It has been demonstrated in the UK quite successfully that speed limits and cameras do increase safety so saying it's about revenue generation is simply ignorant. I'm not even convinced they make more money sitting an officer on a road that is quite clearly signed that speed cameras may be in operation really nets them enough money to make up for the cost of paying that officer to sit there all day and paying for the costs of running the camera etc. anyway. If it was really about revenue you a) wouldn't get points for speeding so that you could be banned, they'd want you to keep getting caught and paying fines indefinitely and b) they wouldn't have to legally have signs up pointing out that speed cameras are in operation on a specific stretch of road. See here:
Yes, correlation is not causation, but it's pretty strong evidence, particularly when road deaths decrease at a greater proportion in areas where speed cameras exist than where they don't even if road conditions are effectively identical. Furthermore, when a fatal accident does occur, accident investigators have to report the speed the car was travelling at as calculated by evidence such as the skid marks which tell the breaking distance and so on. In a high proportion of these cases (iirc about 50%) the vehicle in question was speeding. The remaining cases were real accidents such as lorries getting blown over and that sort of thing. Of course, there are plenty of sites countering that speed cameras improve safety but I've yet to see any that are more than just an opinion peice, or making a mountain out of a single anomally. Statistics relating to improved safety through speed cameras exist for large data sets and repeatedly show that cameras, and hence forcing most people to stick to speed limits does increase safety.
You state the safest way to drive is in a manner safe for the road conditions presented to you, but are you telling me you know the road conditions of every single road you might travel down? Say you travel down a road at 5:30pm every day from work as I do, there is a road that is 30mph which you can easily go safely down at 60mph at that time. Try doing it at 3:30pm though and I gurantee you'll again plow into a bunch of kids that come out of a school that is set back just behind the houses lining that road. The fact is, speed limits are there because they have been created with the hidden dangers on that road you do not know about in mind. What about the one day of the year that that corner you go round at 50mph is known to be prone to black ice formation that you weren't aware of? What you think is a safe speed to drive might not necessarily be correct, and different people have different opinions on what is safe, that's why it's better to have a sign for everyone to adhere to that has been tested to be the best balance between speed and safety.
Now, that's not to say I agree with this measure. The issue I have with speed limits are not that they exist, but that the dangerous people are those that ignore them anyway. Safe drivers follow them, if you remove them, safe drivers no longer know how fast is safe unless they truly know that specific road and it's hazard
Yes, unfortunately so far eBay would disagree with you, hence why they no longer allow auctions of virtual gold and so forth meaning regardless of what you feel about EULAs, eBay will still pull auctions on request for that sort of thing and Walmart etc. will still refuse to deal with electronic accounts and keeping an e-mail address per game is still a ball ache.
Well it claims to make information computable. I accept it's not meant to find results like Google but the issue with it is it doesn't even seem to gather basic data in a computable form.
I mean, you try things like "On what date did the Falklands war commence?", "How many species of Melocactus are there?", "On what date was Adolf Hitler born" and it outright fails.
Okay, so I figured maybe I'm asking questions that are out of the intended realm of knowledge it supports and the assumption is that you'd never want to compute with this information. So I tried something Mathematical - I mean, that is Wolfram's speciality right?
"How many non-isomorphic labelled trees are there with 4 vertices"
Fail.
I've tried a few other relevant, factual questions and it just falls flat over, not even able to try and answer them.
I'm sure it does do a great job of making information computable, the problem is it's unable to gather the information in the first place.
Ironically, Google, that doesn't claim to make information computable manage to provide answers for all these questions within it's first page, often as the first hit. Sure it may not be presented in a standardised format, but data that needs to be parsed is certainly more computable than data that simply can't be provided at all.
I can see what Wolfram was trying to do, but why did he have to couple it with immense hype that it's as important as Google? Why has he been going on and on about it to the media when it struggles to even do what it's supposed to absolutely excel at? I think they could've at least saved face if they'd stopped being so cocky about it and released it with a little less hype and fanfair and let it improve and become more useful and hence more greatly adopted over time. One has to ask when there was so much hype about it and with a ToS like this whether it was all just about Wolfram gathering data for himself or something than providing a tool useful to everyone else. Either that or he simply beleives his own hype and believes the tool is better than it really is. Perhaps in developing and using it himself he was blinded in making and seeing it work well for applications specific to what he wanted without ever truly seeing how well it performs in other problem domains?
