God, I so hope Nintendo mops the floor with the 360 and PS3 so the industry can get back to some semblance of innovation and gameplay. When will morons get sick of their damn FPS clones and crave a real game... do people even remember what a totally new and innovative game is like anymore? Hint: GTA:[insert city name], Doom[insert roman numeral], Madden[insert next year], etc. are NOT innovative!
You and me both - FPS and driving games are becoming so boring that you can literally feel the paint peel off of your eyelids with all the me-too games.
It's all about the fun and the story - and not adding realistic rain drop shadow effects with ray tracing chrome.
Just like the auto industry, it's going down the tubes. Even back when I was a SMOG, in the old days before the Steve Jackson raid, the trend lines were becoming obvious.
So, you can either ask yourself: what are we doing - and why? Or you can keep down the same path and then be surprised.
Look, I'll be honest - the future is games like Nintendogs and Sims: The Urbz - not FPS and race car and gangsta games. You either adapt or die.
So either choose to do a simple game design that's fun or a multi-market game that has multiple linkages - or go for the chrome spif and watch your industry go belly up.
Meanwhile I'll be playing Japanese games and Flash games, cause you've gone down the wrong road.
it's like the people who build on the stochastic mud flow plains around Mt. Rainier - when the mountain erupts - which it will, they will be buried under hundreds of feet of burning hot mud.
which is why it's great farmland - but lousy for residential property.
In late 2006 they will Install Poseidon Vista, which makes the entire pool searchable, have an "aqua" interface and tranparant water. A new filtersing system is also planned, called PoseidonFS, but will probably come with service pack 1.
It will also have tabbed swimming, allowing multiple swimmers to use one pool lane at the same time, at different depths, and will come complete with extra features like clogged filters.
Not very useful if the life isn't DNA-based.:) I.e., RNA genes and the RNA-world hypothesis for RNA-based life, nanobacteria (unknown mechanism - possibly DNA, possibly RNA, possibly strange self-replicating crystals, etc), self-catalytic protein hypercycles, and possibly other more esoteric forms of life.
Hence the assay I mentioned looking for the chemicals used to build RNA/DNA (altho I'd hate to try to do Crystallography on mars....)
It would seem that blocking China's IP block might in some cases cause collateral damage when it comes to accessing certain sites. While it is true that blocking the entire China IP block would get rid of a LOT of spam that comes from Chinese bullet-proof ISPs, there is also a side effect. Ordinary people who try to connect to a network from inside China would also be blocked as well, and this cause a lot of collateral damage in terms of the average Chinese web browsing population.
Wouldn't that encourage them to apply local pressure on their ISPs to fix the problem then?
well, I can't see the scientific world doing wholesale blocking of China, for example, in that many of the recent papers I've been reading in Biochemistry are from that country, including ones in the areas I've been working on - malaria.
But for the local newspaper in Tukwila, WA - this might not be a bad idea.
Mind you, when I travel - so far to France, Italy, the Caribbean, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand but not yet China or Japan - I do like to read the local newspaper back home online, so I can see this not being a good solution especially on the West Coast.
Since when did 'people' become a synonym for a corporation?
It's one of the strange things that happened in the USA around the 1930's - on the face of it, it has no basis in fact or nature, but that never stopped anyone.
No, blogging cannot get you sued, nor can owning and firing a gun.
You're confusing the following:
1. Anyone can sue you - it may be tossed out of court, you may win damages, but anyone can sue you who has standing with the court(s). Especially in America.
2. Owning and firing a gun is illegal in most city limits of America. Even if you eventually win the case, you can still be arrested and held for up to 72 hours without charges being filed, under many pretexts.
3. However, just because 1 and 2 are true doesn't mean you're not right in your basic premise that bloggers being sued for something another person posted is highly unlikely to ever successfully result in a negative ruling by the courts on the merits of the case.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.
OK, I'm going to go through these one by one.
First, small sample size is a problem. That's why you have error bars on your graphs - in fact, if you don't see the error bars, check the tables to see if the t size is big enough - many studies start with thousands of inputs to get only a handful of outputs - in biochemistry, you can have more than 10,000 PCRs of something made, only to result in 10-40 final structures in crystallography at the other end of the pipeline.
The study we're on is unusual in that it actually has sufficient numbers that the t sizes are big enough to ask many questions - but most have such small numbers that they could easily be wrong.
2. Poor study design - again, how you ask the question is important, as well as the conditions - so this may be true. I always check the holes in the logic as well as the basic logic - because those holes can lead to incorrect conclusions - and many popularized science articles don't bother checking for the holes in the logic. They do a quick summary saying "breast cancer is caused by too much salt in the diet" when the study really said "there is a high correlation among middle-aged women having first onset breast cancer if their diets are in the top range of salt intake" - but that could also mean they live in conditions where the high salt intake could be due to the other things in their environment that caused the breast cancer in the first place.
