And cue up a zillion new disaster movies and documentaries about how this "new" super volcano could destroy the planet. I mean that is the only few things these channels offer these days, disaster movies and docs about the potential for disasters, and shows about logging.
Someone needs to keep Dean Cain employed!
Synopsis: Dean Cain, a retired US geologist is standing on his paddleboard off the coast of Hawaii when a freak wave washes over him and crashes ashore. Scratching his head and thinking that something is not right, he, and some B list bimbo, begins an epic shirtless journey and battle to save the planet by building the world's largest laser guided cork to plug a massive Pacific volcano that nobody knew about. Now if only he could get past the mega huge prehistoric sharks that the volcano keeps erupting at him!!!
I get my movies through a tube. That's right, a Senator Ted Stevens reference, Altavista that biatch. It's about as current and relevant as a DVD mailer company complaining about the cost of postage stamps for hand delivered snail mail.
Actually I do. I could care less about the project, who gives a fuck. Another bleeding heart FOSS is your friend bullshit waste of time and money.
But clearly since PayPal provides a crowdfunding platform they have a right to ask for LEGITIMATE reason to continue to fund a project if there is some question to how the money is being used, or no real information about the progress of a project.
I am tired of people rising to the defense of open source and crowdfunded projects without thinking. There is no reason to assume that you can be handed thousands of investor's money and then have no real business strategy, budget, or timeframe to deliver on your goals. If your investor asks for progress, you fucking provide it. If your investor is calling you out, you better cover your ass with legitimate paperwork.
So suck it up MailPile. You thought you could create some crowdfunded bullshit project, take the money from tens of thousands of people that will just throw anything at FOSS out of some vapid belief it matters and then provide what; a reskin of some existing open source mail program and call it a day?
Hey, if MailPile is legitimate and well organized that information should be trivial and readily obtained so feed it to PayPal and tell them to shut the fuck up. But if its a bunch of stoners thinking they got away with ripping off a bunch of retards through PayPal, they should guess again.
I think PayPal is clearly in the right here to ask for some information about how the money is being spent considering they offered the opportunity to have this project funded through their organization.
If all you do is grab off the shelf parts and swap them out for the old parts, that is a modest amount of effort and improvement by any definition of the term.
You have no idea what business transactions were made between MS and Motorola leading up to this case.
I will agree these companies are embroiled in a patent war and so are not playing fairly or favourable with each other, but to call something misleading or false and then have no fucking idea what actually went on is the problem with Slashdot today. Are you a patent lawyer, have you even set up a licensing agreement? Setting them up is usually a little more complicated than negotiating the price of used car followed by a handshake.
I still like to think that the average courtroom contains a judge and lawyers a little more intelligent than the average Slashdot user. Sometimes it seems they are not, but evidence was presented, debated, and weighed into the final decision.
If you don't believe this is the case then perhaps Motorola and Microsoft should just set up an "Ask Slashdot" post and decide their fate there.
Consider the USB "standard". Someone invented that and instead of being a bitch and sitting on it they decided to partner with many companies to implement the technology on many products. Those companies willingly paid the licensing or royalty structure set in place to use the USB standard, largely because the fee structure was not ridiculous or anticompetitive in nature. Once everyone started using USB it BECAME a standard because if you came out with your own proprietary data port then largely that would fail, except for bitches like Apple that created their own proprietary device ports, but they still hook into a USB port anyways.
Now if the original USB patent holder wanted to be a dick they would increase their USB fee structure only for certain companies they didn't like, say that no Microsoft device could use USB without paying $50 a device while other companies would only pay $0.05. If a prick patent holder decides to do that, then of course Microsoft, or any company, would sue and claim that they are impeded from being offered fair access to a parent that has become an essential standard for all devices in the category.
If a company choose to monopolize and sit on a patent, it ill NEVER become a standard. For instance if Apple decided that Thunderbolt was the only technology to use at both ends of the cable, and decided none of their products would have USB, and decided to not cross license Thunderbolt with their competitors, then Thunderbolt would not be a Standards essential patent. Nobody would bother to sue Apple because nobody would bother with Thunderbolt.
Microsoft wanted to use video codecs and wireless standards that almost every other product has, but Motorola choose to extort Microsoft with an unfair fee schedule. Regardless of who is the target of the extortion, the courts are clearly no longer willing to tolerate this bullshit and have ruled favorably to prevent Motorola from succeeding in this.
