The contracts aren't technically required for cell phone service, and are not a 'setup fee'. In the US, most cell carriers subsidize the cost of the actual mobile phone that the customer carries around by 'rolling the cost' into the cost of service. So, you sign up for new service, and you get can a "$300" phone (I put it in quotes, because who knows what the actual price is the cell phone companies have to pay, and thus subsidize) for, say, $100 dollars, with the cell phone company providing a "$200" discount on the phone. The contract, then, is to get that subsidy.
The problems with this system are:
They generally don't 'pro-rate' the early termination fee, so you may have been paying for monthly service for a year, but the ETF is still $200 (instead of $100, allowing for the fact that you have already payed for service for a year).
As I alluded to earlier, since we don't know the real true cost of the phones, we don't know what the real subsidy is, which might be significantly less than the advertised value. This also means that if you choose to buy the phone outright, you are probably paying more for the phone than the cell phone company pays when you sign a contract.
The cost of service is the same whether you get the phone discount or buy the phone outright - so if you buy the phone outright, you are essentially being double-billed. Also, if you keep your phone more than 2 years, your cost of service does not go down after the subsidy has been 'recouped' by the phone companies.
Finally, in the US, most carriers won't let you 'bring your own phone' - you have to buy and use one of theirs, and if you switched carriers, you would still have to get a new phone. Even if they did let you use another phone, they would still be charging you the same rate, as in the previous point, so you are still screwed.
The mobile phone companies, it would seem, have everything figured out. Unfortunately, there is no chance the FCC will do anything about this arrangement, to provide fair treatment of customers, because the government makes too much money off of spectrum auctions for the licenses the mobile phone companies need for radio frequencies (I think each of the phone companies have spent 2-4 billion dollars on their licenses - they have to make that money back somehow, and turn a profit; the whole system of frequency auctions is, IMO, a corrupt collusion between government and the mobile operators to ensure that US consumers pay the highest price they can squeeze out of us).
I've given some thought to getting rid of my cell phone altogether when my current contract expires. But, honestly, just me cancelling my service wouldn't change anything. If I knew that several 10's of millions of other subscribers were going to do it too, in an organized boycott, I'd totally do it, though. Lacking that, I'm just going to do the next best thing - switch carriers when my contract expires, to one that provides slightly better terms to me.
I, personally, don't see any reason why they couldn't release Vista SP2 after the Windows 7 release. I mean, is there a law of the Universe that previous product updates cannot ever come out after a new product? Wasn't Windows XP SP3 released after Windows Vista? I believe it has been MS's policy to continue to release updates for versions of Windows for something like 5 years after their release, even after they've released new OS versions?
I should prelude this with a bit of info on my PC, to give some perspective. It's a Dell Inspiron laptop, so, in all fairness, it's not really a 'gaming PC'. It has a Core2Duo 2.0Ghz processor (I think the model number was T-7200), nVidia GForce Go 7200 video chipset, 1 Gig of RAM, and a 7200RPM hard drive (I payed extra for the faster HDD instead of going with the stock 5400RPM disk).
I think my system sits somewhere in the middle of PC's, performance-wise. I know there are systems that are much faster than mine, but also a lot of systems much slower.
Anyhow, I tried playing TF2 for awhile, but even with all the graphics settings turned down quite a lot, my computer just could not keep up with it for some reason. I play quite a lot of other 3D games on this laptop with no problems (or minimal problems). Since the most important attribute of an FPS is speed, I'm disappointed that TF2 doesn't scale down to middle-tier systems better.
I realized I left part of a sentence out in my previous post. It should have read. . ....trillion dollars of borrowed money, which the US Taxpayers (that is, you and I, if you live in the USA) will have to pay back in higher taxes for decades, to try to keep the economy. . .
I have to agree with the parent. At any time, this would probably be a bad idea, but particularly in a day and age when we are already in a situation where the government is planning to spend over a trillion dollars of borrowed money, which the US Taxpayers (that is, you and I, if you live in the USA), to try to keep the economy from descending into a second great depression, we cannot afford to spend any more money on stupid, unneccessary programs like this one.
All those 'inefficient' old cars will gradually leave the roads over the next decade of their own natural deaths, and will naturally be replaced by more modern, fuel-efficient vehicles. In the meantime, they provide perfectly fine transportation for people who need it. As at least one other poster in a different thread has mentioned, if you start a program like this, mostly all you will accomplish is getting a bunch of people going to junk yards, buying old junkers for $50, fixing them up just enough to barely run, then trading them into the government at a profit which is payed for by our tax dollars, further raising the costs of this program.
Please, write to your Senators and Representatives and oppose this hair-brained spending program.
In the big scheme of things, this won't matter too much. Why? This is only *one* website people - the "Presidential Inaugural Committee" website. There will be other, independent sources of streams. There will be what, dozens or hundreds of news organizations running cameras at the Inauguration? NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, CBC, BBC, Hulu.com, Youtube. You've got your pick of probably dozens of sources online to watch streams from the inauguration.
On the question of why disrupt the school to show an inauguration, I ask. . . Why not? Particularly the inauguration of a *new* president. The 2005 inauguration of Bush was no big deal simply because he was only continuing his Presidency. But, I would say the 2001 inauguration would have been a big enough deal to stop school and show the kids, because Bush was being *newly* installed as President.
