Have you ever actually used XNA? Your comment doesn't make much sense in the context of it, whilst the platforms have some minor differences the quote is dead right- porting between WP7 and XBox is incredibly simple, particularly if you're choosing to write a game that can happily target the Reach profile from the outset- something like Angry Birds for example would happily fit under that category.
Our previous government built a bloated public sector that employs 1/3rd of the UK's working population off the back of massive tax income from financial services.
That massive tax income from financial services is no longer so massive and the massive decline in tax revenue has not been able to be picked up by any other industry sector, thus the public sector is no longer affordable in it's current overly bloated state.
You have a very fucking weird definition of "unnecessary", there is not a cats chance in hell of us being able to sustainably afford public sector and benefits at the size it's at. Worse, the public sector unions are still attacking bankers wages in bonuses even now, seemingly oblivious to the fact that without bankers getting such disproportionately high pay (and hence providing so much tax) in the first place we could never have afforded the bloated public sector those unions serve to represent in the first place.
Seriously, fuck off with the mindless tosh, the cuts are only unnecessary if you're one of those idiots who thinks you can keep taking new loans to pay for existing debts in perpetuity and somehow ignore the growing interest rate burden that comes with it.
'The proposals we've been campaigning for would allow games companies to basically put in a claim for a reduction in corporation tax of between 20-30 per cent on given projects. The R&D tax credits are much smaller in magnitude â" we're talking somewhere around 4-5 per cent.'
20 - 30 percent? Corporation tax in the UK is now only 26% anyway, which is already less than almost the entirety of each of the countries listed in the summary.
Sure our government cancelled games industry specific tax breaks, but they gave corporations overall a tax break of 2% in last week's budget.
It sounds like they basically want to pay no tax at all. I'm sorry but what's the point in us having them here in the first place then if they don't contribute anything much back to society?
"Yes Japan was trying to save a reactor that they had short term plans of shutting down anyway."
Source? Why would they have performed upgrades on it to try and Earthquake proof it as recently as 2006 if they planned to shut it down only a few years later. That'd be a colossal waste of money.
"I saw the morning news that they said now the reactors were no longer salvageable, has their process changed? No, because they weren't trying to save them. The second they were able to they started pumping seawater into the reactors with rising temperature. This according to both experts and slashdot armchair engineers from around the worlds was an asset destroying process of containing the rising temperature."
Right, so rather than listen to Tepco themselves we should listen to armchair experts? No thanks, I think I'll listen to the real experts at the plant itself who have only now decided the plant isn't salvagable.
The main difference between the prior approach and the new approach is that previously they could at minimum salvage the site, even if equipment needed replacing. Now they're talking about encasing the sites themselves which is something they could've done from the outset and solved the problem there and then if they did not have other plans such as well, salvaging the site of course.
I'm not sure why you'd find this unlikely when it's coming from the people operating the plant themselves. I mean what, you think they were just having a laugh and fucking around before or something?
Fundamentally I think the problem is that Japan has tried up until now to save the reactors.
Because of the cost of building nuclear power plants the Japanese government has tried to salvage the situation such that the plants could be restored to working use saving them a fortune on a new plant.
But now I see this morning on the news they've finally agreed to give up on the reactors.
I agree that the problem has been grossly overblown by alarmists and so forth, but nuclear has this reputation and I think they should've been responsible from the outset and just written off the plant and dealt with it quickly and cleanly. The Japanese government in trying to save itself a bit of money on building a new reactor has prolonged the problem and given nuclear an even worse reputation across the globe.
They've now had to do what they could've done in the first place anyway, and screwed the global nuclear industry in the process. Technical incompetence? Not so much, political incompetence? Far too much.
If you put down your rabid fanboy glasses for just a second you'd see that that's basically exactly what I said, hence the use of terms such as "historical".
I was merely pointing out that whilst he's right today, he's wrong to suggest it's always been the case that PC gaming doesn't have a much higher cost in terms of frequency of upgrades, certainly it did in the past. To try and claim that's always been a myth is to completely rewrite history.
As I say, I don't disagree that it's not that way anymore.
You're suggesting that resolution is the only factor in visual quality. This is completely and utterly wrong and why your argument is fundamentally flawed.
"But an IP address (at any specific given time) does have a direct correspondence to a customer of the ISP, a specific person who has agreed to (often in writing) the ISP's terms of service, and would have already had to be prepared to assume accountability for how their connection to their ISP was utilized, even if it wasn't by them personally."
No, it just means an ISP has grounds on which they can cancel their contract with you, and nothing more than that whatsoever.
