It's not a replacement for biological skin. According to the article it has applications in, eg, aeronautical applications where maintaining a seal is critical. You wouldn't consider an advance in paint or similar coatings to be immediately applicable to building a super body so you shouldn't be getting too excited by the use of the term "skin".
Back in the days of Prestel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel ) and Micronet I used to play the competitions they had. Prestel used a numbered pages system and competitions on it would charge, say, 20p per question with 10 questions so getting through to the last page with the prize claim would cost two quid or a bit more if you got a question or two wrong. I soon figured out that the prize claim page for this one company's games was almost always the same offset number from the initial question page number. Unfortunately my haul consisted of a lot of disposable cameras, sponges and money clips so the novelty soon wore off.
When I bought Half Life 2 off Steam they charged me VAT on it. So that's a US company collecting taxes for the UK government. Just FYI.
What would stop you setting up a computer in your shop right now with a barcode scanner attached to it. You bring what you want to buy up to the computer hit it with the barcode scanner and it automatically enters the details into the shops website. You complete the transaction by filling in your credit card details. Internet purchase, delivery choice: collected. No sales tax. Possible?
http://www.gbpvr.com/ does most of what MythTV does but for Windows PCs. I've used it with a PVR500 twin DVB-T tuner and it's almost flawless. And it's free though obviously donations are encouraged.
I looked at Knoppmyth months ago but they didn't recognise SATA hard drives during the autamatic installation at the time. If this has changed I'd be more inclined to try it again.
Oblivion barely qualifies as an RPG. The skills and armor sets were drastically reduced from Morrowind, and the combat was morphed into a Quake-like first-person twitchfest rather than a stat-based combat system.
Who says an RPG needs stats anyway? The Gothics were relatively sandbox RPGs with an even more curtailed skillset than Oblivion has but try to argue they're not great RPGs with any of the fans (0f 1 and 2 - jury's out on 3 and the verdict isn't looking good.)
Arguably STALKER was a statless RPG with "upgrades" by way of improved equipment.
Agreed. I set up NeoOffice for my dad to use on his Mac Mini and it's fine for what he uses it for. But in a school environment you'll run across hundreds of teachers who simply don't want to re-learn how to use a word-processor. Somebody saw all these "Enterprise X switched to opensource and saved a bundle" stories and decided to jump on the bandwagon without implementing a proper plan.
How will this cope with Vista and it's increased security? I'm all for this as an idea but it would be a shame if it takes a couple of years to get up and running but by then Vista is mainstream and, for whatever reason (FUD?), breaks compatibility with the packaging system.
A decent pizza stone won't get you the extra 100 or so degrees you need to cook a fresh pizza right. Usually a combination of heating the oven and pizza stone as hot as possible and then turning on the internal grill element for a while so it's hot too, then switch back to the oven only and cook the pizza in the top part of the oven.
Actually I swear by it. Gets very hot very quickly but it never does the centre of the pizza as much as the outside. OTOH the crust is spot on, imo. Old way as described above would take maybe 30-40 minutes to heat up the pizza stone and grill elements. New way 5 minutes. Still not perfect though.
"2) RIAA bribes the right people and that law gets reversed, which then costs our country its music-playing radio stations and the music industry loses the majority of its sales."
As somebody already pointed out the rest of the world gets by paying a fee for radio play. What this WILL mean is that you'll end up with the bland "selection" of national radio that other Western countries have. I was always surprised at how diverse the US music industry was but I didn't realise your radio stations got a free ride. Now it makes sense and I'm sure this would mean less exposure for niche artistes. Gotta love an industry that's trying to hammer nails in its own coffin.
So do you just wait a year, buy the game for a budget price, pay a one month sub fee and get access to a years worth of extra content? Play it for a couple of weeks and then put it back on the shelf.
I can't remember when or where I read it but I'm pretty sure I read a SF story in which people with incredibly long lifespans would just regularly get their memories blanked so they could re-invent themselves.
That's a totally exploitable system - Digg is already run by an apparently highly organised bunch of blog-spammers and this would just give them more power. The only way to counteract the effect is for "normal" Digg users to band together and effectively form another bloc that would be open to abuse. Digg is broken.
What's the demand like for Danish TV outside of Denmark? BBC makes a stack of money selling its shows abroad so allowing non-DRMed viewing online would hurt them in the pocket.
And the people asking for money back from their TV licenses - only a small percentage of license fee payers are going to use this (in the near future) so in effect almost everybody should be getting a refund. In practice though it doesn't work that way. I don't think the BBC should spend money on Soap Operas or reality TV or... or... a lot of stuff more heinous than Windows DRM.
But the price OEM system builders pay is far less than the OEM retail version or the retail upgrade version. ie OEMs aren't paying anything like $140 for a copy of the OS.
"Right now there is a push to force ISPs to use content filtering, in fact the Fed Govt has a tender out now to evaluate effectiveness or otherwise of filtering technology. "
They should be able to pick up something cheap out of China.