That's a standard that defines a format, not a format by itself, regarldess it's also one of many standards, although many of those are obsolete now. Still, there are plenty more than just one single date format however you cut it!
But the point is that on some days you'll use 20/3/2009, other days you'll use 20/03/2009, then you might use 20th March 2009 and all that's assuming just a single date ordering from days to years which is common in Britain but not so in the US which uses months, days, years or Europe which mostly follows years, months, days.
I guess it depends how many games you have, but having one e-mail address per game is a bit over the top, people really shouldn't have to deal with that.
Also, afaik, as part of the EULA you're not allowed to sell on or allow accounts to change hands, so Valve can also easily get eBay to pull such auctions, it also prevents you selling to places like Walmart etc. because they wont deal with this sort of thing.
Not only that but when I have used them I've found them annoying as they're often case sensitive and it's easy to forget what you entered or how you entered it. What is your dog's name? Which dog? What is your date of birth? What date format?
They're just bad all round, often the questions you get to choose from either fall into the category of far too easily guessed/socially engineered such as where were you born which 90% of people you've ever met can tell from something like your accent or where you work and live if you never moved away or they fall into the category of being too ambiguous such that when it comes back to remembering how you entered it 3 tries will probably get you locked out.
Creating a list of questions that truly are secret and of which at least one is common to everyone is near impossible. You could start asking things like "Who at your workplace would you most like to sleep with" but I don't think most people would want to answer such intrusive questions!
With Steam infesting every game that comes out nowadays forcing you to tie a game to an account and forcing you to activate online for the sole purpose of killing the second hand market off I'm guessing this'll be a fairly short lived venture for PC games at least.
Still it's not a bad idea for the console market and I guess that's where most money is now in this anyway?
I have to agree, just because it has a low market share doesn't mean it's dissapointing.
Personally, for me, the number 1 most dissapointing peice of technology in the last 5 years has been the Wii. It looked great, it had so much potential but now it's sat gathering dust I can't help but feel it was a massive waste of money. The games just haven't come through for it, you go into a game store and 99% of the games are just complete and utter tat. There's a few gems for sure, but you can count them on one hand.
Now that's dissapointment, when something with so much potential turns out to be so dull. Of course, that doesn't mean it'll remain a dissapointment, if we start seeing some more interesting, more mature games it could still pull through.
But of course, many people love the Wii, so it's down to this - one man's dissapointment is another's greatest gadget in decades.
Or do most of the newer Guitar Hero releases basically just add features that really should've just been in a single release in the first place?
When most companies design a game, they create a list of features and implement them into the game and release it. The Guitar Hero guys seem to make the same list, but make a whole new game for each feature.
I love Guitar Hero, but unlike most games I wont buy every version, I bought Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band but nothing since then, it just seems to be getting a little silly - a lot like EA with it's sports games that are really little different from version to version.
Still, it's a cash cow I guess so it's hard to blame them for it if people continue to buy it - the same can be said for EA's sports games I suppose!
You seem to assume because I'm very anti-Labour that I'm pro-Conservative?
I'm not at all, I think Cameron is equally dangerous in the long run because he's blinded by ignorance and a pro-family, anti-everything else think-of-the-children stance, I do however think that at the start, most politicians are a lot more cautious and the Conservatives are at least a little better than Labour in that they're willing to get rid of the DNA database and do away with some of Labour's totalitarian plans possibly the likes of Contactpoint and so on. They're also looking for a public sector cull which is important (I've worked in public sector, it needs to happen).
I'd rather see neither Labour or Conservative in at the next election, I would however prefer to see the Conservatives in over Labour for at least one term, simply because it seems the only way to remind Labour that they can't do whatever they want without the backing of the population or opposition.
Regarding Conservative support when Labour backbenchers rebelled on the more totalitarian legislation - do you have any examples? I used to think the same but when I looked at the voting record, these laws all got through only because Labour have enough seats to push them through single handedly such that even when the whole of the Conservatives and Lib Dems voted against them it still gets passed. Labour have unilaterally pushed nearly all of the worst of the laws through by themselves - I was suprised too when I looked into it.