There was a long period where if you wanted to play new releases you had to have a PC that was no more than about a year or so old unless you were happy with the games looking and running shit.
You're right it's less of an issue nowadays because advancement in the PC gaming market largely seems to have stalled, this is partly because whilst for a while there was a rapid increase in availability of resolutions from the circa ~320x200 point all the way up to 1920x1200 which has now stalled around that mark for a few years, but it's also because there seems to be less focus on writing games that need cutting edge (or even not yet released) hardware to get full benefit of max resolution and decent framerate. I can now buy a brand new game on the PC and run it in max detail at 1920x1200 on my PC that's knocking on for 3 years old now- that would've been completely unheard of 10 years ago, such a system would probably struggle to run the game in an acceptable way at all.
I suspect though part the reason new PC titles don't push the hardware to the limits like they used to is because it's just not that great a business model. In doing so you're limiting the amount of possible customers, and as the industry has matured it's become much less about creating cutting edge ground breaking games and more about reaching the largest possible customer base you can, hence why games are more often built around the lowest common denominator.
Take Starcraft 2 for example, there was really little about the game technologically that wasn't in games released years beforehand. In contrast, look at the difference between Quake and Quake 2, Quake 2 and Half-Life etc. Things moved much faster back then. That's not to say this is a bad thing, it's good in a way precisely because it does remove the prohibitive costs of PC gaming where you really did used to need to upgrade every year or two, but let's not pretend that this is completely a myth- PC gaming really did used to have this problem so it's not a completely unfounded complaint.
Why would that make him legit? Just means if he's an Iranian propaganda agent that the actual group of Iranians, from perhaps Iranian military establishments that did the hack gave it to this PR guy to paste.
We know the hack was real, we know it came from Iran, nothing there changes that. That doesn't in any way prove he was a lone individual. only that he is at least connected to the person or people that really did the attacks.
"Fine, I'll pick option 1, and I'll do it by making it impossible for people to commute that far. Then the free market will sort it out - companies will move to where there are people living, or affordable housing will be built closer to where there is work, or whatever."
Yeah, cos if village a has a doctor and village b has the doctor's surgery then let's just move the doctors surgery from village b to village a, and because village b wont be able to commute to the doctors, then well, tough shit, they can all just fucking die whilst the old surgery sits there unused right?
Sorry no, commuting is fundamental to the modern economy. I'm all for changing away from petrol cars but I am not for reducing the ability to commute, that will seriously hamper humanity as a whole as institutions will just not be able to get the staff they need be it doctors, teachers, scientists, builders, plumbers and so forth. The ability for people to move and work around has been one of the most important and fundamentally important changes in society that has allowed humanity to advance to the degree it has. Worse, even green technology companies themselves would be hit by such a backwards movement.
I agree that simply continuing to allow driving petrol based cars is not the solution, but you sound like you want to stop commuting altogether with your comments, which is probably fine if you're a redneck in central USA that's never stepped outside his home town, but similarly never really contributed anything to the world either, but here in the rest of the world it's kind of important. I disagree with the GP's point that he should be left alone driving a petrol car (note: I'm a petrol car driver myself, whilst I detest the amount fuel costs me personally in the UK, I can understand it's probably not a bad thing for the world overall), but I sympathise with his view of the increasing difficulty in commuting- he's right that we must'nt cause problems for commuters until we have acceptable working alternatives for them, whether it be more home working, better public transport, or simply cleaner more efficient personal transport.
"Of course they do all that, but pretending that passage of regulation that takes effect in about four decades is just silly posturing."
Why? It's a long way off sure, but for good reason, it just gives Europe confirmation of where the leadership wants things to go. It makes the point that you wont be able to get away with just doing what you've always done forever.
It gives incentive for companies to start looking now at more efficient mass transport like trains, or even slower but cheaper and more environmentally friendly methods like canals for less time-sensitive stuff such as building materials for long haul transport rather than trucks.
It gives companies that are investing in green technology or improving their transport practices confirmation that they're on the right track and that their business model is protected whatever happens to oil prices.
You're right that most people and most companies will get a clue as petrol prices go up anyway, but if we found a way to artificially produce infinite amounts of petrol somehow, or just found massive new oil reserves and oil prices went down then it's still not long term acceptable due to emissions from this method of transport. This really just creates a legally binding basis that forces change that others may gladly put off indefinitely. In fact, as demand for oil drops as responsible companies switch to renewable and sustainable methods of transport then so will the prices of it, and when that happens you can be rest assured there will be die hards that will use this as more of an excuse than ever to stick with oil. This type of law gives them no choice.