BTW if any company feels Microsoft wronged them in the past for the same thing, now is an excellent time to re-open those cases. But the comment about FAT is stupid because you have no idea what the licensing fee was for FAT and whether Microsoft did anything unfair in OEM cross licensing. Considering that at one time Microsoft had 95+% of the consumer computer market, it only makes sense that OEMs wanted to support FAT file system at all costs because it was a HUGE market to ignore. Sometimes a company is in a position where they can charge whatever they want because the OEMs will throw money at them to get into the business. If the OEM's felt the fee was fair then I am sure for something like SD cards, the billions they made AFTER the agreement pails to the licensing fees paid.
Motorola filed the patents which is perfectly in their rights, however what they choose to do was try to extort a lot of unreasonable royalties and licensing fees out of Microsoft which thankfully the courts have found in favour of Microsoft. Yes Microsoft ain't no saints, but thankfully the courts are waking up and stopping this kind of anti-competitive bullshit.
The USPO is not involved in setting the conditions of licensing, royalties, or any other arrangement or agreement for two parties to share or exchange patent IP. A patent filed does not come with a set of conditions on how it should be used, shared, or what fee schedule is applied for royalties or licensing. I am tired of people ignorant of the patent process just throwing out stupid diatribes about the patent office and patents in general. Sure if the USPO grants a patent in the first place that is trivial in nature or duplicates existing work, then by all means slam the USPO. This case is not the time for that.
There is nothing wrong with a patent. Someone that "invents" something has full right to protect their IP. They have a right to be compensated for the effort, time and money that went into creating the idea. I don't care if its a trivial bit of nonsense, or some elaborate mechanical wonder, everyone has a right to invent and turn that into a money making enterprise. The alternative is communism where all your ideas belong to the state and you just get some stale bread for all your effort. Do you want to live in that communist state? Keep slamming patents and decrying for their absolution and everything to do with capitalism and democracy in general.
However what has happened to the humble patent today is they are now are used in a cold war of stockpiling of ideas in a direct effort to prevent competition. The company that succeeds today will have the largest patent portfolio and hopes that the only way for their competition to survive is to have to pay them obscene royalties, or go out of business. Companies like Apple rarely even share their patents, they just make so much obscene profit that they patent every little stupid idea that comes into their heads and hope that each one cuts a tiny slice out of the ability for their competition to create a successful product.
The patent has been weaponized.
There is nothing about the patent that needs to be changed, but the laws surrounding how patents are shared, exchanged, that is the business surrounding the patent, needs to change and its up to courts to start setting precedent that extorting ANY company using and anti-competitive pricing structures or withholding a patent that is necessary to support the standardization of products and services should no longer be tolerated.
They are pandering to the emergence of the Idiot Elite.
Think of it, all those features could be argued as "power" features, which have been stripped out or dumbed down to pander to a growing populace of people too lazy or otherwise unable to figure out how to learn something a little more advanced than point and click.
I mean Microsoft pulled the start menu because ALL iOS and Android users are used to accessing apps by slapping a hairy knuckle against a grid these days, no fancy "tree" lists, categorizations or having to type to find something. Microsoft might have pissed off their power users, but guaranteed there are more people that actually like the Metro interface then the vocal minority that hate it. People are NOT complaining about the dumbed down simplicity of other Tablet OS'es these days.
So nerds, geeks, and dweebs do not rule the tech universe anymore, we are just along for the ride. We used to drive the market by wanting faster and better and more powerful in every generation, but eventually companies could not keep up and realized taking a large regressive step backwards made these products more accessible and desirable by the non-tech elite. Instead of upgrading to a new more powerful 16 core desktop, the idiot elite were dazzled by the simplicity of a tablet or phone with only a small fraction of the processing power and abandoned traditional computers, as they are with other services and games. People would rather fling a bird at pigs or harvest Smurfberries for 6 hours a day rather than exploring a world in an RPG or even getting out their aggressions in a state of the art FPS.
Every company today is crafting their services and products to pander to the Idiot Elite because they know they can profit more from them rather than trying to appease the power user. Consider the idea if an FPS like Crysis came out where you would have to buy your ammo with real world money. The GEEKS and NERDS would have revolted and the game would never be successful. However today the Idiot Elite are throwing millions of real world money at companies buying their fucking Smurfberries.
Companies are not ignoring their demographic, they are just beginning to realize how naive they are.
