This Rufus Pollock has some good stuff on his site. I've only had about ten minutes to read over a few of these papers and I'm pretty impressed. Not only is it well written but it aligns heavily with the Slashdot community's interests. For example, the conclusion of his paper The Value of the Public Domain ends with these policy recommendations (the most interesting, in my opinion, is bolded):
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When formulating policy the key variable to consider should be social value, which is the sum of commercial value and user value, rather than commercial value alone (in economist's terminology: welfare rather than national income).
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When looking at the value of knowledge goods in general, and the public domain in particular, policy makers should take account of the value generated by complementary products and services.
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Historically, innovation policy, particularly in relation to intellectual property, is characterized by extensive rent-seeking activity and significant imbalances in power. It is important that this be taken into account in policy making, for example by the provision of a clear set of principles that could safeguard groups that are poorly represented (such as the general public). The public domain while very important to society tends to lack a concentrated set of stakeholders to defend it, compared, for example, to the copyright-based industries.
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For some of the categories of works currently covered by copyright, for example music, the introduction of open access along with some form of alternative compensation system promises to deliver significant gains both to creators and to consumers.
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Access and preservation of older copyrighted works is a significant problem and should be addressed. This could be done in several, potentially complementary ways, including: introduction of a registration requirement, orphan works provisions, and a reduction in copyright term.
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In areas such as open source software and technology standards the first principle should be "do no harm". In particular, it is imperative that policy makers maintain, and strengthen, the exclusion of software and business methods from patentability.
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Make public sector information open. This is one of the most direct, and straightforward actions governments can take in promoting the public domain, and it is one that the available evidence suggests will have large benefits both to industry and to the general public.
He also attempts to show through economic theory that "that a dominant firm may engage in considerable expenditure to maintain its position and the welfare consequences of so doing may be considerable.
Very interesting stuff, to say the least, most of it quite logical which means, of course, that it will be completely ignored by politicians and policy makers.
Surgeon General Describes Censorship From Bush Administration Why is he speaking out? Because the Surgeon General's job is to warn me of things that are dangerous to my health.
I can't wait until Bush has to get a tattoo on his back that reads: "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING! Election of this individual may result in death and will increase the risk of the rest of the world hating you."
Canonical, the corporation behind Ubuntu, has begun to open-source Launchpad. Canonical has been criticized for not doing so earlier. I wish people would relax and remember that everyone has the choice to release their software under whatever license they deem acceptable.
Now, you might be wondering why anyone would open source anything at all. And my simple answer to that is this: Prior to today, if someone said 'Launchpad' to me, it would be the Ducktales character. As soon as this application is open source, it's going to become something I installed on my box and played around with for a while. And that's the difference, if it's proprietary, you better be prepared to sell it or it's going to die a death of obscurity without anyone even hearing about it.
People have the choice not to open source software and oftentimes, it's for very good reasons. I don't think this case is any different as the Wikipedia article states:
Mark Shuttleworth responded personally to this criticism stating that Launchpad needs paid-programmers to continue the development of the Launchpad platform and that there would be no point in developing multiple versions of Launchpad due to the probable incomparability of the forks [2]. Mod me as flamebait if you want but the original creators deciding that they value the quality or single source of code is just as valid as any other for delaying a release under an open source license.
Canonical isn't stupid and, yes, they're making money. According to Wikipedia, their 50 person company has an annual revenue of $10 million. Which isn't too shabby. I think these guys are genuinely interested in being both an active member of the open source (Ubunutu) and commercial (Project Landscape) worlds. Isn't it obvious who their thinking of when they put:
'either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version,' which is pretty much proof that they have companies in mind who refuse to proceed to GPLv3 (like Microsoft and the cadre of companies that have paid them for software patent protection). You can paint this move as evil, brilliant, successful, intelligent or any of all of them. To me, I trust these guys as Ubuntu has made open source a little more accessible to the world and I really believe that not only do they know what they're doing but they're going to be around for a while. That's good news for software and (at least in my opinion) therefor good news for everyone.
So I think the only thing worth mentioning from this article is something that's obvious to the youth but apparently not so obvious to the older crowd--that younger people today use social networking sites (like Facebook) as a kind of status symbol.
That's about it.
Now, the author could go on to discuss the quality of those friends or some deeper psychological impact that this has on youth today (you know, like the title might lead you to believe). But, unfortunately, the second part reads more like an ad for Facebook than even an objective quantifiable analysis at what makes it better than other sites. I enjoyed this gem:
FR looks AWFUL. Not in a vile MySpace way, but in a "My first attempt at HTML" way. Facebook is slick and so 2007. Friends Reunited is clunky and basic, so 1997. There is no way any self-respecting net user is going to evangelise about FR. So you claim that the looks are disgusting but not bad like MySpace (which is possibly the most successful social site so far) but bad like "My first attempt at HMTL"... like all the customized pages on MySpace? I'm so confused, if you're going to knock them for bad looks, don't compare them to the top dog. Obviously looks don't make or break a social networking site. In fact, I would wager that marketing (movies have their own MySpace pages now, what?) has much more to do with it than usability or functionality.
Well, that sounds pretty opinionated and also very unhelpful. After reading this article selling Facebook, I feel like I need to use Facebook for social networking but I don't even know why...
They also criticize ad placement in Facebook with a graphic that reads: "Facebook Ads! Yuck!" while on their site I notice a top banner, a left hand 'ads by Google' and also Advertisement boxes on the right. Um, you probably want to lay off the way that Facebook earns their income, especially when A) you say they're great for being 'free' and B) the site you publish on is using the same method.
So, a borderline Slashvertisement that is hilariously hypocritical and undertakes a psychological analysis of users on a social networking site without doing any surveys or real research that is often necessary to be able to say anything about your 'psychological studies' since any assumptions in the field can be as crazy as Sigmund Freud's Penis Envy Complex.
In this analysis of the psychology of Facebook, a British FB user makes some telling points about how simple the reasons behind its success are. No, no it does not. It is not an 'analysis' even by the loosest sense of the word & it certainly does nothing more than bash sites I've never heard about and avoid tackling the biggest obstacles for Facebook (MySpace and the zombie-back-from-the-grave-Friendster). Things must be awfully different between here and England for this to be frontpaged on Slashdot.
I'm going to go ahead and give this article an F and ask for the last ten minutes of my life back.
Well, this is a really interesting article that, I must admit, I'm guilty of just following the crowd in this respect of allowing--no, relying on the mouse to do everything. It's very interesting and refreshing to read about someone suggesting something new and intuitive about user input to a computing device.
However, I found his premise inaccessible and, after reading the first part of this two part idea, I couldn't come up with a concrete advantage for using his method. At first, it seems like this is an argument for speed though I doubt rendering all those options in an overlay to display to the user would be much more efficient than a mouse click on a menu bar. The real estate gain is the obvious definitive advantage his system would have over everything I've used. However, the user must first know how to bring up the options overlay... and I think he mentions the issues that would be associated with subselections. I tried to imagine the GIMP using this in my mind but the submenus would get out of hand. For example, you would like to use script-fu? Well, there's two submenus under that of a dynamic allotment of add ons that I can structure in directories however I want. Tough to deal with stuff like that.
