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The Age of Steam
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Creator Valve was a developer, not a publisher or distributor, and the service's opening months were marred by bottlenecks and a frustrating online registration experiment.
And in fact, the problems stemming from Valve being historically corporate-facing (publisher-facing) rather than direct consumer-facing company are still being felt. Their customer service is infamously bad, and their policies when things go wrong seem almost specifically tailored to piss off the customer as much as possible.
The software is decent (although I'm still quite unhappy with the intrusiveness of the DRM), but software alone won't take them all the way. I'd suggest that there needs to be a near-complete split in the company - one which focuses on game development and one which focuses on game delivery, as the two are completely different in the approach they need: product development vs service delivery.
I struggle with the ethics of prescribing a placebo.
Why? Many experiments, if held with both a placebo group and a control group that takes nothing, have come back with showing improved results for the placebo group. Therefore, the evidence shows that placebos have a non-negligable beneficial effect.
We don't really understand how or why, but if you're basing your treatment on evidence rather than theory, is that understanding really necessary? For evidence-based medicine, IMO the only thing that should matter is the results.
I'm not a medical practictioner of any sort, so my attempt to make a point comes with a grain of salt, but hopefully we laymen can make decent philosophical arguments even if our knowledge of the specifics are lacking.
But Gamma Ray bursts are a mystery. Actually 3 mysteries, because they been classed into three types the fastest a 1000 times faster than the slower type.
Uh, what? Last I checked, there's only one speed that gamma rays can go in a given medium - the speed of light. Are you perhaps referring to frequency differences?
Meh, I dunno about that. He's clearly got a pretty brain for finding flaws, and he's obviously got experience in the area, so he's a perfectly good cracker resource. You can't see everything from the security side - Whites and Greys need to have their input heard too.
It really is frustrating how intensely climate science is doubted and denied. Economics - a far softer science with a (so far) vastly greater impact on human society - gets a staggering amount of leeway by comparison. And when it's practitioners (who outnumber climate scientists 100 to 1) get things catastrophically wrong, as in the case of the recent Wall Street collapse, there is surprisingly little criticism of the theoretical underpinnings, nevermind little details like bad data.
Oh, this is an easy one. The thought that economics could be wrong is frightening, as then we'd have no control over the basic underpinnings of our society, instead requiring us to leave our very way of life entirely in the hands of chance. On the other hand, climate change theories are frightening if they're right.
And by then, as the cost of labor raises with the working condition, instead of building the same hardware in better conditions, the big companies will relocate their production facilities somewhere else where the cost of producing the parts is even cheaper than everywhere else. Probably in Africa.
Bingo. So the process, over time, does in fact improve living quality worldwide, because it always creates employment among the poorest on Earth (as they are the ones that are cheapest to employ).
Of course, it also decreases the quality of life in the richer countries by decreasing the amount of employment available in them. This is why I find anti-globalisation protesters so charmingly hilarious - what they are in fact arguing for is to employ fewer poor people and more rich people, which I'm pretty sure isn't what they think they're arguing for.
I'm really, really sick of all of the finger pointing and arguments going on. Maybe I'm over-simple, but the way I approach it is with the following questions: Does increasing CO2 increase the thermal insulation of a system (when compared to normal atmosphere)? [] Yes [] No
Does increasing CO2 cause water bodies to acidify? [] Yes [] No
Does human activity increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? [] Yes [] No
It seems to me that if these three questions can be definitively answered, then we should have a fair idea about where we are. Things like feedbacks and other complications of the system should certainly be considered, but they're secondary to the basic logic that we can apply.
Uh, wait, you're calling Italy enlightened, even in sarcasm? The country with a government so far-right nationalistic that it's flirting with a return to fascism?
I mean, I'm not sure where you're from, exactly, but seems beyond belief that you'd lump them in with the mid-left 'enlightened' northerners. Perhaps you should consider breaking the continent down into slightly smaller slices.
The fact is, it's impossible to beat the government in competition, because the government doesn't need to make a profit. This is why government corporations always need to be stimulatory, filling a niche that no private company will fill, or filling a natural monopoly market (where the advantages of capitalism disappear).
Publicly funded FOSS might work, but it should be carefully guided - rather than directly competing in fields with already decent competition, grants would need to be issued in fields where either there's no existing software or there's insufficient competition - otherwise the grants may end up being counter-productive economy-wise.
I'm not prepared to let your half of the species take all the credit for that one - there's more than enough men fearmongering the same issue. The thing is really caused by the media and politicians beating it up far out of proportion - while it's absolutely horrible that it does happen, the instances of child molestation by a stranger are statistically extremely rare, and there are really much more likely things to be worrying about (like the general decline in altruism for fear of this sort of bullshit). Unfortunately, though, these types of stories make great news articles (because everyone's in agreement) and shortly thereafter great bandwagons for politicians to jump on (see the previous reason), so that's what people's attention is focused on. It was a wise (wo)man that said that one of humanity's greatest foes is an inability to really comprehend statistics.