I have to admit, I'm struggling to understand what exactly defies physics about banning petrol cars or even economics for that matter with the growing costs of oil and the decreasing volumes of it available on the planet.
"Europe should spend money on basic research, experimenting with new ideas and taxing petrol if different forms of transportation are desired."
Could they really undercut Nokia though or is that just FUD? With Nokia's sales volumes they have the volume purchase discounts on components Chinese manufacturers couldn't achieve, and they just as easily outsource production to China, India, or eventually even Africa themselves anyway.
Do the Chinese manufacturers even have an OS as capable as Symbian on the low end? Could they even break out of the Chinese market itself? There's a lot of hurdles to cheap Chinese manufacturers outdoing Nokia's low end that I'm not convinced those manufacturers should really overcome.
I'd argue the Chinese manufacturers are as much a threat to the Smartphone market- look at ZTE's Blade, it's sold incredibly well and still is as it was specced between the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 albeit for 1/5th the price- it could do 90% of the things the iPhone, HTC Desire and so forth can, which is all most people need.
So it begs the question- was the Chinese "threat" really a reason to get rid of Symbian, or simply a convenient excuse?
For smartphones yes, but 90% of Nokia's sales aren't smartphones.
I'm struggling to understand what their plan is now, they certainly wont be able to get Windows Phone 7 running on their low end phones, so are they scrapping this line completely?
It's a poor short term view if that's the case, whilst the battle for the smartphone market is lucrative Nokia's dominance of the African, Chinese and Indian cellphone markets meant they were well positioned to take control of the worlds biggest emerging markets, markets that in some years to come will dwarf Western markets.
So what is Nokia thinking? It seems to have thrown away it's future with the hope of making a slight dent into the smartphone market now.
Symbian may well be useless for smartphones but for dumb phones it excelled, it is hands down the market leading OS for such phones, and now they have no OS for such phones, and as such, have no future.
I think that's a better way of doing things personally, Belgium seems to be handling the Sony PS3/Bluray patent case quite decently.
The GP may or may not have been trolling somewhat but I think he has a point, the US does have a history of protectionism against foreign companies whilst often hypocritically turning a blind eye to the wrongs of their own. See the record breaking BAE fine for example over the Saudi Eurofighter deal, despite the fact US firms including Lockheed and Boeing have done the exact same thing and BAE isn't even a US company, nor was the deal anything to do with the US, only the US was unhappy that it meant Saudi buying European kit over US kit. Amusingly they've now pledged to buy about $20bn of US kit as well- want to bet there was no equal wrongdoing in that deal?
In a dispute between a US and European company it'd probably make sense to have it ruled upon by a country like South Africa, Brazil, Iceland, New Zealand, or Canada.
Countries like Russia or China could be an option but I suspect they're too anti-US to do things fairly, and from what I've seen of Australia it's probably a little too pro-US (or at least it's government), so finding countries neutral enough to stand between both parties and not be influenced unfairly one way or another would be key.
"We are still in diapers in weak AI, and not even started in strong AI."
What do you mean "started"? Weak AI is the path to strong AI, it's not binary, it's a spectrum and at some point weak AI research will develop enough for the fruits of it to cross the boundaries into strong AI. Weak AI IS a start towards strong AI, strong AI isn't something we can just jump into blind.
Yeah but how many systems have you and the parent had? If you're talking a handful then your personal anecdotes are meaningless.
I did tech support for local government/schools for 7 years and we had over 5000 PCs to look after at any one time, and of course over that period we went through a number of hardware refreshes so I saw closed to 15,000 machines of various configurations.
I can tell you now that the number of times we had widespread issues with nVidia cards was one due to one bad driver release, but rolling back to old drivers was rediculously easy with nVidia.
In contrast ATI cards were a constant persistent headache, and sure there were some ATI based systems that never really caused a problem, but there were literally hundreds that did. The issues ranged from instability due to shit drivers, through to perhaps one of the most annoying issues- the fact that you could download the right drivers for a card from the ATI site and sometimes they just would not work with the only way to get graphics working properly to find the original CD that came with the system/card and install the version from that because later versions of drivers for a specific card didn't always work right with those older cards. Even when you found the old driver CD if those original drivers were shit- i.e. poor performing, or unstable then you were left with a choice between an unstable/poor performing system or, well, no drivers at all.
ATI cards don't have a poor reputation because the odd gamer has had a dodgy system, they have a poor reputation for drivers because people like me who have dealt with large sample sizes of systems have seen that ATI cards over the years have consistently had these problems whereas nVidia's screwups have been relatively few and far beween in contrast.