I guess what I would have preferred in a blog like this is a more comprehensive analysis of trade offs when going against the grain in UI input methods. For example, using method A provides you with the benefits of speed & real estate saving but may be inaccessible for some users who are very used to the point and click paradigm and find new learning curves challenging or scary (there are people like that out there). In my opinion, keeping it as simple as possible and knowing your audience are the two biggest things to remember when designing a UI and I think this blog raises an excellent point that we shouldn't be afraid with re-examining the window system in operating systems but I don't think this is applicable in all situations.
Anyone out there (Edward Tufte students, psychologists, etc.) ever do a trade study on these features for their applications? Being a "form" ignorant engineer something like that would be most valuable to me.
If it's early in the iteration (we have two week cycles for our agile development plan) then I'll log on to XPlanner which is a Free Open Source project management tool that allows me to control the user stories and tasks for our project. Early on I look for people that have more hours than others and I try to mitigate that by visiting them and just talking over what they have to do on a high level with them. Since I'm still young and know all the technologies we use, I give them drawings and any sort of information they need to get the job done.
If it's near the end of an iteration or someone is empty, I shuffle tasks and then make a note to talk to both the people one on one when they get in. I also take the time in the morning to talk to people about what they need to work on so they don't spend all day on the wrong task. In the event of something pending that isn't going to get done, I schedule a meeting with my manager and maybe the customer. Haven't had to do that yet though.
Now, keep in mind this is only for a 10 person development team so it might not work on your level. But the first thing I do is assess the day by going over what people checked in and completed the day before in my project management tool, XPlanner. If you haven't used it, I heavily suggest and endorse it--you just need a server to host it on and you're ready. Oh and I'm 25 with little or no management experience prior to this so that could also make this advice completely worthless and naive.
In my opinion, the best thing a team lead can do is listen and, well before it happens, stop people from putting themselves in bad positions where they're in until 3 AM one night before a customer meeting. You take precautions at the beginning of every day and your team should be alright.
I once played in a band in Minneapolis at tiny coffeehouses in Dinkytown or Uptown. In a three piece band we would play 50% originals and 50% covers to make things enjoyable for the crowds. We hoped that perhaps people who liked the covers would also like the other songs they heard and buy a CD.
<sarcasm>
I must say that it's about time they cracked down on these coffeehouses! I received no payment for playing but I watched customers repeatedly purchase drinks sometimes resulting in $1, $2 or even $3 transactions! Clearly this was only because the combo I was in was playing well known standards.
In the end, I apologize to Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beta Band, The Turin Brakes, The Beatles, The Doves and all the other bands we blatantly abused to slightly increase the sales at a small fledgling establishment. I know that these artists are undoubtedly ruined by the actions of me and my fellow band mates while we were in college. In the wrongest sense, we evaded the long arm of the law and all deserve felonies if we don't face life sentences.
However, this story has a happy ending, as one of the establishments we had the most shows at (The Purple Onion) is no more now that Starbucks has moved in across the street. Corporate America wins again in this story and we no longer have to suffer from the grave injustices committed near 15th and University Ave in Dinkytown. Hopefully all of these small time operations are shut down one after the other so I don't have to see walls beautifully covered with art featuring a different student artist every week. Instead, I can rest easy in my non-world-disrupting CEO approved mainstream environments... with no other options. Truly the highlander of coffeehouses stood up one day in Seattle and said, "There can be only one!" and now there is today.
</sarcasm>
It's too bad that this cycle will take far too long for the public to realize what they'll be losing by allowing this to occur. It's also very sad that I'm probably a minority of people who live in remorse about this sort of thing--and for that reason it will probably continue to happen. When I saw this headline, it was equivalent to "Music Licensing Companies List 'Eating Kittens' as Favorite Pastime, 'Destroying Dreams' a Close Second."
If you can point me to proof that there's any artist out there that really wants things to be this way, I'd be shocked. This is a classic case of an idea and organization formed with good intentions that has slowly become an uncontrollable machine. The worst part is that if a coffeehouse is sued, I doubt the original artist can intervene as they've probably already signed contracts punishable by death. We would have to wait for a whole new generation of musicians to arise to avoid these mistakes though I doubt they could make it without the affiliation of the large governing organizations.
Hold your local artists that are on indie labels or making it by themselves on a higher level, America. Soon, they will face extinction and your relationship to them will be governed through a man in a suit.
I'll end this post with an excerpt from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, Working for MCA:
Slickers steal my money since I was seventeen,
if it ain't no pencil pusher then it got to be a honky tonk queen.
But I signed my contract, baby, and I want you people to know
that every penny I make, I gotta see where my money goes.
Want you to sign the contract,
want you to sign the date.
Gonna give you lots of money
workin' for MCA. My advice if you want to 'just happen' to hear some good live music would be to first leave the country.
He hopes to visit the great author at his home in Sri Lanka, unveil the completed film, and interview him about the future of humanity in space. I am reminded of a great quote I once heard about from him that would be quite applicable to the above interview:
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. - Arthur C. Clarke I don't know why but my favorite Arthur C. Clarke novel would have to be Childhood's End. In my opinion, there's something more poetic about the style he used for that than there is for any of his other work. Of course, I find myself sliding into more and more bizarre novels these days... possibly the reason why I haven't seen this adapted into a movie is it's not fit for public consumption (or something that can doom a film in the states, Christian acceptance).
I love independent films and I've got high hopes for this--if anyone could do up an amazing indie film, it'd be ILM. More importantly, I hope this opens up the door a little more for indie films to debut in regular theatres but unfortunately, I'd have to travel pretty far to find a theatre playing something like this and I live in D.C.!
That said, he is a great author though from what I've read about him as a man, he is rumoured to be a bit pompous--but you know, he is credited with being the first to conceive a geostationary communications satellite so maybe he deserves to have a movie made for him and his ego stroked a little?:-)
I thought I had heard that Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish owner of Ikea, had surpassed Gates due to the slide in world markets of the American dollar versus the Swedish crown.
Of course, Forbes never registered that because, I believe, the slide was temporary and the dollar rebounded somewhat and some reports put Kamprad in front of Gates and some didn't.
It's kind of funny when your ranking in the world's richest raises and falls with small market fluctuations. Regardless, I'll throw out the idea that it is extremely likely that Slim's net worth will be 'adjusted' by the stock market in the coming days when his stock is re-evaluated. I could be wrong but Kamprad saw his worth rise on something that is (usually) much more stable than the stock market--his country's currency.
Placing an unprecedented 27% increase in his stocks makes his position as the world's richest man all that much more volatile to me. Then again, I'm not an economist or finance specialist so I could be wrong. How the stock market index seems to consistently return 11% on investments baffles my simple computer scientist mind.