Just a good little reminder that no-one is above the law. The President, in fact, has laws that apply only to him (and his senior staff) that he has to follow regarding this sort of thing.
I don't think Musk started SpaceX because he thought it was the best way to make money. He probably did it in part for the fun of it, but I think primarily he's truly driven to make it cheaper. Falcon 1 has proven Musk a capable entrepreneur. I hope so much that he can get Falcon 9 into orbit.
In 2001, Musk had plans for a "Mars Oasis" project, which would land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith. He put this project on hold when he discovered that launch costs would dwarf the mission development and construction costs for the project, and decided to work on lowering launch costs by founding SpaceX. His long term goal is that SpaceX helps humanity become a true spacefaring civilization.
Remember, the trials are not going to be live, so it shouldn't affect you as a normal customer. Hopefully those trials will be the last we hear of this.
Good luck: Conroy is a senate-based minister - he'd be pretty close to the top of his party's state list, which means that you'd have to vote out everyone under him on the state's Labor senate list before you could get him. You'd be looking at a shift of something like 35-40% of the vote.
That's the downside to proportional representation - you can't remove individuals unless they're from a small party/independent.
When I went to university, the first course was in C - which was basically just preparation for the second course, which was in Assembly (specifically, MIPS). I'd say that was the most important part - a good grasp of the fundamentals of computing is really the best thing that you can take away from university. From there, all of the languages (and even paradigms - we covered the main three) were quite a bit simpler to grasp, as you could look a little deeper into them and ask "What are we really doing here?". Stripping away the mystery of compilers and interpreters simplifies understanding dramatically.
Meh, get the girlfriends to come along too - it's not like this isn't attracting mainstream attention. The sign-up for the event on Facebook seems to be going reasonably well - here's the Melbourne one, and it's got links to the other capital cities' events too.
In fact, they've already indicated that they're looking to ban illegal but morally grey information such a euthanasia methods. Independent special interests in the Senate such as Senator Xenophon and Senator Fielding have indicated that they're interested in banning sites where the legality hasn't even been settled, such as gambling websites and hardcore pornography.
The biggest concern, of course, is the potential censoring of political speech. Euthanasia, in fact, falls under that, as the Greens and Democrats have indicated their support for legalising it - in fact, if memory serves, as a precautionary measure a Greens state senator read out methods of euthanasia in parliament under the protection of parliamentary privilege with the knowledge that the proceedings of Parliament must be recorded and be made freely available to the public, rendering the government unable to block the publishing of the material. If material regarding euthanasia and other controversial topics is blocked, could that not soon lead to the blocking of political speech of minor parties and political activists that wish to overturn the bans on the material?
It is when you're comparing it to calling black people in Africa 'African-American' in that they're not American at all. You'll also note that neither African or African-American actually refers to race; something that seems to be ignored in the US. I agree that if you wanted to refer specifically to black Africans, you'd need to actually say that - it's not like many African countries (notably South Africa) don't have a decent-sized population of the various other races.
The university of Chalmers in Sweden has been experimenting with liquid Nitrogen for some time now and their solution (while not cheap) is extremely effective for cooling of small electronic devices. Give it some time and I'm sure this will made it into mainstream (and Abble may very possibly claim that they invented the thing as well).
I doubt it - that sounds like a miniture cryobomb to me. Depressurising liquid nitrogen (i.e. exposed to air) cools very, very fast, so if the device was ruptured it could cause some very nasty cold burns. This might be applicable in some limited circumstances, but the risk of costly litigation is too high for the general consumer market.
If it's based in a part of Africa that's predominantly African Males, you shouldn't have to place other races/sexes in there to make it even.
Seriously? Predominantly African Males? Wow, poor guys - I'd probably turn into a zombie too if there weren't enough women around to keep things interesting.
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where people keep pulling this idea that people want to put random other races into the game. Where's it coming from? Why are people even paying attention to it? It's obviously stupid, and I haven't seen anyone actually suggest it anywhere - just a lot of people attacking a position that no-one actually seems to be holding. In fact, hell, let's go the other way and say that the protagonist should be black too - that solves both your problem that there should be more African Males in the game (admittedly, you could go really extreme and make the protagonist an African Female, but as far as I know that'd be breaking new ground in protagonists so I don't see it happening here), as well as the the real problem that people seem to have that the game is about a white guy running around and killing a lot of black people.
