All jesting aside (yes the 360 does many functions too), does anyone else wonder if the console makers have strayed to far from the core purposes of the consoles themselves - to provide gaming entertainment?
Yes. Which is why Nintendo is kicking ass and taking names in the marketplace, while making more profits at it than either of their competitors ever have.
I'd write off the whole south that way. Any state south of the Mason-Dixon line is pretty well hopeless. Any student that's actually going to learn anything isn't going to learn it stuff in amongst the yokels, he's going to learn it on his own.
I'm not so sure about those sub-prime mortgages. Mostly because there are vast, vast forces aligned at keeping that from happening. One of the interesting phenomena about the ongoing situation is how it threatens to trigger a "readjustment" (and I'm using the term as a euphemism for "collapse") in the valuation of the US dollar. Despite Nixon's nuking of Bretton Woods in '71, the US dollar is still used as a reserve currency throughout the world. A revaluation of the dollar would cause a loss of untold trillions of (present day) dollars of value overnight (or call it untold metric tonnes of gold evaporating). Such an event might very well make the great depression look like a whimper. Which is why we saw governments around the world spend billions to buy up US dollars (basically any government sufficiently stable to do so, did.) in order to avert just such a disaster.
I see this situation as even more precarious than you do, because the minute a major power decides they don't need to keep funding the homes, SUV's and Big Macs in the United States, it's all going to go down the tubes. The USA is an incredible drain on the world economy. I'm terrified of the day that dries up, because it is not going to be pretty. What exactly happens when the USA's economy grinds to a screeching halt, with the only thing the USA has to its name is a few hundred ICBMs, with China being the major industrial superpower? I'm not really convinced anything has changed to keep such volatilities from erupting in the same way they did in the first half of the 20th century.
As I read it the GP was saying that if you don't do something to maintain metabolic levels (which is to say, add exercise) then the body will reduce its metabolic activity. So yes, you avoided that by adding a cardiovascular exercise regime (running). If you hadn't been running, you would have stopped losing weight.
Something else I have to add, is that as we've learned more Science-wise, the amount of things you can seriously write about has severely declined. Before about 1950, you could right seriously about the possibility of Psychic powers, and psionics, and many of the hard sci-fi greats of yore did so. Now? Pfft, trite and laughable is least of it. More and more stuff has been consigned to fantasy "magic" this way. Psionics, Faster than Light travel, time travel, the entire space opera genre. What does that leave? Stuff that's been beaten to death mostly. The pickings for original thought are pretty damn slim.
He writes what he wants, but the reason Neuromancer & Co. was amazing was because he took certain aspects of the current time and extrapolated them into an interesting future.
I think this is the problem. Look at where we are right now. Extrapolating elements of our present into an interesting future is something many authors have struggled with. Because, quite frankly, the era we're living in is pretty dystopian. For an example: Today Congress passed the "Protect America Act" which grants sweeping surveillance powers to the executive branch with no judicial or legislative oversight. George Orwell didn't know the half of it. How do you work with that? Who is most likely to be able to other throw the totalitarian regime recent US governments have turned the USA into? The Chinese? The other great totalitarian surveillance state?
I really disagree that there were as many issues pressing down on us in the '80's. Barring a Strangelove-esque Doomsday device, MAD was never going to really end it all. The worst issues facing the '80's were the ones that we were blissfully unaware of, or ignoring. Global Warming, Energy crisis in the next 50 years, etc. Worst case (realistic) scenario with the Cold War was the utter destruction of the major world power bases, which doesn't sound all that bad in hindsight.
In my opinion, the best long term extrapolation from our current situation is "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart, and its probably too optimistic.
Depending on what mood the court was in as to the interpration of what constitutes a derivitive work, fixing it would require at the very least open-source the steam client library or potentially all of steam.
Unbloody Likely! Not in any court in the USA or Europe! Now this is an example of Anti-GPL fearmongering. In the very worst case, doomsday scenario a judge might rule that: They had to stop distributing the software, immediately, and that they had to pay some quantity in damages to DOSBox developers.
That is all. The only way I can even imagine a judge threatening to order such a thing as the forced open sourcing of a piece of software, is if the offending company continued to distribute the software in direct violation of a Court Order. Even then I think it's about 100 times more likely for additional damages to be awarded.
There is no way that any corporation will ever be forced to open source their software in todays Corp-friendly world. Huge amounts of stuff would have to change before that would ever even be possible. It's just flat-out off the table.