I would also like to point out a few things relating to this #1 position of world's richest man. It's obvious in (at least America) you often need money to make money. More money you have, the easier it seems to be to make money.
I've half a mind to go on a rant about the questionable business model that Gates employed to gain his position as world's richest and keep it... but I'm too tired and it's obvious by now that some people agree. Though I'm sure there won't be a lack of posts on that topic for this particular news story.
Reason Gates won't care that he's not #1 is probably because he's giving a lot of it away anyway in the end. That and he's made his mark on history... will we remember Kamprad or Slim? Highly unlikely. But Gates has touched entire generations with software we been forced to and have chosen to use for better or for worse.
What Bojowald's work does, as I understand it (the paper as I write this is not out yet, so I am going by my limited knowledge of LQG and other theories like it) is simplify the math enough to be able to trace some properties of the Universe backwards, right down to T=0, which he calls the Big Bounce. I caught this story on PhysOrg yesterday and subsequently found the full text from the Journal of Nature Physics. While Mr. Bojowald has many papers currently up for review, I believe the precise paper is available on Arxiv.
As Bad Astronomer noted, this isn't the first time something like this has been proposed. I think the first time I read about it was in a book by George Gamov and then subsequent work/proposed theories done by Roger Penrose & the well known Stephen Hawking.
Considering past results of my comments on matters I have little formal education on, I'll won't bother to remark on this work.
This article is pretty one sided (not that that is bad) so I'm wondering what happened or what is the cause of these new laws?
Usually when you change the law, it's because something happened. I would like to know what failure the current laws have suffered and I didn't really find there to be a lot of comments from the New York City government on this issue, just civil liberties groups.
So as far as I can guess, there are two possible reason. The first is the ole' terrorism card where we can't have people that might be terrorists casing targets and what not. The second possible reason is that it is becoming easier and easier to garner thousands of viewers (like the article mentions) via sites like YouTube by posting your work online. Is the city targeting these people the same way it targets major Hollywood film companies?
I'm kind of disappointed this article didn't accurately reflect both sides of the issue. I can see several downsides to these laws but is there at least a reason for changing them in the first place? Not a lot of information here from NYC.
The Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting seems to be concerned primarily with fining large companies. The free permit you can apply for online states:
The permit we issue to your production is free of charge, and provides access to public locations and street parking for essential production vehicles throughout 300 square miles of public settings in the city's five boroughs, including 27,000 acres of city parks.
When your project is shooting at an exterior location which requires traffic control, or has a scene with prop firearms, weapons or actors in police uniforms, you must request that the NYPD Movie and TV Unit be assigned to your location. The police unit will assign its officers at no charge to you.
All decisions about what is permitted are made by the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting, working in close consultation with the NYPD Movie & TV Unit, and other key city agencies. We have the experience and resources to facilitate your production requests.
Filming in city parks, interiors of city buildings, bridges, subways or tunnels will require additional permissions from the controlling entities. Please contact our office to obtain specific contact information. Which seems fairly reasonable for one of the largest & most densely populated cities in the United States. With amatures having an easier means of publication, the laws could change to keep NYC's MOFTB informed of filming on a regular or extended basis.
Now, I'm well aware of the abuse that police & law enforcement could use this for against citizens, tourists & people of certain ethnicities, but I think the article already adequately reflected the concerns.
What was glossed over was the apparent good these laws would do:
Mr. Dunn said most of the new rules were reasonable. Notably, someone using a hand-held video camera, as Mr. Sharma was doing, would no longer have to get a permit. So, am I to believe that there's a few laws that are questionable while other laws are going to protect people (as in Mr. Sharma's case) from being arrested? Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Still, it really causes one to wonder, what's the reason for the change in these laws?
"If she has any particular requests, we'll almost certainly grant them," he added. To be successful, I can think of a couple requests. One would just be to have more than one other non-infected computer. I could do nothing to the computers and randomly pick one, thus being right. I suppose that's obvious though. Maybe have several trial runs.
Another obvious thing I would request is that different services software be installed (and running) on the laptops. Like maybe put MySql on one running as a service and PostGres on the other. That way they can't do something as ridiculously simple like a memory or CPU profiler to find out which one is using up (all beit small) more CPU resources & memory. That seems to be the strategy of the challenging team:
Matasano's Ptacek, who has spent a lot of time studying Rutkowska's work, said the challenge team will compare the behavior of the system to known norms to find the presence of Blue Pill. But how many times do you approach a computer that's infected & have all the behaviors of that machine mapped out? I think the real world answer to that is never. So perhaps the name of the "100% undetectable rootkit" will have to be "100% undetectable in the wild rootkit" since most of us have software on our machines (hell, even World of Warcraft did this) and not even us (the people who installed it) can adequately predict what its going to do. I guess one could always make a rootkit that (given the priviledges) targets a host process deep within a host tree and inserts itself into it. You CPU scheduler would simply be running a thread of a trusted set of processes but unless you had a behavior/benchmark for each process of that tree, you'd be hard pressed to figure out it is host to a virus. That said, I think it's entirely possible to create a nearly 100% undetectable rootkit as long as there are unknown & unprofiled processes running on that machine at the time. Just one more reason to only use open source, I guess!
I read about this in PhysOrg yesterday and they speak more about something the last paragraph of Scientific American only mentions. The fact that they wouldn't use this enzyme to remove HIV infections but instead to figure out which cells have been infected. The biggest problem in treating HIV is that it can go dormant and undetected for so long during which the host can infect others. It sounds horrible, but even being able to destroy all the cells infected with the virus is worth something though it may often prove fatal to the host. I don't think this is a 'cure' or 'vaccine' merely something that makes HIV treatments much much more effective.
While this may not seem like a big deal, the implications are interesting. It's not a big deal. Everything made in America falls under these laws. Whether it be the corn we grow or the software written (in any part) or served within the United States. Even Windows (bullet 7) falls under these restrictions.
Yet, not too surprisingly, Windows has found its way into Cuba and I'm certain the OLPC will also be found there in mass quantities if it is indeed useful/popular. Physical devices may be harder to find there than software but you'll find them there.
This isn't news. The U.S. trade embargos have been in place on Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan and Syria for a while now. Furthermore, if the laptops are made and assembled outside the U.S.
So let's get creative here, you make and manufacture the hardware outside the United States. Then you ship them to restricted countries (I think the parts are going to come from China anyway). You leave it up to people inside Cuba or where ever to install the OLPC image. Who has violated the TOS? The citizens of the country who really don't give a damn what U.S. export laws they're breaking.
And if these laws are broken, who's going to enforce them? Redhat/Fedora? The U.S. government is going to show up and stop laptops from going to children? The U.S. government is going to shutdown a free open source software hosting site? I highly doubt it.
It's kind of sad that a company who powers its hundreds of thousands of computers in clusters with a trimmed down RedHat puts Linux second on the list of operating systems to support with its software.
