Estimation in software development is something that takes a lot of time to easily nail down. There are a few decent models that you can use, but even with those the results can very by significant amounts. Generally, you just become naturally better with estimation as you gain experience. If you're interesting in improving your abilities, I'd suggest looking into taking a PSP course at school or finding a good program to work with in your spare time. It's slightly scary how quickly you can become better at estimation if you consciously think about it.
If it was only an internship, I would just up front with your manager. I'm sure that they took you on knowing that you have no real experience so I wouldn't consider it fair that they assume you'll have the insight of someone who's been in the industry for twenty years. You could also ask your employer for a reasonable estimate and determine if you think it's reasonable. If it turns out that it probably isn't reasonable, let your manager know that it's going to take longer than anticipated and let him or her know what problems you're running into. Eventually you'll both start to adjust to each other and the estimates he/she gives you and how long you actually think it will take you based on that estimate will improve.
As disappointing as that may sound, there aren't really any better methods. Any model that can be used for highly accurate predictions almost every time is likely so highly specialized to the people using it that it couldn't be applied elsewhere. But like almost everything else, you will get better at estimation with practice and experience.
If Apple really wanted to spend all that cash on something interesting, they could invest in building a super computer capable of simulating the human mind and configuring it to simulate Steve Jobs.
Never mind that it can't be done now. Give them ten years and tens of billions of dollars and they could probably make it work. Not only would they get to keep El Jobso at the helm, it would probably be one of the biggest advances in AI or computer science in general of all time.
I think that at least part of the reason we collectively accept this has a lot to do with the idea that these devices are generally obsolete are at least significantly out of date after five years. If refrigerators and bicycles were making the same kind of advances as these other products, most people honestly wouldn't care if they junked out in five years. If your fridge was doubling in performance every 18 months, wouldn't you want to get a new one every six years or so to take advantage of the cost savings?
We're already starting to reach a point where the common user probably isn't putting their system to full use. In another few years, the baseline desktop models will probably have more than enough computational power to satisfy non-power users. Businesses running computationally heavy software will still need more power, but mom and pop won't even be able to scratch the surface of their eight core, eight gig RAM system with just office apps and email. At that point I can see people buying a desktop with the intention that it last for ten years or more.
Of course this just shifts the battlefield to the netbook and cell phone segment where the performance gains are going to be more significant. Eventually the hardware will peak in this area as well and once again the market will find some new segment to rush after; probably some guy who figures out how to cram all of that functionality into a watch capable of projecting a 3D holograph which is used for a display. Then that'll be the new craze as no one really needs to upgrade their netbook to the new 32 core model with 16 TB of storage space.
When the pace of technology is moving so fast that something becomes obsolete after five years anyhow, most people won't really care if it doesn't last much longer. A few might, but they're probably not in the majority. Add in our societies tendency to go after the product with the least cost upfront (regardless of whether or not it's a POS that will have to be replaced soon after purchase.) and that we're so willing to purchase replacements is it really any surprise the businesses have reacted to what the market seems to demand?
I really have to agree with you that Moffat's episodes were generally better (Blink was easily my favorite episode since the series reboot.). The only thing that worries me is that Moffat generally did filler episodes, while Davies handled the overall story arcs for each season and always did a fairly good job of tying everything together. Moffat's singular efforts were significantly better, but I don't know if he'll be able to tie things together as well as Davies did.
I'd say you're pretty spot-on with your other assessment as well, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt first. Just because he has an emo look now, doens't necessarily mean he'll keep it for his role as the doctor. Either way, I think Tennant will be a hard act to follow.
Unfortunately, there are enough people with this point of view who will never be satisfied. It's almost akin to a conspiracy theory in that if things were made completely transparent and all the facts and evidence were laid out, some people would still maintain that a complete lack of any evidence of evilness or wrongdoing just proves that the organization is hiding something and really is evil.
Google probably isn't evil, but that doesn't mean that they're saints either. There's a pretty large gray area between the two where most people, companies, and organizations tend to operate. Some people, for whatever reason, tend to blur these shades of gray into either black or white. Then again, "Google does some things that I don't like or agree with, but on the whole I find them to be a pretty good company," doesn't generate as many comments or page hits.
If Microsoft really wanted to beat Firefox they'd just fork it and make their own version based off of it. Add a few default plugins to fight pop-ups and improve security and then they have something that's never really any better or worse than Firefox. Any time Firefox gets better, the new IE gets better at no cost to Microsoft. They can point the default search to their own search engine.
Why sink billions of dollars into a product that really doesn't get you anything when you can freely use a product that most people consider superior around these parts? Just re-skin the browser so that it looks like IE does and never have to worry about having a large team of developers on staff again. Make the FOSS fanatics do all your work for you while reaping all the benefit.
