Why do you think teens have "NO MONEY?!?"? The whole reason they get marketed to so much is that they DO have a lot of expendable cash, and usually don't have any more important things to save their money for. (I know I bought a hell of a lot more video games when I was in high school with a part time job than I do now, when I have to pay rent.)
>>Then you did a poor market research. You see: offline games can be pirated easily, don't expect generally underfunded teens not to pirate them.
If you take up this line of reasoning, you'd better never, ever complain about DRM and Steam-style activation protocols. This is the most idiotic kind of "If you didn't want your bike stolen you should have had a better lock" reasoning.
>>I know which one I prefer. What about you?
I love how you can twist a sort of free-market argument to explain why music and game-makers are hurting, but not make the obvious next step: if we're being laissez-faire about the whole thing, then you've got no place to bitch when those companies start including DRM and/or online activation to their products. If The Consumer doesn't want DRM, he can just not buy Half-Life 2.
The way I see it, the only two philosophically consistent options are different:
1. Everybody is bound by law: Pirate Bay and others can't blatantly distribute illegal material, and the various media industries are prevented from locking down their content with DRM that violates fair-use laws.
2. Free market rules: The media industries are basically toothless to prevent Pirate Bay and other from distributing their stuff, but on the other hand they're free to add all sorts of restrictive DRM to new releases, so that nobody CAN pirate.
>>And in case people have forgotten why poor people contribute more to environment problems, keep in mind that poor people cause more environmental damage both through lack of education, apathy, and because the small economic gain from considerable environmental damage can pay for food and such things. Further, they have a higher reproduction rate than wealthier people.
The trick here is that wealthy people don't chop down fewer forests and have fewer children just because money makes them eco-friendly and sterile. They do so because they're part of an industrialized (or post-industrialized) workforce, with different economic concerns.
Take reproduction: in the poorest areas of the world, children are a "positive investment" - they provide free labor and are cheap to raise. This is obviously different in the U.S., where kids cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise and parents are lucky if they'll mow the lawn once a week. Plus, for a U.S. woman to have and raise a whole bunch of children incurs a large opportunity cost, because that woman could otherwise have a decently-paying job; in many parts of the world, economic opportunities for women outside of childbearing are very scarce.
Now, let's say we wipe out all the mosquitos in sub-Saharan Africa and cure malaria and a whole host of other diseases. This will indeed help the people in those areas short-term and on an individual level. But it's not like as soon as they get off the sickbed they're going to go to work as accountants and tech support workers. They STILL won't have any infrastructure or economic opportunities, especially the women, and therefore they'll continue to chop down forests and have more children than can be supported.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong. Far from it. But I do think it's overstating the situation to say that killing these mosquitos will improve the social and economic situation of the affected people enough to alter their effect on the environment on a large level.
(Pet theory time: I think the ideal humanitarian aid package to deeply troubled areas like sub-Saharan Africa would consist of as much "triage" aid as possible - food, clean water, medical supplies, etc. - but also birth-control education and supplies, so that women have the capacity to control their reproduction, and economic investments like microloans for women, so that they have the economic incentive not to have more children than the area can support. That way, hopefully, those areas could start to rise above sustenance level and emergency situations would become rarer. I'd be interested to hear if this makes sense to people with more knowledge about the subject.)
They're pretty up-front about it, but it's worth noting that the authors here work for AdaCore and have a vested interest in getting people to use their language. (Notice how they keep talking about the importance of teaching "languages like C++ and Ada" and the section about why Ada is the best programming language ever.)
>>Referring to scientific facts in terms of 'faith' and 'belief' is rather an unfortunate choice of terminology. There's no need to believe in facts. There's no need to 'have faith' in random mutations--you can prove to yourself that such things happen, and thus have no need for 'faith'.
Hume says it smarterer than I can, but basically, no. Scientific endeavor is based on faith in the concept of "cause and effect," which we can never have any (non-circular) reason for believing. You can only "prove to yourself" facts about DNA, et cetera if you're already willing to make a boatload of assumptions about the nature of the Universe.
Of course, you can go even further back and ask the same questions Descartes asked. (Or zoom forward and look at the Matrix pop-culture version of them.) How do we KNOW that the world around us is "real" and not just an extended illusion, or dream, or computer simulation? Scientific observation can only prove that it's a highly consistent and detailed reality/illusion/dream/Matrix. Descartes could only "prove" the existence of the world by relying on the concept of a benevolent God. Is that an assumption you're willing to work from?