Um, No. You need to go back and read TFA. The initial prognosis was very poor, however: he still a had a brain. A somewhat damaged and not completely functional brain, but a brain nonetheless. Terri Shiavo had a brain stem (sufficient for controlling heart rate and respiration, and that is all) and a big atrophied pile of goo. Note the difference. Prior to the treatment, this guy had short periods of true awareness and lucidity, including speech. Now, after treatment, he's getting better. Terri Shiavo, after years of intensive therapy, medical care, and experimental treatment never demonstrated so much as the merest flicker. Her behavior indicated she was brain dead, the X-rays indicated that she was brain dead, because her brain was gone, and the autopsy confirmed yet again that she had been brain dead for a long time.
There is a world of difference from helping someone who's brain works intermittently, and rebuilding someone who's brain has been reduced to a pool of snot.
Precisely. Can you imagine the disgust in a judges voice the first time he hears one of these, "You mean you're suing over the equivalent of sharing a song taped from radio?" Dismissal. With Prejudice.
Actually, that's a really good format. x264 with ogg audio in mkv, full support for multiple subtitle tracks. Quite found of that one. 'Cept its a touch leading edge and its taken awhile for the players to nail down their support for the containers. I wish the fansub community could decide the format wars, they often come up with stuff that's very user friendly.
It doesn't, but then exactly what makes most of these "web contracts" binding in any sense? For the most part they are intended to indemnify the company from charges of wrong-doing. I am making a leap here, but it is from "the main thrust of this contract is a group a conditions that no court will enforce" to "the contract is worthless." To reverse it a bit, what good is a contract to buy a kilo of Columbian Cocaine? What are you going to do if they don't follow through, sue them?
These "contracts" are mostly invalid in the first place. Conditions like "waving the right to sue" make them so. At least in the USA, you always have a right to sue, always. You may not win, but that's an entirely separate issue. A judge and/or jury is completely free to choose whether or not to take any such agreement into account or not. These are largely included as a psychological weapon, if you're dumb enough to think you can't sue, then you're less likely to.
The conditions cited in this article are, however, particularly asinine. What if a car dealership could change the terms of the sale any time they wanted after the sale, without your approval? How well do you think that would hold up?
You're right, partially, Mostly that the real inflationary catastrophe didn't start until 1971. Richard Nixon's unilateral destruction of Bretton Woods cut loose the dollar into free fall. Arguably he had no choice, had Keynes prevailed at Bretton Woods, such a move would have been unnecessary, but Harry Dexter White won, and as a result, the conference yielded heavy concessions for export/lender nations, a position which White apparently believed the USA would hold forever, when in fact, it didn't last 20 years. Keynes solution was far more egalitarian, and would, I believe, have proved more sustainable. The post WWII period up until the United States bankrupted itself in Vietnam was one of the most unprecedented periods of prosperity in the history of the world.
Damn straight. There's a reason there's an entire cottage industry built up around building clones of '65 Fender Deluxe Reverbs, or rebuilding the current Fender Reissues (The reissues having resistors with too low a wattage rating, causing them to blow over time, poor quality power transformers, and poor quality PCBs). That Amp shows up on so many famous albums it's just an industry standard. 22-Watts of pure tube goodness.
Died there unfortunately (at least, according to the original edit, not the original release). Beautiful Platinum Blonde girls from another planet dying in a nuclear explosion on a Jungle Venus make me a sad panda:(
There's being a charismatic fruit loop, and there's being a successful charismatic fruit loop. Do you really want me to compare the histories of the two men to show the difference? Let's just look at where they are now, Steve Jobs is CEO of Apple, a member of board of directors of Disney (formerly CEO of PIXAR), both companies that are very successful; Jean-Louis Gassee is CEO of Palm Source Inc. Job's weekend side project has been more successful than any company Gassee has been involved with, So, who wins?
On the other hand... Which sounds better through a truly high end Stereo system? Dolby Digital or DTS? Somebody with a pair of Klipschhorns, or high end electrostatics, etc?
Irrelevant. Until VHS rentals came along, and prices dropped, the biggest use for home video players was time shifting. People weren't running out to buy movies until they started to hit the $20-$30 level, for a device they already had, because they used it to tape their favorite shows. Nobody (which is to say, not enough) people cared about the cheaper movies on Laserdisc because nobody was going to buy the $1000+ player that couldn't tape their TV shows. Again, cool technologies, but non-starters given the markets of the day.
The whole article is a troll. It's a bunch of outrageous bullshit and specious claims.
1. Betamax vs. VHS - Betamax was technically superior in a few ways, but lost due to Sony arrogance and vendor lock-in strategies. Which we will see repeated down the line.
2. Laserdisc - actually a very cool technology. In terms of geeky cool factor, possibly only second to Capacitance Electronic Discs (a true Video LP whose needle read data by measuring changes in Capacitance in the grooves, also the last format designed by American Engineers). However, both were unable to do home recording, and prohibitively expensive.
