The group of people who are fans of computer games doesn't tend to overlap with the group of people who buy $300 off the shelf computers, so I can't see that making much of a difference for the serious games companies.
The powers of government derive from the just consent of the governed. When such powers are abused, it is our right to alter or abolish those powers. Given that many people today willfully (and in basically every other case, inadvertently) break copyright laws, these laws are no longer aimed at some small minority of those who are harming the creator of a work, but at the greater population of people revolting against a system that has been stacked against them. We have gone from a fair system where works entered the public domain on a regular basis, expanding our collective culture, to a world where new stories and new ideas are under lock and key, for at least as long as we will be alive, if not forever. How should we respond? What would you have us do? We had a bargain of giving an amount of time for an artist to enjoy the blessings of their work, and then that work was to be passed along to all of us. The side beneficial to the population at large has been abandoned, so why should we be willing to take the negative?
What I find most fucked up about that is a line from the first page in those results:
The church then appealed to the House of Lords who decided that a PCC (Parochial Church Council) is exempt from human rights laws, and so the Wallbanks must pay up.
But it's bullshit. Companies don't need to pay dirt poor wages to be (anything besides abusurdly) profitable, nor do they need to charge an arm and a leg. In the 1950s we had a shitload of things produced right here in America (didn't that used to be a point of pride?), and people were prosperous and happy. Sure, you didn't have CEOs making thousands of times more than the average worker, but you could have a prosperous middle class where even a factory worker straight out of high school could afford to raise a family.
The main problem is that people should need some sort of basic legal training to report on legal news.
The main problem is that people should need some sort of basic financial training to report on financial news.
The main problem is that people should need some sort of basic medical training to report on medical news.
Yes. Please. You can't explain things properly if you don't have a basic level of knowledge in something. I don't think reporters need a Ph.D in physics to report on the LHC, but is it too much to ask that they've taken a couple college level physics classes?
Or offer your daughters to a crowd of rapists so that angels don't get raped. Yeah. Apparently God can nuke a city, but can't precision snipe. Or maybe he just like the Mythbusters philosophy of "How big of a boom can I get away with?"
Even if right now it's at it's maximum distance and it were skimming the surface of the star on the short end, it would still end up being a 1985 year trip. Calculation.
Fair enough. I looked this up on wikipedia this morning from only a vague recollection of high school physics. Mostly I just remembered that the size of a telescope required to see detail that far away is absurdly large for the foreseeable future.
Formula for maximum resolution of a lens:
sin(theta) = 1.22 (wavelength / diameter of lens aperture)
Moving things around we get:
1.22 * wavelength / sin(theta) = diameter
1.22 * wavelength / sin(tan^-1(resolution length / distance to object))
With a wavelength of 500 nanometers (visible light), a resolution of a kilometer (might be enough to see that there's something interesting there), at a distance of 20 light years (the nearest known extrasolar planet is 10.4 light years, so let's be generous and assume that there's some sort of life within twice that distance).
The lens on the telescope would have to be over 115000 kilometers across, almost twice the radius of Saturn. Wolfram Alpha calculation. Up the distance and lower the desired resolution for a more realistic picture of what it would take (100 meters resolution at 200 light years means a lens diameter 17 times the radius of the sun. We'll have finished the Dyson Sphere long before we build that.)
"This difference, however, will be "very small," said the study's co-author Marten van Kerkwijk of the University of Toronto, since the fastest possible orbital period is more than one thousand years.
If the period of rotation for two bodies is T = 2 * pi * (((length of semi-major axis)^3)/(G * (M1+M2))), then the time works out to be 5615 years and change. Anyone know why they're low balling the estimate so much?
Media companies want to have their cake and eat it too. Their all for globalization when it means they can produce cheap junk at the lowest prices, but they'll add region encoding to DVDs and lobby governments to enforce their tiered pricing system so that different parts of the world pay different amounts (or they just won't release it somewhere, for no good reason at all), and you'll get arrested for buying DVDs one place and selling them elsewhere and undercutting them. If you throw them a bone, they'll want your whole skeleton.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -Albert Bartlett
I'd attribute it to a combination of not understanding exponents, the bureaucracy of inventing, investing in, and integrating a new standard, and that such standards are designed to solve the current problem (with the lowest feasible overhead to get things off the ground now), rather than plan based around what would last for 10 or more years after the standard actually gets adopted.
Yes. Yes it does matter. In fact, it's the entire fucking point. You're supposed to get a patent for innovating, not for reinventing the wheel. At this point, can anyone honestly find a business model that's never been tried? And does anyone even try to write a software patent that actually explains how to do what they're claiming? If these patents aren't doing anything worthwhile, then why are we rewarding anyone for them?
Couldn't you solve this problem with public key encryption based digital signatures? I mean, you don't even need some giant government database containing the keys to everyone's private information. The entire point is to let anyone and everyone have my public key, and in fact to assume that every malicious person has everything associated with any transaction involved except for my private key. So long as people keep their private key private, then there's no problem (ok, big assumption, but no worse than passwords currently are), and as a plus it could also be used to set up cryptography as the normal way for information to travel over the internet... oh, I see why the government would never encourage that. Nevermind.
And he's already committed crimes against humanity! Like "Are We There Yet?",and just when you thought it was bad, he made a sequel! This man must be stopped, perhaps by putting him someplace really cold, in fact I hear there's a continent if you go really far south that's just covered in ice...
Slashdot Mirror
I propose the state rock should be Dwayne Johnson.
The group of people who are fans of computer games doesn't tend to overlap with the group of people who buy $300 off the shelf computers, so I can't see that making much of a difference for the serious games companies.
You mean like the N64's expansion pack? Though at least a couple games requiring it were really good (Majora's Mask and Perfect Dark come to mind).