Honestly, there are plenty of "educational" things they could stick in this game other than actually simulating what a rocket scientist does.
If you think about it, most Americans don't really understand space science. They don't understand the basic theory, they don't understand the pragmatic limitations, and (perhaps most importantly) they don't necessarily see the long-term benefits of advanced scientific research. Maybe setting up the game as more of a high-level Sim type game would work.
So you want a framework for a game? How about a Space Race. Players form guild-like Research Groups, all vying for achievements. The Groups would be striving for various achievements, like building a space telescope, landing a person on the Moon, mapping out the surface of Saturn, etc. To succeed in any of these tasks requires a lot of research (which takes in-game time and money), but you are rewarded in several ways. First off, you gain Prestige when you do something headline-worthy, especially if you're the first Group to manage it, but the Prestige is only instrumental - it earns you more funds and qualified manpower (because kids who saw your Moon Landing grow up and study astronomy), which you re-invest into new research.
The real goal of the game, though, is unlocking Knowledge, which you do in all sorts of ways. Some achievements (Hubble) might give you not very much Prestige, but they'll continue to accrue Knowledge over time. Others (space shuttle stuff) might give you a good boost in Prestige when your Group needs it, but aren't a great investment long-term because they don't give as much Knowledge. And as the Knowledge rolls in, players start to see the consequences. Ten game-years after your telescope launch, for example, you might get a note about how medical researchers have adopted your optics research to revolutionize heart surgery (based on a true story, I think).
I think it could definitely work as a high-level game like this; the question is how in-depth you can get. Would it make sense to have players in the Group actually playing as Aerospace Engineers, Electronics Experts, Optics Researchers, Physicists, etc.? Maybe they could manage it through a sort of abstracted skill-based minigame system: for example, the Physicist plays his minigame for as long as he wants, racking up Physics Research points (which the Group leader is responsible for funneling into the various projects the Group is running) but costing his Group money by the minute. That way, Groups could have managed budgets and so on without forcing players to play a certain number of hours every day. (The hot-shot "Physicist" players would be the ones who really excel at that minigame, so they have the best ratio of Research earned to time played.)
>>Do you want a laptop that is 0.16" to 0.76" thick? Go grab a ruler and put that in perspective.
I've been trying, actually. The 0.16" is clearly marketing-speak, because when you look at the thing the edges come to points. By that logic, I've seen cars that are.16" "at the thinnest point." And.76" is certainly thin, but hell, my current MacBook is less than an inch thick already. So at best they saved maybe a tenth of an inch of thickness and added in a prettier, curvy form-factor.
After watching the little intro video on the Apple website, I'm getting the impression this is intended mainly as a shiny executive toy. They mention presentations, meetings and airplanes every time they get a chance, for example. But beyond looking sleek, I'm not sure I get the point. I mean, are you actually SUPPOSED to be storing these in packing envelopes? If not, what are the advantages over a normal laptop? Is it worth the inconvenience of no removeable battery, no optical drive, minimal connectors, and limited hard drive options, all for a pound or two of weight saved? I know, I know, it comes with the subnotebook territory - but who are these "subnotebooks" targeted at, anyway?
I really feel sorry for a bunch of people who will post here too. I mean, what can you say to someone whose first transnational transportation experience was "taking an airplane to Seattle?" Back in my day, we had to load up the whole family into a wagon with six grandfather clocks, two sets of extra clothes, and 99 boxes of bullets and trek our way across the country by ox-driven cart. There were no in-flight snacks, no alternate endings, and PLENTY of fatalities. The path simply got harder and harder and demanded more pure luck from you, until you saw your last family member die of scurvy, probably because you really should have either packed some food or else learned how to maybe carry more than 200 pounds of it at a time when you shot 37,000 pounds of buffalo. Also, the country was uphill both ways, and there were 3 feet of snow, which made fording the river a bitch.
I disagree. The "!vegan" tag WAS indeed silly, because it should really go without saying that soy-based Vegan ice cream isn't going to be putting gelatin in, and vegans ALREADY couldn't eat normal ice cream, so they aren't affected at all by this development. A "!vegetarian" tag would make a lot more sense, because until now vegetarians could reasonably assume there are no animal products in ice cream. (Although I'm not sure that they'd be manufacturing these proteins out of animal-based gelatin in any case.)