3. 8-Track - Nobody gives a shit. LPs sounded better, and CDs were better than both.
4. HD-Audio - Again, for the most part, nobody gives a shit. DVD-Audio, while truly superior to CDs, had no market, and the 1-bit 1Mhz "Super-Audio CD" actually has worse dynamic range and fidelity than a correctly mastered 16-bit 44.1kHz Compact disc.
5. Minidisc - Sony blew another one. A somewhat cool technology ruined by Sony Lock-in/Lock-down now rendered completely irrelevant by FLASH memory, and shakey even in its day due to CD-Rs.
6. BEOS - A competitor in the overcrowded consumer OS market. The Execs tried to push Apple for waaaay more than they were worth, and the rest is history. A history of the triumphant return of Steve Jobs, and Apple riding OS X and the iPod to great success, making BEOS irrelevant.
7. DTS - the differences between DTS and DD are irrelevant except to Home Cinema Afficianados.
8. AtariST - Interesting machine, but nowhere near the technical Marvel of the Commodore Amiga. Another Footnote in history.
The article is bunch of recycled pap on a slow news day.
Picking on Nintendo is probably justified in this area, as they're likely to delay titles for somewhat ulterior motives. I'd be willing to bet that Twilight Princess was ready to ship as a Gamecube title as early as June '06 , or could have been, except that they shifted gears to make it a Wii launch title (and in my opinion, probably delayed it for that reason). However, Nintendo is also much more likely than other Companies to delay the release of a title in a condition that other companies would call "finished" in order to add that extra polish and make it "just right." They've done this in a lot of instances and it's paid off, producing some of the most beloved and classic titles in the whole industry.
Yikes. This is going to be a complex post. There are a number of problems that keep a second abiogenic origin of life from happening. One is that in the past 2.5 Billion years or so, the population of photosynthetic organisms has been sufficient to maintain significant amounts of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere, making it an oxidizing environment (oxidizing in this case referring to the "oxidation number" or positive charge on atoms and molecules). This has the consequence of causing complex molecules unprotected by the biochemistry of a cell to be subject to decomposition over time, in addition to the risk of consumption by other cells. It is therefore extremely unlikely for another abiogenesis event to occur.
It is also generally accepted by the Scientific Community that all life on earth today is descended from a common origin of life only a few hundred million years after the Earth's formation, for the reason you cite, as well as others. Not only does all life have DNA (or, at this point, is descended from a living thing which had DNA, which is how viruses are thought to have arisen, through evolution of progressively simplified parasitic bacteria) but the coding scheme used by DNA in all living things is the same (with a couple of relatively minor exceptions that are thought to be have evolved from the common code, Mammals coding for selenocysteine is one.) There are many other pieces of evidence. But anyway, none of this is to say that there weren't other, independent, competing "origins" of life in the very early days, only that it appears that none of those survived. It is possible that many completely independent lineages existed, but that any others must have been out competed by our own.
So basically, yes it appears that all life on earth has a common origin that occurred sometime 3+ billion years ago, and that the current oxygenated environment, in addition to competition from the existing life prevents another from occurring successfully. Which means that all life on Earth today is related.
Except the music is being broadcast at shite quality to begin with. Which pretty well makes it unlistenable anyway. 96kps is garbage. Why don't the indie labels get together and try to organize their own internet radio network? Or can't they? Is the law structured such that even if you're distributing music with 100% permission and endorsement by the owners, if you're doing it in a radio-like way you have to pay the RIAA or its local counterpart money? I wouldn't be surprised if they've rigged the system that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Which is why Nintendo is kicking ass and taking names in the marketplace, while making more profits at it than either of their competitors ever have.
I'd write off the whole south that way. Any state south of the Mason-Dixon line is pretty well hopeless. Any student that's actually going to learn anything isn't going to learn it stuff in amongst the yokels, he's going to learn it on his own.
I see this situation as even more precarious than you do, because the minute a major power decides they don't need to keep funding the homes, SUV's and Big Macs in the United States, it's all going to go down the tubes. The USA is an incredible drain on the world economy. I'm terrified of the day that dries up, because it is not going to be pretty. What exactly happens when the USA's economy grinds to a screeching halt, with the only thing the USA has to its name is a few hundred ICBMs, with China being the major industrial superpower? I'm not really convinced anything has changed to keep such volatilities from erupting in the same way they did in the first half of the 20th century.
As I read it the GP was saying that if you don't do something to maintain metabolic levels (which is to say, add exercise) then the body will reduce its metabolic activity. So yes, you avoided that by adding a cardiovascular exercise regime (running). If you hadn't been running, you would have stopped losing weight.