I can similarly tell you from my experience of such a large sample size that whilst HP printers are generally some of the best hardware, they have equally had some terrible driver releases through the years. I can tell you that Maxtor drives have a drastically higher failure rate than that of other manufacturers.
It's not fanboyism if a particular product or manufacturer has a bad reputation for some reason, no it's generally based on the fact there's a lot of truth in that reputation. If it was as you say individuals building questionable systems then why don't nVidia equally have a bad rep, or are you suggesting nVidia users are more competent at selecting good components and configurations than ATI/AMD users? Obviously that seems unlikely.
"Those who use less of it should be rewarded and those who use more of it punished. There definitely needs to be petrol excise taxes."
This is a common view in the UK too when mention of dropping road tax for more usage based taxation is brought up.
But fundamentally it conflicts with your earlier point- the use of petrol being detrimental to society.
The problem is that usage based taxation does nothing to get those off the road who make truly wasteful journeys, for example, lazy mothers driving their children a mile to school and back each day in a gas guzzling SUV, yet it leaves commuters who are actually required to travel to fill skill shortages, and who are actually highly beneficial to society unable to afford to do that.
The real tax should be on short journeys, because that's what's truly wasteful- a short journey of a couple to a few miles round trip can trivially be replaced simply by walking or cycling, yet longer commutes really can't.
Of course if your main point is that we should move away from petrol to say electric vehicles then fair enough, but your point that those who use the road more should be punished will cause far more harm to society in terms of economic detriment due to inflexible work force and increase local skill shortage whilst punishing those who make short more wasteful journeys will continue to do so.
Of course there's no real non-invasive way to judge whether someone does lots of wasteful short journeys where they could've walked instead if they weren't simply lazy, so really the most sensible solution is to just heavily tax inefficient vehicles like many SUVs unless people can prove they have a real use for them (i.e. fundamental to their job). This wont get wasteful drivers in efficient cars off the road but at least their cars will be efficient and at least it wont harm longer distance commuters who greatly benefit the economy filling localised skills shortages.
Just to illustrate the type of skills shortages you might see- imagine the likes of doctors or dentists who commute to serve local communities who would otherwise be without. This is before you even consider jobs where people might have to travel to different locations a few times throughout the day such as telecomms repair folk, IT support folk and so forth.
It just doesn't make sense to punish these people for using the roads in a way that roads were designed to benefit society- whilst not really causing any problem for lazy and truly wasteful road users.
It's the same in the UK, there was a recent court case where a cop was manning a mobile speed camera and a car that passed it flashed at other drivers further down the road to warn them. The guy warning them got caught somehow, presumably another cop saw him and was found guilty of obstructing an officer in their duties.
Now, if the cameras were about safety and the guy was warning them to becareful and slow down for the camera then he quite clearly was actually helping the officer in their duties to get them to slow down. The only way he could've been obstructing the officer in her duties would be if the officer's duty was to make money off speeding motorists.
I'm amazed with the seperation between the courts and the police that the courts found against the guy, but clearly both the police and the courts believe it is the duty of the police to maximise the amount of people who speed so that they can catch them and fine them and that anyone attempting to minimise the number of people speeding and who hence get caught is obstructing the duties of the police.
Well you can have a monopoly regardless of whether you abuse it, but yes that's certainly what the case has to decide- whether it has been abused.
My personal view is that Apple isn't as clean as you suggest- other stores had DRM free music long before Apple and despite Job's say so it seems likely Apple preferred DRM because of the lockin to their platform and only really budged when they started losing ground to other distributors because of their DRM policy.
Apple don't make it easier for other hardware to use their store- when Palm tried to do it in the same way Apple does they got into a big fight, Apple's competitors have to go through a relatively crippled API such that Apple is certainly making sure using artificial methods that their product works better with their software than their competitors does.
So whilst it's pointless to say one way or another, as that's really for the courts, I think it's naive to suggest there isn't evidence of potential monopoly abuse.
I think that thing was really a massive misunderstanding.
At issue was talk of "hacking" the Kinect, when really people were just figuring out how to interface with it. What Microsoft seemed to be concerned about and threatening about was people actually hacking it to give them an unfair advantage in Kinect based games as opposed to simply interfacing with it via a PC.
It seemed to come down to abuse of the term hacking.
Often because the easiest way of implementing such blocks is to simply reroute any requests on the blocklist to an empty webserver and simultaneously avoid having to deal with customers asking why something was blocked or whether they're going to have the police coming and knocking on their door if they were duped into visiting the site or managed to stumble across it accidently.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever actually used XNA? Your comment doesn't make much sense in the context of it, whilst the platforms have some minor differences the quote is dead right- porting between WP7 and XBox is incredibly simple, particularly if you're choosing to write a game that can happily target the Reach profile from the outset- something like Angry Birds for example would happily fit under that category.
