Could see Cannabis getting reclassified back to a Class C which I think is a reasonable classification to it (no criminal charges for possession, unlikely to get jail time for distributing)
I should not be penalised for having pictures of a simulated act between two consenting adults.
I also think the 'anti-lolicon' law should be scrapped. I disliked lolicon but it's utterly wrong that I could draw two stick people having sex, label one of them as being 17 and end up in jail (with all the fun treatment you get for being labelled a nonce).
Although it's possible they may review it, the bill won't be scrapped. Before the election, I emailed my local Conservative MP (Nick Soames) about the Digital Economy Bill. Here's the response:
Thank you for your email of the 8th April about the Digital Economy Act. I share your concern about this piece of legislation and I want to make clear the approach that my Party has taken.
As you will be aware the Bill received Royal Assent yesterday.
Britain has been made to wait too long for legislation updating the regulatory environment for the digital and creative industries. I regret that once the Government got around to considering these issues, it did not allocate sufficient time in the House of Commons for proper legislative scrutiny. It says a great deal about the Government's support for the creative industries that despite considering many of these issues as far back as 2006 they only just brought this piece of legislation forward.
My Party took the decision to seek to remove those clauses of the Digital Economy Bill that we did not support or feel received proper legislative scrutiny, while supporting the Bill as a whole. Rejecting the Bill would have been an unacceptable set-back for the important measures it contains.
We supported the Bill's efforts to tackle online copyright infringement. This is an extremely serious issue that costs the creative industries hundreds of millions of pounds each year. We want to make sure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual property framework in the world for innovators, digital content creators and high tech businesses.
The measures in the Bill aimed at tackling online copyright infringement received robust scrutiny in the House of Lords. My Party was concerned about the lack of Parliamentary oversight of the original clauses and as such the Act now has a super-affirmative resolution in it. This means Parliament will debate any order that the Secretary of State lays that would allow people to be disconnected. These measures can also not be introduced for 12 months [ie 12 months after it became law]. This means that we are by no means rushing in to these decisions and that the next Parliament will be able to consider them beforehand.
The measures in the Act designed to tackle illegal peer to peer file sharing set up a proportionate regime that would, only following public consultation, repeated warnings and due process, lead to people having their internet connection temporarily suspended. It will not, as many have suggested, lead to people being disconnected without an appeal. Even if people are disconnected they will be able to sign up to another ISP immediately without penalty.
While I have no doubt that these measures could have been improved if the Government had allocated time for this Bill to be debated in Committee, blocking these measures in their entirety would have risked hundreds of thousands of jobs in the TV, film, music and sports industries and was therefore not something we were willing to do.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact me.
Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Soames
Fun fact: Nick Soames is Winston Churchill's grandson.
You cannot prevent basic human instinct and functionality.
You kick me in the shin, it's going to hurt. I may be of strong enough character not to wince, but if you keep kicking, I'm going to get a bigger and bigger bruise and it's going to hurt more and more. Eventually I'm going to wince, even if it takes for my shin is a bloody mess and for the bone to be exposed.
Civil liberty isn't just protection to say what you want. It's also protection from harm. In a fully fair and just society rights are applied equally to everyone.
Reddit and digg will certainly get you modded down into oblivion if you say something that goes against popular opinion. Even if it's perfectly sourced and hard to refute. Even Slashdot falls victim to this; it's restricted moderation does ensure that people tend to mod up rather than mod down but you still get the occasional "-1, I disagree".
Yeah... That's incredibly stupid logic and it's used as a pathetic justification by immature 'ALL COPS ARE PIGS WHO DESERVE DEATH' types you see on places like Reddit and Digg.
You're part of your country! Your country has committed war crimes in the past! What have you done about those war crimes? You haven't moved or pressed charges! You are just as guilty as those who actively did those crimes if not more so!
The police are no different from any other employer. You don't want to hire people over qualified. People who are overqualified get bored fast and move on.
It's not about worrying about people 'thinking for themselves', it's about spending £20,000 training an officer only for him to decide after 6 weeks he'd rather earn £30K a year as a manager somewhere.
Antagonising a police officer and being a dick to them will get you slapped with a 'Intentional harassment, alarm or distress' or a 'breach of the peace' charge which will result in you being arrested and probably fined or cautioned.
The law doesn't apply to "members of the public", it applies to "persons", ie everyone.
I completely don't get the explanation at the initial stage. Namely that the possibility of the second child being a boy is 1/3.
Once you're told that there's at least one boy, doesn't that mean that one result is fixed and has no outcome on the second result?
The calculations for a 1/3 chance would make sense in the following situation: You flip two coins, if you get two tails, you flip again. What is the chance of you ending up with two heads?