Since Microsoft doesn't make any money off of IE through direct sales, it makes almost perfect sense to just adopt some FOSS code, customize the look, and add a few defaults so that they can claim how it's better out of the box than the actual browser they're using.
"Very, very few people if any are able to completely avoid the public system. Groceries, utilities, emergency services, those things all require a maintained public street system for nearly all the work. So even those that theoretically don't drive on public roads are still benefiting from the ability to do so."
Any goods delivered on a public road system are delivered by vehicles driving on that road which require fuel to run which is in turn taxed. I suppose people like me freeload a bit when we walk a few blocks to the grocery store on the nice sidewalks and roads instead of driving a car which pay for road upkeep through fuel consumption, but I still have to drive to work and other places so they invariably get me in the end. Of course there might be a few people who use the public roadways without driving a car at all. My personal belief is that these people should get a free pass as they're choosing a means of conveyance that will keep them healthier without adding to the amount of pollution in a given area. I think that the small amount of money lost from these people is made up in other areas.
Gas tax works remarkably well for the most part and is probably one of most fair taxes that I could think of off of the top of my head. The only problem is that as we shift towards electric cars and hybrids we're still using the roads but not using the fuel. At that point it probably just makes more sense to have the state apply some other form of tax. A flat tax per vehicle per year works out well enough, but it does tend to punish those who don't use their vehicle as often. If they really wanted, they could just set up toll booths and collect funds that way as well.
The proposed solution seems nice, but I feel as though it's overly complex and would require significant cost to implement at this point; never mind the potential for abuse.
Here's an article from earlier this year that explains a lot of the problems. The article interviews a tester who worked at Microsoft and had some good first hand knowledge of what went wrong.
I have no idea whether or not this information is actually accurate, but I found it interesting none-the-less.
While watching an episode of Top Gear where Jeremy Clarkson was in Japan driving a car, he mentioned that photographs taken by speed cameras were only valid if your face could be identified from the picture. He had a paper cutout of another person's face that he would hold over his own whenever passing by a camera so that he could not be given a ticket.
I'm sure that this was mostly for comedic effect, but if true, doesn't something like this make speed cameras completely pointless?
I've also read a few stories where those who especially hate speed cameras will obscure its vision in some manner so that it cannot take accurate pictures or any pictures at all. Assuming that the rate of this mischief is high enough and there are enough other methods available to circumvent the accuracy of these cameras, is it really worthwhile to use them?
Whether it's morally right or not is completely irrelevant because there's no way to stop it. People will continue to place content for which Warner holds the copyright on YouTube, and Warner will have to spend money to have people check for that content and have it removed. Even if they do have marginal success with removing the content from YouTube it will only pop up on other video websites.
Some of these websites will not fall under the jurisdiction of the United States and can politely tell Warner to piss off. At that point they're completely screwed and at best they can whine to the government in which the website's servers are located and hope that the that country's government actually gives a damn. They probably won't.
If I really want to find some content it's not difficult at all. For example, pick an arbitrary popular television show and I can find three websites that will have the most recent episode of that show within a hour or so of its broadcast.
There's no way to stop this at all. For middle men, they should be damned glad to take whatever they can get and start investing it in alternative methods of generating a profit because their current business model is screwed. It's only a matter of time before it completely fails and something else takes its place. If they're interested in existing in the next twenty years, they should definitely look towards shifting their business strategy towards something useful instead of pissing money away trying to fight something that's impossible to stop.
"Famous Monsters of Filmland ceased publication in 1983, but returned a decade later with Ray Ferry as publisher and Ackerman as editor. Ackerman, however, reportedly had a falling out with Ferry and left the magazine. Years of litigation followed. In 2000, after a civil trial, Ackerman won a trademark infringement and breach-of-contract lawsuit against Ferry, though he said a year later that he had not yet collected a penny of the judgment.
In recent decades, according to a 2003 Times story, Ackerman slowly sold pieces of his massive collection in order to survive. Because of health problems and his still-unresolved legal battle, he put up all but about 100 of his favorite objects for sale in 2002.
The same year, he moved out of the Ackermansion and into a bungalow in the flats of Los Feliz. But he continued to make what was left of his collection available for fans to view on Saturday mornings."
It appears as though he was also involved in a legal battle as well which the article seems to imply he never received the money owed to him. I wonder if that was at all costly. There's also no mention of him actually selling his house either and the article's statement that people could still view what remained of his collection leads me to believe that he still owns the house. The article also mentions that his collection consisted of some 300,000 objects. I have no way of knowing how valuable any of those objects is on average or how valuable the 100 or so he sold were, but it seems that the vast majority of his collection is still intact. All of this leads me to assume he was still in possession of a considerable amount of wealth.