Our previous government built a bloated public sector that employs 1/3rd of the UK's working population off the back of massive tax income from financial services.
That massive tax income from financial services is no longer so massive and the massive decline in tax revenue has not been able to be picked up by any other industry sector, thus the public sector is no longer affordable in it's current overly bloated state.
You have a very fucking weird definition of "unnecessary", there is not a cats chance in hell of us being able to sustainably afford public sector and benefits at the size it's at. Worse, the public sector unions are still attacking bankers wages in bonuses even now, seemingly oblivious to the fact that without bankers getting such disproportionately high pay (and hence providing so much tax) in the first place we could never have afforded the bloated public sector those unions serve to represent in the first place.
Seriously, fuck off with the mindless tosh, the cuts are only unnecessary if you're one of those idiots who thinks you can keep taking new loans to pay for existing debts in perpetuity and somehow ignore the growing interest rate burden that comes with it.
Well it wouldn't be so bad, but:
'The proposals we've been campaigning for would allow games companies to basically put in a claim for a reduction in corporation tax of between 20-30 per cent on given projects. The R&D tax credits are much smaller in magnitude â" we're talking somewhere around 4-5 per cent.'
20 - 30 percent? Corporation tax in the UK is now only 26% anyway, which is already less than almost the entirety of each of the countries listed in the summary.
Sure our government cancelled games industry specific tax breaks, but they gave corporations overall a tax break of 2% in last week's budget.
It sounds like they basically want to pay no tax at all. I'm sorry but what's the point in us having them here in the first place then if they don't contribute anything much back to society?
"Yes Japan was trying to save a reactor that they had short term plans of shutting down anyway."
Source? Why would they have performed upgrades on it to try and Earthquake proof it as recently as 2006 if they planned to shut it down only a few years later. That'd be a colossal waste of money.
"I saw the morning news that they said now the reactors were no longer salvageable, has their process changed? No, because they weren't trying to save them. The second they were able to they started pumping seawater into the reactors with rising temperature. This according to both experts and slashdot armchair engineers from around the worlds was an asset destroying process of containing the rising temperature."
Right, so rather than listen to Tepco themselves we should listen to armchair experts? No thanks, I think I'll listen to the real experts at the plant itself who have only now decided the plant isn't salvagable.
The main difference between the prior approach and the new approach is that previously they could at minimum salvage the site, even if equipment needed replacing. Now they're talking about encasing the sites themselves which is something they could've done from the outset and solved the problem there and then if they did not have other plans such as well, salvaging the site of course.
I'm not sure why you'd find this unlikely when it's coming from the people operating the plant themselves. I mean what, you think they were just having a laugh and fucking around before or something?
Fundamentally I think the problem is that Japan has tried up until now to save the reactors.
Because of the cost of building nuclear power plants the Japanese government has tried to salvage the situation such that the plants could be restored to working use saving them a fortune on a new plant.
But now I see this morning on the news they've finally agreed to give up on the reactors.
I agree that the problem has been grossly overblown by alarmists and so forth, but nuclear has this reputation and I think they should've been responsible from the outset and just written off the plant and dealt with it quickly and cleanly. The Japanese government in trying to save itself a bit of money on building a new reactor has prolonged the problem and given nuclear an even worse reputation across the globe.
They've now had to do what they could've done in the first place anyway, and screwed the global nuclear industry in the process. Technical incompetence? Not so much, political incompetence? Far too much.
If you put down your rabid fanboy glasses for just a second you'd see that that's basically exactly what I said, hence the use of terms such as "historical".
I was merely pointing out that whilst he's right today, he's wrong to suggest it's always been the case that PC gaming doesn't have a much higher cost in terms of frequency of upgrades, certainly it did in the past. To try and claim that's always been a myth is to completely rewrite history.
As I say, I don't disagree that it's not that way anymore.
You're suggesting that resolution is the only factor in visual quality. This is completely and utterly wrong and why your argument is fundamentally flawed.
"But an IP address (at any specific given time) does have a direct correspondence to a customer of the ISP, a specific person who has agreed to (often in writing) the ISP's terms of service, and would have already had to be prepared to assume accountability for how their connection to their ISP was utilized, even if it wasn't by them personally."
No, it just means an ISP has grounds on which they can cancel their contract with you, and nothing more than that whatsoever.
It's not really a myth, it's historical.
There was a long period where if you wanted to play new releases you had to have a PC that was no more than about a year or so old unless you were happy with the games looking and running shit.