Regarding the Lib Dems, the only reason they're not worth voting for is because well, people don't vote for them. It's stupid to say I'm not going to vote for them because they're not worth voting for. For what it's worth, the Lib Dems currently are only 4% behind Labour in the polls - if everyone who wants to vote Lib Dems actually voted for them they'd come second, and once they come second then what? Sure they wont get in this time with second place - but if the Tories show themselves to asses again, what about next time? It's possible.
At very least getting the Lib Dems in second place changes the field away from the two major parties situation you describe and people will realise there is a viable third party out there. In the absolute worst case, by voting Lib Dem you're at least showing the country they have more support than people thought - that's better than artificially suggesting Labour or the Conservatives have more support than they really do because people vote for one just so the other doesn't get in.
"If people want to elect somebody over and over, that is their decision"
It is, but it's also not a closed decision - Putin quite clearly ordered the assassination of Litvinenko on British soil, he also clearly ordered the harassment of Georgia and the massing of troops in South Ossetia which is actually Georgian territory to the point they managed to get a war out of it. If they make a decision that persistently causes problems with other nations then other nations have the right to point out their idiocy, just as much of the world did when Bush was busy war mongering across the world.
No I certainly agree about Brown's potential (or lack of), but my point is I can see now how countries can allow themselves to be taken over by much more evil dictators. Brown is only going to lose this next election because of his lack of charisma and incompetence and not because of his policies that seek to further control the population.
Essentially, I can see now how countries can allow themselves to be taken over by these people in the first place, if Labour had someone more competent and charismatic in at the next election and they got in and further stepped towards totalitarianism to the extent they have this election and the people just sat back and accepted it until they have recently that creep towards such a situation is worryingly possible.
Whilst you mention Labour haven't murdered their opponents that might not necessarily be true (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_David_Kelly#Death), and they have certainly at least had their politicial opponents arrested (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Green#2008_arrest). They also pushed for the ability to hold terror suspects for 45 days without trial, which is particularly unnerving in light of the fact that recent stats have shown only 13% of people arrested on terror charges are ever actually convicted of them.
I'm not actually sure the Labour government is any better than this Guatamalan dictatorship - the only real difference is they perhaps don't have the backing of important forces such as the army, although the Police in the UK do seem to be unnervingly in the pockets of the home office which they are not supposed to be. Evidence of this comes from things such as the fact the police are willing to arrest political opponents but are entirely unwilling to pursue investigations against the likes of Phorm which would be a clear cut prosecution and which the EU has deemed illegal, of course, the home office strongly supports Phorm and has been guilty of collusion with it (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8021661.stm).
One things for sure, as you say, Brown and Labour are no threat, if however they had the army and such wrapped round their finger like they do the police and security services such that they could literally get away with what they want I do not believe it is beyond Brown and Labour to order the execution of political opponents, if that hasn't even already happened as per the above.
My point about shortened terms, hung governments etc. is more a reference to the idea that we should've been able to get rid of Labour before now - they started to lose general acceptance about 2 years ago.
We'll have to wait and see how it comes out of Google's random censorship machine.
I mean, this is a company that is more scared of the DMCA than it is offending a whole nation such as Turkey. This is also the same company that rapidly bad anti-Scientology and anti-Islam videos whilst being the single biggest repository of anti-Western, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-Atheist hate videos.
I'm not a fan of any religion, but christ I wish Google would stop censoring videos of only some religions but not touching the others.
As for my bet? My bet is they wont touch it for the afformentioned reason that Google is more scared of a DMCA takedown notice than it is the leader of an entire nation bitching at it. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, what I am sure of though is that they have their priorities fucked - they'll make a stand against an evil dictator but if Mr music industry lawyer comes knocking about a perfectly valid fair use video they'll run shit scared with their tail between their legs removing the video immediately.
If there's one thing Google needs to sort out at YouTube, it's their censorship policy to at very least add some amount of objectivity and common sense to it.
Because power corrupts, and even in Western democracies like Britain the ruling party Labour have been pushing more and more of a totalitarian agenda over the last few years.