Of course don't let this get in the way of taking a swipe at the American healthcare industry.
Where are they going to gain back the market share from?
Although it's slow, Linux and OS X are becoming more widespread. It'll probably be a long while until either tears out a significant portion of the market, but they're still growing. There isn't a recent version of IE for either of these operating systems and it's unlikely that there will be any time soon.
The people who use Firefox on Windows are likely to continue to do so unless Microsoft releases a must-have feature that isn't implemented in any other browser. Playing catch-up isn't enough to get people to switch back.
The only thing that it's likely to accomplish is to slow the exodus away from Explorer. I don't think I've seen anyone who's used Firefox, Opera, or some other non-IE browser talk about switching back to IE. Some people might download a new version to try it out, but I highly doubt that they'll stick with it. Even if these people install a new version of Windows, they'll likely install their favorite browser instead of just sticking with IE.
It's not as though I expect IE to disappear overnight, but I don't expect it to pick up any significant amount of lost ground. It's just going to continue to slowly hemorrhage market share to competing browsers. There's no going back. It's only about stopping the bleeding.
There are a lot of people, like you, who want more depth from games, but I don't feel as though we're the majority.
It's the people who play the beefed up, run-and-gun, action FPS games that dominate the market. Gears of War 2 has already sold more copies on the Xbox 360 in its first week than Bioshock has sold in its lifetime on the Xbox 360.
It's the same way with films as well. The big studio action film is generally going to do better than the well-made independent film.
Maybe more people in general are just attracted to that type of content and we're going to have to live with everyone proclaiming how great a few games are that we would view as rather mediocre. Find a reviewer who shares your opinion and stick to that for opinions or first impressions of upcoming games.
I don't think the current rating system which just lumps things into categories like 'T' and 'M' work all that well. Take for instance, the hypothetical game "Bert and Ernie's Fucking Amazing Adventure!" where characters perform no violent actions at all and there is no sexual content in the game. The only catch is that every other word is the foulest profanity known to man. The game will probably be rated 'M' simply due to the language content, but being completely devoid of sexual or violent content, it's still fine for a child to play assuming you don't care if they pick up any fowl language.
Why not rate games based on a few categories: Violence, Sex, Language, etc. Each category is given a score where a higher score indicates more objectionable content. I think that this gives consumers looking at the box a better understanding of what the game's content is like without actually lumping it into some other person's idea of "Mature." This would also go a long way towards stopping games that are labeled "Adults Only" from essentially being banned from store shelves.
If you actually define the ratings fairly well you really don't need an ERSB as companies can actually determine where the ratings should be at themselves. It will probably never happen, but it's just another solution that's considerably better than the ERSB and all the incompetence and idiocy that comes along with it.
Lego can continue to do just as well, even without government help. In a free market consumers are able to choose what they will and what they won't buy. Occasionally I'll be able to find a product at one store for less, but will do business elsewhere simply because another company has better customer support. The same can be said with product quality as well.
If people want cheap, Lego knockoffs then they can buy them. They'll get exactly what they pay for though. You're entirely right that Lego doesn't deserve to be in business if they can't complete, but as long as they can offer quality, or something else that the competition can't, they'll remain in business. The margins might be tighter, but that's what competition does. Hopefully it will drive Lego to find methods to produce their product at the same quality while reducing their cost.
It seems like any time a company gets a free pass to rest on their laurels and past successes, they fail to produce anything new or truly useful and generally end up spending their money keeping others from doing just that.
The only problem with Lego is that their product may be too good. I probably won't need to buy my children very many Lego sets simply because they'll be able to use all of the ones I had as a child because they'll still work just as well now as they did then.
I'm not claiming that I didn't grow up watching TV, or even that there are very many people out there like that, but what about people who didn't watch a lot of TV growing up? Is it related to the environment in which we spend the most time? What I'm wondering is whether or not reading a lot of books would cause black and white dreams simply because the black text on a white background is similar to black and white television.
Ethical issues aside, can we raise some children in an environment largely deprived of green and see if that affects their dreams? It would probably be interesting to know, but I'm not sure how much it would further our understanding of the human mind.
If they eventually do something illegal they'll end up in hot water. Go after them for emotional distress for all the harassment and milk the CoS for a few million dollars of these fools' money. It'll be a long legal struggle and probably annoying as hell, but the odds are a few idiots from the CoS will harass you during the trial and make it all the worse for themselves. It might also reach the national spotlight and start some kind of public outcry against the CoS.
I'd be inclined to believe this if there were any other indications that such a problem had occurred. Every other game I have runs perfectly fine whether it's for a few minutes or for several hour marathon sessions. The nature of the problem also makes it highly unlikely that it has anything to do with a graphics card problem either.