I know Google's just playing the numbers (far more Win users than Linux) but you would think that there would be at least enough respect present for them to develop and release for both platforms in tandem. Google has the resources to do that, it's almost like some sort of 'love yet neglect' relationship that churns out of American movies these days.
I hope Google has bigger plans than slowly rolling out its apps in Linux well after it's put them out in Windows.
69% of the Republican candidates, in contrast, prefer Windows. What's even more shocking is that the other 31% of the Republican candidates are running Ubuntu Christian Edition while it turns out in the end that the very core of their operating system is the same kernel that Ubuntu Satanic Edition runs on.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
And don't even get me started on Hillary, there's solid proof that her servers resolve to the IP address 66.66.66.66 and that good packets go in but only packets with the evil flag flipped to '1' come out.
I suppose that's politicians for you, though. 'Does not compute' with them, can't pretend we're living in a society where everyone feels equally represented without them.
I'm no geologist so I can't comment on whether or not this lake looks typical but I will say that, judging by the coloration of the foliage around it, this is probable the same land as the river/stream that winds to the west of it. Interesting is that if you follow it northwest for miles it looks smooth cut. Once it passes Lake Cheko, it seems to become more speckled and pock marked. Doesn't seem 'natural' to me for an inlet and outlet to be positioned so close together on a lake--though the topography could indeed make that make sense if I could see a map of it.
I would guess this is quite feasible indeed to be part of whatever happened nearly 100 years ago. Check out the last page of this PDF which seems to show the comet/asteroid approaching at an angle (thus the strange blast pattern). At that trajectory, you'd think there'd be a chance for whatever hit to break apart and skip. Maybe the other abnormal marks in the stream are from other pieces/debris?
Probably fueled by the sci-fi stories written about the same topic (like the 1946 one by Alexander Kazantsev), I find it interesting to read about things like the Tunguska Genetic Anomaly whether they be true or not. Maybe these are the scientist's tabloids?:)
Purchases can be made using credit cards or Paypal, with Gamer2Gamer providing an escrow service to guarantee a safe transaction for the buyer. After in-game delivery is confirmed by the buyer, the site releases the transacted funds to the seller, completing the sale. The service is supported across games such as Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft, Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online, Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest 2, and CCP's EVE Online.
How will you protect against 'buyers' who put the money in the escrow service, receive the goods and then claim they never got them and demand the escrow back? In Warcraft, I could forward the gold to another character and claim I never got it. Then you have two customers in a dirty dispute. Wouldn't it be smarter (but more work) for you to also have an intermediary account in game to hold the goods and money at the same time? How do you plan to resolve these issues that auction sites like eBay have to deal with?
How do you plan to deal with the litigation against you that will inevitably spring up from companies like Blizzard & Sony that state this violates TOS and restrict auctions/selling on eBay and everywhere else?
Will your site will work out converting currencies in one game to currencies in another game--so that if I play Warcraft and Final Fantasy I can spend my gold for gil? If you are doing this, how are you going to keep these markets in check? Will it all just be normalized against the dollar?
Bottom line question is whether or not you'll control dumping of virtual currency or if you'll institute ranges. If you're not instituting limits or regulating in a Federal Reserve type manner, how are you going to protect against a single person running the market (buying all the gold and sitting on it while letting it drip out slowly at an extreme amount of USD)?
Will you post graphs of each MMO's currency so we can watch currencies like SWG's credit against Warcraft's Gold?
So you say you work out the middle man in this horrible scheme of capitalism. But I'm still concerned that the people who are farming right now at a severely reduced pay rate are doing so because they don't have the money to front for the operation and they have no choice but to remain a pawn. They make very little money and the real profits go to some American guy manipulating them all and paying for their accounts.
Tell me again how your service does not promote this middle man from acting like a player? How am I assured that my gold is not earned by some innocent kid who is doing this as a job to make money? How am I assured this isn't still some cog in a scheme to exploit foreign workers?
Disclaimer for the rest of Slashdot: I'm well aware of the situations where this may be the person's only means of income. I still would rather not support this system.
So, I guess if you want to videotape the police, you'd better declare yourself an independent journalist and hope the judge values our freedom of the press?
This is both shocking & amazing on so many levels. I can think of several ways to look at this that make it hilariously backwards. The cops are on duty, their income is supplied by individuals like this man. As far as I'm aware, employers are allowed to videotape their employers.
I've met good policemen and I've met pigs. These instances sound like a pig on a power trip. Illegal wiretapping, yeah right! It has a sound function so he's wiretapping? Everything just sounds so ridiculous. If it happens in public, it's public domain. This is just obvious abuse of those they are supposed to protect.
7. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is the world.
8. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is a continent.
9. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is a country.
10. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is a state.
11. The system of claim 1 wherein said geographical search area is a provence.
12. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is a territory.
13. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is a city.
14. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is a point of interest.
Quick! Patent me up:
15. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is... the universe.
Laugh now, but thousands of years from now when you're looking for an all night Denny's around Omicron Percei 8, the system that you use will end up paying me patent royalties!
Having grown up in Minnesota, I was raised in a grade school that had many copies of the Oregon Trail.
But something that isn't often mentioned about the Oregon Trail is the controversy that surrounded one of the first releases about it. We're all very familiar with the original but before that there was an even older one with crappier graphics. I distinctly remember playing the very old one only to have the teacher come up to my computer, ask me where I got that & then she took the disc and formatted it. Now that was curious behavior for a teacher.
So I came into the lab after school, got another copy of the disk from where I had found the original (stacks of old disks were common) and popped it in. The graphics were worse but I soon realized why this particular version was frowned upon. Instead of saying, "You have encountered Native Americans..." or something like that, it said "Indians Attack!" and then you were holding a shotgun from the point of view of the shooter. There were three frames of images with a Native American on horseback and a bow. He would ride at a random speed in front of you and you had to shoot when he was in the middle of the screen. The better you did, the less supplies you lost.
I could see how you could argue either way to keep that in the game. Maybe that's really how some Native Americans reacted to settlers. Maybe you don't want your kid thinking that Native Americans were (and still are) like that. One thing is for sure--it was never in another version of the Trail.
Minnesota's history is ingrained with Native Americans. I have many Native American friends and thoroughly enjoy Pow Wows & their amazing celebrations. At the same time, I recognize that there was conflict going on with settlers being killed or wounded at towns like Milford, Acton & Slaughter Slough. Interesting history to me, haven't heard anyone who's known about these events aside from Native Americans.
Is it right to just forget about it? I personally don't think denial is the best way to deal with history. Although, the displacement of Native Americans from the east to parts further west like Oklahoma, Minnesota & Wisconsin (resulting in many deaths) isn't very widely known by most Americans.