Labour in the UK is in ruins, the party is done, it has no hope now of re-election, yet the leader, Gordon Brown continues, he continues blindly believing in his own mind that he is doing the right thing not being willing to step down.
It's for this reason that they are against it, because the reality is that they know, eventually, it will be used against them as it goes against what they themselves want - more power, despite being corrupt to the core as the last week in British politics has shown.
Leaders who remain good throughout their entire term in office are rare- we've seen it happen in Canada with the corruption in their previous ruling party, we've seen it happen in the US under Bush, although from pretty early on, we've seen it in Australia. It happens time and time again - the longer a single leader or party is in power, the more complacent they get, and the more they forget they're there to serve the people, not control them.
I believe this is why the European courts have done a better job at preventing Labour's attempts at ever more draconian measures to control the population- because the European court of human rights has no direct explicit power over each individual country in the EU and the lack of any direct explicit power means their is less scope for them to become drunk with power.
It's also why I'm a big fan of minority governments, there's an argument it makes them more efficient, but I believe it realistically increase efficiency because such a minority government is kept on it's toes, it's being constantly reminded of what it's there for, and if it forgets that a coalition of opposition parties will remind it by forcing an election. The only laws that get passed are laws acceptable to all parties, rather than as we have in the UK and as the US had for many years under Bush - a situation where they can implement any policy changes they want regardless of what the population or opposition thinks of it. I believe that leadership terms should be shortened to 2 to 3 years to more frequently remind those in power that they can be removed and removed at any moment.
It is a dangerous situation in the likes of Venezuelan where the people have been dumb enough to allow Chavez to stand indefinitely and in Russia where Putin appears to be gaming the system to continue controlling the nation well past his constitutionally allowed maximum term. If history has taught us anything, it is allowing leaders this much power for this long without challenge that has allowed many of the cruelest dictators throughout history to achieve power and maintain it until it was finally lost nearly always through bloodshed.
I believe many politicians become politicians because they are phsycologically inclined towards a thirst for power in the first place, not that they're necessarily competent or intelligent and want to make a specific country better.
Re:Microsoft's Ripoff Of Sony's Skill Points
on
The Best Achievements
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· Score: 3, Interesting
To me that's the key difference between a good achievements system and a bad one.
Call of Duty 4 was imo quite good, 1000 points was achievable on the 360 if you played well, but you also didn't really have to go out of your way to get them - you just had to be quite good at the game to get the mile high club one and I liked that, getting it actually felt like an achievement.
Compare that to something like Fallout 3, where you're expected to do tedious, dull side quests that are no more exciting than your average dumbed down so the server doesn't keel over MMO quests and the main game story finishes in just a few hours and you have an example of a crap achievement system. Stuff like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 and some of the NHL games had silly achievements too where you effectively had to be the best online player in the world or thereabouts to achieve them. Most people don't have time to get themselves up to that level.
Sometimes the extra stuff on top of the main storyline works - some of the big open world games can be pretty fun with achievements like climb your way to the tallest part of the game world in Crackdown, but others, such as finding the 800 or whatever orbs it was you had to find total were just fucking stupid.
"Actually, I'm not. I just wish that anyone who still showed an interest in my book would be shown directly to a place where they could actually pay for it. And I wish that they wouldn't be tempted with all of the Torrent sites."
Why? I mean, you must have a reason for wishing they'd be shown a place where they could pay for it? Presumably so you can earn money off of it? If so then how can you simultaneously say you're not expecting to get money off of it? Either you are or you aren't, if you are expecting to get money off of it then the person you're responding to has a valid argument, if you're not then what's wrong with people downloading it from torrent sites?
"I know the book is ten years old. I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly."
I suppose it depends how you define fair, many might suggest that a book that has made it's author money for 10 years has been treated pretty fairly.
"In the end, my needs are inconsequential. The problem is that the better authors who write the newer books are going to be affected even more by piracy. And then they're going to do something else. So you can blame my book all you want, but we're all going to be hurt when the better books disappear."
