Excepting that the naked short sellign issue is being taken up by a considerably varied group of financial people here, not just the "Crackpots" you describe.
While it's far from total mainstream acceptance, the current state of wikipedia articles is abysmally onesided and biased toward the NSS=ok viewpoint, with all other viewpoints supressed, and anyone attempting to add such information banned as a sock of a certain user. And no, I am not that user, and have never edited such articles, despite being appalled by their complete lack of objectivity.
If a critical mass of users started doing this (and I see more than enough pissed off people _outside_ of the site to achieve this) then we could change the situation.
Nope, you'd be labeled as meat/sock/whateverpuppets and your contributions to the policies without sufficient article-space edits would be discounted, if you weren't outright banned, as part of an obvious campaign to sully wikipedia's "purity".
For the "sum of all human knowledge" they don't play well with outsiders who don't follow their very specific, and often times completely arbitrary, way of doing things. Expect many many hoops.
Has this Brodie dude even provided the court with evidence that his establishment isn't unsanitary-looking?
That's a matter of fact for a jury at trial. The question about who to sue and if the anonymity is protected or can be divulged, it a matter of law for a judge to determine prior to a jury being seated.
As long as he has a case that appears to be valid, a judge can't toss it out based on facts, only a jury can decide that (unless both parties allow for a bench trial, which obviously they can't since one hasn't been served yet).
Shouldn't this be directed not at the publisher, but at the retailer, though? If you get a bad dinner,you go to the restaurant and demand they give you a refund, do you go to the food wholesaler and demand a refund from them?
it just seems to be a perfect opportunity for any law students to actually practice law and earn some valuable experience on high profile cases.
This might actually be part of the problem. It would interfere with the long-standing internship/apprenticeship period which most law school students/graduates have to go through. Tradition, exploitation of cheap work, and a feeling of "this is what I had to do, so you do too" that all to many of us foist upon younger generations out of spite.
Althoug, really, I suspect more of it is the law school being hampered by overly cautious and spineless administrations.
I suggest instead that these individuals avail themselves of a ship of the line, or perhaps a man-o-war, with a crew of doughty british sailors instead. All this new fangled scientific mumbo-jumbo seems quite unlikely to dissuade these men of low moral fiber, but a peg-leg or two should do the trick, wot wot.
I haven't read, and don't have the time right now to read, the sources for that. But it should be noted, there's a rather significant faction of peta/anti factory farming people using wikipedia to push their pov. That whole movement is replete with people who will abuse, misuse or outright distort facts and studies to prove their point (even if they don't prove causation).
All survey respondents were asked whether they have ever engaged in any of 13 different political and civic activities. These included, for example, registering to vote, signing a petition, contacting a public official, publishing a letter to the editor, and whether they have ever been elected to a government office.
Among the 2,508 respondents, 164 say they have been elected to a government office at least once.
Not only was it a rather small size of elected officials, it was also completely voluntary test in the first place and entirely voluntary to answer the identifying questions.
The small sample size, and entirely opt-in nature of the test and questions lead me to believe these results mean very little (their results regarding colleges in the US is much more instructive, however).
In November, the city withdrew its demand that Reisinger not link to city government sites.
SO um, what's the issue?
The fact that a governmental agency attempted to suppress free speech in the first place? Perhaps that's not an issue, but even if they later dropped the demand, I still consider it an issue, and the public servants and elected officials responsible need to be held accountable.
Abuse of power, even if it's now stopped, is henious and demands investigation and the full light of day to be shined upon it, lest it occur again.
Fourth point, with 10 million subs do think Blizzard cares what Mythic does?
Why do people keep saying this? What planet do you live on where company executives and shareholders do not care about their revenues?
Complacency is not a laudable attribute for a company. If they do in fact think "we have 10 million subscribers, what do we care?" then they are setting themselves up for failure. They have other projects in the works that require funding, infrastructure costs, payroll costs, and shareholder expectations to uphold (regardless of them being publicly traded or not). If their revenues go down, they have to answer questions and run the risk of not having the funding to uphold their budget. Do you really think Blizzard doesn't care about that?
Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that 1 million people leave wow for warhammer and cancel their accounts (numbers completely made up). $10/month for each customer, that's $10 million/month gone, $120 million/year. Do you really think they're not going to notice or care about that? I can tell you anyone who's invested with an expectation of return upon that investment is going to care and ask a lot of uncomfortable questions. Wall street has destroyed companies for failing to meet projected earnings by $120 million over a year. I don't see how blizzard is magically immune to that because they make WoW and have 10 million subscribers currently.
Or to make a bad analogy: imagine telling your spouse you got docked 10% of your paycheck for the next year.
How many of these announcements are being made before, not at, blizzcon, and how they all line up to be made within days of Warhammer Online's release. While it's normal to try and steal the spotlight from a competitor, this does seem awfully reactionary by Blizzard's normal standards of pr.
I know it's probably quite shocking to many people here, but internet audience != majority of the american public. On a site like/. it's even much less so.
It is worth wondering if the at large public does consider these tactics a failure, or is even aware of them, or if they are if they even care. That's where this battle is to be fought, not amongst a (more) informed internet audience that is savvy to technological issues.
I don't know if it's just the same nostalgia that caught people up in the 70s with happy days, etc, or if it's just a complete lack of imagination in the gaming "journalism" crowd (or a combination of the two) but I'm sick of hearing about Atari, it's rise, and the reasons behind it's fall.
We shouldn't forget about the past, but that doesn't mean we need to read or see the same object lesson several times a year, for multiple years running.
Not like the ESA is really a major concern these days. The games industry is hardly the Cabalistic oligarchy that the recording industry is. It's still quite possible for small/independant studios to put out a good product that garners high ranking sales, without the help of arbitrarily inserted gatekeepers.
What was ESA's big claim to fame anyway? Oh yeah, E3. And look at how shockingly important that is these days...
Judging by the success of other quality games based on the Warhammer franchises, I'd say it's enough to at least establish them. Taking WoW off it's #1 podium is doubtful, but it certainly has the chance to be successful. And an mmo isn't like a marriage, just because you've got one to play now doesn't mean you aren't looking for something new. Or maybe it is just a marriage, depending on the individual situation...
The issue with hellgate was, in my opinion, that they used a strategy that is analogous to taking far too many ingredients and trying to make a stew out of it. It never blends into one satisfying concoction, what you get is something that tastes weird because there are too many competing flavors. You might run across the spot of excellent taste, but overall you're eating something your palate doesn't know how to process.
I didn't find hellgate to be annoyingly buggy (there were bugs, but none gamebreaking or unusaly from normal multiplayeronline games) and it wasn't highly polished. It was polished, but not enough. It just had way too many people trying to do way too many different things and a distributor that forced them to release before they were satisfied with the end product. It was a recipie for disaster, and a prime example of why you don't let the creative end run amok without any competant business oversight. The subscription model and it's lack of profitability proved that with crystal clarity.
I did watch the video, thanks. The smiling, when I watched, was just her mouth moving without the other nuances there. Just because it captures an actual person doesn't mean it captures all of the nuances of the person's expressions (smile lines are an important part of a smile/frown expression, for obvious reasons those aren't going to be part of motion capture).
Like I said though, the video on the linked article is low res youtube crap, there may be nuance i'm missing because of it and the crappy work monitor. Or it might not be there, hard to tell.
Add to that: the smiles are all just the mouth smiling. If you watch someone smile, it's a complete facial expression, not just the lips changing orientation to the horizontal axis. The eyes narrow and cant upward at the outside, cheeks change shape slightly due to muscle tensions, hell the hairline and ears even move slightly. This is all lacking.
Add to that, it's really hard to tell just how good the animation is on some crappy low-res youtube clip of 5 second sections of her. Give me a good 5 minute, high rez, large clip and it'll be much easier to tell just how good it is.