I never was an avid fan of the Sopranos. My roommate was seriously in love with it and I'd catch an episode with him. I've seen only a handful and they spread across a broad spectrum from an interesting first season episode full of mob action & scheming to a kid shitting in a shower and stepping on it. Ok, so maybe I'm oversimplifying the episodes that slowly build up family strife and psychological problems that must come with being in organized crime families.
Last night, it was very easy for me to accept the ending of the series finale. Because I wasn't addicted to the show. Logically, not all mob stories end in a Scarface-like explosion where everyone dies... if they did, mobsters would have just killed each other off. But there are smart mobsters out there and what I took the ending to mean to me is that Tony is, after all, a smart mobster. He made it. Guys around him were dying left & right and his time had come but he struck a deal after holding out. I think they killed his brother or at least someone close to him but he was smart enough to write that casualty off. Not a lot of people could do that. Maybe this series chronicles the growth of an intelligent mobster? The old Tony might have made an offensive after that.
I kept waiting for an assassin to pop out & kill Tony for the last half of the show. But, I didn't have a reason why that should have happened. Am I so trained by movies & books on endings that I can't accept one without a climax? My roommate new it was coming because he kept looking at his watch and saying stuff like "ok, shit better start happening because they've only got like 15 minutes." But you know, you're at the mercy of the writers and creaters of the show.
It was unorthodoxed for it to end that way. I'm reminded of the utter ripoff I felt when I saw the last episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. But that was due to funding, I think this was the idea of the minds behind the show. Good for them. I like seeing deviations from normality when I don't have to suffer from it.:)
In the end, there were a lot of things that weren't wrapped up and I think that's the big problem a lot of fans are having to deal with. I think the reason so many fans are going to feel this is that the show started off as a badass mob series that attracted viewers of a certain nature who enjoy living a vicarious life of crime. Unfortunately, the ending just wasn't juicy enough to satiate that kind of appetite and I think that's why you'll hear so much about this. Personally, I liked it although I recognize that too many questions were left unanswered, too many futures were left uncertain & too many problems were left unresolved.
Slashdot Mirror
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When formulating policy the key variable to consider should be social value, which is the sum of commercial value and user value, rather than commercial value alone (in economist's terminology: welfare rather than national income).
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When looking at the value of knowledge goods in general, and the public domain in particular, policy makers should take account of the value generated by complementary products and services.
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Historically, innovation policy, particularly in relation to intellectual property, is characterized by extensive rent-seeking activity and significant imbalances in power. It is important that this be taken into account in policy making, for example by the provision of a clear set of principles that could safeguard groups that are poorly represented (such as the general public). The public domain while very important to society tends to lack a concentrated set of stakeholders to defend it, compared, for example, to the copyright-based industries.
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For some of the categories of works currently covered by copyright, for example music, the introduction of open access along with some form of alternative compensation system promises to deliver significant gains both to creators and to consumers.
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Access and preservation of older copyrighted works is a significant problem and should be addressed. This could be done in several, potentially complementary ways, including: introduction of a registration requirement, orphan works provisions, and a reduction in copyright term.
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In areas such as open source software and technology standards the first principle should be "do no harm". In particular, it is imperative that policy makers maintain, and strengthen, the exclusion of software and business methods from patentability.
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Make public sector information open. This is one of the most direct, and straightforward actions governments can take in promoting the public domain, and it is one that the available evidence suggests will have large benefits both to industry and to the general public.
He also attempts to show through economic theory that "that a dominant firm may engage in considerable expenditure to maintain its position and the welfare consequences of so doing may be considerable.Also interesting is that he conjectures that the burden of proof of ownership in intellectual property should be placed on those attempting to acquire the IP, not anyone else.
He has a paper detailing a model where innovation occurs without intellectual property in an attempt to show that the assumption regarding IP's relationship to innovation is false.
Very interesting stuff, to say the least, most of it quite logical which means, of course, that it will be completely ignored by politicians and policy makers.
I can't wait until Bush has to get a tattoo on his back that reads: "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING! Election of this individual may result in death and will increase the risk of the rest of the world hating you."
Now, you might be wondering why anyone would open source anything at all. And my simple answer to that is this: Prior to today, if someone said 'Launchpad' to me, it would be the Ducktales character. As soon as this application is open source, it's going to become something I installed on my box and played around with for a while. And that's the difference, if it's proprietary, you better be prepared to sell it or it's going to die a death of obscurity without anyone even hearing about it.
People have the choice not to open source software and oftentimes, it's for very good reasons. I don't think this case is any different as the Wikipedia article states: Mark Shuttleworth responded personally to this criticism stating that Launchpad needs paid-programmers to continue the development of the Launchpad platform and that there would be no point in developing multiple versions of Launchpad due to the probable incomparability of the forks [2]. Mod me as flamebait if you want but the original creators deciding that they value the quality or single source of code is just as valid as any other for delaying a release under an open source license.
Canonical isn't stupid and, yes, they're making money. According to Wikipedia, their 50 person company has an annual revenue of $10 million. Which isn't too shabby. I think these guys are genuinely interested in being both an active member of the open source (Ubunutu) and commercial (Project Landscape) worlds. Isn't it obvious who their thinking of when they put: 'either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version,' which is pretty much proof that they have companies in mind who refuse to proceed to GPLv3 (like Microsoft and the cadre of companies that have paid them for software patent protection). You can paint this move as evil, brilliant, successful, intelligent or any of all of them. To me, I trust these guys as Ubuntu has made open source a little more accessible to the world and I really believe that not only do they know what they're doing but they're going to be around for a while. That's good news for software and (at least in my opinion) therefor good news for everyone.
That's about it.
Now, the author could go on to discuss the quality of those friends or some deeper psychological impact that this has on youth today (you know, like the title might lead you to believe). But, unfortunately, the second part reads more like an ad for Facebook than even an objective quantifiable analysis at what makes it better than other sites. I enjoyed this gem: FR looks AWFUL. Not in a vile MySpace way, but in a "My first attempt at HTML" way. Facebook is slick and so 2007. Friends Reunited is clunky and basic, so 1997. There is no way any self-respecting net user is going to evangelise about FR. So you claim that the looks are disgusting but not bad like MySpace (which is possibly the most successful social site so far) but bad like "My first attempt at HMTL"
Well, that sounds pretty opinionated and also very unhelpful. After reading this article selling Facebook, I feel like I need to use Facebook for social networking but I don't even know why
They also criticize ad placement in Facebook with a graphic that reads: "Facebook Ads! Yuck!" while on their site I notice a top banner, a left hand 'ads by Google' and also Advertisement boxes on the right. Um, you probably want to lay off the way that Facebook earns their income, especially when A) you say they're great for being 'free' and B) the site you publish on is using the same method.
So, a borderline Slashvertisement that is hilariously hypocritical and undertakes a psychological analysis of users on a social networking site without doing any surveys or real research that is often necessary to be able to say anything about your 'psychological studies' since any assumptions in the field can be as crazy as Sigmund Freud's Penis Envy Complex.
In this analysis of the psychology of Facebook, a British FB user makes some telling points about how simple the reasons behind its success are. No, no it does not. It is not an 'analysis' even by the loosest sense of the word & it certainly does nothing more than bash sites I've never heard about and avoid tackling the biggest obstacles for Facebook (MySpace and the zombie-back-from-the-grave-Friendster). Things must be awfully different between here and England for this to be frontpaged on Slashdot.
I'm going to go ahead and give this article an F and ask for the last ten minutes of my life back.
Well, this is a really interesting article that, I must admit, I'm guilty of just following the crowd in this respect of allowing--no, relying on the mouse to do everything. It's very interesting and refreshing to read about someone suggesting something new and intuitive about user input to a computing device.
... and I think he mentions the issues that would be associated with subselections. I tried to imagine the GIMP using this in my mind but the submenus would get out of hand. For example, you would like to use script-fu? Well, there's two submenus under that of a dynamic allotment of add ons that I can structure in directories however I want. Tough to deal with stuff like that.
However, I found his premise inaccessible and, after reading the first part of this two part idea, I couldn't come up with a concrete advantage for using his method. At first, it seems like this is an argument for speed though I doubt rendering all those options in an overlay to display to the user would be much more efficient than a mouse click on a menu bar. The real estate gain is the obvious definitive advantage his system would have over everything I've used. However, the user must first know how to bring up the options overlay
I guess what I would have preferred in a blog like this is a more comprehensive analysis of trade offs when going against the grain in UI input methods. For example, using method A provides you with the benefits of speed & real estate saving but may be inaccessible for some users who are very used to the point and click paradigm and find new learning curves challenging or scary (there are people like that out there). In my opinion, keeping it as simple as possible and knowing your audience are the two biggest things to remember when designing a UI and I think this blog raises an excellent point that we shouldn't be afraid with re-examining the window system in operating systems but I don't think this is applicable in all situations.
Anyone out there (Edward Tufte students, psychologists, etc.) ever do a trade study on these features for their applications? Being a "form" ignorant engineer something like that would be most valuable to me.
If it's early in the iteration (we have two week cycles for our agile development plan) then I'll log on to XPlanner which is a Free Open Source project management tool that allows me to control the user stories and tasks for our project. Early on I look for people that have more hours than others and I try to mitigate that by visiting them and just talking over what they have to do on a high level with them. Since I'm still young and know all the technologies we use, I give them drawings and any sort of information they need to get the job done.
If it's near the end of an iteration or someone is empty, I shuffle tasks and then make a note to talk to both the people one on one when they get in. I also take the time in the morning to talk to people about what they need to work on so they don't spend all day on the wrong task. In the event of something pending that isn't going to get done, I schedule a meeting with my manager and maybe the customer. Haven't had to do that yet though.
Now, keep in mind this is only for a 10 person development team so it might not work on your level. But the first thing I do is assess the day by going over what people checked in and completed the day before in my project management tool, XPlanner. If you haven't used it, I heavily suggest and endorse it--you just need a server to host it on and you're ready. Oh and I'm 25 with little or no management experience prior to this so that could also make this advice completely worthless and naive.
In my opinion, the best thing a team lead can do is listen and, well before it happens, stop people from putting themselves in bad positions where they're in until 3 AM one night before a customer meeting. You take precautions at the beginning of every day and your team should be alright.
<sarcasm>
I must say that it's about time they cracked down on these coffeehouses! I received no payment for playing but I watched customers repeatedly purchase drinks sometimes resulting in $1, $2 or even $3 transactions! Clearly this was only because the combo I was in was playing well known standards.
In the end, I apologize to Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beta Band, The Turin Brakes, The Beatles, The Doves and all the other bands we blatantly abused to slightly increase the sales at a small fledgling establishment. I know that these artists are undoubtedly ruined by the actions of me and my fellow band mates while we were in college. In the wrongest sense, we evaded the long arm of the law and all deserve felonies if we don't face life sentences.
However, this story has a happy ending, as one of the establishments we had the most shows at (The Purple Onion) is no more now that Starbucks has moved in across the street. Corporate America wins again in this story and we no longer have to suffer from the grave injustices committed near 15th and University Ave in Dinkytown. Hopefully all of these small time operations are shut down one after the other so I don't have to see walls beautifully covered with art featuring a different student artist every week. Instead, I can rest easy in my non-world-disrupting CEO approved mainstream environments
</sarcasm>
It's too bad that this cycle will take far too long for the public to realize what they'll be losing by allowing this to occur. It's also very sad that I'm probably a minority of people who live in remorse about this sort of thing--and for that reason it will probably continue to happen. When I saw this headline, it was equivalent to "Music Licensing Companies List 'Eating Kittens' as Favorite Pastime, 'Destroying Dreams' a Close Second."
If you can point me to proof that there's any artist out there that really wants things to be this way, I'd be shocked. This is a classic case of an idea and organization formed with good intentions that has slowly become an uncontrollable machine. The worst part is that if a coffeehouse is sued, I doubt the original artist can intervene as they've probably already signed contracts punishable by death. We would have to wait for a whole new generation of musicians to arise to avoid these mistakes though I doubt they could make it without the affiliation of the large governing organizations.
Hold your local artists that are on indie labels or making it by themselves on a higher level, America. Soon, they will face extinction and your relationship to them will be governed through a man in a suit.
I'll end this post with an excerpt from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, Working for MCA: Slickers steal my money since I was seventeen,
if it ain't no pencil pusher then it got to be a honky tonk queen.
But I signed my contract, baby, and I want you people to know
that every penny I make, I gotta see where my money goes.
Want you to sign the contract,
want you to sign the date.
Gonna give you lots of money
workin' for MCA. My advice if you want to 'just happen' to hear some good live music would be to first leave the country.
I love independent films and I've got high hopes for this--if anyone could do up an amazing indie film, it'd be ILM. More importantly, I hope this opens up the door a little more for indie films to debut in regular theatres but unfortunately, I'd have to travel pretty far to find a theatre playing something like this and I live in D.C.!
That said, he is a great author though from what I've read about him as a man, he is rumoured to be a bit pompous--but you know, he is credited with being the first to conceive a geostationary communications satellite so maybe he deserves to have a movie made for him and his ego stroked a little?
I thought I had heard that Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish owner of Ikea, had surpassed Gates due to the slide in world markets of the American dollar versus the Swedish crown.
... but I'm too tired and it's obvious by now that some people agree. Though I'm sure there won't be a lack of posts on that topic for this particular news story.
... will we remember Kamprad or Slim? Highly unlikely. But Gates has touched entire generations with software we been forced to and have chosen to use for better or for worse.
Of course, Forbes never registered that because, I believe, the slide was temporary and the dollar rebounded somewhat and some reports put Kamprad in front of Gates and some didn't.
It's kind of funny when your ranking in the world's richest raises and falls with small market fluctuations. Regardless, I'll throw out the idea that it is extremely likely that Slim's net worth will be 'adjusted' by the stock market in the coming days when his stock is re-evaluated. I could be wrong but Kamprad saw his worth rise on something that is (usually) much more stable than the stock market--his country's currency.
Placing an unprecedented 27% increase in his stocks makes his position as the world's richest man all that much more volatile to me. Then again, I'm not an economist or finance specialist so I could be wrong. How the stock market index seems to consistently return 11% on investments baffles my simple computer scientist mind.
I would also like to point out a few things relating to this #1 position of world's richest man. It's obvious in (at least America) you often need money to make money. More money you have, the easier it seems to be to make money.
I've half a mind to go on a rant about the questionable business model that Gates employed to gain his position as world's richest and keep it
Reason Gates won't care that he's not #1 is probably because he's giving a lot of it away anyway in the end. That and he's made his mark on history
As Bad Astronomer noted, this isn't the first time something like this has been proposed. I think the first time I read about it was in a book by George Gamov and then subsequent work/proposed theories done by Roger Penrose & the well known Stephen Hawking.
Considering past results of my comments on matters I have little formal education on, I'll won't bother to remark on this work.
Usually when you change the law, it's because something happened. I would like to know what failure the current laws have suffered and I didn't really find there to be a lot of comments from the New York City government on this issue, just civil liberties groups.
So as far as I can guess, there are two possible reason. The first is the ole' terrorism card where we can't have people that might be terrorists casing targets and what not. The second possible reason is that it is becoming easier and easier to garner thousands of viewers (like the article mentions) via sites like YouTube by posting your work online. Is the city targeting these people the same way it targets major Hollywood film companies?
I'm kind of disappointed this article didn't accurately reflect both sides of the issue. I can see several downsides to these laws but is there at least a reason for changing them in the first place? Not a lot of information here from NYC.
The Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting seems to be concerned primarily with fining large companies. The free permit you can apply for online states: The permit we issue to your production is free of charge, and provides access to public locations and street parking for essential production vehicles throughout 300 square miles of public settings in the city's five boroughs, including 27,000 acres of city parks.
When your project is shooting at an exterior location which requires traffic control, or has a scene with prop firearms, weapons or actors in police uniforms, you must request that the NYPD Movie and TV Unit be assigned to your location. The police unit will assign its officers at no charge to you.
All decisions about what is permitted are made by the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting, working in close consultation with the NYPD Movie & TV Unit, and other key city agencies. We have the experience and resources to facilitate your production requests.
Filming in city parks, interiors of city buildings, bridges, subways or tunnels will require additional permissions from the controlling entities. Please contact our office to obtain specific contact information. Which seems fairly reasonable for one of the largest & most densely populated cities in the United States. With amatures having an easier means of publication, the laws could change to keep NYC's MOFTB informed of filming on a regular or extended basis.
Now, I'm well aware of the abuse that police & law enforcement could use this for against citizens, tourists & people of certain ethnicities, but I think the article already adequately reflected the concerns.
What was glossed over was the apparent good these laws would do: Mr. Dunn said most of the new rules were reasonable. Notably, someone using a hand-held video camera, as Mr. Sharma was doing, would no longer have to get a permit. So, am I to believe that there's a few laws that are questionable while other laws are going to protect people (as in Mr. Sharma's case) from being arrested? Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Still, it really causes one to wonder, what's the reason for the change in these laws?
Another obvious thing I would request is that different services software be installed (and running) on the laptops. Like maybe put MySql on one running as a service and PostGres on the other. That way they can't do something as ridiculously simple like a memory or CPU profiler to find out which one is using up (all beit small) more CPU resources & memory. That seems to be the strategy of the challenging team: Matasano's Ptacek, who has spent a lot of time studying Rutkowska's work, said the challenge team will compare the behavior of the system to known norms to find the presence of Blue Pill. But how many times do you approach a computer that's infected & have all the behaviors of that machine mapped out? I think the real world answer to that is never. So perhaps the name of the "100% undetectable rootkit" will have to be "100% undetectable in the wild rootkit" since most of us have software on our machines (hell, even World of Warcraft did this) and not even us (the people who installed it) can adequately predict what its going to do. I guess one could always make a rootkit that (given the priviledges) targets a host process deep within a host tree and inserts itself into it. You CPU scheduler would simply be running a thread of a trusted set of processes but unless you had a behavior/benchmark for each process of that tree, you'd be hard pressed to figure out it is host to a virus. That said, I think it's entirely possible to create a nearly 100% undetectable rootkit as long as there are unknown & unprofiled processes running on that machine at the time. Just one more reason to only use open source, I guess!
I read about this in PhysOrg yesterday and they speak more about something the last paragraph of Scientific American only mentions. The fact that they wouldn't use this enzyme to remove HIV infections but instead to figure out which cells have been infected. The biggest problem in treating HIV is that it can go dormant and undetected for so long during which the host can infect others. It sounds horrible, but even being able to destroy all the cells infected with the virus is worth something though it may often prove fatal to the host. I don't think this is a 'cure' or 'vaccine' merely something that makes HIV treatments much much more effective.
Yet, not too surprisingly, Windows has found its way into Cuba and I'm certain the OLPC will also be found there in mass quantities if it is indeed useful/popular. Physical devices may be harder to find there than software but you'll find them there.
This isn't news. The U.S. trade embargos have been in place on Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan and Syria for a while now. Furthermore, if the laptops are made and assembled outside the U.S.
So let's get creative here, you make and manufacture the hardware outside the United States. Then you ship them to restricted countries (I think the parts are going to come from China anyway). You leave it up to people inside Cuba or where ever to install the OLPC image. Who has violated the TOS? The citizens of the country who really don't give a damn what U.S. export laws they're breaking.
And if these laws are broken, who's going to enforce them? Redhat/Fedora? The U.S. government is going to show up and stop laptops from going to children? The U.S. government is going to shutdown a free open source software hosting site? I highly doubt it.
It's kind of sad that a company who powers its hundreds of thousands of computers in clusters with a trimmed down RedHat puts Linux second on the list of operating systems to support with its software.
I know Google's just playing the numbers (far more Win users than Linux) but you would think that there would be at least enough respect present for them to develop and release for both platforms in tandem. Google has the resources to do that, it's almost like some sort of 'love yet neglect' relationship that churns out of American movies these days.
I hope Google has bigger plans than slowly rolling out its apps in Linux well after it's put them out in Windows.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
And don't even get me started on Hillary, there's solid proof that her servers resolve to the IP address 66.66.66.66 and that good packets go in but only packets with the evil flag flipped to '1' come out.
I suppose that's politicians for you, though. 'Does not compute' with them, can't pretend we're living in a society where everyone feels equally represented without them.
Areal view of what was believed to be the original impact site and Lake Cheko.
:)
I'm no geologist so I can't comment on whether or not this lake looks typical but I will say that, judging by the coloration of the foliage around it, this is probable the same land as the river/stream that winds to the west of it. Interesting is that if you follow it northwest for miles it looks smooth cut. Once it passes Lake Cheko, it seems to become more speckled and pock marked. Doesn't seem 'natural' to me for an inlet and outlet to be positioned so close together on a lake--though the topography could indeed make that make sense if I could see a map of it.
I would guess this is quite feasible indeed to be part of whatever happened nearly 100 years ago. Check out the last page of this PDF which seems to show the comet/asteroid approaching at an angle (thus the strange blast pattern). At that trajectory, you'd think there'd be a chance for whatever hit to break apart and skip. Maybe the other abnormal marks in the stream are from other pieces/debris?
Probably fueled by the sci-fi stories written about the same topic (like the 1946 one by Alexander Kazantsev), I find it interesting to read about things like the Tunguska Genetic Anomaly whether they be true or not. Maybe these are the scientist's tabloids?
How do you plan to deal with the litigation against you that will inevitably spring up from companies like Blizzard & Sony that state this violates TOS and restrict auctions/selling on eBay and everywhere else?
Will your servers be foreign based to avoid this?
Will your site will work out converting currencies in one game to currencies in another game--so that if I play Warcraft and Final Fantasy I can spend my gold for gil? If you are doing this, how are you going to keep these markets in check? Will it all just be normalized against the dollar?
Bottom line question is whether or not you'll control dumping of virtual currency or if you'll institute ranges. If you're not instituting limits or regulating in a Federal Reserve type manner, how are you going to protect against a single person running the market (buying all the gold and sitting on it while letting it drip out slowly at an extreme amount of USD)?
Will you post graphs of each MMO's currency so we can watch currencies like SWG's credit against Warcraft's Gold?
So you say you work out the middle man in this horrible scheme of capitalism. But I'm still concerned that the people who are farming right now at a severely reduced pay rate are doing so because they don't have the money to front for the operation and they have no choice but to remain a pawn. They make very little money and the real profits go to some American guy manipulating them all and paying for their accounts.
Tell me again how your service does not promote this middle man from acting like a player? How am I assured that my gold is not earned by some innocent kid who is doing this as a job to make money? How am I assured this isn't still some cog in a scheme to exploit foreign workers?
Disclaimer for the rest of Slashdot: I'm well aware of the situations where this may be the person's only means of income. I still would rather not support this system.
I'm guessing that if it's illegal to take a picture of police than it's also illegal to film them.
So, I guess if you want to videotape the police, you'd better declare yourself an independent journalist and hope the judge values our freedom of the press?
This is both shocking & amazing on so many levels. I can think of several ways to look at this that make it hilariously backwards. The cops are on duty, their income is supplied by individuals like this man. As far as I'm aware, employers are allowed to videotape their employers.
I've met good policemen and I've met pigs. These instances sound like a pig on a power trip. Illegal wiretapping, yeah right! It has a sound function so he's wiretapping? Everything just sounds so ridiculous. If it happens in public, it's public domain. This is just obvious abuse of those they are supposed to protect.
15. The system of claim 1, wherein said geographical search area is
Laugh now, but thousands of years from now when you're looking for an all night Denny's around Omicron Percei 8, the system that you use will end up paying me patent royalties!
Having grown up in Minnesota, I was raised in a grade school that had many copies of the Oregon Trail.
..." or something like that, it said "Indians Attack!" and then you were holding a shotgun from the point of view of the shooter. There were three frames of images with a Native American on horseback and a bow. He would ride at a random speed in front of you and you had to shoot when he was in the middle of the screen. The better you did, the less supplies you lost.
But something that isn't often mentioned about the Oregon Trail is the controversy that surrounded one of the first releases about it. We're all very familiar with the original but before that there was an even older one with crappier graphics. I distinctly remember playing the very old one only to have the teacher come up to my computer, ask me where I got that & then she took the disc and formatted it. Now that was curious behavior for a teacher.
So I came into the lab after school, got another copy of the disk from where I had found the original (stacks of old disks were common) and popped it in. The graphics were worse but I soon realized why this particular version was frowned upon. Instead of saying, "You have encountered Native Americans
I could see how you could argue either way to keep that in the game. Maybe that's really how some Native Americans reacted to settlers. Maybe you don't want your kid thinking that Native Americans were (and still are) like that. One thing is for sure--it was never in another version of the Trail.
Minnesota's history is ingrained with Native Americans. I have many Native American friends and thoroughly enjoy Pow Wows & their amazing celebrations. At the same time, I recognize that there was conflict going on with settlers being killed or wounded at towns like Milford, Acton & Slaughter Slough. Interesting history to me, haven't heard anyone who's known about these events aside from Native Americans.
Is it right to just forget about it? I personally don't think denial is the best way to deal with history. Although, the displacement of Native Americans from the east to parts further west like Oklahoma, Minnesota & Wisconsin (resulting in many deaths) isn't very widely known by most Americans.
I never was an avid fan of the Sopranos. My roommate was seriously in love with it and I'd catch an episode with him. I've seen only a handful and they spread across a broad spectrum from an interesting first season episode full of mob action & scheming to a kid shitting in a shower and stepping on it. Ok, so maybe I'm oversimplifying the episodes that slowly build up family strife and psychological problems that must come with being in organized crime families.
... if they did, mobsters would have just killed each other off. But there are smart mobsters out there and what I took the ending to mean to me is that Tony is, after all, a smart mobster. He made it. Guys around him were dying left & right and his time had come but he struck a deal after holding out. I think they killed his brother or at least someone close to him but he was smart enough to write that casualty off. Not a lot of people could do that. Maybe this series chronicles the growth of an intelligent mobster? The old Tony might have made an offensive after that.
:)
Last night, it was very easy for me to accept the ending of the series finale. Because I wasn't addicted to the show. Logically, not all mob stories end in a Scarface-like explosion where everyone dies
I kept waiting for an assassin to pop out & kill Tony for the last half of the show. But, I didn't have a reason why that should have happened. Am I so trained by movies & books on endings that I can't accept one without a climax? My roommate new it was coming because he kept looking at his watch and saying stuff like "ok, shit better start happening because they've only got like 15 minutes." But you know, you're at the mercy of the writers and creaters of the show.
It was unorthodoxed for it to end that way. I'm reminded of the utter ripoff I felt when I saw the last episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. But that was due to funding, I think this was the idea of the minds behind the show. Good for them. I like seeing deviations from normality when I don't have to suffer from it.
In the end, there were a lot of things that weren't wrapped up and I think that's the big problem a lot of fans are having to deal with. I think the reason so many fans are going to feel this is that the show started off as a badass mob series that attracted viewers of a certain nature who enjoy living a vicarious life of crime. Unfortunately, the ending just wasn't juicy enough to satiate that kind of appetite and I think that's why you'll hear so much about this. Personally, I liked it although I recognize that too many questions were left unanswered, too many futures were left uncertain & too many problems were left unresolved.
But, hey, that's life, isn't it?