To me the question doesn't match the answer, the question is saying: This result happened, what is the chances of the second try being the same result? The answer is saying: One outcome is impossible, what is the chances of a certain outcome?
Maybe I am being thick and not grasping basic probability...
Doesn't make sense for it to be EA. They have Bright Light and Criterion in the UK. They would have a lot to gain from tax breaks and it would be easy for them to shift a lot of development from mainland Europe to the UK.
However a large portion of the budget would have been sorted out before the Tories came into power, the rest of it being nasty surprises left by Labour and some manoeuvring to keep the Lib Dems happy (the increase in allowance for the lowest tax band being a big issue for them).
However, these tax breaks for the gaming industry were not only pre-election pledges, they were pre-election pledges for both parties.
This whole thing has annoyed me so much I actually filed a FOIA request with the house of commons asking for the minutes of every meeting this was discussed and records of all the advice/lobbying done by external companies. It should hopefully provide strong evidence about which company was responsible for shooting this down at the last second.
My personal belief is that it's Ubisoft who were behind this. Given their presence in Canada and the rest of Europe, they would be hurt most by a UK based brain drain. They do however have a single UK dev house and said in an interview they were in favour of the tax breaks (although that doesn't mean they weren't being two faced ).
The 3DS features a 3D slider that allows you to adjust the 'depth' of the 3D image (presumably it's linked the the standard 3D API) or lets you turn it off completely (presumably the console then doubles the pixels and shuts off the barrier).
Nintendo have said they won't be requiring 3D for the console so potentially there could be some games that aren't 3D that use 800*240
The Metal Gear Solid demo was in real time on the demo units (it let you control the camera) so the 3DS *can* do graphics of that quality (just depends how much of an impact gameplay code has).
RE was video only though which leaves it open to being 'simulated' visuals.
Nope talking about the difference between 800*240 (2D mode for the top screen) and 400*240 (3D mode). Parallax barrier tech basically ensures each eye only sees every other pixel horizontally.
Overhead isn't really the correct term though. With 3D you are pretty much rendering the image at twice the resolution. Each eye sees a different image so you're seeing twice as much detail.
You're switching an 800x240 image for 2*400x240 images. That to me doesn't imply any overhead because there's no loss of resolution, you're seeing the same number of pixels.
Where there will be overhead is in calculating two different camera angles (although I imagine there are all sorts of optimisations that can be done for this).
From what I gather, rendering in 3D doesn't feature that much more overhead than rendering at twice resolution. Certainly seems on PS3 and PC systems that 3D versions of games usually result in a simple 1/2 resolution or half frame rate choice.
The NVidia deal fell through quite early on from what I gather. Rumours suggest that after that, Nintendo wanted to look for a Japanese solution.
Although PowerVR is widespread and powerful, it also seems to eat a lot of power at full load. Nintendo since the GB days have always targeted 6 hours life as an acceptable minimum. I also imagine Nintendo wouldn't be too happy with their system being too 'off the shelf'. They won't want iphone ports (or 3DS games appearing on iphone).
The PSP3 is still expected to use Tegra 3 and rumours suggest graphics somewhere between the xbox and the 360.
Looking at just the gfx chip features would draw the conclusion that the PowerVR chips found in a good number of portables is more powerful. It seems to provide ammunition to Apple for them to say the iphone is more powerful.
The demo vids shown are inconclusive though. The Metal Gear Solid demo vids is better than anything on the iphone. As is the suspicious Resident Evil demo. However Kid Icarus is on par with the best iphone games graphically and Star Fox and Mario kart in their current form wouldn't exactly max out the iphone.
Depending on the trickery on display in the MGS and RE demos, the power of the 3DS seems to range from PS2 level to slightly above GC level. Although those two demos are likely not well optimised for the console, they also don't have the gameplay/AI overhead you'd get from a full game.
It's probably safe to assume that the main CPU will be similar to that in the DSi and XL, probably at a higher clock (maybe with a few new instructions).
The main advantage of the 3DS will likely be the battery life. Despite Apple's claims about how amazing the battery life for their devices are, they only ever do benchmarks for tasks offloaded from the main CPU or that aren't taxing. The second you start playing an intensive game, you're looking at a 2 hour battery life. This is something that almost every tech site ignores when talking about idevices as gaming machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Could see Cannabis getting reclassified back to a Class C which I think is a reasonable classification to it (no criminal charges for possession, unlikely to get jail time for distributing)
Is the extreme pornography law.
I should not be penalised for having pictures of a simulated act between two consenting adults.
I also think the 'anti-lolicon' law should be scrapped. I disliked lolicon but it's utterly wrong that I could draw two stick people having sex, label one of them as being 17 and end up in jail (with all the fun treatment you get for being labelled a nonce).