Ninth Circus... since that court is universally vilified and laughed at due to its complete rejection of the Constitution
Hogwash. The only people thinking that are Bushite neocons. I'm guessing this comes from the "most overturned court" fallacy that Bill O'Reilly and others keep harping on. That's only true from an absolute numbers case. The percentages aren't in favor of that assessment, as the 9th circuit in 2003-4 had a 77% average overturn rate, and 2004-5 an 84% overturn rate (as compared to average overturn rate of all circuits of 73% for both years).
They have a higher absolute number of appealed, and thus overturned, cases simply because they hear a vastly higher number of cases than any other circuit in the nation (due to the geographical size and population of the area the circuit covers). The 9th circuit in 2004 adjudicated 12,600 cases, compared with the next busiest (5th) that adjudicated 7,700 cases. The supreme court heard appeals on 19 and 7 cases, respectively. If they were that widely vilified, I'd certainly expect a considerably higher number of appeals of their cases heard by the supreme court, and yet that doesn't happen.
Oh, it's nothing new to this century at all. Back in the 70s there were clear issues of scoring bias that went along cold war political lines. It got bad enough that you could figure out who would score well, just based on the political affiliations of the judges.
For an even more egregious example (and possible karmic source for the gymnastic incident referenced in the article) look up the olympic boxing competition between Roy Jones Jr and Park Si-Hun in 1988.
At any rate, no system will ever make an objective scoring system out of something as subjective as interpreting the actions of an athlete. While winning a gold medal is nice, they're not really winning one based upon the objective skills of the sport, they are winning a gold medal at the olympic competition of impressing judges.
Slashdot Mirror
"Their mid-range also seems a bit ambitious - more like mid-range of new hardware for serious gamers"
Well the site's tagline is "Home of the hardcore gamer" so yeah, the specs on x-range are going to be different from other people's.
Excepting that the naked short sellign issue is being taken up by a considerably varied group of financial people here, not just the "Crackpots" you describe.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122885715615592401.html for one example.
While it's far from total mainstream acceptance, the current state of wikipedia articles is abysmally onesided and biased toward the NSS=ok viewpoint, with all other viewpoints supressed, and anyone attempting to add such information banned as a sock of a certain user. And no, I am not that user, and have never edited such articles, despite being appalled by their complete lack of objectivity.
If a critical mass of users started doing this (and I see more than enough pissed off people _outside_ of the site to achieve this) then we could change the situation.
Nope, you'd be labeled as meat/sock/whateverpuppets and your contributions to the policies without sufficient article-space edits would be discounted, if you weren't outright banned, as part of an obvious campaign to sully wikipedia's "purity".
For the "sum of all human knowledge" they don't play well with outsiders who don't follow their very specific, and often times completely arbitrary, way of doing things. Expect many many hoops.
Since when are items which give an experience bonus considered fluff?
Has this Brodie dude even provided the court with evidence that his establishment isn't unsanitary-looking?
That's a matter of fact for a jury at trial. The question about who to sue and if the anonymity is protected or can be divulged, it a matter of law for a judge to determine prior to a jury being seated.
As long as he has a case that appears to be valid, a judge can't toss it out based on facts, only a jury can decide that (unless both parties allow for a bench trial, which obviously they can't since one hasn't been served yet).
Shouldn't this be directed not at the publisher, but at the retailer, though? If you get a bad dinner,you go to the restaurant and demand they give you a refund, do you go to the food wholesaler and demand a refund from them?
it just seems to be a perfect opportunity for any law students to actually practice law and earn some valuable experience on high profile cases.
This might actually be part of the problem. It would interfere with the long-standing internship/apprenticeship period which most law school students/graduates have to go through. Tradition, exploitation of cheap work, and a feeling of "this is what I had to do, so you do too" that all to many of us foist upon younger generations out of spite.
Althoug, really, I suspect more of it is the law school being hampered by overly cautious and spineless administrations.