We lost, even Slashdot is slowly slipping into a social site where people would rather debate the qualities of cat breeds rather than ripping into the merits of a new CPU architecture.
No company makes a change to their service or product just to piss of customers, they do so because they are realizing there is a growing market of users that simply do not give a fuck!
Seeing this I had to laugh remembering an episode of Parks and Recreation where the town keeps promoting the use of Altavista when the rest of the world has moved on.
By the way, its ridiculous to complain about the use of a free service. If they were paying money for it then they have a right to complain, but using a free service leaves you prone to the whims of the company. If you don't like their policies then by all means please fire up your own Linux server and serve your own GD blog.
Do you want a world with 2+ billion middle class citizens greedy and wasteful like western culture?
I mean its all grand to sit in your 1/2 million dollar home you can't afford, sipping Starbucks while your Tesla beams its charging status to your iPhone and smack your hand down on a table and demand that the Chinese population earn the same kind of living you do, but China is doing what most other Western countries did to establish their "foundations".
I mean there was a time in US history, not TOO long ago, where the "human rights" violations of a country that needed to grow their industry and economy quickly resulted in a civil war, after which the US entered an era of unprecedented growth and influence on the world stage. You think the US started on a strong foundation of quality and natural economic growth? Or didn't the US start on a foundation of slaves building the infrastructure of the country?
Not defending that China should just go through the motions of a slave economy just because everyone else has, but I mean a country the size of China can't turn on a dime and have every citizen sitting in houses they can't afford, sipping expensive branded coffee and waiting for the Tesla to finish charging so they can drive their kids to soccer practice at a park 1/4 mile away.
Hopefully China might do something better this time then create a state of petulant and lazy citizens.
But while Western governments twiddle their thumbs in their respective senates or congress figuring out how to recover from a devastating decline in the economy with a mounting ecological deficit and can't do anything without gauging public opinion from the largely idiot masses when it comes to any kind of "super-project", China will most likely solve most of the world's problems in energy and climate change.
Surprisingly the country with past human right violations may actually save humanity, while countries that promote the idea they protect human rights sit and let the world rot while their ineffective politicians quibble in their grand ballrooms of democracy.
Of course if China's economy collapses under the weight and pressure of these super-projects, the world is fucked.
Yes, if you want your kids to be both ignorant and socially retarded, then please homeschool them.
While I will agree some home schooled kids receive a good level education, considering that it also requires significant discipline from the parents usually home schooled children come from families of highly opinionated and socially maladjusted adults that are simply pushing their own narrow minded views of life on their children.
For instance a religious parent is going to skip over the bits of "science" that don't align with the Bible, or a vegan parent is going to force their children to be vegan. And then on top of that the parent controls every aspect of social interaction of the child with other children, they are going to pick and choose only children from other families with a similar narrow-minded outlook on life. If you want to hide your children from being able to make their own decisions in life when they become an adult, then clone their minds to your exact POV through home school. The role of a parent is to guide their child to adulthood, not to make carbon copies of themselves.
And yes, social interaction is a lot more important in the long run than IQ. IQ is nothing, its a measure of how well you can retain information. Having a high IQ but then being socially awkward means you probably won't have a lot of success in life. It might not be fair, but applying for a job is a social experience, your resume can be full of glowing recommendations from your, um, parents, but you ain't getting that job if you can't demonstrate compatibility with the culture of the company you are applying for.
Hiding your child from social interaction just to selectively shove information into their brains, does that sound like a great idea? I mean homeschooling is pretty much just a step away from being a cult with a lot fewer members.
All Elon has done is put a battery into a nice attractive container and sells it as a high-end luxury car. There is absolutely NOTHING innovative about the Tesla cars.
Elon needs to step out of the fantasy world he has created in his mind and start applying some of that supposed "innovative thinking" towards solving some real problems with electric vehicles. The battery technology today is not an appropriate solution for the future of electric powered vehicles.
Instead of pie-in-the-sky ideas like Hyperloop, Elon should invest his billions into coming out with a new generation of batteries that:
a) don't rob the world of a specific limited resource to produce, need to make it from carbon, period, we have more than enough, use up what we have dumped into the atmosphere as a start. b) has a much higher energy density than found in today's batteries, extends range and delivery of power comparable to combustion engines. c) are quicker to charge, ideally 5 minutes for a long enough charge that matters d) are significantly cheaper to produce, we don't want $20k batteries that have a limited lifetime.