Moving an asteroid off course would seem likely to require huge nuclear warheads in any case. Obviously, we can't wait until we see something headed towards us in a telescope to start refining uranium or whatever the hell, so we'd have to produce those huge warheads in advance.
So if the options are (a) have some gigaton warheads sitting around in a bunker Just In Case or (b) hope we don't get hit, I'm thinking (b) is by far the SAFER option, because there's probably a greater than 1 in a kajillion chance that some asshole here on Earth would get a hold of those warheads and use them to create their very own man-made Extinction Event(TM).
Well, exactly, a box cutter wasn't on the prohibited list, so he was able to bring it on board and use it to hijack a plane. Nowadays he couldn't do that. Maybe he'll come up with some other clever way to get a weapon on board, bribing the Dasani delivery guy or whatever - but maybe he won't.
The bigger problem is copycats. Take the shoe-bomber guy. Obviously he only got through because they weren't checking shoes, and he probably wouldn't have even tried that tactic if they WERE checking shoes. But what if after that news story broke, the TSA DIDN'T start checking shoes? Probably a couple hundred wackos and would-be terrorists saying, "Hey, good idea!"
Same with the Die Hard thing. Once an idea's made public, somebody's probably going to try it. Remember, we're not ONLY dealing with a cadre of evil super-genius terrorists. For every one of those, we've probably got dozens or hundreds of idiots and wackos who'll try it themselves, just like we had a "rash" of school shootings because there were a bunch of unbalanced high-schoolers who saw the news and somehow thought it was a good idea.
What makes you think a terrorist won't walk through a checkpoint with a weapon? Isn't it thought that at least some of the 9/11 hijackers got control of their planes by stabbing a passenger with a knife they'd brought on board?
As for shoes, didn't some jackass stick a bomb in his shoe and try to light it mid-flight just after 9/11? If he'd gone into the bathroom and done it, he might have succeeded; he was just stupid enough to try lighting his shoe in the passenger cabin.
I'm sure there's a lot of masquerade involved in security checks, but it's disingenuous to paint them as completely pointless. Would it make more sense for them to NOT check our shoes once it'd been established that an apparent moron could use shoes to smuggle a bomb on board?
I flew out of Newark on January 2 (which I'd assume is a pretty busy day), and I think I was in line for... maybe two minutes. Over maybe half a dozen flights in the past year, I think 10 minutes is probably my longest wait (excluding customs lines on international flights).
Yeah, taking your shoes off sucks, and they can stop being paranoid about deodorant any time now as far as I'm concerned, but the actual waiting period seems very tolerable. A shoe-scanner and some Prozak for the TFA guys would take care of those two problems, and from there we're just waiting around for Minority Report body-scanners so I don't have to take off my belt anymore.
>The real promise for this vaccine is as a preventative measure. The average age for a new smoker is 13. Only 10% start after age 18. So if this works, a school inoculation program might be the way to prevent smoking.
Huh? Kids don't start smoking to get high. Cigarettes aren't like cocaine where there's an immediate euphoric rush when you smoke them; really they're no more mood-altering than a cup of coffee. Kids start because they think it looks cool or whatever, and often don't even admit they're addicted for years. I'd think a vaccine would actually be COUNTERproductive, because kids would be more likely to think, "What's the harm in smoking a cigarette to impress the cool kids since I'm vaccinated against addiction anyway?"
I think it'd make more sense as a sort of cap to an anti-smoking patch program or something. Wean yourself off the immediate physical addiction, and then take the vacccine to help prevent a relapse.
I'm honestly not trying to troll here, but it's probably a hell of a lot easier to do those "visionary" and innovative games in a non-free context.
To use your example, Spore has been in development for like seven years and has undoubtedly cost tens of millions of dollars, mostly in man-hours of work. Do you think a free-source project could get a solid core of designers, coders, and artists to donate their time and money regularly for over half a decade with NO product to show for it, on the hope that one day it might be released and... look good on their resumes?
We've all heard the horror stories about what EA puts its employees through to get games out the door. Do you think an entire project team would put themselves through that voluntarily for NO money, or for what little money a free project could get from ads, donations, and so on?