I suggest instead that these individuals avail themselves of a ship of the line, or perhaps a man-o-war, with a crew of doughty british sailors instead. All this new fangled scientific mumbo-jumbo seems quite unlikely to dissuade these men of low moral fiber, but a peg-leg or two should do the trick, wot wot.
I haven't read, and don't have the time right now to read, the sources for that. But it should be noted, there's a rather significant faction of peta/anti factory farming people using wikipedia to push their pov. That whole movement is replete with people who will abuse, misuse or outright distort facts and studies to prove their point (even if they don't prove causation).
All survey respondents were asked whether they have ever engaged in any of 13 different political and civic activities. These included, for example, registering to vote, signing a petition, contacting a public official, publishing a letter to the editor, and whether they have ever been elected to a government office. Among the 2,508 respondents, 164 say they have been elected to a government office at least once.
Not only was it a rather small size of elected officials, it was also completely voluntary test in the first place and entirely voluntary to answer the identifying questions.
The small sample size, and entirely opt-in nature of the test and questions lead me to believe these results mean very little (their results regarding colleges in the US is much more instructive, however).
In November, the city withdrew its demand that Reisinger not link to city government sites. SO um, what's the issue?
The fact that a governmental agency attempted to suppress free speech in the first place? Perhaps that's not an issue, but even if they later dropped the demand, I still consider it an issue, and the public servants and elected officials responsible need to be held accountable.
Abuse of power, even if it's now stopped, is henious and demands investigation and the full light of day to be shined upon it, lest it occur again.
Fourth point, with 10 million subs do think Blizzard cares what Mythic does?
Why do people keep saying this? What planet do you live on where company executives and shareholders do not care about their revenues?
Complacency is not a laudable attribute for a company. If they do in fact think "we have 10 million subscribers, what do we care?" then they are setting themselves up for failure. They have other projects in the works that require funding, infrastructure costs, payroll costs, and shareholder expectations to uphold (regardless of them being publicly traded or not). If their revenues go down, they have to answer questions and run the risk of not having the funding to uphold their budget. Do you really think Blizzard doesn't care about that?
Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that 1 million people leave wow for warhammer and cancel their accounts (numbers completely made up). $10/month for each customer, that's $10 million/month gone, $120 million/year. Do you really think they're not going to notice or care about that? I can tell you anyone who's invested with an expectation of return upon that investment is going to care and ask a lot of uncomfortable questions. Wall street has destroyed companies for failing to meet projected earnings by $120 million over a year. I don't see how blizzard is magically immune to that because they make WoW and have 10 million subscribers currently.
Or to make a bad analogy: imagine telling your spouse you got docked 10% of your paycheck for the next year.
How many of these announcements are being made before, not at, blizzcon, and how they all line up to be made within days of Warhammer Online's release. While it's normal to try and steal the spotlight from a competitor, this does seem awfully reactionary by Blizzard's normal standards of pr.
the internet circle of life continues.
At what point do the investors and/or advertisers get eaten by a lion? Please tell me at least one of them gets eaten by a lion...
I know it's probably quite shocking to many people here, but internet audience != majority of the american public. On a site like /. it's even much less so.
It is worth wondering if the at large public does consider these tactics a failure, or is even aware of them, or if they are if they even care. That's where this battle is to be fought, not amongst a (more) informed internet audience that is savvy to technological issues.
Thank you for saying this.
I don't know if it's just the same nostalgia that caught people up in the 70s with happy days, etc, or if it's just a complete lack of imagination in the gaming "journalism" crowd (or a combination of the two) but I'm sick of hearing about Atari, it's rise, and the reasons behind it's fall.
We shouldn't forget about the past, but that doesn't mean we need to read or see the same object lesson several times a year, for multiple years running.
Not like the ESA is really a major concern these days. The games industry is hardly the Cabalistic oligarchy that the recording industry is. It's still quite possible for small/independant studios to put out a good product that garners high ranking sales, without the help of arbitrarily inserted gatekeepers.