The installment of a new president happens at most every 4 years, sometimes after 8 years (as in this case). Is it such a big disruption to our educational system to devote 1 hour every 4 or 8 years to showing the kids the installment of a new President? When I was in school, part of education was Civics, and Current Events. The installment of a new President certainly fits those conditions.
I think it's not unreasonable that our educational system should include having the students watch important Presidential speeches - inaugural speeches, State-of-the-Union Address (though that is always at night, so that's more of a homework assignment, or watch recorded clips the next day), and potentially one-off speeches of high significance (declarations of war, declarations of armistice/treaty/enemy surrender, response to attacks from terrorists or hostile states, etc).
On the issue of live vs. recorded - well, I suppose it could be viewed recorded, but why? Why not watch it live? Things like this typically have more significance to people when they are watching it live, when they feel like they are *part* of events, as opposed to viewing events after-the-fact.
Because, it appears, that the problem is that they only have enough bandwidth two support one or two copies of the stream. If you have computers in 15 different classrooms, and the teachers load up hulu.com (or cnn.com, msnbc.com, cspan.org, whatever) and play the video, this will result in 15 different copies of the stream being separately downloaded.
What they need is some sort of multicast-like solution - something where the stream is being downloaded only once. Since the Internet hasn't really adopted multicast (which is really the 'solution' for these types of problems), the next best thing is, as some people have suggested, some sort of 'proxy server', which goes and loads the video, over the T1, then all the classrooms stream the video from that proxy server over the LAN.
I wonder if VLC could be used to do such proxying (probably depends on the stream format - if it's a 'standard' format without DRM, VLC might be able to handle this)?
OOo is LGPL licenses. I believe that the terms of the GPL and LGPL do actually allow you to charge for the software - you simply cannot then require any further payment from end-users for their further copying. Quoting from the preamble of the LGPL 2.1: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)".
Now, these users might have some sort of consumer protection laws they could invoke if it wasn't clear that they were going to be billed for downloading OpenOffice. I really can't say - I'm no laywer, much less a German lawyer, but this is something I would definitely be trying to speak to an attorney, or a consumer advocacy group about, or, if Germany has an equivalent - to an Attorney General's office.
I don't think this 'memristor' is suitable, at least in its current incarnation, to create Solid-State hard drives. Why not? It only retains your info for several hours. So, that essentially limits it to use as RAM. But RAM shouldn't store data for several hours.
The distinction here is that, on the hard drive, the data is always encrypted, but in RAM, it must be decrypted. I don't mind the hard drive storing the *encrypted* data for years, but I don't want my memory storing decrypted data for hours after I shut off my computer.
Now, that said, I could see, possibly, one application for this technology - used as a very large, very high-speed 'cache' in an otherwise conventional hard drive. That is, instead of the computer transferring data directly to/from the HD platters, it would read the data and write changes to the cache, then the hard drive would synchronize any changes in the cache back to the platters. Would, no doubt, speed up games and databases tremendously having a 100 GB high-speed cache. The key here is, if you have encrypted data, it is always encrypted in this cache (since the cache is just part of the hard drive), while your RAM is of a more 'conventional' nature that loses its state a few seconds or minutes after shutdown. Heck, with this tech, if your computer loses power, if the power comes back on within an hour or two, the hard drive could finish writing changes from the semi-persistent cache to the disk before bootup, so you minimize data loss.
Well, it's not really an arena game, but it's great fun, it's free, and if you really want to, you can play a single map, which usually takes 20-30 mins (sometimes shorter, rarely longer).
It's based on the Q3 engine, and there are a lot of active servers, and some great mods (most of the mods don't change the gameplay a whole lot, but simply refine the game in a lot of ways that were missing in the stock release - there are, I believe, a few total conversion mods if that's your thing).
Instead of being about death-matching, the game is mostly about trying to achieve objectives, so it's not quite as much fun with only 2 or 4 players (I find the best matches are with 5-8 players per team; fewer than that, and the maps tend to be unbalanced towards the 'attacking' team [that is, it becomes too easy for the attackers, and with more players, the maps tend to be unbalanced towards the 'defending' team).
"But when played this way, gamers would not be able to save their progress".
Wait, I'm confused. Most games nowadays take anwhere from 5-200 hours to complete. If you can't save your progress when you play with this feature, how is this at all useful? It becomes little more than a demo to show you the first bit of the game, something games had in 1980 (if you didn't start the game, most games used to go into demo loops which would show you what the game was like).
You know, this is the first thing that crossed my mind too. I don't *want* my memory to 'remember' what's stored in it for hours. How is that a good thing?
"If they're going to use this, (some) people are going to want to have more secure operating systems that don't leak security data all over the place."
How do you design an O/S that doesn't load security data into RAM? How do you design an O/S that doesn't load your encrypted files into memory when you decrypt them to view or work on them?
AFAIK, with memory which holds state for hours, there's no real possible way to secure your data, if you load it, until the computer's been turned off for hours ( Can you maybe wipe it sooner if you cool the memory with a gas or liquid, since it sounds like this tech might be based on thermal changes?)
If your phone has a web browser, and you are truly free to go to any website, then nothing stops anyone from still using Google, even if it isn't the default.
Anyhow, this is just one more reason, among many, of why I'm glad I'm switching to T-Mo (though, to be fair, I'm not gonna get a smart phone or a data plan - I can't justify spending $60/mo just to surf the web on my phone, or $100/mo for an unlimited-everything plan, if Verizon has one, like Sprint's. That is just *too much money* to spend on a phone, unless you are using it for business purposes and really do depend on constant connectivity to make your livelyhood.
Partly, though, I'm confused about how anyone could possibly not know about the digital TV transition and not be prepared for it at this point? Every time I try to watch OTA broadcasts using my digital converter box, I'm constantly being annoyed by text overlays obscuring the programming I'm watching, with messages about the digital transition. I've seen one possible explanation.
Still, I do agree with the parent - why not *permanently* leave one analog channel for information about the fact that TV has switched to digital transmissions, and also use it for emergency programming (like evacuation and health-related notices, severe weather coverage, disaster-related instructions and info, etc)?
"I was also under the impression that under British law, early Beatles recordings are about to become public domain. .."
How does that work internationally? Can those same recordings still be under copyright in other nations (like the US)? Or, since the UK is the 'home' country of the Beatles, does their copyright term prevail internationally? Even if the recordings are still under copyright, in the US, but are public domain in the UK, can people in the US receive legal copies from someone in the UK, even though it would be illegal for them to further copy those works? I believe a fundamental principle of copyright law is that those receiving works don't need the right to make the copy, but rather the person/company that gives them the copy - leading to, I would think, an ability for someone in the US to be able to *receive* the legal copy from the UK?
. . . the problem is, no systems really seem to do truly relevant ads.
As an example. . . because I am a student, and work part time as well, I can almost never watch TV shows when they are broadcast, so I've been watching them on the Internet - I just find it far more convenient, and I don't have to spend $200+ on a DVR. Anyhow, the point is, I've been somewhat annoyed that, often, the sponsor of one of the shows (Heroes, or Chuck, I think; can't remember for sure) has been a feminine body products line. I'm a 30 year old, single guy. I don't need them myself, currently don't have a girlfriend, and if I did, I doubt I'd be buying such products for her (*maybe* as part of a birthday or Christmas gift basket, but I'm not even sure about that), and I think it might be a little weird to buy such products as gifts for my mother or sisters, so I would really rather watch ads, if I must watch ads at all, for other products, instead.
So that's a case where I would rather get relevant ads, since I have to watch the ads anyhow. The main problem seems to be that when advertisers promise you 'relevant' advertising, it rarely ever is.
I honestly have to wonder - they say that the new TV's will save about $18 per year. How much more expensive might these regulations make TVs in California? If I save $18/year, but the TV is $50 more expensive, then it takes about 3 years before I even break even. This is my problem, right now, with Toyata Prius and similar hybrid vehicles - they tend to be so much more expensive that I might as well buy a conventional car and just put the difference towards the extra gas I'll need.
My other problem with the idea of hybrids is that, I suspect, in the long term, the added efficiencies won't help much, because more people are going to drive (think about developing nations, where a lot more people drive now than they did 10 or 20 years ago, and they still have a lot of people who don't drive now, but probably will in the future). Plus, I suspect people will drive more miles if they use less gas per mile (I for one, would love to do more weekend road-trips, but the cost of gas makes me curb that, but if I had a more efficient vehicle, I would probably use the 'savings' to travel more), so the savings achieved through efficiency will, probably, disappear pretty quickly.
We can't, really, solve our energy problems, through increased efficiency, though efficiency isn't bad. Long term, we just need more energy. Or fewer people.
Now, I don't have a problem, per se, with monitoring what sex offenders do in public spaces (whether virtual or real), but the fact remains that this proposed measure (requiring people to provide account passwords to the government), per our current Constitution, would be an illegal statute. Even if it seems like a "good idea", the government *cannot* legally just decide to ignore the Constitution when it wants to do something, no matter how well intentioned or seemingly benign.
If the Constitution needs to be changed, it can be - that's what amendments are for, after all. But, the Constitution must first be so amended by the States before something like this, which some people think, even if a *super majority* thinks, is a good idea, can be put in place. The argument that sex offender recidivism is high does not give the government any legal basis to contravene the Constitution.
This is the same problem I have with all the gun control advocates. They *might* have good arguments for gun control, but the point is that, without amending the Constitution, there is no good legal basis for this.
How efficient does it have to be? I realize that incandescents are pretty inefficient, but is there a point where lights are 'efficient enough'? I mean, does it matter that a full-size fluorescent light gets 13 more Lm/W than LED lighting? What about the environmental/disposal aspects of the mercury used in Fluorescents - might it be worth giving up a relatively small efficiency gain, in order to get lights which are less toxic?
Also, there is the matter that people will always want to have the option of having small lamps which don't brightly illuminate an entire room - for those applications, your choices are LED, CFL or incandescent - full size fluorescents, obviously, aren't an option, in which case, it looks like LEDs have advantages over the CFLs (in terms of lifetime, efficiency, and toxicity).
NCSoft has Lineage and Lineage II which, though not very popular in the US, I believe are very popular in Korea (which is where NCSoft started). As the other poster in this thread commented, the City of Heroes/City of Villains game, as far as I know, is still quite popular and is making money. Sure, Tabula Rasa is being shut down, but where are you getting the idea that the whole company is going bankrupt?
If you look at the link to the actual patent, and begin reading the claims, this does not apply to the (original version of) Ultima Online, or to text muds, because the patent specifically describes a 3-dimensional graphical world as being part of the claims. UO is (or at least was, last time I played it around 2001 or 2002) 2-dimensional. Right about the time I was leaving, they introduced an expansion called Third-Dawn, which still didn't make the world truly 3D, but it did make player avatars and monsters 3D, IIRC.
EQ, as I recall, was true 3D (I only played a trial account for like 10 days once, so my memories are rather vague), so it might be a good candidate for prior art.
It should be noted that the patent does not appear to cover (I don't know for sure; I'm not a lawyer), the idea of a 3D MMO, per se, but rather a few necessary client rendering techniques (which, in reality, almost any 3D MMO would be likely to employ) for determining what other users' avatars should be displayed by the client. It appears the idea they are trying to patent is that, in a 3D world, when you turn the camera to look a given direction, you should only see some avatars, and not others (that is, only the ones in your field of view). Additionally, if there are a lot of avatars, this patent claims protection for the idea that the client can implement a maximum number of avatars to display, and to use the knowledge of the maximum number to display, combined with the position information, to determine some subset of the avatars to display (presumably the X nearest avatars, where X is the maximum number to display, though the patent doesn't specify this explicitly).
I'd be shocked if EQ and Meridian59 didn't both do these things several years before this patent app was filed.
I'd also like to point out, that the patent doesn't specify 'camera orientation' or 'client view orientation' (even though that appears to be what they are trying to cover), but rather 'avatar orientation' (which suggests to me that this patent would only apply to MMOGs where the camera orientation is locked to the avatar orientation). Based on my 3+ years of playing CoH, I can tell you that the CoH client doesn't determine which other avatars to show on screen based on the orientation of my avatar - I can spin the camera freely to point in any direction, even look completely backwards from the direction my avatar is facing, so I suspect that NCSoft could claim that as a defense, if they had to.
Also, I think they could, maybe, make a defense against claim 6 (I'm not sure though):
6. A method for enabling a plurality of users to interact in a virtual space, wherein each user has a computer associated therewith, wherein each computer has a client process associated therewith, wherein each client process has an avatar associated therewith, and wherein each client process is in communication with a server process, comprising:
(a) monitoring, by each client process, a position of the avatar associated with the client process;
(b) transmitting, by each client process to the server process, the position of the avatar associated with the client process;
(c) transmitting, by the server process to each client process, the positions of less than all of the avatars that are not associated with the client process; and
(d) determining from the positions transmitted in step (c), by each client process, a set of the avatars that are to be displayed.
Now, I could be wrong here, but I thought most client/server 3D game protocols do *not* have the clients transmit the position of the avatar to the server, which is part (b)? Don't the servers already know the position of the avatar, and the clients just send a vector, that is, a request to move a certain number of units in a particular direction, at which point the server calculates a new position from the original posti
Since I don't have time to read a book-size legal document, can someone explain to me - was the RIAA asking for that money for just having illegal copies of those tracks, or was that 'valuation' based on the premise that the user was giving illegal copies to other users through some sort of file-sharing app, so that the large fee is based on giving away x number of copies of each track?
I could, *maybe*, see an almost valid argument that if someone gave away 9k+ copies of each song, having damages in that amount.
However, I also think the RIAA is sort of short sighted about this filesharing thing, because I suspect a lot of people just use filesharing like they used to use radio - as a way to find new music, which, if they like the music, they may often go and purchase it later. Sure, some people will never pay, but I, for one, and most of my friends, actually want to support the musicians we like, so they will keep making more good music. The thing is, you want to listen to a track once or twice before paying for it, to decide if it's 'worth it'.
The article is, "The Gaming PC is dead". Everyone is reading this to mean, "PC Gaming is dead". But those are two completely different things.
A little quote directly from the article to clarify:
"I am not saying PC gaming is doomed, because it's not--far from it--but the PC with four GPUs, a 2-kilowatt power supply, 16 gigabytes of memory, and a stack of hard drives is all but distant memory, at least for the PC gamer."
I can't say I disagree with this guy. Not that *no one* will build super-high-end rigs, but just that, from the perspective of someone like a Dell or HP, the market for that type of super high end system is shrinking. Just like the world will never run *out* of oil (but it will run *low* on oil, at some point), there will always be some small market of high-end gamers, but at a certain point, when that market shrinks too much, it makes no sense for manufacturers or software developers to target that market.
What I read this guy to be saying is that the market for PC Gaming is 'mellowing out' in terms of specs. A lot of people who are PC gamers are increasingly buying a slightly-high end stock PC, and maybe supe-ing it up with a $150 video card, and a little extra ram for another $100, but there are no longer *enough* people willing to pay $1000+ dollars more than other PC buyers, to get that mega-rig, to keep alive the 'boutique' Gaming PC 'retail' industry (the people who do want the very high end rig are probably building it themselves from components).
He points out something which I think is pretty true - aside from certain titles, most PC game developers have been releasing games for the past few years which scale pretty well (with various graphics settings and such, so that you can get it to run decently on a lower end machine, or tweak it up on a higher-end box for a better visual experience). Because of this, users don't *need* a super-rig just to run the games they probably want to play. Even if the games *did* require higher-end PC's, a lot of consumers will just not buy/play those games, because they can no longer afford to buy a Thousand Dollar Game.
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The contracts aren't technically required for cell phone service, and are not a 'setup fee'. In the US, most cell carriers subsidize the cost of the actual mobile phone that the customer carries around by 'rolling the cost' into the cost of service. So, you sign up for new service, and you get can a "$300" phone (I put it in quotes, because who knows what the actual price is the cell phone companies have to pay, and thus subsidize) for, say, $100 dollars, with the cell phone company providing a "$200" discount on the phone. The contract, then, is to get that subsidy.
The problems with this system are:
The mobile phone companies, it would seem, have everything figured out. Unfortunately, there is no chance the FCC will do anything about this arrangement, to provide fair treatment of customers, because the government makes too much money off of spectrum auctions for the licenses the mobile phone companies need for radio frequencies (I think each of the phone companies have spent 2-4 billion dollars on their licenses - they have to make that money back somehow, and turn a profit; the whole system of frequency auctions is, IMO, a corrupt collusion between government and the mobile operators to ensure that US consumers pay the highest price they can squeeze out of us).
I've given some thought to getting rid of my cell phone altogether when my current contract expires. But, honestly, just me cancelling my service wouldn't change anything. If I knew that several 10's of millions of other subscribers were going to do it too, in an organized boycott, I'd totally do it, though. Lacking that, I'm just going to do the next best thing - switch carriers when my contract expires, to one that provides slightly better terms to me.
I, personally, don't see any reason why they couldn't release Vista SP2 after the Windows 7 release. I mean, is there a law of the Universe that previous product updates cannot ever come out after a new product? Wasn't Windows XP SP3 released after Windows Vista? I believe it has been MS's policy to continue to release updates for versions of Windows for something like 5 years after their release, even after they've released new OS versions?
I realized after submitting, I had put the model for the GPU wrong. It's a GForce Go 7900, not 7200.
I should prelude this with a bit of info on my PC, to give some perspective. It's a Dell Inspiron laptop, so, in all fairness, it's not really a 'gaming PC'. It has a Core2Duo 2.0Ghz processor (I think the model number was T-7200), nVidia GForce Go 7200 video chipset, 1 Gig of RAM, and a 7200RPM hard drive (I payed extra for the faster HDD instead of going with the stock 5400RPM disk).
I think my system sits somewhere in the middle of PC's, performance-wise. I know there are systems that are much faster than mine, but also a lot of systems much slower.
Anyhow, I tried playing TF2 for awhile, but even with all the graphics settings turned down quite a lot, my computer just could not keep up with it for some reason. I play quite a lot of other 3D games on this laptop with no problems (or minimal problems). Since the most important attribute of an FPS is speed, I'm disappointed that TF2 doesn't scale down to middle-tier systems better.
I realized I left part of a sentence out in my previous post. It should have read. . . ...trillion dollars of borrowed money, which the US Taxpayers (that is, you and I, if you live in the USA) will have to pay back in higher taxes for decades, to try to keep the economy. . .
I have to agree with the parent. At any time, this would probably be a bad idea, but particularly in a day and age when we are already in a situation where the government is planning to spend over a trillion dollars of borrowed money, which the US Taxpayers (that is, you and I, if you live in the USA), to try to keep the economy from descending into a second great depression, we cannot afford to spend any more money on stupid, unneccessary programs like this one.
All those 'inefficient' old cars will gradually leave the roads over the next decade of their own natural deaths, and will naturally be replaced by more modern, fuel-efficient vehicles. In the meantime, they provide perfectly fine transportation for people who need it. As at least one other poster in a different thread has mentioned, if you start a program like this, mostly all you will accomplish is getting a bunch of people going to junk yards, buying old junkers for $50, fixing them up just enough to barely run, then trading them into the government at a profit which is payed for by our tax dollars, further raising the costs of this program.
Please, write to your Senators and Representatives and oppose this hair-brained spending program.
In the big scheme of things, this won't matter too much. Why? This is only *one* website people - the "Presidential Inaugural Committee" website. There will be other, independent sources of streams. There will be what, dozens or hundreds of news organizations running cameras at the Inauguration? NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, CBC, BBC, Hulu.com, Youtube. You've got your pick of probably dozens of sources online to watch streams from the inauguration.
On the question of why disrupt the school to show an inauguration, I ask. . . Why not? Particularly the inauguration of a *new* president. The 2005 inauguration of Bush was no big deal simply because he was only continuing his Presidency. But, I would say the 2001 inauguration would have been a big enough deal to stop school and show the kids, because Bush was being *newly* installed as President.
The installment of a new president happens at most every 4 years, sometimes after 8 years (as in this case). Is it such a big disruption to our educational system to devote 1 hour every 4 or 8 years to showing the kids the installment of a new President? When I was in school, part of education was Civics, and Current Events. The installment of a new President certainly fits those conditions.
I think it's not unreasonable that our educational system should include having the students watch important Presidential speeches - inaugural speeches, State-of-the-Union Address (though that is always at night, so that's more of a homework assignment, or watch recorded clips the next day), and potentially one-off speeches of high significance (declarations of war, declarations of armistice/treaty/enemy surrender, response to attacks from terrorists or hostile states, etc).
On the issue of live vs. recorded - well, I suppose it could be viewed recorded, but why? Why not watch it live? Things like this typically have more significance to people when they are watching it live, when they feel like they are *part* of events, as opposed to viewing events after-the-fact.
Because, it appears, that the problem is that they only have enough bandwidth two support one or two copies of the stream. If you have computers in 15 different classrooms, and the teachers load up hulu.com (or cnn.com, msnbc.com, cspan.org, whatever) and play the video, this will result in 15 different copies of the stream being separately downloaded.
What they need is some sort of multicast-like solution - something where the stream is being downloaded only once. Since the Internet hasn't really adopted multicast (which is really the 'solution' for these types of problems), the next best thing is, as some people have suggested, some sort of 'proxy server', which goes and loads the video, over the T1, then all the classrooms stream the video from that proxy server over the LAN.
I wonder if VLC could be used to do such proxying (probably depends on the stream format - if it's a 'standard' format without DRM, VLC might be able to handle this)?
OOo is LGPL licenses. I believe that the terms of the GPL and LGPL do actually allow you to charge for the software - you simply cannot then require any further payment from end-users for their further copying. Quoting from the preamble of the LGPL 2.1: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)".
Now, these users might have some sort of consumer protection laws they could invoke if it wasn't clear that they were going to be billed for downloading OpenOffice. I really can't say - I'm no laywer, much less a German lawyer, but this is something I would definitely be trying to speak to an attorney, or a consumer advocacy group about, or, if Germany has an equivalent - to an Attorney General's office.
I don't think this 'memristor' is suitable, at least in its current incarnation, to create Solid-State hard drives. Why not? It only retains your info for several hours. So, that essentially limits it to use as RAM. But RAM shouldn't store data for several hours.
The distinction here is that, on the hard drive, the data is always encrypted, but in RAM, it must be decrypted. I don't mind the hard drive storing the *encrypted* data for years, but I don't want my memory storing decrypted data for hours after I shut off my computer.
Now, that said, I could see, possibly, one application for this technology - used as a very large, very high-speed 'cache' in an otherwise conventional hard drive. That is, instead of the computer transferring data directly to/from the HD platters, it would read the data and write changes to the cache, then the hard drive would synchronize any changes in the cache back to the platters. Would, no doubt, speed up games and databases tremendously having a 100 GB high-speed cache. The key here is, if you have encrypted data, it is always encrypted in this cache (since the cache is just part of the hard drive), while your RAM is of a more 'conventional' nature that loses its state a few seconds or minutes after shutdown. Heck, with this tech, if your computer loses power, if the power comes back on within an hour or two, the hard drive could finish writing changes from the semi-persistent cache to the disk before bootup, so you minimize data loss.
Well, it's not really an arena game, but it's great fun, it's free, and if you really want to, you can play a single map, which usually takes 20-30 mins (sometimes shorter, rarely longer).
It's based on the Q3 engine, and there are a lot of active servers, and some great mods (most of the mods don't change the gameplay a whole lot, but simply refine the game in a lot of ways that were missing in the stock release - there are, I believe, a few total conversion mods if that's your thing).
Instead of being about death-matching, the game is mostly about trying to achieve objectives, so it's not quite as much fun with only 2 or 4 players (I find the best matches are with 5-8 players per team; fewer than that, and the maps tend to be unbalanced towards the 'attacking' team [that is, it becomes too easy for the attackers, and with more players, the maps tend to be unbalanced towards the 'defending' team).
"But when played this way, gamers would not be able to save their progress".
Wait, I'm confused. Most games nowadays take anwhere from 5-200 hours to complete. If you can't save your progress when you play with this feature, how is this at all useful? It becomes little more than a demo to show you the first bit of the game, something games had in 1980 (if you didn't start the game, most games used to go into demo loops which would show you what the game was like).
You know, this is the first thing that crossed my mind too. I don't *want* my memory to 'remember' what's stored in it for hours. How is that a good thing?
"If they're going to use this, (some) people are going to want to have more secure operating systems that don't leak security data all over the place."
How do you design an O/S that doesn't load security data into RAM? How do you design an O/S that doesn't load your encrypted files into memory when you decrypt them to view or work on them?
AFAIK, with memory which holds state for hours, there's no real possible way to secure your data, if you load it, until the computer's been turned off for hours ( Can you maybe wipe it sooner if you cool the memory with a gas or liquid, since it sounds like this tech might be based on thermal changes?)
If your phone has a web browser, and you are truly free to go to any website, then nothing stops anyone from still using Google, even if it isn't the default.
Anyhow, this is just one more reason, among many, of why I'm glad I'm switching to T-Mo (though, to be fair, I'm not gonna get a smart phone or a data plan - I can't justify spending $60/mo just to surf the web on my phone, or $100/mo for an unlimited-everything plan, if Verizon has one, like Sprint's. That is just *too much money* to spend on a phone, unless you are using it for business purposes and really do depend on constant connectivity to make your livelyhood.
Well, they sort of are doing something like that.
Ars ran a story last week, FCC okays DTV "analog nightlight" rules. Unfortunately, it's only for 30 days - seems like it should be 90 or 180 days. Also, apparently, this doesn't apply to all markets, so I think the FCC is kind of messing up there.
Partly, though, I'm confused about how anyone could possibly not know about the digital TV transition and not be prepared for it at this point? Every time I try to watch OTA broadcasts using my digital converter box, I'm constantly being annoyed by text overlays obscuring the programming I'm watching, with messages about the digital transition. I've seen one possible explanation.
Still, I do agree with the parent - why not *permanently* leave one analog channel for information about the fact that TV has switched to digital transmissions, and also use it for emergency programming (like evacuation and health-related notices, severe weather coverage, disaster-related instructions and info, etc)?
"I was also under the impression that under British law, early Beatles recordings are about to become public domain. . ."
How does that work internationally? Can those same recordings still be under copyright in other nations (like the US)? Or, since the UK is the 'home' country of the Beatles, does their copyright term prevail internationally? Even if the recordings are still under copyright, in the US, but are public domain in the UK, can people in the US receive legal copies from someone in the UK, even though it would be illegal for them to further copy those works? I believe a fundamental principle of copyright law is that those receiving works don't need the right to make the copy, but rather the person/company that gives them the copy - leading to, I would think, an ability for someone in the US to be able to *receive* the legal copy from the UK?
. . . the problem is, no systems really seem to do truly relevant ads.
As an example. . . because I am a student, and work part time as well, I can almost never watch TV shows when they are broadcast, so I've been watching them on the Internet - I just find it far more convenient, and I don't have to spend $200+ on a DVR. Anyhow, the point is, I've been somewhat annoyed that, often, the sponsor of one of the shows (Heroes, or Chuck, I think; can't remember for sure) has been a feminine body products line. I'm a 30 year old, single guy. I don't need them myself, currently don't have a girlfriend, and if I did, I doubt I'd be buying such products for her (*maybe* as part of a birthday or Christmas gift basket, but I'm not even sure about that), and I think it might be a little weird to buy such products as gifts for my mother or sisters, so I would really rather watch ads, if I must watch ads at all, for other products, instead.
So that's a case where I would rather get relevant ads, since I have to watch the ads anyhow. The main problem seems to be that when advertisers promise you 'relevant' advertising, it rarely ever is.
I honestly have to wonder - they say that the new TV's will save about $18 per year. How much more expensive might these regulations make TVs in California? If I save $18/year, but the TV is $50 more expensive, then it takes about 3 years before I even break even. This is my problem, right now, with Toyata Prius and similar hybrid vehicles - they tend to be so much more expensive that I might as well buy a conventional car and just put the difference towards the extra gas I'll need.
My other problem with the idea of hybrids is that, I suspect, in the long term, the added efficiencies won't help much, because more people are going to drive (think about developing nations, where a lot more people drive now than they did 10 or 20 years ago, and they still have a lot of people who don't drive now, but probably will in the future). Plus, I suspect people will drive more miles if they use less gas per mile (I for one, would love to do more weekend road-trips, but the cost of gas makes me curb that, but if I had a more efficient vehicle, I would probably use the 'savings' to travel more), so the savings achieved through efficiency will, probably, disappear pretty quickly.
We can't, really, solve our energy problems, through increased efficiency, though efficiency isn't bad. Long term, we just need more energy. Or fewer people.
Now, I don't have a problem, per se, with monitoring what sex offenders do in public spaces (whether virtual or real), but the fact remains that this proposed measure (requiring people to provide account passwords to the government), per our current Constitution, would be an illegal statute. Even if it seems like a "good idea", the government *cannot* legally just decide to ignore the Constitution when it wants to do something, no matter how well intentioned or seemingly benign.
If the Constitution needs to be changed, it can be - that's what amendments are for, after all. But, the Constitution must first be so amended by the States before something like this, which some people think, even if a *super majority* thinks, is a good idea, can be put in place. The argument that sex offender recidivism is high does not give the government any legal basis to contravene the Constitution.
This is the same problem I have with all the gun control advocates. They *might* have good arguments for gun control, but the point is that, without amending the Constitution, there is no good legal basis for this.
How efficient does it have to be? I realize that incandescents are pretty inefficient, but is there a point where lights are 'efficient enough'? I mean, does it matter that a full-size fluorescent light gets 13 more Lm/W than LED lighting? What about the environmental/disposal aspects of the mercury used in Fluorescents - might it be worth giving up a relatively small efficiency gain, in order to get lights which are less toxic?
Also, there is the matter that people will always want to have the option of having small lamps which don't brightly illuminate an entire room - for those applications, your choices are LED, CFL or incandescent - full size fluorescents, obviously, aren't an option, in which case, it looks like LEDs have advantages over the CFLs (in terms of lifetime, efficiency, and toxicity).
NCSoft has Lineage and Lineage II which, though not very popular in the US, I believe are very popular in Korea (which is where NCSoft started). As the other poster in this thread commented, the City of Heroes/City of Villains game, as far as I know, is still quite popular and is making money. Sure, Tabula Rasa is being shut down, but where are you getting the idea that the whole company is going bankrupt?
If you look at the link to the actual patent, and begin reading the claims, this does not apply to the (original version of) Ultima Online, or to text muds, because the patent specifically describes a 3-dimensional graphical world as being part of the claims. UO is (or at least was, last time I played it around 2001 or 2002) 2-dimensional. Right about the time I was leaving, they introduced an expansion called Third-Dawn, which still didn't make the world truly 3D, but it did make player avatars and monsters 3D, IIRC.
EQ, as I recall, was true 3D (I only played a trial account for like 10 days once, so my memories are rather vague), so it might be a good candidate for prior art.
It should be noted that the patent does not appear to cover (I don't know for sure; I'm not a lawyer), the idea of a 3D MMO, per se, but rather a few necessary client rendering techniques (which, in reality, almost any 3D MMO would be likely to employ) for determining what other users' avatars should be displayed by the client. It appears the idea they are trying to patent is that, in a 3D world, when you turn the camera to look a given direction, you should only see some avatars, and not others (that is, only the ones in your field of view). Additionally, if there are a lot of avatars, this patent claims protection for the idea that the client can implement a maximum number of avatars to display, and to use the knowledge of the maximum number to display, combined with the position information, to determine some subset of the avatars to display (presumably the X nearest avatars, where X is the maximum number to display, though the patent doesn't specify this explicitly).
I'd be shocked if EQ and Meridian59 didn't both do these things several years before this patent app was filed.
I'd also like to point out, that the patent doesn't specify 'camera orientation' or 'client view orientation' (even though that appears to be what they are trying to cover), but rather 'avatar orientation' (which suggests to me that this patent would only apply to MMOGs where the camera orientation is locked to the avatar orientation). Based on my 3+ years of playing CoH, I can tell you that the CoH client doesn't determine which other avatars to show on screen based on the orientation of my avatar - I can spin the camera freely to point in any direction, even look completely backwards from the direction my avatar is facing, so I suspect that NCSoft could claim that as a defense, if they had to.
Also, I think they could, maybe, make a defense against claim 6 (I'm not sure though):
Now, I could be wrong here, but I thought most client/server 3D game protocols do *not* have the clients transmit the position of the avatar to the server, which is part (b)? Don't the servers already know the position of the avatar, and the clients just send a vector, that is, a request to move a certain number of units in a particular direction, at which point the server calculates a new position from the original posti
Since I don't have time to read a book-size legal document, can someone explain to me - was the RIAA asking for that money for just having illegal copies of those tracks, or was that 'valuation' based on the premise that the user was giving illegal copies to other users through some sort of file-sharing app, so that the large fee is based on giving away x number of copies of each track?
I could, *maybe*, see an almost valid argument that if someone gave away 9k+ copies of each song, having damages in that amount.
However, I also think the RIAA is sort of short sighted about this filesharing thing, because I suspect a lot of people just use filesharing like they used to use radio - as a way to find new music, which, if they like the music, they may often go and purchase it later. Sure, some people will never pay, but I, for one, and most of my friends, actually want to support the musicians we like, so they will keep making more good music. The thing is, you want to listen to a track once or twice before paying for it, to decide if it's 'worth it'.
The article is, "The Gaming PC is dead". Everyone is reading this to mean, "PC Gaming is dead". But those are two completely different things.
A little quote directly from the article to clarify:
"I am not saying PC gaming is doomed, because it's not--far from it--but the PC with four GPUs, a 2-kilowatt power supply, 16 gigabytes of memory, and a stack of hard drives is all but distant memory, at least for the PC gamer."
I can't say I disagree with this guy. Not that *no one* will build super-high-end rigs, but just that, from the perspective of someone like a Dell or HP, the market for that type of super high end system is shrinking. Just like the world will never run *out* of oil (but it will run *low* on oil, at some point), there will always be some small market of high-end gamers, but at a certain point, when that market shrinks too much, it makes no sense for manufacturers or software developers to target that market.
What I read this guy to be saying is that the market for PC Gaming is 'mellowing out' in terms of specs. A lot of people who are PC gamers are increasingly buying a slightly-high end stock PC, and maybe supe-ing it up with a $150 video card, and a little extra ram for another $100, but there are no longer *enough* people willing to pay $1000+ dollars more than other PC buyers, to get that mega-rig, to keep alive the 'boutique' Gaming PC 'retail' industry (the people who do want the very high end rig are probably building it themselves from components).
He points out something which I think is pretty true - aside from certain titles, most PC game developers have been releasing games for the past few years which scale pretty well (with various graphics settings and such, so that you can get it to run decently on a lower end machine, or tweak it up on a higher-end box for a better visual experience). Because of this, users don't *need* a super-rig just to run the games they probably want to play. Even if the games *did* require higher-end PC's, a lot of consumers will just not buy/play those games, because they can no longer afford to buy a Thousand Dollar Game.