This is mere speculation - I do not see any evidence on Amazon.com that there is a slow down in books being written. But here's a more important point, as someone who buys a lot of books I understand the criteria consumers use when deciding whether to buy a book, and here's the most important one for me - can I gain any useful knowledge from this book that I can't buy elsewhere? The answer regarding your book is no, I can't, because as per this thread the knowledge is available in a better, more uptodate form elsewhere for free, there is absolutely no value in me purchasing your book.
So what books do I buy? Books on subjects that aren't well covered elsewhere or that are simply much easier to follow on a hard copy book than on screen, and despite the massive amount of information on the internet some of this information is better presented in books, or the internet simply doesn't contain the relevant information. There are a vast amount of niche subjects out there that the internet doesn't cover, but that there is a decent amount of people looking for it. Sure that information may turn up online eventually, but here's the deal - like with pretty much every other job outside the creative industries, you've got to keep working. If you can keep producing books on niche subjects, people will keep buying them. I have purchased many mathematical and computing texts over the last decade where they simply weren't available or available to that quality online.
This is why your theory about books disspearing altogether is wrong, because some authors are capable of producing books that provide knowledge that is not more easily gained with a smaller price tag elsewhere. Your book may have filled a niche area 10 years ago, but it doesn't now, the questions you need to be asking yourself are whether you have increased your knowledge since you released that book, and whether you can use the knowledge you've learnt since then to produce another book whose contents aren't already covered better elsewhere.
Musicians, authors, songwriters and so on seem to be repeatedly missing this same point over and over - if you want to make money, you have to actually do some work. Yes copyright and the music cartel etc. have allowed you to get away with not doing any work for your money for a long time, but now you have to join the real world with the rest of us. Stay on top of your game, provide something people want and you can stay in your preferred business, if you aren't willing to do that then go get a job elsewhere.
Yep, that pretty much sums it up, and I found out how stupid the whole copyright on books thing was the other day.
A friend wanted to do some legitimate research on a book, published original in 1937. The research was to check whether the classification of a specific plant into a specific genus had not been done correctly. He had a copy of the 1959 and 1970 reprints of the book which stated the plant had been put into a particular genus by someone else, but the person who the book claimed had done this had never done so even though it was officially accepted as being in that genus - his question was whether anyone ever actually checked to see if that plant had ever been correctly classified or if it had only ever been accepted as a member of that genus due to an error on behalf of the author. He wanted to check whether the 1937 version of the book attributed the classification incorrectly also so simply needed to look briefly at this edition of the book.
Google books seemed perfect for this, as it had the book:
Unfortunately it can't be viewed, why? Because as it was reprinted in 1959 and 1970, it gets a copyright term of 95 years and so wont be available freely to look at until 2032.
There's something basically fucked up about that, despite this knowledge being archived, and despite it being relevant to important legitimate research, it's locked away for another 23 years. I do not believe there is any valid argument that something written in 1937 should under any circumstance be kept hidden away for this time period, and it is clearly and demonstrably holding back real research that ultimately benefits us.
Of course, in the era of the internet copyright is losing strength, frankly, I'd recommend people pirate anything that's been out for a reasonable amount of time - if the author starts crying about it then maybe they should actually go and do some more work to make money.
So in answer to the ask slashdot question - yes, you should go and get another fucking job just like everyone else instead of expecting to be paid for something you did 10 years ago and have already been paid for.
I've actually had larger heatsinks on my GPUs than CPUs in recent years with those double height graphics cards taking up two back plate slots and that was with a 2.83ghz quad core when it was high end! That said, the heatsinks often seem to be on the wrong side of the card in most motherboards/cases, that is, they're on the bottom, and of course, heat rises, so presumably it's more that than the actual size of the heat sinks? They seem to get round this by creating those heat tunnels that try to lead the hot air out the back of the system presumably drawing heat away from the components using convection by creating a cooler space underneath the components for heat to dissipate to.
No, AMD don't have a bad track record you're right, however ATI do, I can't comment on them now though.
I was in tech. support for 7 years from 2000 to 2007 and the fact is that ATI drivers were consistently crap. Our team supported over 10,000 systems, ranging from low end desktops, to high end workstations and big high end laptops to small netbook type systems.