"I believe that there should be a law against purposely and maliciously attacking someone who didn't attack you first. This applies to verbal attacks as well as physical attacks."
But..but..but I don't want them taking the Daily Show off air!
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a replacement for biological skin. According to the article it has applications in, eg, aeronautical applications where maintaining a seal is critical. You wouldn't consider an advance in paint or similar coatings to be immediately applicable to building a super body so you shouldn't be getting too excited by the use of the term "skin".
To be honest, I thought Bloodrayne was okay for a low budget movie. Haven't seen the rest and have no intention, I'm just a sucker for vampires...
Back in the days of Prestel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel ) and Micronet I used to play the competitions they had. Prestel used a numbered pages system and competitions on it would charge, say, 20p per question with 10 questions so getting through to the last page with the prize claim would cost two quid or a bit more if you got a question or two wrong. I soon figured out that the prize claim page for this one company's games was almost always the same offset number from the initial question page number. Unfortunately my haul consisted of a lot of disposable cameras, sponges and money clips so the novelty soon wore off.
What would stop you setting up a computer in your shop right now with a barcode scanner attached to it. You bring what you want to buy up to the computer hit it with the barcode scanner and it automatically enters the details into the shops website. You complete the transaction by filling in your credit card details. Internet purchase, delivery choice: collected. No sales tax. Possible?
http://www.gbpvr.com/ does most of what MythTV does but for Windows PCs. I've used it with a PVR500 twin DVB-T tuner and it's almost flawless. And it's free though obviously donations are encouraged.
I looked at Knoppmyth months ago but they didn't recognise SATA hard drives during the autamatic installation at the time. If this has changed I'd be more inclined to try it again.
Who says an RPG needs stats anyway? The Gothics were relatively sandbox RPGs with an even more curtailed skillset than Oblivion has but try to argue they're not great RPGs with any of the fans (0f 1 and 2 - jury's out on 3 and the verdict isn't looking good.)
Arguably STALKER was a statless RPG with "upgrades" by way of improved equipment.
Agreed. I set up NeoOffice for my dad to use on his Mac Mini and it's fine for what he uses it for. But in a school environment you'll run across hundreds of teachers who simply don't want to re-learn how to use a word-processor. Somebody saw all these "Enterprise X switched to opensource and saved a bundle" stories and decided to jump on the bandwagon without implementing a proper plan.
How will this cope with Vista and it's increased security? I'm all for this as an idea but it would be a shame if it takes a couple of years to get up and running but by then Vista is mainstream and, for whatever reason (FUD?), breaks compatibility with the packaging system.
I've used one of these: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pizza-at-Home-Maker/dp/B00 0GH3QIU
Actually I swear by it. Gets very hot very quickly but it never does the centre of the pizza as much as the outside. OTOH the crust is spot on, imo. Old way as described above would take maybe 30-40 minutes to heat up the pizza stone and grill elements. New way 5 minutes. Still not perfect though.
There's a dog sidekick that's playable in MDK 2. A six-armed pistol-packing dog no less.
As somebody already pointed out the rest of the world gets by paying a fee for radio play. What this WILL mean is that you'll end up with the bland "selection" of national radio that other Western countries have. I was always surprised at how diverse the US music industry was but I didn't realise your radio stations got a free ride. Now it makes sense and I'm sure this would mean less exposure for niche artistes. Gotta love an industry that's trying to hammer nails in its own coffin.
The big difference being that stealing DVDs from a shop generally carries lower penalties than sharing a cracked ISO does.
Talking Malibu Stacey...
So do you just wait a year, buy the game for a budget price, pay a one month sub fee and get access to a years worth of extra content? Play it for a couple of weeks and then put it back on the shelf.
I can't remember when or where I read it but I'm pretty sure I read a SF story in which people with incredibly long lifespans would just regularly get their memories blanked so they could re-invent themselves.
Not for much longer with that attitude.
That's a totally exploitable system - Digg is already run by an apparently highly organised bunch of blog-spammers and this would just give them more power. The only way to counteract the effect is for "normal" Digg users to band together and effectively form another bloc that would be open to abuse. Digg is broken.
What's the demand like for Danish TV outside of Denmark? BBC makes a stack of money selling its shows abroad so allowing non-DRMed viewing online would hurt them in the pocket. And the people asking for money back from their TV licenses - only a small percentage of license fee payers are going to use this (in the near future) so in effect almost everybody should be getting a refund. In practice though it doesn't work that way. I don't think the BBC should spend money on Soap Operas or reality TV or... or... a lot of stuff more heinous than Windows DRM.
Jesus! You mean I'm going to need friends now? Those fascists at the **AAs have found my weakness...
But the price OEM system builders pay is far less than the OEM retail version or the retail upgrade version. ie OEMs aren't paying anything like $140 for a copy of the OS.
Careful - the monkeys may sue for defamation of character.
They should be able to pick up something cheap out of China.
But..but..but I don't want them taking the Daily Show off air!
But if Fallout 3 is based on the Oblivion engine then modders should be able to take the basic game and mod in all the dark humour from the original.