You're right it's less of an issue nowadays because advancement in the PC gaming market largely seems to have stalled, this is partly because whilst for a while there was a rapid increase in availability of resolutions from the circa ~320x200 point all the way up to 1920x1200 which has now stalled around that mark for a few years, but it's also because there seems to be less focus on writing games that need cutting edge (or even not yet released) hardware to get full benefit of max resolution and decent framerate. I can now buy a brand new game on the PC and run it in max detail at 1920x1200 on my PC that's knocking on for 3 years old now- that would've been completely unheard of 10 years ago, such a system would probably struggle to run the game in an acceptable way at all.
I suspect though part the reason new PC titles don't push the hardware to the limits like they used to is because it's just not that great a business model. In doing so you're limiting the amount of possible customers, and as the industry has matured it's become much less about creating cutting edge ground breaking games and more about reaching the largest possible customer base you can, hence why games are more often built around the lowest common denominator.
Take Starcraft 2 for example, there was really little about the game technologically that wasn't in games released years beforehand. In contrast, look at the difference between Quake and Quake 2, Quake 2 and Half-Life etc. Things moved much faster back then. That's not to say this is a bad thing, it's good in a way precisely because it does remove the prohibitive costs of PC gaming where you really did used to need to upgrade every year or two, but let's not pretend that this is completely a myth- PC gaming really did used to have this problem so it's not a completely unfounded complaint.
Why would that make him legit? Just means if he's an Iranian propaganda agent that the actual group of Iranians, from perhaps Iranian military establishments that did the hack gave it to this PR guy to paste.
We know the hack was real, we know it came from Iran, nothing there changes that. That doesn't in any way prove he was a lone individual. only that he is at least connected to the person or people that really did the attacks.
"Fine, I'll pick option 1, and I'll do it by making it impossible for people to commute that far. Then the free market will sort it out - companies will move to where there are people living, or affordable housing will be built closer to where there is work, or whatever."
Yeah, cos if village a has a doctor and village b has the doctor's surgery then let's just move the doctors surgery from village b to village a, and because village b wont be able to commute to the doctors, then well, tough shit, they can all just fucking die whilst the old surgery sits there unused right?
Sorry no, commuting is fundamental to the modern economy. I'm all for changing away from petrol cars but I am not for reducing the ability to commute, that will seriously hamper humanity as a whole as institutions will just not be able to get the staff they need be it doctors, teachers, scientists, builders, plumbers and so forth. The ability for people to move and work around has been one of the most important and fundamentally important changes in society that has allowed humanity to advance to the degree it has. Worse, even green technology companies themselves would be hit by such a backwards movement.
I agree that simply continuing to allow driving petrol based cars is not the solution, but you sound like you want to stop commuting altogether with your comments, which is probably fine if you're a redneck in central USA that's never stepped outside his home town, but similarly never really contributed anything to the world either, but here in the rest of the world it's kind of important. I disagree with the GP's point that he should be left alone driving a petrol car (note: I'm a petrol car driver myself, whilst I detest the amount fuel costs me personally in the UK, I can understand it's probably not a bad thing for the world overall), but I sympathise with his view of the increasing difficulty in commuting- he's right that we must'nt cause problems for commuters until we have acceptable working alternatives for them, whether it be more home working, better public transport, or simply cleaner more efficient personal transport.
"Of course they do all that, but pretending that passage of regulation that takes effect in about four decades is just silly posturing."
Why? It's a long way off sure, but for good reason, it just gives Europe confirmation of where the leadership wants things to go. It makes the point that you wont be able to get away with just doing what you've always done forever.
It gives incentive for companies to start looking now at more efficient mass transport like trains, or even slower but cheaper and more environmentally friendly methods like canals for less time-sensitive stuff such as building materials for long haul transport rather than trucks.
It gives companies that are investing in green technology or improving their transport practices confirmation that they're on the right track and that their business model is protected whatever happens to oil prices.
You're right that most people and most companies will get a clue as petrol prices go up anyway, but if we found a way to artificially produce infinite amounts of petrol somehow, or just found massive new oil reserves and oil prices went down then it's still not long term acceptable due to emissions from this method of transport. This really just creates a legally binding basis that forces change that others may gladly put off indefinitely. In fact, as demand for oil drops as responsible companies switch to renewable and sustainable methods of transport then so will the prices of it, and when that happens you can be rest assured there will be die hards that will use this as more of an excuse than ever to stick with oil. This type of law gives them no choice.