I know that you were only trying to be helpful, but you're advice has been about as useful as EA's customer support, which is to say, "not at all." There's apparently a software bug buried deep within the bowels of the code. At some point in the game something is being set that latter causes problems with the game. I've given EA as much information as I can about the nature of the error messages, what I was doing at the time of the error, system specifications, and everything thing else that could be useful in diagnosing the problem. They still haven't been able to provide a working fix.
I don't think that it's as different as you think.
We don't have full-blown universal healthcare, but we do have Medicaid which helps provide some assistance for low-income families. Public schools are funded through tax dollars. A lot of it comes from local property taxes but there still is some federal and state money. A lot of universities in the US also receive federal or state tax dollars. Students are also able to receive subsidized government loans which accumulate no interest at all while you're in school and generally have a low interest rate. PBS is a television station that receives partial public funding and also generates a lot of its other income from viewer contributions. Individual states have varying employment laws, but I'm not sure to what degree and individual state matches European standards or laws.
Iowa, for example, may not be much like a European country, but California, on the other hand, may be very similar. Personally, I believe that if the federal government were less powerful, individual states would have more freeway in implementing more social programs within their own state. I'm not entirely sure why the state of Massachusetts doesn't just implement their own state-wide universal healthcare. If it works as well as everyone in favor of it says is does, then other states will eventually adopt it as well.
Or they could just stay on the legal side of the line. I know a guy who protested outside of a scientology center and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing illegal about that. You could go around handing out flyers explaining to people who you view Scientology as dangerous and still not get arrested. Encourage televised debates about it in a public forum and take it to them there.
You don't need to try and not get caught if you're not doing anything illegal to start with. If the CoS tries to get you arrested for peaceful protesting they'll be the ones that end up looking like assholes.
Pft... I'd actually like to get Spore working before before I get any expansion. I bought the game and it played fine for three days without a hitch and then decided to give up on life and refuses to run for long before running into issues and crashing. EA's customer support has been dreadful and haven't even come close to a working resolution. I haven't played the game in over a month now and even though it wasn't the most enjoyable experience I managed to have a decent time with it. I'll probably never bother with it again.
I can't foresee myself picking up any EA games in the future, even if it means missing out on some good titles. I might be tempted to pick up used copies of the console versions. It's probably the first time I've actually gone out of my way to buy used simply to deprive a company of any of my money. The antics they've been pulling recently and their horrible support have pissed me off to that point. Sure they're finally getting around to releasing some new and original games like Dead Space or Mirror's Edge, but they still come off as a soul-crushing corporation that's a pain in the ass to deal with in any capacity other than letting them pillage my pocketbook.
What's really sad is idea that consoles will be moving away from disc-based media. I can understand that there are a lot of reasons to support that move, but I want a disc copy of the game that I can insert and play on any machine without having to deal with any additional bullshit DRM or that I can sell back to a store if the game turns out to be a disappointment in my eyes. Anything less will probably only turn me away from gaming even more than I've been in the last few months.
The gaming industry may be growing significantly as new generations of people start to get into gaming, but how fast are they going to start pushing customers away with all the crap they've been pulling lately? Right now I don't think it will make a huge impact, but has anyone considered what the impact will be in ten years? The DRM just seems to get more draconian coupled with a decrease in consumer rights. Eventually enough people are going to get fed up and just take their entertainment money elsewhere. How long until the industry actually will have to respond to their crap policies due to negative growth?
If you look here and here you will notice that most European countries are not much more economically left than the US Democrat party. The Scandinavian countries are much less authoritarian than either major US party, but on the economical scale, they're not terribly far off for the most part. For some countries the Republican party doesn't appear to be too much further to the right either.
I think that the one major difference is the universal (or social if you prefer) healthcare that exists in most European countries. Beyond that, I don't think that there are any major differences that I can think of off the top of my head, but I'm sure some European slashdot readers could provide a few more examples.
For the most part, things probably aren't that different. I think that the whole thing is just some meme started by Europeans to mock Americans (as though there weren't already enough reasons.) some more. There's certainly a larger difference on the social scale, but that really doesn't have much to do with economically left or right. You could be a completely socialist country or a completely free market country and still legalize prostitution, marijuana, abortions, etc.
I think it could be fairly trivial for static to add that number of votes. Depending on the register size, all you would need to do is have a register with 1500 less votes than its maximum capacity. Assuming that the static interference toggled all of the bits to one, that would add exactly 1500 votes.
Whether or not static electricity can cause this is another matter entirely. I find it unlikely that it is the culprit, but assuming that it were possible for this to occur, it's possible that it could add any number of votes up to the maximum size of the register that it zaps.