Now, an FPS, that's a known criteria. You can set clear goals for how every little thing should work, and any "controversial" parts, like level design, are conveniently lumped into chunks that can be handled individually. (If I want to make an oddball level or character model, I can handle it on my own.) Compare that to a more experimental game like Spore, where there aren't discrete levels and the creature models are intrinsic to the gameplay.
Basically, you can have innovative, high-production-value, or free: pick two. "Innovative and free" can be managed by small teams, and "high-budget and free" might theoretically be managed by initiatives like this one with clear and easily-established milestones along the way, but to get innovation AND high production values, you probably need a level of team discipline and management that can only be established with regular paychecks to incentivize everyone involved.
How about I insist on anti-corporate whining by pointing out that the state has basically just undermined local authorities' ability to negotiate better rates, service, etc. from Time Warner without the state actually getting negotiating power in return (except for the few bullet points in the press release)?
Previously, Time Warner (or whoever) would come to a "little rural hick town" (fuck you too, by the way) and have to negotiate with the community leaders. Maybe they'd be required to offer a few channels of cable access or public TV, maybe they'd have to agree to provide free internet service for public schools and libraries, whatever. No more! Now Ohio has done its citizens the great service of letting Time Warner give those local authorities the finger while pumping their service through a taxpayer-funded cable infrastructure largely built on municipal land.
"I've had a friend buried over abusing drugs. It wasn't pretty, but neither was their life that led them to drugs."
What? What "sad life" are we talking about here? Tons of kids experiment with drugs in college just because they want to party. I'm talking smart kids with promising futures who make bad decisions because they're friggin' 18 and ripped away from their family/friend support structure and thrown into a world where hedonistic partying is the preferred form of socialization. Yeah, a lot of them would say their parents don't understand them and they're under too much pressure, but that's because they're TEENAGERS.
The thing is, if we're talking about "hard" drugs here (and I personally think stuff like marijuana and LSD doesn't really belong in the same conversation as physically-addictive stuff like meth and heroin), they only have to be stupid for a very short period of time for it to cost them their lives.
Anyway, the premise that the drug war is "failed" seems ludicrous. How much does it cost to grow and manufacture a kilogram of cocaine? Maybe $10? And how much does it sell for on the street? A bit over $40,000? If it were legal, there sure as hell wouldn't be a 400000% markup, and when coke got so cheap and available that every frat party had Scarface-style piles of the stuff lying around, drug abuse would be a LOT more widespread.
Well, if your kids didn't HAVE a PS2, or organized sports, or basically anything else to do other than kick around a wad of newspaper pretending it was a soccer ball, maybe hacking an OLPC would look more interesting by contrast, hmm?;-)
I like how the guy justifies his selection of DTD by saying that picking "game of the year" is like picking "favorite thing you've seen on your TV set," because I'd argue that picking DTD for the former is like picking Jerry Springer or American Idol for the latter because you "just can't stop watching."
For that matter, I probably spend more time reading crappy fantasy novels than literary masterpieces, but I'm not gonna nominate "Dragonfyre Chronicles Part 7: The Soul-Blackening" as Book of the Year. These are the same guys who won't shut up about games being legitimate art, and they can't make this kind of distinction?
And those who understand Logic understand that we've been putting up really big buildings that absorb a lot more wind energy than a windmill for millenia now and we have yet to make all the Earth's atmosphere shoot out into space.
So does the Wii come packaged with two extra friends, or something? Why are you comparing 3 added controllers with 1 added controller for the 360?
And let's not forget that your Wii bundle came with two game (Wii Play and Wii Sports), versus zero for the Xbox... better stick at least a couple bargain-bin Xbox games in there to make a decent price comparison.
The fair comparison is either:
Wii with 1 extra WiiPlay ($300) vs. Xbox 360 with 1 extra controller and 2 $25 games ($460)
or
Wii with Wii Play and 2 controllers ($380) vs Xbox 360 with 3 controllers and 2 cheap games ($580)
So basically you're paying > 50% more for either Xbox package.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you think teens have "NO MONEY?!?"? The whole reason they get marketed to so much is that they DO have a lot of expendable cash, and usually don't have any more important things to save their money for. (I know I bought a hell of a lot more video games when I was in high school with a part time job than I do now, when I have to pay rent.)
>>Then you did a poor market research. You see: offline games can be pirated easily, don't expect generally underfunded teens not to pirate them.