Uh, they aren't African-Americans, you know - they're Africans. That reminds me of when an American interviewer was interviewing a black British guy - she called him African-American, he corrected her, but she couldn't stop doing it. It's times like these that you yanks really do seem slightly crazed.
Anyway, back to the point, I really love the strawmen that people are building up around this. Who the heck is saying that you shouldn't have black people in Africa? I certainly haven't seen anyone suggesting that. What most people seem to be pissed off at is that it's A) a white guy going around killing lots of black people that are B) behaving like stereotypical savages. Yeah, the B part is because they're zombies, but the parallels with the violent colonisation and subjugation of Africa by the European nations in the Age of Discovery are pretty strong. It would have been a lot simpler to just have a local cop be the protagonist - it's not like they haven't done that before.
Slashdot Mirror
And in fact, the problems stemming from Valve being historically corporate-facing (publisher-facing) rather than direct consumer-facing company are still being felt. Their customer service is infamously bad, and their policies when things go wrong seem almost specifically tailored to piss off the customer as much as possible.
The software is decent (although I'm still quite unhappy with the intrusiveness of the DRM), but software alone won't take them all the way. I'd suggest that there needs to be a near-complete split in the company - one which focuses on game development and one which focuses on game delivery, as the two are completely different in the approach they need: product development vs service delivery.
Why? Many experiments, if held with both a placebo group and a control group that takes nothing, have come back with showing improved results for the placebo group. Therefore, the evidence shows that placebos have a non-negligable beneficial effect.
We don't really understand how or why, but if you're basing your treatment on evidence rather than theory, is that understanding really necessary? For evidence-based medicine, IMO the only thing that should matter is the results.
I'm not a medical practictioner of any sort, so my attempt to make a point comes with a grain of salt, but hopefully we laymen can make decent philosophical arguments even if our knowledge of the specifics are lacking.
Uh, what? Last I checked, there's only one speed that gamma rays can go in a given medium - the speed of light. Are you perhaps referring to frequency differences?
Meh, I dunno about that. He's clearly got a pretty brain for finding flaws, and he's obviously got experience in the area, so he's a perfectly good cracker resource. You can't see everything from the security side - Whites and Greys need to have their input heard too.
Oh, this is an easy one. The thought that economics could be wrong is frightening, as then we'd have no control over the basic underpinnings of our society, instead requiring us to leave our very way of life entirely in the hands of chance. On the other hand, climate change theories are frightening if they're right.
It's amazing how fear-driven our species is.
Bingo. So the process, over time, does in fact improve living quality worldwide, because it always creates employment among the poorest on Earth (as they are the ones that are cheapest to employ).
Of course, it also decreases the quality of life in the richer countries by decreasing the amount of employment available in them. This is why I find anti-globalisation protesters so charmingly hilarious - what they are in fact arguing for is to employ fewer poor people and more rich people, which I'm pretty sure isn't what they think they're arguing for.
"Boris the Blade? As in Boris the Bullet-Dodger?"
"Why do they call him the Bullet-Dodger?"
"'Cause he dodges bullets, Avi."
I'm really, really sick of all of the finger pointing and arguments going on. Maybe I'm over-simple, but the way I approach it is with the following questions:
Does increasing CO2 increase the thermal insulation of a system (when compared to normal atmosphere)?
[] Yes
[] No
Does increasing CO2 cause water bodies to acidify?
[] Yes
[] No
Does human activity increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?
[] Yes
[] No
It seems to me that if these three questions can be definitively answered, then we should have a fair idea about where we are. Things like feedbacks and other complications of the system should certainly be considered, but they're secondary to the basic logic that we can apply.
Uh, wait, you're calling Italy enlightened, even in sarcasm? The country with a government so far-right nationalistic that it's flirting with a return to fascism?
I mean, I'm not sure where you're from, exactly, but seems beyond belief that you'd lump them in with the mid-left 'enlightened' northerners. Perhaps you should consider breaking the continent down into slightly smaller slices.
It must be, given that it didn't mention C++ at all (which certainly gave me a momentary WTF reaction before I figured out what they'd done).
The fact is, it's impossible to beat the government in competition, because the government doesn't need to make a profit. This is why government corporations always need to be stimulatory, filling a niche that no private company will fill, or filling a natural monopoly market (where the advantages of capitalism disappear).
Publicly funded FOSS might work, but it should be carefully guided - rather than directly competing in fields with already decent competition, grants would need to be issued in fields where either there's no existing software or there's insufficient competition - otherwise the grants may end up being counter-productive economy-wise.