Slashdot Mirror
Estimation in software development is something that takes a lot of time to easily nail down. There are a few decent models that you can use, but even with those the results can very by significant amounts. Generally, you just become naturally better with estimation as you gain experience. If you're interesting in improving your abilities, I'd suggest looking into taking a PSP course at school or finding a good program to work with in your spare time. It's slightly scary how quickly you can become better at estimation if you consciously think about it.
If it was only an internship, I would just up front with your manager. I'm sure that they took you on knowing that you have no real experience so I wouldn't consider it fair that they assume you'll have the insight of someone who's been in the industry for twenty years. You could also ask your employer for a reasonable estimate and determine if you think it's reasonable. If it turns out that it probably isn't reasonable, let your manager know that it's going to take longer than anticipated and let him or her know what problems you're running into. Eventually you'll both start to adjust to each other and the estimates he/she gives you and how long you actually think it will take you based on that estimate will improve.
As disappointing as that may sound, there aren't really any better methods. Any model that can be used for highly accurate predictions almost every time is likely so highly specialized to the people using it that it couldn't be applied elsewhere. But like almost everything else, you will get better at estimation with practice and experience.
If Apple really wanted to spend all that cash on something interesting, they could invest in building a super computer capable of simulating the human mind and configuring it to simulate Steve Jobs.
Never mind that it can't be done now. Give them ten years and tens of billions of dollars and they could probably make it work. Not only would they get to keep El Jobso at the helm, it would probably be one of the biggest advances in AI or computer science in general of all time.
I think that at least part of the reason we collectively accept this has a lot to do with the idea that these devices are generally obsolete are at least significantly out of date after five years. If refrigerators and bicycles were making the same kind of advances as these other products, most people honestly wouldn't care if they junked out in five years. If your fridge was doubling in performance every 18 months, wouldn't you want to get a new one every six years or so to take advantage of the cost savings?
We're already starting to reach a point where the common user probably isn't putting their system to full use. In another few years, the baseline desktop models will probably have more than enough computational power to satisfy non-power users. Businesses running computationally heavy software will still need more power, but mom and pop won't even be able to scratch the surface of their eight core, eight gig RAM system with just office apps and email. At that point I can see people buying a desktop with the intention that it last for ten years or more.
Of course this just shifts the battlefield to the netbook and cell phone segment where the performance gains are going to be more significant. Eventually the hardware will peak in this area as well and once again the market will find some new segment to rush after; probably some guy who figures out how to cram all of that functionality into a watch capable of projecting a 3D holograph which is used for a display. Then that'll be the new craze as no one really needs to upgrade their netbook to the new 32 core model with 16 TB of storage space.
When the pace of technology is moving so fast that something becomes obsolete after five years anyhow, most people won't really care if it doesn't last much longer. A few might, but they're probably not in the majority. Add in our societies tendency to go after the product with the least cost upfront (regardless of whether or not it's a POS that will have to be replaced soon after purchase.) and that we're so willing to purchase replacements is it really any surprise the businesses have reacted to what the market seems to demand?
I really have to agree with you that Moffat's episodes were generally better (Blink was easily my favorite episode since the series reboot.). The only thing that worries me is that Moffat generally did filler episodes, while Davies handled the overall story arcs for each season and always did a fairly good job of tying everything together. Moffat's singular efforts were significantly better, but I don't know if he'll be able to tie things together as well as Davies did.
I'd say you're pretty spot-on with your other assessment as well, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt first. Just because he has an emo look now, doens't necessarily mean he'll keep it for his role as the doctor. Either way, I think Tennant will be a hard act to follow.
Unfortunately, there are enough people with this point of view who will never be satisfied. It's almost akin to a conspiracy theory in that if things were made completely transparent and all the facts and evidence were laid out, some people would still maintain that a complete lack of any evidence of evilness or wrongdoing just proves that the organization is hiding something and really is evil.
Google probably isn't evil, but that doesn't mean that they're saints either. There's a pretty large gray area between the two where most people, companies, and organizations tend to operate. Some people, for whatever reason, tend to blur these shades of gray into either black or white. Then again, "Google does some things that I don't like or agree with, but on the whole I find them to be a pretty good company," doesn't generate as many comments or page hits.
If Microsoft really wanted to beat Firefox they'd just fork it and make their own version based off of it. Add a few default plugins to fight pop-ups and improve security and then they have something that's never really any better or worse than Firefox. Any time Firefox gets better, the new IE gets better at no cost to Microsoft. They can point the default search to their own search engine.
Why sink billions of dollars into a product that really doesn't get you anything when you can freely use a product that most people consider superior around these parts? Just re-skin the browser so that it looks like IE does and never have to worry about having a large team of developers on staff again. Make the FOSS fanatics do all your work for you while reaping all the benefit.