I have to admit, I'm struggling to understand what exactly defies physics about banning petrol cars or even economics for that matter with the growing costs of oil and the decreasing volumes of it available on the planet.
"Europe should spend money on basic research, experimenting with new ideas and taxing petrol if different forms of transportation are desired."
Yeah, it does all that too.
My fault, you're right, do you know if they're keeping S40?
Could they really undercut Nokia though or is that just FUD? With Nokia's sales volumes they have the volume purchase discounts on components Chinese manufacturers couldn't achieve, and they just as easily outsource production to China, India, or eventually even Africa themselves anyway.
Do the Chinese manufacturers even have an OS as capable as Symbian on the low end? Could they even break out of the Chinese market itself? There's a lot of hurdles to cheap Chinese manufacturers outdoing Nokia's low end that I'm not convinced those manufacturers should really overcome.
I'd argue the Chinese manufacturers are as much a threat to the Smartphone market- look at ZTE's Blade, it's sold incredibly well and still is as it was specced between the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 albeit for 1/5th the price- it could do 90% of the things the iPhone, HTC Desire and so forth can, which is all most people need.
So it begs the question- was the Chinese "threat" really a reason to get rid of Symbian, or simply a convenient excuse?
For smartphones yes, but 90% of Nokia's sales aren't smartphones.
I'm struggling to understand what their plan is now, they certainly wont be able to get Windows Phone 7 running on their low end phones, so are they scrapping this line completely?
It's a poor short term view if that's the case, whilst the battle for the smartphone market is lucrative Nokia's dominance of the African, Chinese and Indian cellphone markets meant they were well positioned to take control of the worlds biggest emerging markets, markets that in some years to come will dwarf Western markets.
So what is Nokia thinking? It seems to have thrown away it's future with the hope of making a slight dent into the smartphone market now.
Symbian may well be useless for smartphones but for dumb phones it excelled, it is hands down the market leading OS for such phones, and now they have no OS for such phones, and as such, have no future.
I think that's a better way of doing things personally, Belgium seems to be handling the Sony PS3/Bluray patent case quite decently.
The GP may or may not have been trolling somewhat but I think he has a point, the US does have a history of protectionism against foreign companies whilst often hypocritically turning a blind eye to the wrongs of their own. See the record breaking BAE fine for example over the Saudi Eurofighter deal, despite the fact US firms including Lockheed and Boeing have done the exact same thing and BAE isn't even a US company, nor was the deal anything to do with the US, only the US was unhappy that it meant Saudi buying European kit over US kit. Amusingly they've now pledged to buy about $20bn of US kit as well- want to bet there was no equal wrongdoing in that deal?
In a dispute between a US and European company it'd probably make sense to have it ruled upon by a country like South Africa, Brazil, Iceland, New Zealand, or Canada.
Countries like Russia or China could be an option but I suspect they're too anti-US to do things fairly, and from what I've seen of Australia it's probably a little too pro-US (or at least it's government), so finding countries neutral enough to stand between both parties and not be influenced unfairly one way or another would be key.
"We are still in diapers in weak AI, and not even started in strong AI."
What do you mean "started"? Weak AI is the path to strong AI, it's not binary, it's a spectrum and at some point weak AI research will develop enough for the fruits of it to cross the boundaries into strong AI. Weak AI IS a start towards strong AI, strong AI isn't something we can just jump into blind.
Yeah but how many systems have you and the parent had? If you're talking a handful then your personal anecdotes are meaningless.
I did tech support for local government/schools for 7 years and we had over 5000 PCs to look after at any one time, and of course over that period we went through a number of hardware refreshes so I saw closed to 15,000 machines of various configurations.
I can tell you now that the number of times we had widespread issues with nVidia cards was one due to one bad driver release, but rolling back to old drivers was rediculously easy with nVidia.
In contrast ATI cards were a constant persistent headache, and sure there were some ATI based systems that never really caused a problem, but there were literally hundreds that did. The issues ranged from instability due to shit drivers, through to perhaps one of the most annoying issues- the fact that you could download the right drivers for a card from the ATI site and sometimes they just would not work with the only way to get graphics working properly to find the original CD that came with the system/card and install the version from that because later versions of drivers for a specific card didn't always work right with those older cards. Even when you found the old driver CD if those original drivers were shit- i.e. poor performing, or unstable then you were left with a choice between an unstable/poor performing system or, well, no drivers at all.
ATI cards don't have a poor reputation because the odd gamer has had a dodgy system, they have a poor reputation for drivers because people like me who have dealt with large sample sizes of systems have seen that ATI cards over the years have consistently had these problems whereas nVidia's screwups have been relatively few and far beween in contrast.