If you take up this line of reasoning, you'd better never, ever complain about DRM and Steam-style activation protocols. This is the most idiotic kind of "If you didn't want your bike stolen you should have had a better lock" reasoning.
>>I know which one I prefer. What about you?
I love how you can twist a sort of free-market argument to explain why music and game-makers are hurting, but not make the obvious next step: if we're being laissez-faire about the whole thing, then you've got no place to bitch when those companies start including DRM and/or online activation to their products. If The Consumer doesn't want DRM, he can just not buy Half-Life 2.
The way I see it, the only two philosophically consistent options are different:
1. Everybody is bound by law: Pirate Bay and others can't blatantly distribute illegal material, and the various media industries are prevented from locking down their content with DRM that violates fair-use laws.
2. Free market rules: The media industries are basically toothless to prevent Pirate Bay and other from distributing their stuff, but on the other hand they're free to add all sorts of restrictive DRM to new releases, so that nobody CAN pirate.
I know which one I prefer. What about you?
>>And in case people have forgotten why poor people contribute more to environment problems, keep in mind that poor people cause more environmental damage both through lack of education, apathy, and because the small economic gain from considerable environmental damage can pay for food and such things. Further, they have a higher reproduction rate than wealthier people.
The trick here is that wealthy people don't chop down fewer forests and have fewer children just because money makes them eco-friendly and sterile. They do so because they're part of an industrialized (or post-industrialized) workforce, with different economic concerns.
Take reproduction: in the poorest areas of the world, children are a "positive investment" - they provide free labor and are cheap to raise. This is obviously different in the U.S., where kids cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise and parents are lucky if they'll mow the lawn once a week. Plus, for a U.S. woman to have and raise a whole bunch of children incurs a large opportunity cost, because that woman could otherwise have a decently-paying job; in many parts of the world, economic opportunities for women outside of childbearing are very scarce.
Now, let's say we wipe out all the mosquitos in sub-Saharan Africa and cure malaria and a whole host of other diseases. This will indeed help the people in those areas short-term and on an individual level. But it's not like as soon as they get off the sickbed they're going to go to work as accountants and tech support workers. They STILL won't have any infrastructure or economic opportunities, especially the women, and therefore they'll continue to chop down forests and have more children than can be supported.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong. Far from it. But I do think it's overstating the situation to say that killing these mosquitos will improve the social and economic situation of the affected people enough to alter their effect on the environment on a large level.
(Pet theory time: I think the ideal humanitarian aid package to deeply troubled areas like sub-Saharan Africa would consist of as much "triage" aid as possible - food, clean water, medical supplies, etc. - but also birth-control education and supplies, so that women have the capacity to control their reproduction, and economic investments like microloans for women, so that they have the economic incentive not to have more children than the area can support. That way, hopefully, those areas could start to rise above sustenance level and emergency situations would become rarer. I'd be interested to hear if this makes sense to people with more knowledge about the subject.)
They're pretty up-front about it, but it's worth noting that the authors here work for AdaCore and have a vested interest in getting people to use their language. (Notice how they keep talking about the importance of teaching "languages like C++ and Ada" and the section about why Ada is the best programming language ever.)
>>Referring to scientific facts in terms of 'faith' and 'belief' is rather an unfortunate choice of terminology. There's no need to believe in facts. There's no need to 'have faith' in random mutations--you can prove to yourself that such things happen, and thus have no need for 'faith'.
http://18th.eserver.org/hume-enquiry.html#4.1
Hume says it smarterer than I can, but basically, no. Scientific endeavor is based on faith in the concept of "cause and effect," which we can never have any (non-circular) reason for believing. You can only "prove to yourself" facts about DNA, et cetera if you're already willing to make a boatload of assumptions about the nature of the Universe.
Of course, you can go even further back and ask the same questions Descartes asked. (Or zoom forward and look at the Matrix pop-culture version of them.) How do we KNOW that the world around us is "real" and not just an extended illusion, or dream, or computer simulation? Scientific observation can only prove that it's a highly consistent and detailed reality/illusion/dream/Matrix. Descartes could only "prove" the existence of the world by relying on the concept of a benevolent God. Is that an assumption you're willing to work from?
Honestly, there are plenty of "educational" things they could stick in this game other than actually simulating what a rocket scientist does.
If you think about it, most Americans don't really understand space science. They don't understand the basic theory, they don't understand the pragmatic limitations, and (perhaps most importantly) they don't necessarily see the long-term benefits of advanced scientific research. Maybe setting up the game as more of a high-level Sim type game would work.