Since Microsoft doesn't make any money off of IE through direct sales, it makes almost perfect sense to just adopt some FOSS code, customize the look, and add a few defaults so that they can claim how it's better out of the box than the actual browser they're using.
"Very, very few people if any are able to completely avoid the public system. Groceries, utilities, emergency services, those things all require a maintained public street system for nearly all the work. So even those that theoretically don't drive on public roads are still benefiting from the ability to do so."
Any goods delivered on a public road system are delivered by vehicles driving on that road which require fuel to run which is in turn taxed. I suppose people like me freeload a bit when we walk a few blocks to the grocery store on the nice sidewalks and roads instead of driving a car which pay for road upkeep through fuel consumption, but I still have to drive to work and other places so they invariably get me in the end. Of course there might be a few people who use the public roadways without driving a car at all. My personal belief is that these people should get a free pass as they're choosing a means of conveyance that will keep them healthier without adding to the amount of pollution in a given area. I think that the small amount of money lost from these people is made up in other areas.
Gas tax works remarkably well for the most part and is probably one of most fair taxes that I could think of off of the top of my head. The only problem is that as we shift towards electric cars and hybrids we're still using the roads but not using the fuel. At that point it probably just makes more sense to have the state apply some other form of tax. A flat tax per vehicle per year works out well enough, but it does tend to punish those who don't use their vehicle as often. If they really wanted, they could just set up toll booths and collect funds that way as well.
The proposed solution seems nice, but I feel as though it's overly complex and would require significant cost to implement at this point; never mind the potential for abuse.
Here's an article from earlier this year that explains a lot of the problems. The article interviews a tester who worked at Microsoft and had some good first hand knowledge of what went wrong.
Hope that helps.
Making them listen to their own commercials for two weeks straight without rest?
I have no idea whether or not this information is actually accurate, but I found it interesting none-the-less.
While watching an episode of Top Gear where Jeremy Clarkson was in Japan driving a car, he mentioned that photographs taken by speed cameras were only valid if your face could be identified from the picture. He had a paper cutout of another person's face that he would hold over his own whenever passing by a camera so that he could not be given a ticket.
I'm sure that this was mostly for comedic effect, but if true, doesn't something like this make speed cameras completely pointless?
I've also read a few stories where those who especially hate speed cameras will obscure its vision in some manner so that it cannot take accurate pictures or any pictures at all. Assuming that the rate of this mischief is high enough and there are enough other methods available to circumvent the accuracy of these cameras, is it really worthwhile to use them?
Whether it's morally right or not is completely irrelevant because there's no way to stop it. People will continue to place content for which Warner holds the copyright on YouTube, and Warner will have to spend money to have people check for that content and have it removed. Even if they do have marginal success with removing the content from YouTube it will only pop up on other video websites.
Some of these websites will not fall under the jurisdiction of the United States and can politely tell Warner to piss off. At that point they're completely screwed and at best they can whine to the government in which the website's servers are located and hope that the that country's government actually gives a damn. They probably won't.
If I really want to find some content it's not difficult at all. For example, pick an arbitrary popular television show and I can find three websites that will have the most recent episode of that show within a hour or so of its broadcast.
There's no way to stop this at all. For middle men, they should be damned glad to take whatever they can get and start investing it in alternative methods of generating a profit because their current business model is screwed. It's only a matter of time before it completely fails and something else takes its place. If they're interested in existing in the next twenty years, they should definitely look towards shifting their business strategy towards something useful instead of pissing money away trying to fight something that's impossible to stop.
From TFA:
"Famous Monsters of Filmland ceased publication in 1983, but returned a decade later with Ray Ferry as publisher and Ackerman as editor. Ackerman, however, reportedly had a falling out with Ferry and left the magazine. Years of litigation followed. In 2000, after a civil trial, Ackerman won a trademark infringement and breach-of-contract lawsuit against Ferry, though he said a year later that he had not yet collected a penny of the judgment.
In recent decades, according to a 2003 Times story, Ackerman slowly sold pieces of his massive collection in order to survive. Because of health problems and his still-unresolved legal battle, he put up all but about 100 of his favorite objects for sale in 2002.
The same year, he moved out of the Ackermansion and into a bungalow in the flats of Los Feliz. But he continued to make what was left of his collection available for fans to view on Saturday mornings."
It appears as though he was also involved in a legal battle as well which the article seems to imply he never received the money owed to him. I wonder if that was at all costly. There's also no mention of him actually selling his house either and the article's statement that people could still view what remained of his collection leads me to believe that he still owns the house. The article also mentions that his collection consisted of some 300,000 objects. I have no way of knowing how valuable any of those objects is on average or how valuable the 100 or so he sold were, but it seems that the vast majority of his collection is still intact. All of this leads me to assume he was still in possession of a considerable amount of wealth.