Time and time again the only cards that provided driver issues were ATI, it was absolutely horrendous how bad ATI's drivers were, they've simply never been up to scratch historically and if they couldn't get their act together in releasing stable drivers in over 12 years between releasing their first 3D accellerator cards and me finishing dealing with them in tech. support I'd be surprised if they've made any strides since then, even if AMD has acquired them, judging by comments from the tech. support guys where I work now they really haven't, but I wouldn't like to say that for sure without first hand knowledge.
It's easy to see things differently one way or the other if you're only basing your view on your home systems, but if you deal with thousands of systems like I have, and like this guy you're responding to probably has in his job then you'll find ATI cards have always been consistently far worse in terms of drivers over the years.
No, because it's so small it wouldn't have the slightest effect.
To put it into perspective, it's less than £1bn and the bank of England has just pumped £125bn into the British economy in quantitive easing, we're also around £150 - £200bn in debt for the next year or two.
Now multiply that across all the other countries in Europe and you'll realise that this fine would have no effect on improving European economies.
I'm not entirely sure what you meant by weak economy either, whether you're referring to any specific country or the EU as a whole, if it's the latter it's worth pointing out the EU is the largest economy in the world, beating out even the US by a decent amount. The euro has done well too in the current economic situation which has also helped many European economies come out okay. Even if one European countries economy is weak, the EU as a whole has the power to make sure things do well - this is why Iceland, whose economy pretty much collapsed in the current recession is now desperately trying to get in the EU because it can help them.
Realistically, this fine is in the millions, the hundreds of millions but in the millions, whilst the US and Europe are talking in the trillions to fix their economies.
Even fairly cheap Logitech ones have been able to do this for a few years, but not only that they can overlay your face with rendered characters also so that you can have, say, an aliens head whos eyelids blink when yours do and whose head tilts and turns with your and whose mouth and expressions are mapped to yours. Effectively it recognises key points on your face that define expressions and maps them to a 3D rendered facial model - everything from aliens to dinosaurs to sharks. It can also apply overlays to your face, like drawing a moustache, glasses or a hat in the correct place on your face as you move around.
I think his idea isn't so much aimed at people who share and download, but at sites like The Pirate Bay.
I'll admit I haven't RTFA, but I'm guessing the idea is that a ton of content would be available for anyone to use if they pay royalties, so for example, the guys behind TPB could go legit using this license by paying royalties from their ad-revenue.
Effectively it'd make a way for new business ideas to be carried out without hassle. You could go home tonight and create your pay subscription site for the TV program Lost for example that has every episode available for download in 1080p to people you pay x amount per month. You could then pay the royalties out of that.
It wont ever work of course, because no one is going to pick up the idea, particularly the cartels who own all the content, it's a nice idea though and would be win-win for everyone as long as everyone was sensible - i.e. sensible royalty percentages etc. It'd mean the likes of TPB could go legit, artists etc. could get some money, and people could get content cheap or even free with an ad based revenue model or similar.
"Here (in the UK) I don't remember being taught much more than 'oh, and the Japanese, Chinese and Americans were having a bit of a fight over there too'."
I'm in the UK too and it's certainly something we were taught, primarily because the British were over there too. We still pretty much had a lot of our empire at that time and Australia and New Zealand were still much more friendly and to an extent tied to us, similarly we had Hong Kong and fought with the Chinese.
About the only theatre that was under-taught was probably the Russian front, that's not that it wasn't taught at all, but that proportionally it wasn't given the importance it deserved.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry but that's bullshit.