So you want a framework for a game? How about a Space Race. Players form guild-like Research Groups, all vying for achievements. The Groups would be striving for various achievements, like building a space telescope, landing a person on the Moon, mapping out the surface of Saturn, etc. To succeed in any of these tasks requires a lot of research (which takes in-game time and money), but you are rewarded in several ways. First off, you gain Prestige when you do something headline-worthy, especially if you're the first Group to manage it, but the Prestige is only instrumental - it earns you more funds and qualified manpower (because kids who saw your Moon Landing grow up and study astronomy), which you re-invest into new research.
The real goal of the game, though, is unlocking Knowledge, which you do in all sorts of ways. Some achievements (Hubble) might give you not very much Prestige, but they'll continue to accrue Knowledge over time. Others (space shuttle stuff) might give you a good boost in Prestige when your Group needs it, but aren't a great investment long-term because they don't give as much Knowledge. And as the Knowledge rolls in, players start to see the consequences. Ten game-years after your telescope launch, for example, you might get a note about how medical researchers have adopted your optics research to revolutionize heart surgery (based on a true story, I think).
I think it could definitely work as a high-level game like this; the question is how in-depth you can get. Would it make sense to have players in the Group actually playing as Aerospace Engineers, Electronics Experts, Optics Researchers, Physicists, etc.? Maybe they could manage it through a sort of abstracted skill-based minigame system: for example, the Physicist plays his minigame for as long as he wants, racking up Physics Research points (which the Group leader is responsible for funneling into the various projects the Group is running) but costing his Group money by the minute. That way, Groups could have managed budgets and so on without forcing players to play a certain number of hours every day. (The hot-shot "Physicist" players would be the ones who really excel at that minigame, so they have the best ratio of Research earned to time played.)
>>One of the best things about community driven FOSS projects is the lack of BS words like "revolutionary".
Google the following:
"Openoffice+revolutionary": 174,000 results.
"Bittorrent+revolutionary": 249,000
"Firefox+revolutionary": 435,000
"Linux+revolutionary": 441,000
"Richard+Stallman+revolutionary": 167,000
Whatever positive attributes the open-source movement might have, lack of hyperbole is not high among them.
>>Do you want a laptop that is 0.16" to 0.76" thick? Go grab a ruler and put that in perspective.
.16" "at the thinnest point." And .76" is certainly thin, but hell, my current MacBook is less than an inch thick already. So at best they saved maybe a tenth of an inch of thickness and added in a prettier, curvy form-factor.
I've been trying, actually. The 0.16" is clearly marketing-speak, because when you look at the thing the edges come to points. By that logic, I've seen cars that are
After watching the little intro video on the Apple website, I'm getting the impression this is intended mainly as a shiny executive toy. They mention presentations, meetings and airplanes every time they get a chance, for example. But beyond looking sleek, I'm not sure I get the point. I mean, are you actually SUPPOSED to be storing these in packing envelopes? If not, what are the advantages over a normal laptop? Is it worth the inconvenience of no removeable battery, no optical drive, minimal connectors, and limited hard drive options, all for a pound or two of weight saved? I know, I know, it comes with the subnotebook territory - but who are these "subnotebooks" targeted at, anyway?
I really feel sorry for a bunch of people who will post here too. I mean, what can you say to someone whose first transnational transportation experience was "taking an airplane to Seattle?" Back in my day, we had to load up the whole family into a wagon with six grandfather clocks, two sets of extra clothes, and 99 boxes of bullets and trek our way across the country by ox-driven cart. There were no in-flight snacks, no alternate endings, and PLENTY of fatalities. The path simply got harder and harder and demanded more pure luck from you, until you saw your last family member die of scurvy, probably because you really should have either packed some food or else learned how to maybe carry more than 200 pounds of it at a time when you shot 37,000 pounds of buffalo. Also, the country was uphill both ways, and there were 3 feet of snow, which made fording the river a bitch.
I disagree. The "!vegan" tag WAS indeed silly, because it should really go without saying that soy-based Vegan ice cream isn't going to be putting gelatin in, and vegans ALREADY couldn't eat normal ice cream, so they aren't affected at all by this development. A "!vegetarian" tag would make a lot more sense, because until now vegetarians could reasonably assume there are no animal products in ice cream. (Although I'm not sure that they'd be manufacturing these proteins out of animal-based gelatin in any case.)