Something else I have to add, is that as we've learned more Science-wise, the amount of things you can seriously write about has severely declined. Before about 1950, you could right seriously about the possibility of Psychic powers, and psionics, and many of the hard sci-fi greats of yore did so. Now? Pfft, trite and laughable is least of it. More and more stuff has been consigned to fantasy "magic" this way. Psionics, Faster than Light travel, time travel, the entire space opera genre. What does that leave? Stuff that's been beaten to death mostly. The pickings for original thought are pretty damn slim.
I think this is the problem. Look at where we are right now. Extrapolating elements of our present into an interesting future is something many authors have struggled with. Because, quite frankly, the era we're living in is pretty dystopian. For an example: Today Congress passed the "Protect America Act" which grants sweeping surveillance powers to the executive branch with no judicial or legislative oversight. George Orwell didn't know the half of it. How do you work with that? Who is most likely to be able to other throw the totalitarian regime recent US governments have turned the USA into? The Chinese? The other great totalitarian surveillance state?
I really disagree that there were as many issues pressing down on us in the '80's. Barring a Strangelove-esque Doomsday device, MAD was never going to really end it all. The worst issues facing the '80's were the ones that we were blissfully unaware of, or ignoring. Global Warming, Energy crisis in the next 50 years, etc. Worst case (realistic) scenario with the Cold War was the utter destruction of the major world power bases, which doesn't sound all that bad in hindsight.
In my opinion, the best long term extrapolation from our current situation is "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart, and its probably too optimistic.
Unbloody Likely! Not in any court in the USA or Europe! Now this is an example of Anti-GPL fearmongering. In the very worst case, doomsday scenario a judge might rule that: They had to stop distributing the software, immediately, and that they had to pay some quantity in damages to DOSBox developers.
That is all. The only way I can even imagine a judge threatening to order such a thing as the forced open sourcing of a piece of software, is if the offending company continued to distribute the software in direct violation of a Court Order. Even then I think it's about 100 times more likely for additional damages to be awarded.
There is no way that any corporation will ever be forced to open source their software in todays Corp-friendly world. Huge amounts of stuff would have to change before that would ever even be possible. It's just flat-out off the table.
If real men drink beer, then who's drinking aged single-malt whiskeys?
There is a world of difference from helping someone who's brain works intermittently, and rebuilding someone who's brain has been reduced to a pool of snot.
Precisely. Can you imagine the disgust in a judges voice the first time he hears one of these, "You mean you're suing over the equivalent of sharing a song taped from radio?" Dismissal. With Prejudice.
Actually, that's a really good format. x264 with ogg audio in mkv, full support for multiple subtitle tracks. Quite found of that one. 'Cept its a touch leading edge and its taken awhile for the players to nail down their support for the containers. I wish the fansub community could decide the format wars, they often come up with stuff that's very user friendly.
Woops! You're right.
It doesn't, but then exactly what makes most of these "web contracts" binding in any sense? For the most part they are intended to indemnify the company from charges of wrong-doing. I am making a leap here, but it is from "the main thrust of this contract is a group a conditions that no court will enforce" to "the contract is worthless." To reverse it a bit, what good is a contract to buy a kilo of Columbian Cocaine? What are you going to do if they don't follow through, sue them?
The conditions cited in this article are, however, particularly asinine. What if a car dealership could change the terms of the sale any time they wanted after the sale, without your approval? How well do you think that would hold up?
You're right, partially, Mostly that the real inflationary catastrophe didn't start until 1971. Richard Nixon's unilateral destruction of Bretton Woods cut loose the dollar into free fall. Arguably he had no choice, had Keynes prevailed at Bretton Woods, such a move would have been unnecessary, but Harry Dexter White won, and as a result, the conference yielded heavy concessions for export/lender nations, a position which White apparently believed the USA would hold forever, when in fact, it didn't last 20 years. Keynes solution was far more egalitarian, and would, I believe, have proved more sustainable. The post WWII period up until the United States bankrupted itself in Vietnam was one of the most unprecedented periods of prosperity in the history of the world.
Damn straight. There's a reason there's an entire cottage industry built up around building clones of '65 Fender Deluxe Reverbs, or rebuilding the current Fender Reissues (The reissues having resistors with too low a wattage rating, causing them to blow over time, poor quality power transformers, and poor quality PCBs). That Amp shows up on so many famous albums it's just an industry standard. 22-Watts of pure tube goodness.
Personally, I prefer a knob that's connected directly to a Potentiometer for volume control, but that's just me.