I can similarly tell you from my experience of such a large sample size that whilst HP printers are generally some of the best hardware, they have equally had some terrible driver releases through the years. I can tell you that Maxtor drives have a drastically higher failure rate than that of other manufacturers.
It's not fanboyism if a particular product or manufacturer has a bad reputation for some reason, no it's generally based on the fact there's a lot of truth in that reputation. If it was as you say individuals building questionable systems then why don't nVidia equally have a bad rep, or are you suggesting nVidia users are more competent at selecting good components and configurations than ATI/AMD users? Obviously that seems unlikely.
"Those who use less of it should be rewarded and those who use more of it punished. There definitely needs to be petrol excise taxes."
This is a common view in the UK too when mention of dropping road tax for more usage based taxation is brought up.
But fundamentally it conflicts with your earlier point- the use of petrol being detrimental to society.
The problem is that usage based taxation does nothing to get those off the road who make truly wasteful journeys, for example, lazy mothers driving their children a mile to school and back each day in a gas guzzling SUV, yet it leaves commuters who are actually required to travel to fill skill shortages, and who are actually highly beneficial to society unable to afford to do that.
The real tax should be on short journeys, because that's what's truly wasteful- a short journey of a couple to a few miles round trip can trivially be replaced simply by walking or cycling, yet longer commutes really can't.
Of course if your main point is that we should move away from petrol to say electric vehicles then fair enough, but your point that those who use the road more should be punished will cause far more harm to society in terms of economic detriment due to inflexible work force and increase local skill shortage whilst punishing those who make short more wasteful journeys will continue to do so.
Of course there's no real non-invasive way to judge whether someone does lots of wasteful short journeys where they could've walked instead if they weren't simply lazy, so really the most sensible solution is to just heavily tax inefficient vehicles like many SUVs unless people can prove they have a real use for them (i.e. fundamental to their job). This wont get wasteful drivers in efficient cars off the road but at least their cars will be efficient and at least it wont harm longer distance commuters who greatly benefit the economy filling localised skills shortages.
Just to illustrate the type of skills shortages you might see- imagine the likes of doctors or dentists who commute to serve local communities who would otherwise be without. This is before you even consider jobs where people might have to travel to different locations a few times throughout the day such as telecomms repair folk, IT support folk and so forth.
It just doesn't make sense to punish these people for using the roads in a way that roads were designed to benefit society- whilst not really causing any problem for lazy and truly wasteful road users.
It's the same in the UK, there was a recent court case where a cop was manning a mobile speed camera and a car that passed it flashed at other drivers further down the road to warn them. The guy warning them got caught somehow, presumably another cop saw him and was found guilty of obstructing an officer in their duties.
Now, if the cameras were about safety and the guy was warning them to becareful and slow down for the camera then he quite clearly was actually helping the officer in their duties to get them to slow down. The only way he could've been obstructing the officer in her duties would be if the officer's duty was to make money off speeding motorists.
I'm amazed with the seperation between the courts and the police that the courts found against the guy, but clearly both the police and the courts believe it is the duty of the police to maximise the amount of people who speed so that they can catch them and fine them and that anyone attempting to minimise the number of people speeding and who hence get caught is obstructing the duties of the police.
Well you can have a monopoly regardless of whether you abuse it, but yes that's certainly what the case has to decide- whether it has been abused.
My personal view is that Apple isn't as clean as you suggest- other stores had DRM free music long before Apple and despite Job's say so it seems likely Apple preferred DRM because of the lockin to their platform and only really budged when they started losing ground to other distributors because of their DRM policy.
Apple don't make it easier for other hardware to use their store- when Palm tried to do it in the same way Apple does they got into a big fight, Apple's competitors have to go through a relatively crippled API such that Apple is certainly making sure using artificial methods that their product works better with their software than their competitors does.
So whilst it's pointless to say one way or another, as that's really for the courts, I think it's naive to suggest there isn't evidence of potential monopoly abuse.
Really lucky.
My colleague's broke when it fell off her desk.
I think that thing was really a massive misunderstanding.
At issue was talk of "hacking" the Kinect, when really people were just figuring out how to interface with it. What Microsoft seemed to be concerned about and threatening about was people actually hacking it to give them an unfair advantage in Kinect based games as opposed to simply interfacing with it via a PC.
It seemed to come down to abuse of the term hacking.
Often because the easiest way of implementing such blocks is to simply reroute any requests on the blocklist to an empty webserver and simultaneously avoid having to deal with customers asking why something was blocked or whether they're going to have the police coming and knocking on their door if they were duped into visiting the site or managed to stumble across it accidently.