Again, 1 in a kajillion chance.
Moving an asteroid off course would seem likely to require huge nuclear warheads in any case. Obviously, we can't wait until we see something headed towards us in a telescope to start refining uranium or whatever the hell, so we'd have to produce those huge warheads in advance.
So if the options are (a) have some gigaton warheads sitting around in a bunker Just In Case or (b) hope we don't get hit, I'm thinking (b) is by far the SAFER option, because there's probably a greater than 1 in a kajillion chance that some asshole here on Earth would get a hold of those warheads and use them to create their very own man-made Extinction Event(TM).
But the OLPC doesn't come with "more than one OS."
Well, exactly, a box cutter wasn't on the prohibited list, so he was able to bring it on board and use it to hijack a plane. Nowadays he couldn't do that. Maybe he'll come up with some other clever way to get a weapon on board, bribing the Dasani delivery guy or whatever - but maybe he won't.
The bigger problem is copycats. Take the shoe-bomber guy. Obviously he only got through because they weren't checking shoes, and he probably wouldn't have even tried that tactic if they WERE checking shoes. But what if after that news story broke, the TSA DIDN'T start checking shoes? Probably a couple hundred wackos and would-be terrorists saying, "Hey, good idea!"
Same with the Die Hard thing. Once an idea's made public, somebody's probably going to try it. Remember, we're not ONLY dealing with a cadre of evil super-genius terrorists. For every one of those, we've probably got dozens or hundreds of idiots and wackos who'll try it themselves, just like we had a "rash" of school shootings because there were a bunch of unbalanced high-schoolers who saw the news and somehow thought it was a good idea.
What makes you think a terrorist won't walk through a checkpoint with a weapon? Isn't it thought that at least some of the 9/11 hijackers got control of their planes by stabbing a passenger with a knife they'd brought on board?
As for shoes, didn't some jackass stick a bomb in his shoe and try to light it mid-flight just after 9/11? If he'd gone into the bathroom and done it, he might have succeeded; he was just stupid enough to try lighting his shoe in the passenger cabin.
I'm sure there's a lot of masquerade involved in security checks, but it's disingenuous to paint them as completely pointless. Would it make more sense for them to NOT check our shoes once it'd been established that an apparent moron could use shoes to smuggle a bomb on board?
I flew out of Newark on January 2 (which I'd assume is a pretty busy day), and I think I was in line for... maybe two minutes. Over maybe half a dozen flights in the past year, I think 10 minutes is probably my longest wait (excluding customs lines on international flights).
Yeah, taking your shoes off sucks, and they can stop being paranoid about deodorant any time now as far as I'm concerned, but the actual waiting period seems very tolerable. A shoe-scanner and some Prozak for the TFA guys would take care of those two problems, and from there we're just waiting around for Minority Report body-scanners so I don't have to take off my belt anymore.
>The real promise for this vaccine is as a preventative measure. The average age for a new smoker is 13. Only 10% start after age 18. So if this works, a school inoculation program might be the way to prevent smoking.
Huh? Kids don't start smoking to get high. Cigarettes aren't like cocaine where there's an immediate euphoric rush when you smoke them; really they're no more mood-altering than a cup of coffee. Kids start because they think it looks cool or whatever, and often don't even admit they're addicted for years. I'd think a vaccine would actually be COUNTERproductive, because kids would be more likely to think, "What's the harm in smoking a cigarette to impress the cool kids since I'm vaccinated against addiction anyway?"
I think it'd make more sense as a sort of cap to an anti-smoking patch program or something. Wean yourself off the immediate physical addiction, and then take the vacccine to help prevent a relapse.
I'm honestly not trying to troll here, but it's probably a hell of a lot easier to do those "visionary" and innovative games in a non-free context.
To use your example, Spore has been in development for like seven years and has undoubtedly cost tens of millions of dollars, mostly in man-hours of work. Do you think a free-source project could get a solid core of designers, coders, and artists to donate their time and money regularly for over half a decade with NO product to show for it, on the hope that one day it might be released and... look good on their resumes?
We've all heard the horror stories about what EA puts its employees through to get games out the door. Do you think an entire project team would put themselves through that voluntarily for NO money, or for what little money a free project could get from ads, donations, and so on?