What was ESA's big claim to fame anyway? Oh yeah, E3. And look at how shockingly important that is these days...
Obligatory P-A: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/
Judging by the success of other quality games based on the Warhammer franchises, I'd say it's enough to at least establish them. Taking WoW off it's #1 podium is doubtful, but it certainly has the chance to be successful. And an mmo isn't like a marriage, just because you've got one to play now doesn't mean you aren't looking for something new. Or maybe it is just a marriage, depending on the individual situation...
meant to be delivered to people, and was not a computer-to-computer 'transmission.'
The failed point was that the communicaiton in question was from one person to another, and not from one computer to another.
The issue with hellgate was, in my opinion, that they used a strategy that is analogous to taking far too many ingredients and trying to make a stew out of it. It never blends into one satisfying concoction, what you get is something that tastes weird because there are too many competing flavors. You might run across the spot of excellent taste, but overall you're eating something your palate doesn't know how to process.
I didn't find hellgate to be annoyingly buggy (there were bugs, but none gamebreaking or unusaly from normal multiplayeronline games) and it wasn't highly polished. It was polished, but not enough. It just had way too many people trying to do way too many different things and a distributor that forced them to release before they were satisfied with the end product. It was a recipie for disaster, and a prime example of why you don't let the creative end run amok without any competant business oversight. The subscription model and it's lack of profitability proved that with crystal clarity.
I did watch the video, thanks. The smiling, when I watched, was just her mouth moving without the other nuances there. Just because it captures an actual person doesn't mean it captures all of the nuances of the person's expressions (smile lines are an important part of a smile/frown expression, for obvious reasons those aren't going to be part of motion capture).
Like I said though, the video on the linked article is low res youtube crap, there may be nuance i'm missing because of it and the crappy work monitor. Or it might not be there, hard to tell.
Add to that: the smiles are all just the mouth smiling. If you watch someone smile, it's a complete facial expression, not just the lips changing orientation to the horizontal axis. The eyes narrow and cant upward at the outside, cheeks change shape slightly due to muscle tensions, hell the hairline and ears even move slightly. This is all lacking.
Add to that, it's really hard to tell just how good the animation is on some crappy low-res youtube clip of 5 second sections of her. Give me a good 5 minute, high rez, large clip and it'll be much easier to tell just how good it is.
Ninth Circus... since that court is universally vilified and laughed at due to its complete rejection of the Constitution
Hogwash. The only people thinking that are Bushite neocons. I'm guessing this comes from the "most overturned court" fallacy that Bill O'Reilly and others keep harping on. That's only true from an absolute numbers case. The percentages aren't in favor of that assessment, as the 9th circuit in 2003-4 had a 77% average overturn rate, and 2004-5 an 84% overturn rate (as compared to average overturn rate of all circuits of 73% for both years).
They have a higher absolute number of appealed, and thus overturned, cases simply because they hear a vastly higher number of cases than any other circuit in the nation (due to the geographical size and population of the area the circuit covers). The 9th circuit in 2004 adjudicated 12,600 cases, compared with the next busiest (5th) that adjudicated 7,700 cases. The supreme court heard appeals on 19 and 7 cases, respectively. If they were that widely vilified, I'd certainly expect a considerably higher number of appeals of their cases heard by the supreme court, and yet that doesn't happen.
Oh, it's nothing new to this century at all. Back in the 70s there were clear issues of scoring bias that went along cold war political lines. It got bad enough that you could figure out who would score well, just based on the political affiliations of the judges.
For an even more egregious example (and possible karmic source for the gymnastic incident referenced in the article) look up the olympic boxing competition between Roy Jones Jr and Park Si-Hun in 1988.
At any rate, no system will ever make an objective scoring system out of something as subjective as interpreting the actions of an athlete. While winning a gold medal is nice, they're not really winning one based upon the objective skills of the sport, they are winning a gold medal at the olympic competition of impressing judges.