The powers of government derive from the just consent of the governed. When such powers are abused, it is our right to alter or abolish those powers. Given that many people today willfully (and in basically every other case, inadvertently) break copyright laws, these laws are no longer aimed at some small minority of those who are harming the creator of a work, but at the greater population of people revolting against a system that has been stacked against them. We have gone from a fair system where works entered the public domain on a regular basis, expanding our collective culture, to a world where new stories and new ideas are under lock and key, for at least as long as we will be alive, if not forever. How should we respond? What would you have us do? We had a bargain of giving an amount of time for an artist to enjoy the blessings of their work, and then that work was to be passed along to all of us. The side beneficial to the population at large has been abandoned, so why should we be willing to take the negative?
Or the angler fish.
The church then appealed to the House of Lords who decided that a PCC (Parochial Church Council) is exempt from human rights laws, and so the Wallbanks must pay up.
But it's bullshit. Companies don't need to pay dirt poor wages to be (anything besides abusurdly) profitable, nor do they need to charge an arm and a leg. In the 1950s we had a shitload of things produced right here in America (didn't that used to be a point of pride?), and people were prosperous and happy. Sure, you didn't have CEOs making thousands of times more than the average worker, but you could have a prosperous middle class where even a factory worker straight out of high school could afford to raise a family.
The main problem is that people should need some sort of basic legal training to report on legal news.
The main problem is that people should need some sort of basic financial training to report on financial news.
The main problem is that people should need some sort of basic medical training to report on medical news.
Yes. Please. You can't explain things properly if you don't have a basic level of knowledge in something. I don't think reporters need a Ph.D in physics to report on the LHC, but is it too much to ask that they've taken a couple college level physics classes?
Or offer your daughters to a crowd of rapists so that angels don't get raped. Yeah. Apparently God can nuke a city, but can't precision snipe. Or maybe he just like the Mythbusters philosophy of "How big of a boom can I get away with?"
Even if right now it's at it's maximum distance and it were skimming the surface of the star on the short end, it would still end up being a 1985 year trip. Calculation.
Fair enough. I looked this up on wikipedia this morning from only a vague recollection of high school physics. Mostly I just remembered that the size of a telescope required to see detail that far away is absurdly large for the foreseeable future.
Pun... intended? You mean France is going to be facing an attack from terrorists using jelly? Is Osama really that desperate?
Formula for maximum resolution of a lens:
sin(theta) = 1.22 (wavelength / diameter of lens aperture)
Moving things around we get:
1.22 * wavelength / sin(theta) = diameter
1.22 * wavelength / sin(tan^-1(resolution length / distance to object))
With a wavelength of 500 nanometers (visible light), a resolution of a kilometer (might be enough to see that there's something interesting there), at a distance of 20 light years (the nearest known extrasolar planet is 10.4 light years, so let's be generous and assume that there's some sort of life within twice that distance).
The lens on the telescope would have to be over 115000 kilometers across, almost twice the radius of Saturn. Wolfram Alpha calculation. Up the distance and lower the desired resolution for a more realistic picture of what it would take (100 meters resolution at 200 light years means a lens diameter 17 times the radius of the sun. We'll have finished the Dyson Sphere long before we build that.)
"This difference, however, will be "very small," said the study's co-author Marten van Kerkwijk of the University of Toronto, since the fastest possible orbital period is more than one thousand years.
If the period of rotation for two bodies is T = 2 * pi * (((length of semi-major axis)^3)/(G * (M1+M2))), then the time works out to be 5615 years and change. Anyone know why they're low balling the estimate so much?
Media companies want to have their cake and eat it too. Their all for globalization when it means they can produce cheap junk at the lowest prices, but they'll add region encoding to DVDs and lobby governments to enforce their tiered pricing system so that different parts of the world pay different amounts (or they just won't release it somewhere, for no good reason at all), and you'll get arrested for buying DVDs one place and selling them elsewhere and undercutting them. If you throw them a bone, they'll want your whole skeleton.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -Albert Bartlett I'd attribute it to a combination of not understanding exponents, the bureaucracy of inventing, investing in, and integrating a new standard, and that such standards are designed to solve the current problem (with the lowest feasible overhead to get things off the ground now), rather than plan based around what would last for 10 or more years after the standard actually gets adopted.
My hobby is disagreeing with people on message boards. The car definitely isn't interesting.
I dunno, I still wish there were a built in Windows desktop cube clone. That's my favorite eye candy from Ubuntu.
He's hoping /. readers will click the link. He's sadly mistaken.
Yes. Yes it does matter. In fact, it's the entire fucking point. You're supposed to get a patent for innovating, not for reinventing the wheel. At this point, can anyone honestly find a business model that's never been tried? And does anyone even try to write a software patent that actually explains how to do what they're claiming? If these patents aren't doing anything worthwhile, then why are we rewarding anyone for them?
Couldn't you solve this problem with public key encryption based digital signatures? I mean, you don't even need some giant government database containing the keys to everyone's private information. The entire point is to let anyone and everyone have my public key, and in fact to assume that every malicious person has everything associated with any transaction involved except for my private key. So long as people keep their private key private, then there's no problem (ok, big assumption, but no worse than passwords currently are), and as a plus it could also be used to set up cryptography as the normal way for information to travel over the internet... oh, I see why the government would never encourage that. Nevermind.
The Phalangs will successfully defend against Warships.
So what's different than previous versions?
Probably because a 2d array of squares is easier and quicker to code (and faster to process). Inertia from there.
And he's already committed crimes against humanity! Like "Are We There Yet?",and just when you thought it was bad, he made a sequel! This man must be stopped, perhaps by putting him someplace really cold, in fact I hear there's a continent if you go really far south that's just covered in ice...
"Oh, yes, don't stop, don't... don't.. don't... BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ"