I generally buy games "behind the curve", after they've come down in price, and after enough time for the hype to wear off, and for it to become common knowledge whether the game is actually that awesome or not.
How would you perform all the functions needed in say, Super Mario World with a motion control system, while retaining the same level of responsiveness and control. You can't.
I guess someone here didn't play Super Mario Galaxy
And almost nothing of any significance in Super Mario Galaxy is motion controlled. In any situation where fast and precise reactions are required, control is achieved using the analog stick or buttons.
There are games where motion control works well, especially by tilting the controller - for example, I think Super Monkey Ball is much better on the Wii than on the Gamecube, because I think it's easier to achieve fine movement control. That's not to say that Super Mario Galaxy would be improved with the same control scheme, because fast reactions are more neceeary there; I can move the analog stick from one axis to the other, much faster than I can swing the whole controller round by 180 degrees.
Apple eventually dropped their lock-in DRM from the iTMS (but not until more than a year after some of their competitors, like Amazon),
Not really true.
Apple was the first legal download service to feature major-label music DRM-free. "iTunes +" was introduced with the EMI catalogue in May 2007. Amazon's MP3 store launched in September 2007, and it wasn't until 2008 that they got all the major labels on board.
Perhaps you are referring to April 2009, at which time DRM had been removed from the entire iTMS catalogue. Yes, there was a delay here (maybe it was Apple's fault, maybe the music companies were being awkward? We might never know) but your empasis of this milestone over the introducion of iTunes plus is misleading in the extreme. There is no question that Apple led the way with DRM-free downloads from significant artists. If it were not for their successful experiment with EMI, it is barely conceivable that the major record labels would have licensed DRM-free downloads to anybody else.
Perhaps they only install these at the entrances to the car park, where you expect everybody to be slowing down - the excess kinetic energy might as well be siphoned off somewhere useful rather than being wasted as heat in the brakes.
However, I agree with your analysis that the numbers, as presented, make no sense (and the picture with illustrates the article is only a few mm thick, so 238,000 crossings is probably a rather conservative estimate). Another article on the topic says "The kinetic road plates are expected to produce 30 kWh of green energy every hour" (so that would just be 30kW, then) but I can guarantee you that a supermarket is not going to get a quarter of a million visitors in an hour (or to put that another way, more than 60 every second).
It's all just meaningless posturing, and it takes attention away from anything which might actually be useful. Any journalist reporting this as a green initiative ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Yes, if there's one North American politician of the last decade who's been well-known for his verbal gaffes, the first name to leap to mind is of course none other than Joe Biden.
Don't confuse the recent "everything is DRM-free" move with a much earlier deal with EMI to offer most of their catalogue DRM-free. Albums were sold at the same price as before. That was available well before the Amazon store came online.
Yes, emusic was earlier, but a few people do occasionally want to buy major-label music...
... the USPS one of the safest systems in the world. It is one of the things that America does extremely well and even the European Post Systems are poor in comparison
In the past, Microsoft has settled fines by giving away the fine value in money-off vouchers for schools to buy cheaper copies of Windows (in areas where the schools had tended to use the competition's systems, naturally).
These workers should do the same thing. Print up a few dozen vouchers for $100 off a week's contracting rate.
Consider why it is not smart to modify your TCP/IP stack to be incompatible with the standard. You have the right to do so, but doing so will make it very difficult to communicate with others.
Bruce
Do you, then, advocate that protocol reference implementations should be supplied under a license which allows examination but prohibits modification of the source code?
My objection to the FSF's position is not so much a question of whether or not modification is a good idea, but that their rhetoric and actions are inconsistent and thus hypocritical.
GPL advocates generally it is a good, and necessary, freedom for people to be able to do things like recompile their software (e.g. a Linux kernel) modifying part of it, and perhaps distribute their modifications.
Yet it is apparently a bad thing for people to modify their Open Source software licenses, because of the number of different combinations which arise as a result. Indeed, the FSF copyright the text of their license, and do not allow modified versions to be distributed. The article asserts they were smart to do this.
Why is it "smart" to copyright text, but not smart (restrictive, proprietary, evil etc.) to copyright source code? Is the complexity of a software license really so much greater than the complexity of the Linux kernel?
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers (X) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (X) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
First the average payment was £18 (about $25), which is hardly unreasonable. Secondly the law explicitly allows for ISPs to make a charge covering the costs of data retrieval. If it wasn't for that, you'd get police forces on fishing expeditions requesting information on just about *everybody*.
You mean, the one where you have to hand your iPod in for service and they replace the battery, ensuring the materials in the old one can be properly recycled - as opposed to selling people new batteries and letting the old ones contribute its toxic elements to landfill?
Their main product is CrossOver - an easy-to-use installer and front-end for WINE (they also do a lot of the development on the WINE library itself and feed those updates back into the Open Source codebase).
Since I can't reach the site, I've no idea if this is the product they're actually giving away...
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, the standards of journalistic integrity are going down.
I generally buy games "behind the curve", after they've come down in price, and after enough time for the hype to wear off, and for it to become common knowledge whether the game is actually that awesome or not.
Oblig xkcd.
The cake may or not be a lie! (I wouldn't want to spoil the ending for you).
How would you perform all the functions needed in say, Super Mario World with a motion control system, while retaining the same level of responsiveness and control. You can't.
I guess someone here didn't play Super Mario Galaxy
And almost nothing of any significance in Super Mario Galaxy is motion controlled. In any situation where fast and precise reactions are required, control is achieved using the analog stick or buttons.
There are games where motion control works well, especially by tilting the controller - for example, I think Super Monkey Ball is much better on the Wii than on the Gamecube, because I think it's easier to achieve fine movement control. That's not to say that Super Mario Galaxy would be improved with the same control scheme, because fast reactions are more neceeary there; I can move the analog stick from one axis to the other, much faster than I can swing the whole controller round by 180 degrees.
relatively more programmer-friendly
[citation needed]
Oh come on now. Some tech news site updates its submissions link, and it gets a front page story? Really? Slow news day or what.
noncommercial use of patents is free.
[citation needed]
Don't miss Mitch Benn's song on the subject, also recorded for the BBC Watchdog programme.
Apple eventually dropped their lock-in DRM from the iTMS (but not until more than a year after some of their competitors, like Amazon),
Not really true.
Apple was the first legal download service to feature major-label music DRM-free. "iTunes +" was introduced with the EMI catalogue in May 2007. Amazon's MP3 store launched in September 2007, and it wasn't until 2008 that they got all the major labels on board.
Perhaps you are referring to April 2009, at which time DRM had been removed from the entire iTMS catalogue. Yes, there was a delay here (maybe it was Apple's fault, maybe the music companies were being awkward? We might never know) but your empasis of this milestone over the introducion of iTunes plus is misleading in the extreme. There is no question that Apple led the way with DRM-free downloads from significant artists. If it were not for their successful experiment with EMI, it is barely conceivable that the major record labels would have licensed DRM-free downloads to anybody else.
Perhaps they only install these at the entrances to the car park, where you expect everybody to be slowing down - the excess kinetic energy might as well be siphoned off somewhere useful rather than being wasted as heat in the brakes.
However, I agree with your analysis that the numbers, as presented, make no sense (and the picture with illustrates the article is only a few mm thick, so 238,000 crossings is probably a rather conservative estimate). Another article on the topic says "The kinetic road plates are expected to produce 30 kWh of green energy every hour" (so that would just be 30kW, then) but I can guarantee you that a supermarket is not going to get a quarter of a million visitors in an hour (or to put that another way, more than 60 every second).
It's all just meaningless posturing, and it takes attention away from anything which might actually be useful. Any journalist reporting this as a green initiative ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Yes, if there's one North American politician of the last decade who's been well-known for his verbal gaffes, the first name to leap to mind is of course none other than Joe Biden.
No - Amazon weren't first.
Don't confuse the recent "everything is DRM-free" move with a much earlier deal with EMI to offer most of their catalogue DRM-free. Albums were sold at the same price as before. That was available well before the Amazon store came online.
Yes, emusic was earlier, but a few people do occasionally want to buy major-label music...
... the USPS one of the safest systems in the world. It is one of the things that America does extremely well and even the European Post Systems are poor in comparison
[citation needed]
Please correct me if i'm wrong!!
You're wrong. You can upgrade individual tracks or albums.
That may be exactly why he uses it...
In the past, Microsoft has settled fines by giving away the fine value in money-off vouchers for schools to buy cheaper copies of Windows (in areas where the schools had tended to use the competition's systems, naturally).
These workers should do the same thing. Print up a few dozen vouchers for $100 off a week's contracting rate.
Consider why it is not smart to modify your TCP/IP stack to be incompatible with the standard. You have the right to do so, but doing so will make it very difficult to communicate with others.
Bruce
Do you, then, advocate that protocol reference implementations should be supplied under a license which allows examination but prohibits modification of the source code?
My objection to the FSF's position is not so much a question of whether or not modification is a good idea, but that their rhetoric and actions are inconsistent and thus hypocritical.
GPL advocates generally it is a good, and necessary, freedom for people to be able to do things like recompile their software (e.g. a Linux kernel) modifying part of it, and perhaps distribute their modifications.
Yet it is apparently a bad thing for people to modify their Open Source software licenses, because of the number of different combinations which arise as a result. Indeed, the FSF copyright the text of their license, and do not allow modified versions to be distributed. The article asserts they were smart to do this.
Why is it "smart" to copyright text, but not smart (restrictive, proprietary, evil etc.) to copyright source code? Is the complexity of a software license really so much greater than the complexity of the Linux kernel?
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
First the average payment was £18 (about $25), which is hardly unreasonable. Secondly the law explicitly allows for ISPs to make a charge covering the costs of data retrieval. If it wasn't for that, you'd get police forces on fishing expeditions requesting information on just about *everybody*.
I see you were referring to the pidgin English and not my post.
Quite.
Apparently, casual racism is funny in slashdot.
Battery replacement issue?
You mean, the one where you have to hand your iPod in for service and they replace the battery, ensuring the materials in the old one can be properly recycled - as opposed to selling people new batteries and letting the old ones contribute its toxic elements to landfill?
just look at all the $country's Got Talent spin-offs that were launched after the success of American Idol.
Ah yes, American Idol, 2002, spin-off of the popular British series, Pop Idol, 2001.
If America's biggest export is culture, then its biggest import is credit for other people's ideas.
Pun fail.
It's pronounced like ""wuster"".
Their main product is CrossOver - an easy-to-use installer and front-end for WINE (they also do a lot of the development on the WINE library itself and feed those updates back into the Open Source codebase).
Since I can't reach the site, I've no idea if this is the product they're actually giving away...