I mean, its been easy to just take existing technology and repackage it as a luxury car, and maybe guys like Elon are nothing more than snake oil salesmen, but if this guy wants to "save the planet" like he thinks he is doing, then an X-Prize for a new generation of battery technology is what both Tesla and the planet needs if we want to move forward with electric vehicles.
This is the problem with ALL green thinkers, they see a single minded solution and don't realize or understand the logistics of it in terms of scaling up to make an actual environmental difference or what other side-effect impact it has on the environment. The world moving away from oil and towards something more difficult and limited such as Lithium is definitely not a solution; we would have to scrap the earth bare and drain the oceans to make enough Lithium to match the power storage equivalent of what is found in oil today, and then you still need to make the power to charge them. I am so frustrated when some green thinker thinks we need to stop using oil and then offers stupid narrow-minded solutions like solar or battery power vehicles and doesn't understand even a modicum of the logistics involved in making that happen. I am all for an alternative, but come up with a solution that works, not a vapid pipe-dream.
After watching an episode of Top Gear, Romania made it to the number one spot on my Bucket List of places NOT to go to before I die. So far the check box beside it is holding strong.
However if any Canadian village tried to do the same thing then the Rogers, Bell and Telus oligopoly would mount an armed strike and blow the village off the face of the planet because only one of those three companies can provide shitty telecom services to remote Canadian villages. I bet this Mexican village is still getting better service than even many people in Canadian urban centers.
I think there is another gaming depression looming similar to the great Atari game depression of the early 80's.
The problem is that companies like EA are so profit hungry that almost everything they do in games today is to drive more profit. Always on ensures no piracy, DLC ensures a constant revenue stream after a game release, Freemium is almost one of the most blatant attempts at gaming cash grabs ever because they know that stupid people will drop hundreds of dollars into a "free" game just to be able to advance to level 2. Nintendo has destroyed everything that was successful about it. Microsoft is pushing forward with a product that is already unpopular and Sony is just Sony.
This is happening on the PC, Tablets, Phones and Consoles, no platform is immune to the greedy corporations.
And so you might say what about the Indies, they are going to save gaming! Not if they are trying to push Freemium products like they are doing.
Eventually consumers are going to get fed up and stop buying games. I have no interest in the next generation systems and have generally stopped playing games even on mobile devices. I mean when Angry Birds started wanting you to buy power up's and Might Eagles to help you through the games then its obvious there is no integrity left in this industry. When I need to invest $40 to upgrade a dinosaur in the last Freemium game I will ever play, something is VERY wrong with the gaming industry.
What needs to happen is an almost universal collapse of ALL game companies before we might see a new generation of companies that actually respect their customers and not just their customer's money.
Intel was never an enemy of overclocking, Intel was an enemy of people taking their CPU's and turning them into a puff of smoke because they thought they would just set the clock speed and multiplier to maximum and start playing Quake immediately. Eventually they decided to prevent the average moron from destroying their CPU in a nanosecond by putting in more restrictions. Also they realized that these days that with the quality of GPU's and the fact few people even maximize the speed of a single core, let alone all 4 or 8 cores, overclocking a CPU is moot.
Better parenting usually prevents things from becoming destroyed I have found. A better parent doesn't hand a child a $800 titanium encased tablet and then ignores them for 8 hours leaving them in a room full of hammers and saws.
All I have ever seen with autonomous cars is controlled tests in controlled areas under ideal weather conditions in Nevada or California.
It's time to put up or shut up about autonomous cars and put them under some real world testing.
Put 100 of these things on the Trans-Canada highway and ask them to drive from St John's, NL to Vancouver, BC in the middle of January and get there faster than a horse drawn carriage. Use the schmucks who want to fly to Mars as their passengers because they have no value for their own lives.
The biggest issue is they will have to face is driving through Montreal and the province of Quebec, no autonomous car is going to come out of that city and province unscathed.
A box of Timbits and a large Double Double for the first passenger that survives the trip.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have to test it, it already succeeded and failed at the same time.
And cue up a zillion new disaster movies and documentaries about how this "new" super volcano could destroy the planet. I mean that is the only few things these channels offer these days, disaster movies and docs about the potential for disasters, and shows about logging.
Someone needs to keep Dean Cain employed!
Synopsis: Dean Cain, a retired US geologist is standing on his paddleboard off the coast of Hawaii when a freak wave washes over him and crashes ashore. Scratching his head and thinking that something is not right, he, and some B list bimbo, begins an epic shirtless journey and battle to save the planet by building the world's largest laser guided cork to plug a massive Pacific volcano that nobody knew about. Now if only he could get past the mega huge prehistoric sharks that the volcano keeps erupting at him!!!
© 2014 Asylum Pictures, the official movie studio of Syfy. "Making Movies for only $3.50/min" TM
I get my movies through a tube. That's right, a Senator Ted Stevens reference, Altavista that biatch. It's about as current and relevant as a DVD mailer company complaining about the cost of postage stamps for hand delivered snail mail.
Care, no...
Actually I do. I could care less about the project, who gives a fuck. Another bleeding heart FOSS is your friend bullshit waste of time and money.
But clearly since PayPal provides a crowdfunding platform they have a right to ask for LEGITIMATE reason to continue to fund a project if there is some question to how the money is being used, or no real information about the progress of a project.
I am tired of people rising to the defense of open source and crowdfunded projects without thinking. There is no reason to assume that you can be handed thousands of investor's money and then have no real business strategy, budget, or timeframe to deliver on your goals. If your investor asks for progress, you fucking provide it. If your investor is calling you out, you better cover your ass with legitimate paperwork.
So suck it up MailPile. You thought you could create some crowdfunded bullshit project, take the money from tens of thousands of people that will just throw anything at FOSS out of some vapid belief it matters and then provide what; a reskin of some existing open source mail program and call it a day?
Hey, if MailPile is legitimate and well organized that information should be trivial and readily obtained so feed it to PayPal and tell them to shut the fuck up. But if its a bunch of stoners thinking they got away with ripping off a bunch of retards through PayPal, they should guess again.
I think PayPal is clearly in the right here to ask for some information about how the money is being spent considering they offered the opportunity to have this project funded through their organization.
Bam
https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/lifecycle/crowdfunding/
Time to RTF-Guidlines
Yes it is modest.
If all you do is grab off the shelf parts and swap them out for the old parts, that is a modest amount of effort and improvement by any definition of the term.
You have no idea what business transactions were made between MS and Motorola leading up to this case.
I will agree these companies are embroiled in a patent war and so are not playing fairly or favourable with each other, but to call something misleading or false and then have no fucking idea what actually went on is the problem with Slashdot today. Are you a patent lawyer, have you even set up a licensing agreement? Setting them up is usually a little more complicated than negotiating the price of used car followed by a handshake.
I still like to think that the average courtroom contains a judge and lawyers a little more intelligent than the average Slashdot user. Sometimes it seems they are not, but evidence was presented, debated, and weighed into the final decision.
If you don't believe this is the case then perhaps Motorola and Microsoft should just set up an "Ask Slashdot" post and decide their fate there.
Nope, another fail in understanding patents.
Consider the USB "standard". Someone invented that and instead of being a bitch and sitting on it they decided to partner with many companies to implement the technology on many products. Those companies willingly paid the licensing or royalty structure set in place to use the USB standard, largely because the fee structure was not ridiculous or anticompetitive in nature. Once everyone started using USB it BECAME a standard because if you came out with your own proprietary data port then largely that would fail, except for bitches like Apple that created their own proprietary device ports, but they still hook into a USB port anyways.
Now if the original USB patent holder wanted to be a dick they would increase their USB fee structure only for certain companies they didn't like, say that no Microsoft device could use USB without paying $50 a device while other companies would only pay $0.05. If a prick patent holder decides to do that, then of course Microsoft, or any company, would sue and claim that they are impeded from being offered fair access to a parent that has become an essential standard for all devices in the category.
If a company choose to monopolize and sit on a patent, it ill NEVER become a standard. For instance if Apple decided that Thunderbolt was the only technology to use at both ends of the cable, and decided none of their products would have USB, and decided to not cross license Thunderbolt with their competitors, then Thunderbolt would not be a Standards essential patent. Nobody would bother to sue Apple because nobody would bother with Thunderbolt.
Microsoft wanted to use video codecs and wireless standards that almost every other product has, but Motorola choose to extort Microsoft with an unfair fee schedule. Regardless of who is the target of the extortion, the courts are clearly no longer willing to tolerate this bullshit and have ruled favorably to prevent Motorola from succeeding in this.
BTW if any company feels Microsoft wronged them in the past for the same thing, now is an excellent time to re-open those cases. But the comment about FAT is stupid because you have no idea what the licensing fee was for FAT and whether Microsoft did anything unfair in OEM cross licensing. Considering that at one time Microsoft had 95+% of the consumer computer market, it only makes sense that OEMs wanted to support FAT file system at all costs because it was a HUGE market to ignore. Sometimes a company is in a position where they can charge whatever they want because the OEMs will throw money at them to get into the business. If the OEM's felt the fee was fair then I am sure for something like SD cards, the billions they made AFTER the agreement pails to the licensing fees paid.
This has nothing to do with the USPO.
Motorola filed the patents which is perfectly in their rights, however what they choose to do was try to extort a lot of unreasonable royalties and licensing fees out of Microsoft which thankfully the courts have found in favour of Microsoft. Yes Microsoft ain't no saints, but thankfully the courts are waking up and stopping this kind of anti-competitive bullshit.
The USPO is not involved in setting the conditions of licensing, royalties, or any other arrangement or agreement for two parties to share or exchange patent IP. A patent filed does not come with a set of conditions on how it should be used, shared, or what fee schedule is applied for royalties or licensing. I am tired of people ignorant of the patent process just throwing out stupid diatribes about the patent office and patents in general. Sure if the USPO grants a patent in the first place that is trivial in nature or duplicates existing work, then by all means slam the USPO. This case is not the time for that.
There is nothing wrong with a patent. Someone that "invents" something has full right to protect their IP. They have a right to be compensated for the effort, time and money that went into creating the idea. I don't care if its a trivial bit of nonsense, or some elaborate mechanical wonder, everyone has a right to invent and turn that into a money making enterprise. The alternative is communism where all your ideas belong to the state and you just get some stale bread for all your effort. Do you want to live in that communist state? Keep slamming patents and decrying for their absolution and everything to do with capitalism and democracy in general.
However what has happened to the humble patent today is they are now are used in a cold war of stockpiling of ideas in a direct effort to prevent competition. The company that succeeds today will have the largest patent portfolio and hopes that the only way for their competition to survive is to have to pay them obscene royalties, or go out of business. Companies like Apple rarely even share their patents, they just make so much obscene profit that they patent every little stupid idea that comes into their heads and hope that each one cuts a tiny slice out of the ability for their competition to create a successful product.
The patent has been weaponized.
There is nothing about the patent that needs to be changed, but the laws surrounding how patents are shared, exchanged, that is the business surrounding the patent, needs to change and its up to courts to start setting precedent that extorting ANY company using and anti-competitive pricing structures or withholding a patent that is necessary to support the standardization of products and services should no longer be tolerated.
They are definitely NOT ignoring their users.
They are pandering to the emergence of the Idiot Elite.
Think of it, all those features could be argued as "power" features, which have been stripped out or dumbed down to pander to a growing populace of people too lazy or otherwise unable to figure out how to learn something a little more advanced than point and click.
I mean Microsoft pulled the start menu because ALL iOS and Android users are used to accessing apps by slapping a hairy knuckle against a grid these days, no fancy "tree" lists, categorizations or having to type to find something. Microsoft might have pissed off their power users, but guaranteed there are more people that actually like the Metro interface then the vocal minority that hate it. People are NOT complaining about the dumbed down simplicity of other Tablet OS'es these days.
So nerds, geeks, and dweebs do not rule the tech universe anymore, we are just along for the ride. We used to drive the market by wanting faster and better and more powerful in every generation, but eventually companies could not keep up and realized taking a large regressive step backwards made these products more accessible and desirable by the non-tech elite. Instead of upgrading to a new more powerful 16 core desktop, the idiot elite were dazzled by the simplicity of a tablet or phone with only a small fraction of the processing power and abandoned traditional computers, as they are with other services and games. People would rather fling a bird at pigs or harvest Smurfberries for 6 hours a day rather than exploring a world in an RPG or even getting out their aggressions in a state of the art FPS.
Every company today is crafting their services and products to pander to the Idiot Elite because they know they can profit more from them rather than trying to appease the power user. Consider the idea if an FPS like Crysis came out where you would have to buy your ammo with real world money. The GEEKS and NERDS would have revolted and the game would never be successful. However today the Idiot Elite are throwing millions of real world money at companies buying their fucking Smurfberries.
Companies are not ignoring their demographic, they are just beginning to realize how naive they are.
We lost, even Slashdot is slowly slipping into a social site where people would rather debate the qualities of cat breeds rather than ripping into the merits of a new CPU architecture.
No company makes a change to their service or product just to piss of customers, they do so because they are realizing there is a growing market of users that simply do not give a fuck!
yes, all 4 users revolt.
Seeing this I had to laugh remembering an episode of Parks and Recreation where the town keeps promoting the use of Altavista when the rest of the world has moved on.
By the way, its ridiculous to complain about the use of a free service. If they were paying money for it then they have a right to complain, but using a free service leaves you prone to the whims of the company. If you don't like their policies then by all means please fire up your own Linux server and serve your own GD blog.
The order of songs in a compilation is the only original thing they can copyright as the songs are largely all vapid and derivative anyways.
No the definition of insanity is to do the same thing and expect different results, like protesting DRM.
Do you want a world with 2+ billion middle class citizens greedy and wasteful like western culture?
I mean its all grand to sit in your 1/2 million dollar home you can't afford, sipping Starbucks while your Tesla beams its charging status to your iPhone and smack your hand down on a table and demand that the Chinese population earn the same kind of living you do, but China is doing what most other Western countries did to establish their "foundations".
I mean there was a time in US history, not TOO long ago, where the "human rights" violations of a country that needed to grow their industry and economy quickly resulted in a civil war, after which the US entered an era of unprecedented growth and influence on the world stage. You think the US started on a strong foundation of quality and natural economic growth? Or didn't the US start on a foundation of slaves building the infrastructure of the country?
Not defending that China should just go through the motions of a slave economy just because everyone else has, but I mean a country the size of China can't turn on a dime and have every citizen sitting in houses they can't afford, sipping expensive branded coffee and waiting for the Tesla to finish charging so they can drive their kids to soccer practice at a park 1/4 mile away.
Hopefully China might do something better this time then create a state of petulant and lazy citizens.
But while Western governments twiddle their thumbs in their respective senates or congress figuring out how to recover from a devastating decline in the economy with a mounting ecological deficit and can't do anything without gauging public opinion from the largely idiot masses when it comes to any kind of "super-project", China will most likely solve most of the world's problems in energy and climate change.
Surprisingly the country with past human right violations may actually save humanity, while countries that promote the idea they protect human rights sit and let the world rot while their ineffective politicians quibble in their grand ballrooms of democracy.
Of course if China's economy collapses under the weight and pressure of these super-projects, the world is fucked.
Yes, if you want your kids to be both ignorant and socially retarded, then please homeschool them.
While I will agree some home schooled kids receive a good level education, considering that it also requires significant discipline from the parents usually home schooled children come from families of highly opinionated and socially maladjusted adults that are simply pushing their own narrow minded views of life on their children.
For instance a religious parent is going to skip over the bits of "science" that don't align with the Bible, or a vegan parent is going to force their children to be vegan. And then on top of that the parent controls every aspect of social interaction of the child with other children, they are going to pick and choose only children from other families with a similar narrow-minded outlook on life. If you want to hide your children from being able to make their own decisions in life when they become an adult, then clone their minds to your exact POV through home school. The role of a parent is to guide their child to adulthood, not to make carbon copies of themselves.
And yes, social interaction is a lot more important in the long run than IQ. IQ is nothing, its a measure of how well you can retain information. Having a high IQ but then being socially awkward means you probably won't have a lot of success in life. It might not be fair, but applying for a job is a social experience, your resume can be full of glowing recommendations from your, um, parents, but you ain't getting that job if you can't demonstrate compatibility with the culture of the company you are applying for.
Hiding your child from social interaction just to selectively shove information into their brains, does that sound like a great idea? I mean homeschooling is pretty much just a step away from being a cult with a lot fewer members.
All Elon has done is put a battery into a nice attractive container and sells it as a high-end luxury car. There is absolutely NOTHING innovative about the Tesla cars.
Elon needs to step out of the fantasy world he has created in his mind and start applying some of that supposed "innovative thinking" towards solving some real problems with electric vehicles. The battery technology today is not an appropriate solution for the future of electric powered vehicles.
Instead of pie-in-the-sky ideas like Hyperloop, Elon should invest his billions into coming out with a new generation of batteries that:
a) don't rob the world of a specific limited resource to produce, need to make it from carbon, period, we have more than enough, use up what we have dumped into the atmosphere as a start.
b) has a much higher energy density than found in today's batteries, extends range and delivery of power comparable to combustion engines.
c) are quicker to charge, ideally 5 minutes for a long enough charge that matters
d) are significantly cheaper to produce, we don't want $20k batteries that have a limited lifetime.
I mean, its been easy to just take existing technology and repackage it as a luxury car, and maybe guys like Elon are nothing more than snake oil salesmen, but if this guy wants to "save the planet" like he thinks he is doing, then an X-Prize for a new generation of battery technology is what both Tesla and the planet needs if we want to move forward with electric vehicles.
This is the problem with ALL green thinkers, they see a single minded solution and don't realize or understand the logistics of it in terms of scaling up to make an actual environmental difference or what other side-effect impact it has on the environment. The world moving away from oil and towards something more difficult and limited such as Lithium is definitely not a solution; we would have to scrap the earth bare and drain the oceans to make enough Lithium to match the power storage equivalent of what is found in oil today, and then you still need to make the power to charge them. I am so frustrated when some green thinker thinks we need to stop using oil and then offers stupid narrow-minded solutions like solar or battery power vehicles and doesn't understand even a modicum of the logistics involved in making that happen. I am all for an alternative, but come up with a solution that works, not a vapid pipe-dream.
After watching an episode of Top Gear, Romania made it to the number one spot on my Bucket List of places NOT to go to before I die. So far the check box beside it is holding strong.
However if any Canadian village tried to do the same thing then the Rogers, Bell and Telus oligopoly would mount an armed strike and blow the village off the face of the planet because only one of those three companies can provide shitty telecom services to remote Canadian villages. I bet this Mexican village is still getting better service than even many people in Canadian urban centers.
I think there is another gaming depression looming similar to the great Atari game depression of the early 80's.
The problem is that companies like EA are so profit hungry that almost everything they do in games today is to drive more profit. Always on ensures no piracy, DLC ensures a constant revenue stream after a game release, Freemium is almost one of the most blatant attempts at gaming cash grabs ever because they know that stupid people will drop hundreds of dollars into a "free" game just to be able to advance to level 2. Nintendo has destroyed everything that was successful about it. Microsoft is pushing forward with a product that is already unpopular and Sony is just Sony.
This is happening on the PC, Tablets, Phones and Consoles, no platform is immune to the greedy corporations.
And so you might say what about the Indies, they are going to save gaming! Not if they are trying to push Freemium products like they are doing.
Eventually consumers are going to get fed up and stop buying games. I have no interest in the next generation systems and have generally stopped playing games even on mobile devices. I mean when Angry Birds started wanting you to buy power up's and Might Eagles to help you through the games then its obvious there is no integrity left in this industry. When I need to invest $40 to upgrade a dinosaur in the last Freemium game I will ever play, something is VERY wrong with the gaming industry.
What needs to happen is an almost universal collapse of ALL game companies before we might see a new generation of companies that actually respect their customers and not just their customer's money.
Intel was never an enemy of overclocking, Intel was an enemy of people taking their CPU's and turning them into a puff of smoke because they thought they would just set the clock speed and multiplier to maximum and start playing Quake immediately. Eventually they decided to prevent the average moron from destroying their CPU in a nanosecond by putting in more restrictions. Also they realized that these days that with the quality of GPU's and the fact few people even maximize the speed of a single core, let alone all 4 or 8 cores, overclocking a CPU is moot.
Better parenting usually prevents things from becoming destroyed I have found. A better parent doesn't hand a child a $800 titanium encased tablet and then ignores them for 8 hours leaving them in a room full of hammers and saws.
Nobody cares about the dark side of the moon, mine the fuck out of it!
Just don't let NASA up their drawing a big wang on the front side.
All I have ever seen with autonomous cars is controlled tests in controlled areas under ideal weather conditions in Nevada or California.
It's time to put up or shut up about autonomous cars and put them under some real world testing.
Put 100 of these things on the Trans-Canada highway and ask them to drive from St John's, NL to Vancouver, BC in the middle of January and get there faster than a horse drawn carriage. Use the schmucks who want to fly to Mars as their passengers because they have no value for their own lives.
The biggest issue is they will have to face is driving through Montreal and the province of Quebec, no autonomous car is going to come out of that city and province unscathed.
A box of Timbits and a large Double Double for the first passenger that survives the trip.
Because 3D is the next big thing in....oh wait everybody is pulling out of 3D content these days.
Leave it to Microsoft to be way behind on current consumer trends.
No, it explains that you wasted some poor teacher's time.