Of course don't let this get in the way of taking a swipe at the American healthcare industry.
Where are they going to gain back the market share from?
Although it's slow, Linux and OS X are becoming more widespread. It'll probably be a long while until either tears out a significant portion of the market, but they're still growing. There isn't a recent version of IE for either of these operating systems and it's unlikely that there will be any time soon.
The people who use Firefox on Windows are likely to continue to do so unless Microsoft releases a must-have feature that isn't implemented in any other browser. Playing catch-up isn't enough to get people to switch back.
The only thing that it's likely to accomplish is to slow the exodus away from Explorer. I don't think I've seen anyone who's used Firefox, Opera, or some other non-IE browser talk about switching back to IE. Some people might download a new version to try it out, but I highly doubt that they'll stick with it. Even if these people install a new version of Windows, they'll likely install their favorite browser instead of just sticking with IE.
It's not as though I expect IE to disappear overnight, but I don't expect it to pick up any significant amount of lost ground. It's just going to continue to slowly hemorrhage market share to competing browsers. There's no going back. It's only about stopping the bleeding.
There are a lot of people, like you, who want more depth from games, but I don't feel as though we're the majority.
It's the people who play the beefed up, run-and-gun, action FPS games that dominate the market. Gears of War 2 has already sold more copies on the Xbox 360 in its first week than Bioshock has sold in its lifetime on the Xbox 360.
It's the same way with films as well. The big studio action film is generally going to do better than the well-made independent film.
Maybe more people in general are just attracted to that type of content and we're going to have to live with everyone proclaiming how great a few games are that we would view as rather mediocre. Find a reviewer who shares your opinion and stick to that for opinions or first impressions of upcoming games.
I don't think the current rating system which just lumps things into categories like 'T' and 'M' work all that well. Take for instance, the hypothetical game "Bert and Ernie's Fucking Amazing Adventure!" where characters perform no violent actions at all and there is no sexual content in the game. The only catch is that every other word is the foulest profanity known to man. The game will probably be rated 'M' simply due to the language content, but being completely devoid of sexual or violent content, it's still fine for a child to play assuming you don't care if they pick up any fowl language.
Why not rate games based on a few categories: Violence, Sex, Language, etc. Each category is given a score where a higher score indicates more objectionable content. I think that this gives consumers looking at the box a better understanding of what the game's content is like without actually lumping it into some other person's idea of "Mature." This would also go a long way towards stopping games that are labeled "Adults Only" from essentially being banned from store shelves.
If you actually define the ratings fairly well you really don't need an ERSB as companies can actually determine where the ratings should be at themselves. It will probably never happen, but it's just another solution that's considerably better than the ERSB and all the incompetence and idiocy that comes along with it.
Lego can continue to do just as well, even without government help. In a free market consumers are able to choose what they will and what they won't buy. Occasionally I'll be able to find a product at one store for less, but will do business elsewhere simply because another company has better customer support. The same can be said with product quality as well.
If people want cheap, Lego knockoffs then they can buy them. They'll get exactly what they pay for though. You're entirely right that Lego doesn't deserve to be in business if they can't complete, but as long as they can offer quality, or something else that the competition can't, they'll remain in business. The margins might be tighter, but that's what competition does. Hopefully it will drive Lego to find methods to produce their product at the same quality while reducing their cost.
It seems like any time a company gets a free pass to rest on their laurels and past successes, they fail to produce anything new or truly useful and generally end up spending their money keeping others from doing just that.
The only problem with Lego is that their product may be too good. I probably won't need to buy my children very many Lego sets simply because they'll be able to use all of the ones I had as a child because they'll still work just as well now as they did then.
I'm almost certain there's a 'your mother' joke in there somewhere.
I'm not claiming that I didn't grow up watching TV, or even that there are very many people out there like that, but what about people who didn't watch a lot of TV growing up? Is it related to the environment in which we spend the most time? What I'm wondering is whether or not reading a lot of books would cause black and white dreams simply because the black text on a white background is similar to black and white television.
Ethical issues aside, can we raise some children in an environment largely deprived of green and see if that affects their dreams? It would probably be interesting to know, but I'm not sure how much it would further our understanding of the human mind.
If they eventually do something illegal they'll end up in hot water. Go after them for emotional distress for all the harassment and milk the CoS for a few million dollars of these fools' money. It'll be a long legal struggle and probably annoying as hell, but the odds are a few idiots from the CoS will harass you during the trial and make it all the worse for themselves. It might also reach the national spotlight and start some kind of public outcry against the CoS.
I'd be inclined to believe this if there were any other indications that such a problem had occurred. Every other game I have runs perfectly fine whether it's for a few minutes or for several hour marathon sessions. The nature of the problem also makes it highly unlikely that it has anything to do with a graphics card problem either.
I know that you were only trying to be helpful, but you're advice has been about as useful as EA's customer support, which is to say, "not at all." There's apparently a software bug buried deep within the bowels of the code. At some point in the game something is being set that latter causes problems with the game. I've given EA as much information as I can about the nature of the error messages, what I was doing at the time of the error, system specifications, and everything thing else that could be useful in diagnosing the problem. They still haven't been able to provide a working fix.
I don't think that it's as different as you think.
We don't have full-blown universal healthcare, but we do have Medicaid which helps provide some assistance for low-income families. Public schools are funded through tax dollars. A lot of it comes from local property taxes but there still is some federal and state money. A lot of universities in the US also receive federal or state tax dollars. Students are also able to receive subsidized government loans which accumulate no interest at all while you're in school and generally have a low interest rate. PBS is a television station that receives partial public funding and also generates a lot of its other income from viewer contributions. Individual states have varying employment laws, but I'm not sure to what degree and individual state matches European standards or laws.
Iowa, for example, may not be much like a European country, but California, on the other hand, may be very similar. Personally, I believe that if the federal government were less powerful, individual states would have more freeway in implementing more social programs within their own state. I'm not entirely sure why the state of Massachusetts doesn't just implement their own state-wide universal healthcare. If it works as well as everyone in favor of it says is does, then other states will eventually adopt it as well.
Or they could just stay on the legal side of the line. I know a guy who protested outside of a scientology center and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing illegal about that. You could go around handing out flyers explaining to people who you view Scientology as dangerous and still not get arrested. Encourage televised debates about it in a public forum and take it to them there.
You don't need to try and not get caught if you're not doing anything illegal to start with. If the CoS tries to get you arrested for peaceful protesting they'll be the ones that end up looking like assholes.
Pft... I'd actually like to get Spore working before before I get any expansion. I bought the game and it played fine for three days without a hitch and then decided to give up on life and refuses to run for long before running into issues and crashing. EA's customer support has been dreadful and haven't even come close to a working resolution. I haven't played the game in over a month now and even though it wasn't the most enjoyable experience I managed to have a decent time with it. I'll probably never bother with it again.
I can't foresee myself picking up any EA games in the future, even if it means missing out on some good titles. I might be tempted to pick up used copies of the console versions. It's probably the first time I've actually gone out of my way to buy used simply to deprive a company of any of my money. The antics they've been pulling recently and their horrible support have pissed me off to that point. Sure they're finally getting around to releasing some new and original games like Dead Space or Mirror's Edge, but they still come off as a soul-crushing corporation that's a pain in the ass to deal with in any capacity other than letting them pillage my pocketbook.
What's really sad is idea that consoles will be moving away from disc-based media. I can understand that there are a lot of reasons to support that move, but I want a disc copy of the game that I can insert and play on any machine without having to deal with any additional bullshit DRM or that I can sell back to a store if the game turns out to be a disappointment in my eyes. Anything less will probably only turn me away from gaming even more than I've been in the last few months.
The gaming industry may be growing significantly as new generations of people start to get into gaming, but how fast are they going to start pushing customers away with all the crap they've been pulling lately? Right now I don't think it will make a huge impact, but has anyone considered what the impact will be in ten years? The DRM just seems to get more draconian coupled with a decrease in consumer rights. Eventually enough people are going to get fed up and just take their entertainment money elsewhere. How long until the industry actually will have to respond to their crap policies due to negative growth?
If you look here and here you will notice that most European countries are not much more economically left than the US Democrat party. The Scandinavian countries are much less authoritarian than either major US party, but on the economical scale, they're not terribly far off for the most part. For some countries the Republican party doesn't appear to be too much further to the right either.
I think that the one major difference is the universal (or social if you prefer) healthcare that exists in most European countries. Beyond that, I don't think that there are any major differences that I can think of off the top of my head, but I'm sure some European slashdot readers could provide a few more examples.
For the most part, things probably aren't that different. I think that the whole thing is just some meme started by Europeans to mock Americans (as though there weren't already enough reasons.) some more. There's certainly a larger difference on the social scale, but that really doesn't have much to do with economically left or right. You could be a completely socialist country or a completely free market country and still legalize prostitution, marijuana, abortions, etc.
I think it could be fairly trivial for static to add that number of votes. Depending on the register size, all you would need to do is have a register with 1500 less votes than its maximum capacity. Assuming that the static interference toggled all of the bits to one, that would add exactly 1500 votes.
Whether or not static electricity can cause this is another matter entirely. I find it unlikely that it is the culprit, but assuming that it were possible for this to occur, it's possible that it could add any number of votes up to the maximum size of the register that it zaps.