Died there unfortunately (at least, according to the original edit, not the original release). Beautiful Platinum Blonde girls from another planet dying in a nuclear explosion on a Jungle Venus make me a sad panda :(
There's being a charismatic fruit loop, and there's being a successful charismatic fruit loop. Do you really want me to compare the histories of the two men to show the difference? Let's just look at where they are now, Steve Jobs is CEO of Apple, a member of board of directors of Disney (formerly CEO of PIXAR), both companies that are very successful; Jean-Louis Gassee is CEO of Palm Source Inc. Job's weekend side project has been more successful than any company Gassee has been involved with, So, who wins?
On the other hand... Which sounds better through a truly high end Stereo system? Dolby Digital or DTS? Somebody with a pair of Klipschhorns, or high end electrostatics, etc?
Irrelevant. Until VHS rentals came along, and prices dropped, the biggest use for home video players was time shifting. People weren't running out to buy movies until they started to hit the $20-$30 level, for a device they already had, because they used it to tape their favorite shows. Nobody (which is to say, not enough) people cared about the cheaper movies on Laserdisc because nobody was going to buy the $1000+ player that couldn't tape their TV shows. Again, cool technologies, but non-starters given the markets of the day.
1. Betamax vs. VHS - Betamax was technically superior in a few ways, but lost due to Sony arrogance and vendor lock-in strategies. Which we will see repeated down the line.
2. Laserdisc - actually a very cool technology. In terms of geeky cool factor, possibly only second to Capacitance Electronic Discs (a true Video LP whose needle read data by measuring changes in Capacitance in the grooves, also the last format designed by American Engineers). However, both were unable to do home recording, and prohibitively expensive.
3. 8-Track - Nobody gives a shit. LPs sounded better, and CDs were better than both.
4. HD-Audio - Again, for the most part, nobody gives a shit. DVD-Audio, while truly superior to CDs, had no market, and the 1-bit 1Mhz "Super-Audio CD" actually has worse dynamic range and fidelity than a correctly mastered 16-bit 44.1kHz Compact disc.
5. Minidisc - Sony blew another one. A somewhat cool technology ruined by Sony Lock-in/Lock-down now rendered completely irrelevant by FLASH memory, and shakey even in its day due to CD-Rs.
6. BEOS - A competitor in the overcrowded consumer OS market. The Execs tried to push Apple for waaaay more than they were worth, and the rest is history. A history of the triumphant return of Steve Jobs, and Apple riding OS X and the iPod to great success, making BEOS irrelevant.
7. DTS - the differences between DTS and DD are irrelevant except to Home Cinema Afficianados.
8. AtariST - Interesting machine, but nowhere near the technical Marvel of the Commodore Amiga. Another Footnote in history.
The article is bunch of recycled pap on a slow news day.
Picking on Nintendo is probably justified in this area, as they're likely to delay titles for somewhat ulterior motives. I'd be willing to bet that Twilight Princess was ready to ship as a Gamecube title as early as June '06 , or could have been, except that they shifted gears to make it a Wii launch title (and in my opinion, probably delayed it for that reason). However, Nintendo is also much more likely than other Companies to delay the release of a title in a condition that other companies would call "finished" in order to add that extra polish and make it "just right." They've done this in a lot of instances and it's paid off, producing some of the most beloved and classic titles in the whole industry.
It is also generally accepted by the Scientific Community that all life on earth today is descended from a common origin of life only a few hundred million years after the Earth's formation, for the reason you cite, as well as others. Not only does all life have DNA (or, at this point, is descended from a living thing which had DNA, which is how viruses are thought to have arisen, through evolution of progressively simplified parasitic bacteria) but the coding scheme used by DNA in all living things is the same (with a couple of relatively minor exceptions that are thought to be have evolved from the common code, Mammals coding for selenocysteine is one.) There are many other pieces of evidence. But anyway, none of this is to say that there weren't other, independent, competing "origins" of life in the very early days, only that it appears that none of those survived. It is possible that many completely independent lineages existed, but that any others must have been out competed by our own.
So basically, yes it appears that all life on earth has a common origin that occurred sometime 3+ billion years ago, and that the current oxygenated environment, in addition to competition from the existing life prevents another from occurring successfully. Which means that all life on Earth today is related.
Except the music is being broadcast at shite quality to begin with. Which pretty well makes it unlistenable anyway. 96kps is garbage. Why don't the indie labels get together and try to organize their own internet radio network? Or can't they? Is the law structured such that even if you're distributing music with 100% permission and endorsement by the owners, if you're doing it in a radio-like way you have to pay the RIAA or its local counterpart money? I wouldn't be surprised if they've rigged the system that way.