For example, you could say Romans got lead poisoning because they lived in cities, when it was actually the use of lead in their pipes, not the living in cities - although we don't know, as perhaps cities had lead particulates in food from airborne fallout from factories or burning certain things in their candles... you have to be careful.
3. Researcher bias - ok. Not going to argue that.
4. Selective reporting - see 2 for how this occurs.
But that doesn't mean a good high-quality peer reviewed scientific paper in a respected and well-juried paper is "inaccurate". There are a lot of journals out there, and different standards and quality levels.
It already did, but the first four beta tests ended with only scribbled notes and mass insanities and suicides amongst the developers and playtesters, so they had to start over.
I think you meant the process for patent filing in the US is:
1) Document the idea copiously. 2) Get the documentation notarized. 3) Send application (with $6K check) to USPTO 4) Ignore any and all prior art. 5)... 6) Profit!
As a Canadian, watching the suffocating growth in Intellectual Property rights in America, I get a recurring image of the epiphyte choking the life of that giant tree. One day what nurished American industry will disappear choked off by patents, maybe we won't even see it die.
It is sad, and when one compares it with other systems which aren't quite as insane, it becomes more obvious - my guess is most Americans have no idea this is happening or that most of the world does it in a different way.
Slashdot Mirror
God, I so hope Nintendo mops the floor with the 360 and PS3 so the industry can get back to some semblance of innovation and gameplay. When will morons get sick of their damn FPS clones and crave a real game... do people even remember what a totally new and innovative game is like anymore? Hint: GTA:[insert city name], Doom[insert roman numeral], Madden[insert next year], etc. are NOT innovative!
You and me both - FPS and driving games are becoming so boring that you can literally feel the paint peel off of your eyelids with all the me-too games.
It's all about the fun and the story - and not adding realistic rain drop shadow effects with ray tracing chrome.
With more and more chrome.
Just like the auto industry, it's going down the tubes. Even back when I was a SMOG, in the old days before the Steve Jackson raid, the trend lines were becoming obvious.
So, you can either ask yourself: what are we doing - and why? Or you can keep down the same path and then be surprised.
Look, I'll be honest - the future is games like Nintendogs and Sims: The Urbz - not FPS and race car and gangsta games. You either adapt or die.
So either choose to do a simple game design that's fun or a multi-market game that has multiple linkages - or go for the chrome spif and watch your industry go belly up.
Meanwhile I'll be playing Japanese games and Flash games, cause you've gone down the wrong road.
and let the silt build up as it always done.
problem solved.
it's like the people who build on the stochastic mud flow plains around Mt. Rainier - when the mountain erupts - which it will, they will be buried under hundreds of feet of burning hot mud.
which is why it's great farmland - but lousy for residential property.
We simply need to send people to Mars. :-)
You might want to set up some supplies of potable water, edible food, breathable atmosphere, energy stores, and some living quarters first.
Hell, why don't we take Rosetta Resolver along just for kicks so we can analyze the data on Mars!
...
I doubt they have enough server farms there.
Besides, since it takes days to work, I'm sure we can cope with the time delay from Mars
In late 2006 they will Install Poseidon Vista, which makes the entire pool searchable, have an "aqua" interface and tranparant water. A new filtersing system is also planned, called PoseidonFS, but will probably come with service pack 1.
It will also have tabbed swimming, allowing multiple swimmers to use one pool lane at the same time, at different depths, and will come complete with extra features like clogged filters.
where hundreds died of drowning.
Not very useful if the life isn't DNA-based. :) I.e., RNA genes and the RNA-world hypothesis for RNA-based life, nanobacteria (unknown mechanism - possibly DNA, possibly RNA, possibly strange self-replicating crystals, etc), self-catalytic protein hypercycles, and possibly other more esoteric forms of life.
....)
Hence the assay I mentioned looking for the chemicals used to build RNA/DNA (altho I'd hate to try to do Crystallography on mars
Great, but if they really want to find signs of life, they need a tricorder. :-)
... which might be a tad more useful, since they already have a portable assay onboard.
Or a portable DNA Microarray
not to mention other building blocks.
...
Looks like a useful mission.
Now if only they could include a robot penguin that hops on it
You forgot:
... so it must be obvious.
0) Come up with an obvious idea.
Yeah. But if it's a patent, you know it's almost always going to be something that could never be patented in Europe
Sigh. I remember when the US was in the Vanguard of ideas and creativity.
so the "alternative to Skype" market is already being filled by yahoo on my WinXP laptop at home.
