailored for the palettes of critics Robert Parker and James Laube. Because the company that does it keeps its list of customers confidential, this isn't much of a news story anywhere but France, where strict traditionalists are constantly railing against it.
So if you like really fruity wines with soft tannins, this sort of thing is a boon, assuming you have the money to buy the hot wines. If you don't, you're still in luck, because the popularity of high-scoring wines pushes down the prices of wines with less fashionable flavors. And once the current trend of buying anything the two big critics give a great review has passed, vintners will be able to use it to do a better job with just about about any wine, preventing a lot of crappy batches from going out.
Any user important enough to need root is important enough to have access to development machines where he or she can fuck things up with impunity. But on live systems, only a moron gives root to users - especially if those users are developers!
From the (lame) article:
"While a scant few players do support lossless compression formats (mostly FLAC), lossless formats are generally unavailable for portable players."
iTunes and the iPod support lossless AAC encoding, which is comparable in size to FLAC. Given iPod's status as the market leader ever since its introduction, it seems like a safe assumption that many, if not the majority of digital media player owners have the option of using lossless compression.
"Laptop and home users also have the right to run an insecure PC."
And what about the right of an ISP not to play host to a myriad of spam-sending, DDOSing zombies because users refuse into install Windows service packs? Internet access is not a right, it is a privilege. If a user cannot be bothered to let automatic updates run on his Windows box, it should be entirely within the rights of said user's ISP to restrict said user to only accessing the internet on TCP ports 80 and 443.
The really sad part is that these companies have now wasted millions of dollars and months, if not years bickering about a DRM system that will be cracked by bootleggers within months of its public release.
Blockbuster still has one ace up its sleeve - porn. Most of the mom-and-pop shops that survived Blockbusters intense expansion did so by renting and selling hard-core porn. That option is certainly a tough one for Blockbuster, as many franchise owners will object, but for the corporate locations it may be the only option to keep them open.
Of course, this wouldn't kill Netflix - it would just turn Blockbuster into the world's largest chain of sex shops. But being a chain of sex shops is a better option than going bankrupt.
"...then the services that the taxes pay for get reduced."
And that's the big problem with lowering taxes. People demand lots of services from the US Government. Poor people want services like free healthcare and school lunches. Rich people want the SEC to keep an eye on their bankers and brokers. Neocons want the government to overrun every nondemocratic government on Earth and install democratic ones. Environmentalists want the government regulating oil companies, oil companies want the government to subsidize them. And taking money away from just about anybody's pet programs is often career suicide for politicians.
Existing in a weird balance between capitalism and socialism seems to be an important step in the advancement of civilization. The problem is doing it without the governments all collapsing under the weight of their own debts before the economies of the world adjust to support all the entitlement programs.
"So what's the point? This type of restriction is ridiculous."
This type of restriction is great politics. It gives all those Senators and Congresscritters something to take back home to the bible belt and show off. Do you really think that all the people out there stupid enough to believe that an invisible man in the sky wished the universe into being, simply because a collection of fairy tales says so, are going to rationalize that crypto export restrictions are good for anything other than hampering the ability of American businesses to compete with foreign businesses?
My point with the 9/11 reference is that appropriate timing can get any bill through. The Patriot act got passed because at that time people were obsessed with the belief that the government had to do more to prevent terrorism that they didn't think about the possibility that our government failed to prevent the attacks because of simple ineptitude. All it takes to get a crazy agenda put into law a good opening to exploit, and that may be what the *AAs are doing here - pushing a nasty law when all the wonks are too busy worrying about a plague of bigger stories.
"We should be glad that it is so ridiculous that it has no chance of passing, rather than only being semi-crazy like the DMCA."
On September 10, 2001, almost everyone in Washington would have told you that the Patriot Act was so ridiculous that it had no chance of passing. All it takes to get a despicable law passed in Washington is timing. Wait for voters to stop paying attention to what's really important, and one can slip any crazy law by. News from Washington in January will see the Alito nomination, more Patriot act showdowns, hearings into domestic spying by the DoD and the NSA, and a lot of noise from 2008 presidential hopefulls. Karl Rove is expected to be indicted soon and rumors of the imminent resignation of Donald Rumsfield just keep coming. With all of that noise on top of the bird flu nonsense, continued post-Katrina rebuilding being bungled, and the latest noise from Iraq constantly coming in, do you really think that it would be very hard for the *AAs to grease a few palms, twist a few arms, and sucker in a few morons to get this law passed?