Now, an FPS, that's a known criteria. You can set clear goals for how every little thing should work, and any "controversial" parts, like level design, are conveniently lumped into chunks that can be handled individually. (If I want to make an oddball level or character model, I can handle it on my own.) Compare that to a more experimental game like Spore, where there aren't discrete levels and the creature models are intrinsic to the gameplay.
Basically, you can have innovative, high-production-value, or free: pick two. "Innovative and free" can be managed by small teams, and "high-budget and free" might theoretically be managed by initiatives like this one with clear and easily-established milestones along the way, but to get innovation AND high production values, you probably need a level of team discipline and management that can only be established with regular paychecks to incentivize everyone involved.
How about I insist on anti-corporate whining by pointing out that the state has basically just undermined local authorities' ability to negotiate better rates, service, etc. from Time Warner without the state actually getting negotiating power in return (except for the few bullet points in the press release)?
Previously, Time Warner (or whoever) would come to a "little rural hick town" (fuck you too, by the way) and have to negotiate with the community leaders. Maybe they'd be required to offer a few channels of cable access or public TV, maybe they'd have to agree to provide free internet service for public schools and libraries, whatever. No more! Now Ohio has done its citizens the great service of letting Time Warner give those local authorities the finger while pumping their service through a taxpayer-funded cable infrastructure largely built on municipal land.
"I've had a friend buried over abusing drugs. It wasn't pretty, but neither was their life that led them to drugs."
What? What "sad life" are we talking about here? Tons of kids experiment with drugs in college just because they want to party. I'm talking smart kids with promising futures who make bad decisions because they're friggin' 18 and ripped away from their family/friend support structure and thrown into a world where hedonistic partying is the preferred form of socialization. Yeah, a lot of them would say their parents don't understand them and they're under too much pressure, but that's because they're TEENAGERS.
The thing is, if we're talking about "hard" drugs here (and I personally think stuff like marijuana and LSD doesn't really belong in the same conversation as physically-addictive stuff like meth and heroin), they only have to be stupid for a very short period of time for it to cost them their lives.
Anyway, the premise that the drug war is "failed" seems ludicrous. How much does it cost to grow and manufacture a kilogram of cocaine? Maybe $10? And how much does it sell for on the street? A bit over $40,000? If it were legal, there sure as hell wouldn't be a 400000% markup, and when coke got so cheap and available that every frat party had Scarface-style piles of the stuff lying around, drug abuse would be a LOT more widespread.
Well, if your kids didn't HAVE a PS2, or organized sports, or basically anything else to do other than kick around a wad of newspaper pretending it was a soccer ball, maybe hacking an OLPC would look more interesting by contrast, hmm? ;-)
He's enjoyed it for a whole COUPLE WEEKS!
I like how the guy justifies his selection of DTD by saying that picking "game of the year" is like picking "favorite thing you've seen on your TV set," because I'd argue that picking DTD for the former is like picking Jerry Springer or American Idol for the latter because you "just can't stop watching."
For that matter, I probably spend more time reading crappy fantasy novels than literary masterpieces, but I'm not gonna nominate "Dragonfyre Chronicles Part 7: The Soul-Blackening" as Book of the Year. These are the same guys who won't shut up about games being legitimate art, and they can't make this kind of distinction?
3500 books x $10-20 per book = $35,000-70,000, which is more than most of us have ever spent on any given hobby.
But it could well be that a lot of those books are inherited or received as gifts, or the submitter's job requires a lot of reading, etc.
And those who understand Logic understand that we've been putting up really big buildings that absorb a lot more wind energy than a windmill for millenia now and we have yet to make all the Earth's atmosphere shoot out into space.
What's the difference between the wind hitting a windmill and the wind hitting a building?
So does the Wii come packaged with two extra friends, or something? Why are you comparing 3 added controllers with 1 added controller for the 360?
And let's not forget that your Wii bundle came with two game (Wii Play and Wii Sports), versus zero for the Xbox... better stick at least a couple bargain-bin Xbox games in there to make a decent price comparison.
The fair comparison is either:
Wii with 1 extra WiiPlay ($300) vs. Xbox 360 with 1 extra controller and 2 $25 games ($460)
or
Wii with Wii Play and 2 controllers ($380) vs Xbox 360 with 3 controllers and 2 cheap games ($580)
So basically you're paying > 50% more for either Xbox package.