I'm not prepared to let your half of the species take all the credit for that one - there's more than enough men fearmongering the same issue. The thing is really caused by the media and politicians beating it up far out of proportion - while it's absolutely horrible that it does happen, the instances of child molestation by a stranger are statistically extremely rare, and there are really much more likely things to be worrying about (like the general decline in altruism for fear of this sort of bullshit). Unfortunately, though, these types of stories make great news articles (because everyone's in agreement) and shortly thereafter great bandwagons for politicians to jump on (see the previous reason), so that's what people's attention is focused on. It was a wise (wo)man that said that one of humanity's greatest foes is an inability to really comprehend statistics.
Just a good little reminder that no-one is above the law. The President, in fact, has laws that apply only to him (and his senior staff) that he has to follow regarding this sort of thing.
A specific instance of 'You don't know what you've got until it's gone'?
From Wikipedia:
Remember, the trials are not going to be live, so it shouldn't affect you as a normal customer. Hopefully those trials will be the last we hear of this.
Good luck: Conroy is a senate-based minister - he'd be pretty close to the top of his party's state list, which means that you'd have to vote out everyone under him on the state's Labor senate list before you could get him. You'd be looking at a shift of something like 35-40% of the vote.
That's the downside to proportional representation - you can't remove individuals unless they're from a small party/independent.
When I went to university, the first course was in C - which was basically just preparation for the second course, which was in Assembly (specifically, MIPS). I'd say that was the most important part - a good grasp of the fundamentals of computing is really the best thing that you can take away from university. From there, all of the languages (and even paradigms - we covered the main three) were quite a bit simpler to grasp, as you could look a little deeper into them and ask "What are we really doing here?". Stripping away the mystery of compilers and interpreters simplifies understanding dramatically.
Meh, get the girlfriends to come along too - it's not like this isn't attracting mainstream attention. The sign-up for the event on Facebook seems to be going reasonably well - here's the Melbourne one, and it's got links to the other capital cities' events too.
In fact, they've already indicated that they're looking to ban illegal but morally grey information such a euthanasia methods. Independent special interests in the Senate such as Senator Xenophon and Senator Fielding have indicated that they're interested in banning sites where the legality hasn't even been settled, such as gambling websites and hardcore pornography.
The biggest concern, of course, is the potential censoring of political speech. Euthanasia, in fact, falls under that, as the Greens and Democrats have indicated their support for legalising it - in fact, if memory serves, as a precautionary measure a Greens state senator read out methods of euthanasia in parliament under the protection of parliamentary privilege with the knowledge that the proceedings of Parliament must be recorded and be made freely available to the public, rendering the government unable to block the publishing of the material. If material regarding euthanasia and other controversial topics is blocked, could that not soon lead to the blocking of political speech of minor parties and political activists that wish to overturn the bans on the material?
It's known as the Door-in-the-face technique.
It is when you're comparing it to calling black people in Africa 'African-American' in that they're not American at all. You'll also note that neither African or African-American actually refers to race; something that seems to be ignored in the US. I agree that if you wanted to refer specifically to black Africans, you'd need to actually say that - it's not like many African countries (notably South Africa) don't have a decent-sized population of the various other races.
I doubt it - that sounds like a miniture cryobomb to me. Depressurising liquid nitrogen (i.e. exposed to air) cools very, very fast, so if the device was ruptured it could cause some very nasty cold burns. This might be applicable in some limited circumstances, but the risk of costly litigation is too high for the general consumer market.
Seriously? Predominantly African Males? Wow, poor guys - I'd probably turn into a zombie too if there weren't enough women around to keep things interesting.
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where people keep pulling this idea that people want to put random other races into the game. Where's it coming from? Why are people even paying attention to it? It's obviously stupid, and I haven't seen anyone actually suggest it anywhere - just a lot of people attacking a position that no-one actually seems to be holding. In fact, hell, let's go the other way and say that the protagonist should be black too - that solves both your problem that there should be more African Males in the game (admittedly, you could go really extreme and make the protagonist an African Female, but as far as I know that'd be breaking new ground in protagonists so I don't see it happening here), as well as the the real problem that people seem to have that the game is about a white guy running around and killing a lot of black people.
Uh, they aren't African-Americans, you know - they're Africans. That reminds me of when an American interviewer was interviewing a black British guy - she called him African-American, he corrected her, but she couldn't stop doing it. It's times like these that you yanks really do seem slightly crazed.
Anyway, back to the point, I really love the strawmen that people are building up around this. Who the heck is saying that you shouldn't have black people in Africa? I certainly haven't seen anyone suggesting that. What most people seem to be pissed off at is that it's A) a white guy going around killing lots of black people that are B) behaving like stereotypical savages. Yeah, the B part is because they're zombies, but the parallels with the violent colonisation and subjugation of Africa by the European nations in the Age of Discovery are pretty strong. It would have been a lot simpler to just have a local cop be the protagonist - it's not like they haven't done that before.