Although it's possible they may review it, the bill won't be scrapped. Before the election, I emailed my local Conservative MP (Nick Soames) about the Digital Economy Bill. Here's the response:
Thank you for your email of the 8th April about the Digital Economy Act. I share your concern about this piece of legislation and I want to make clear the approach that my Party has taken.
As you will be aware the Bill received Royal Assent yesterday.
Britain has been made to wait too long for legislation updating the regulatory environment for the digital and creative industries. I regret that once the Government got around to considering these issues, it did not allocate sufficient time in the House of Commons for proper legislative scrutiny. It says a great deal about the Government's support for the creative industries that despite considering many of these issues as far back as 2006 they only just brought this piece of legislation forward.
My Party took the decision to seek to remove those clauses of the Digital Economy Bill that we did not support or feel received proper legislative scrutiny, while supporting the Bill as a whole. Rejecting the Bill would have been an unacceptable set-back for the important measures it contains.
We supported the Bill's efforts to tackle online copyright infringement. This is an extremely serious issue that costs the creative industries hundreds of millions of pounds each year. We want to make sure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual property framework in the world for innovators, digital content creators and high tech businesses.
The measures in the Bill aimed at tackling online copyright infringement received robust scrutiny in the House of Lords. My Party was concerned about the lack of Parliamentary oversight of the original clauses and as such the Act now has a super-affirmative resolution in it. This means Parliament will debate any order that the Secretary of State lays that would allow people to be disconnected. These measures can also not be introduced for 12 months [ie 12 months after it became law]. This means that we are by no means rushing in to these decisions and that the next Parliament will be able to consider them beforehand.
The measures in the Act designed to tackle illegal peer to peer file sharing set up a proportionate regime that would, only following public consultation, repeated warnings and due process, lead to people having their internet connection temporarily suspended. It will not, as many have suggested, lead to people being disconnected without an appeal. Even if people are disconnected they will be able to sign up to another ISP immediately without penalty.
While I have no doubt that these measures could have been improved if the Government had allocated time for this Bill to be debated in Committee, blocking these measures in their entirety would have risked hundreds of thousands of jobs in the TV, film, music and sports industries and was therefore not something we were willing to do.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact me.
Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Soames
Fun fact: Nick Soames is Winston Churchill's grandson.
You cannot prevent basic human instinct and functionality.
You kick me in the shin, it's going to hurt. I may be of strong enough character not to wince, but if you keep kicking, I'm going to get a bigger and bigger bruise and it's going to hurt more and more. Eventually I'm going to wince, even if it takes for my shin is a bloody mess and for the bone to be exposed.
Everyone has their limits
Wow, flamebait? Really?
Civil liberty isn't just protection to say what you want. It's also protection from harm. In a fully fair and just society rights are applied equally to everyone.
Or Tyranny of the majority?
Reddit and digg will certainly get you modded down into oblivion if you say something that goes against popular opinion. Even if it's perfectly sourced and hard to refute. Even Slashdot falls victim to this; it's restricted moderation does ensure that people tend to mod up rather than mod down but you still get the occasional "-1, I disagree".
Yeah... That's incredibly stupid logic and it's used as a pathetic justification by immature 'ALL COPS ARE PIGS WHO DESERVE DEATH' types you see on places like Reddit and Digg.
You're part of your country! Your country has committed war crimes in the past! What have you done about those war crimes? You haven't moved or pressed charges! You are just as guilty as those who actively did those crimes if not more so!
The police are no different from any other employer. You don't want to hire people over qualified. People who are overqualified get bored fast and move on.
It's not about worrying about people 'thinking for themselves', it's about spending £20,000 training an officer only for him to decide after 6 weeks he'd rather earn £30K a year as a manager somewhere.
No, it isn't. That's just your view of an ideal society.
How can you say you have true civil liberties when you say you have different rights depending on who you (or the persons you're dealing with) are?
Antagonising a police officer and being a dick to them will get you slapped with a 'Intentional harassment, alarm or distress' or a 'breach of the peace' charge which will result in you being arrested and probably fined or cautioned.
The law doesn't apply to "members of the public", it applies to "persons", ie everyone.
The answer is Fred
Johnny is 22 now, he's hardly a kid!
I completely don't get the explanation at the initial stage. Namely that the possibility of the second child being a boy is 1/3.
Once you're told that there's at least one boy, doesn't that mean that one result is fixed and has no outcome on the second result?
The calculations for a 1/3 chance would make sense in the following situation: You flip two coins, if you get two tails, you flip again. What is the chance of you ending up with two heads?
To me the question doesn't match the answer, the question is saying: This result happened, what is the chances of the second try being the same result? The answer is saying: One outcome is impossible, what is the chances of a certain outcome?
Maybe I am being thick and not grasping basic probability...