Plus now I can phone tallgirlwithguitar and talk when she turns on her webcam. Even if she's in NYC and I'm in Seattle.
Who is going to use this? What demographic is this targetting? There's not a platform out there that supports IE but not FF.
...
Well, there is the Mac and Linux platforms
but there's always Opera for that.
with the added features of Firefox!
...
um, yeah.
Now if they'd just fix the music.yahoo.com so it works properly in Firefox, this might not actually be appealing
It would seem that blocking China's IP block might in some cases cause collateral damage when it comes to accessing certain sites. While it is true that blocking the entire China IP block would get rid of a LOT of spam that comes from Chinese bullet-proof ISPs, there is also a side effect. Ordinary people who try to connect to a network from inside China would also be blocked as well, and this cause a lot of collateral damage in terms of the average Chinese web browsing population.
Wouldn't that encourage them to apply local pressure on their ISPs to fix the problem then?
well, I can't see the scientific world doing wholesale blocking of China, for example, in that many of the recent papers I've been reading in Biochemistry are from that country, including ones in the areas I've been working on - malaria.
But for the local newspaper in Tukwila, WA - this might not be a bad idea.
Mind you, when I travel - so far to France, Italy, the Caribbean, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand but not yet China or Japan - I do like to read the local newspaper back home online, so I can see this not being a good solution especially on the West Coast.
do you perhaps mean China?
to kill Batman on the Moon.
Sorry, it just seems appropriate.
As to hopping, one would think this was more useful on the Moon than on Mars, as lunar gravity is much lower than martian gravity.
Since when did 'people'
become a synonym for
a corporation?
It's one of the strange things that happened in the USA around the 1930's - on the face of it, it has no basis in fact or nature, but that never stopped anyone.
Timely Warnings...Blogging Can Get You Sued!
No, blogging cannot get you sued, nor can owning and firing a gun.
You're confusing the following:
1. Anyone can sue you - it may be tossed out of court, you may win damages, but anyone can sue you who has standing with the court(s). Especially in America.
2. Owning and firing a gun is illegal in most city limits of America. Even if you eventually win the case, you can still be arrested and held for up to 72 hours without charges being filed, under many pretexts.
3. However, just because 1 and 2 are true doesn't mean you're not right in your basic premise that bloggers being sued for something another person posted is highly unlikely to ever successfully result in a negative ruling by the courts on the merits of the case.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.
... you have to be careful.
OK, I'm going to go through these one by one.
First, small sample size is a problem. That's why you have error bars on your graphs - in fact, if you don't see the error bars, check the tables to see if the t size is big enough - many studies start with thousands of inputs to get only a handful of outputs - in biochemistry, you can have more than 10,000 PCRs of something made, only to result in 10-40 final structures in crystallography at the other end of the pipeline.
The study we're on is unusual in that it actually has sufficient numbers that the t sizes are big enough to ask many questions - but most have such small numbers that they could easily be wrong.
2. Poor study design - again, how you ask the question is important, as well as the conditions - so this may be true. I always check the holes in the logic as well as the basic logic - because those holes can lead to incorrect conclusions - and many popularized science articles don't bother checking for the holes in the logic. They do a quick summary saying "breast cancer is caused by too much salt in the diet" when the study really said "there is a high correlation among middle-aged women having first onset breast cancer if their diets are in the top range of salt intake" - but that could also mean they live in conditions where the high salt intake could be due to the other things in their environment that caused the breast cancer in the first place.
For example, you could say Romans got lead poisoning because they lived in cities, when it was actually the use of lead in their pipes, not the living in cities - although we don't know, as perhaps cities had lead particulates in food from airborne fallout from factories or burning certain things in their candles
3. Researcher bias - ok. Not going to argue that.
4. Selective reporting - see 2 for how this occurs.
But that doesn't mean a good high-quality peer reviewed scientific paper in a respected and well-juried paper is "inaccurate". There are a lot of journals out there, and different standards and quality levels.
Call of Cthulhu... when is it really coming out?
It already did, but the first four beta tests ended with only scribbled notes and mass insanities and suicides amongst the developers and playtesters, so they had to start over.
The EU system.
I guess you forgot about Europe, huh?
I think you meant the process for patent filing in the US is:
...
1) Document the idea copiously.
2) Get the documentation notarized.
3) Send application (with $6K check) to USPTO
4) Ignore any and all prior art.
5)
6) Profit!
As a Canadian, watching the suffocating growth in Intellectual Property rights in America, I get a recurring image of the epiphyte choking the life of that giant tree. One day what nurished American industry will disappear choked off by patents, maybe we won't even see it die.
It is sad, and when one compares it with other systems which aren't quite as insane, it becomes more obvious - my guess is most Americans have no idea this is happening or that most of the world does it in a different way.