YA RLY
http://www.develop-online.net/news/34341/Tories-come-clean-Well-offer-tax-cuts-in-first-budget
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=244938
Doesn't make sense for it to be EA. They have Bright Light and Criterion in the UK. They would have a lot to gain from tax breaks and it would be easy for them to shift a lot of development from mainland Europe to the UK.
However a large portion of the budget would have been sorted out before the Tories came into power, the rest of it being nasty surprises left by Labour and some manoeuvring to keep the Lib Dems happy (the increase in allowance for the lowest tax band being a big issue for them).
However, these tax breaks for the gaming industry were not only pre-election pledges, they were pre-election pledges for both parties.
This whole thing has annoyed me so much I actually filed a FOIA request with the house of commons asking for the minutes of every meeting this was discussed and records of all the advice/lobbying done by external companies. It should hopefully provide strong evidence about which company was responsible for shooting this down at the last second.
My personal belief is that it's Ubisoft who were behind this. Given their presence in Canada and the rest of Europe, they would be hurt most by a UK based brain drain. They do however have a single UK dev house and said in an interview they were in favour of the tax breaks (although that doesn't mean they weren't being two faced ).
Video is 10 hours on Tegra 2 because it doesn't stretch the GPU or CPU.
Look at an iphone. I can watch 8 hours of video no problem. Start up an intensive game like Espgaluda 2 and I'll barely get 2 hours.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/12/3d_illusion/
Good article on the tech it uses.
The 3DS features a 3D slider that allows you to adjust the 'depth' of the 3D image (presumably it's linked the the standard 3D API) or lets you turn it off completely (presumably the console then doubles the pixels and shuts off the barrier).
Nintendo have said they won't be requiring 3D for the console so potentially there could be some games that aren't 3D that use 800*240
http://www.firingsquad.com/media/gallery_index.asp/244
You could've spent 10 seconds to search for it in google. It would've been quicker than posting your comment.
The Metal Gear Solid demo was in real time on the demo units (it let you control the camera) so the 3DS *can* do graphics of that quality (just depends how much of an impact gameplay code has).
RE was video only though which leaves it open to being 'simulated' visuals.
Nope talking about the difference between 800*240 (2D mode for the top screen) and 400*240 (3D mode). Parallax barrier tech basically ensures each eye only sees every other pixel horizontally.
Overhead isn't really the correct term though. With 3D you are pretty much rendering the image at twice the resolution. Each eye sees a different image so you're seeing twice as much detail.
You're switching an 800x240 image for 2*400x240 images. That to me doesn't imply any overhead because there's no loss of resolution, you're seeing the same number of pixels.
Where there will be overhead is in calculating two different camera angles (although I imagine there are all sorts of optimisations that can be done for this).
From what I gather, rendering in 3D doesn't feature that much more overhead than rendering at twice resolution. Certainly seems on PS3 and PC systems that 3D versions of games usually result in a simple 1/2 resolution or half frame rate choice.
The NVidia deal fell through quite early on from what I gather. Rumours suggest that after that, Nintendo wanted to look for a Japanese solution.
Although PowerVR is widespread and powerful, it also seems to eat a lot of power at full load. Nintendo since the GB days have always targeted 6 hours life as an acceptable minimum. I also imagine Nintendo wouldn't be too happy with their system being too 'off the shelf'. They won't want iphone ports (or 3DS games appearing on iphone).
The PSP3 is still expected to use Tegra 3 and rumours suggest graphics somewhere between the xbox and the 360.
Looking at just the gfx chip features would draw the conclusion that the PowerVR chips found in a good number of portables is more powerful. It seems to provide ammunition to Apple for them to say the iphone is more powerful.
The demo vids shown are inconclusive though. The Metal Gear Solid demo vids is better than anything on the iphone. As is the suspicious Resident Evil demo. However Kid Icarus is on par with the best iphone games graphically and Star Fox and Mario kart in their current form wouldn't exactly max out the iphone.
Depending on the trickery on display in the MGS and RE demos, the power of the 3DS seems to range from PS2 level to slightly above GC level. Although those two demos are likely not well optimised for the console, they also don't have the gameplay/AI overhead you'd get from a full game.
It's probably safe to assume that the main CPU will be similar to that in the DSi and XL, probably at a higher clock (maybe with a few new instructions).
The main advantage of the 3DS will likely be the battery life. Despite Apple's claims about how amazing the battery life for their devices are, they only ever do benchmarks for tasks offloaded from the main CPU or that aren't taxing. The second you start playing an intensive game, you're looking at a 2 hour battery life. This is something that almost every tech site ignores when talking about idevices as gaming machines.
Doom 3 can run on a Voodoo 2 at a playable frame rate (admittedly it'll look like a higher polygon count version of Quake 2).
I'd imagine that there'd be much lower res textures and lots of other sacrifices that would have to be made to on a 2gb cart.