It has been demonstrated in the UK quite successfully that speed limits and cameras do increase safety so saying it's about revenue generation is simply ignorant. I'm not even convinced they make more money sitting an officer on a road that is quite clearly signed that speed cameras may be in operation really nets them enough money to make up for the cost of paying that officer to sit there all day and paying for the costs of running the camera etc. anyway. If it was really about revenue you a) wouldn't get points for speeding so that you could be banned, they'd want you to keep getting caught and paying fines indefinitely and b) they wouldn't have to legally have signs up pointing out that speed cameras are in operation on a specific stretch of road. See here:
http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/news/Cameras-help-slash-Notts-road-deaths-injuriesarticle-900689-details/article.html
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/lawandorder/Speed-cameras-lose-money-save.5230243.jp
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/speed-cameras--have-cut-road-carnage-by-over-40-psni-13409612.html
http://slower-speeds.org.uk/cameras_reduce_speeding
Yes, correlation is not causation, but it's pretty strong evidence, particularly when road deaths decrease at a greater proportion in areas where speed cameras exist than where they don't even if road conditions are effectively identical. Furthermore, when a fatal accident does occur, accident investigators have to report the speed the car was travelling at as calculated by evidence such as the skid marks which tell the breaking distance and so on. In a high proportion of these cases (iirc about 50%) the vehicle in question was speeding. The remaining cases were real accidents such as lorries getting blown over and that sort of thing. Of course, there are plenty of sites countering that speed cameras improve safety but I've yet to see any that are more than just an opinion peice, or making a mountain out of a single anomally. Statistics relating to improved safety through speed cameras exist for large data sets and repeatedly show that cameras, and hence forcing most people to stick to speed limits does increase safety.
You state the safest way to drive is in a manner safe for the road conditions presented to you, but are you telling me you know the road conditions of every single road you might travel down? Say you travel down a road at 5:30pm every day from work as I do, there is a road that is 30mph which you can easily go safely down at 60mph at that time. Try doing it at 3:30pm though and I gurantee you'll again plow into a bunch of kids that come out of a school that is set back just behind the houses lining that road. The fact is, speed limits are there because they have been created with the hidden dangers on that road you do not know about in mind. What about the one day of the year that that corner you go round at 50mph is known to be prone to black ice formation that you weren't aware of? What you think is a safe speed to drive might not necessarily be correct, and different people have different opinions on what is safe, that's why it's better to have a sign for everyone to adhere to that has been tested to be the best balance between speed and safety.
Now, that's not to say I agree with this measure. The issue I have with speed limits are not that they exist, but that the dangerous people are those that ignore them anyway. Safe drivers follow them, if you remove them, safe drivers no longer know how fast is safe unless they truly know that specific road and it's hazard
I like the fact that the guy actually assumes Google even cares about such minor inconveniences as laws too.
Yes, unfortunately so far eBay would disagree with you, hence why they no longer allow auctions of virtual gold and so forth meaning regardless of what you feel about EULAs, eBay will still pull auctions on request for that sort of thing and Walmart etc. will still refuse to deal with electronic accounts and keeping an e-mail address per game is still a ball ache.
Well it claims to make information computable. I accept it's not meant to find results like Google but the issue with it is it doesn't even seem to gather basic data in a computable form.
I mean, you try things like "On what date did the Falklands war commence?", "How many species of Melocactus are there?", "On what date was Adolf Hitler born" and it outright fails.
Okay, so I figured maybe I'm asking questions that are out of the intended realm of knowledge it supports and the assumption is that you'd never want to compute with this information. So I tried something Mathematical - I mean, that is Wolfram's speciality right?
"How many non-isomorphic labelled trees are there with 4 vertices"
Fail.
I've tried a few other relevant, factual questions and it just falls flat over, not even able to try and answer them.
I'm sure it does do a great job of making information computable, the problem is it's unable to gather the information in the first place.
Ironically, Google, that doesn't claim to make information computable manage to provide answers for all these questions within it's first page, often as the first hit. Sure it may not be presented in a standardised format, but data that needs to be parsed is certainly more computable than data that simply can't be provided at all.
I can see what Wolfram was trying to do, but why did he have to couple it with immense hype that it's as important as Google? Why has he been going on and on about it to the media when it struggles to even do what it's supposed to absolutely excel at? I think they could've at least saved face if they'd stopped being so cocky about it and released it with a little less hype and fanfair and let it improve and become more useful and hence more greatly adopted over time. One has to ask when there was so much hype about it and with a ToS like this whether it was all just about Wolfram gathering data for himself or something than providing a tool useful to everyone else. Either that or he simply beleives his own hype and believes the tool is better than it really is. Perhaps in developing and using it himself he was blinded in making and seeing it work well for applications specific to what he wanted without ever truly seeing how well it performs in other problem domains?
That's a standard that defines a format, not a format by itself, regarldess it's also one of many standards, although many of those are obsolete now. Still, there are plenty more than just one single date format however you cut it!
But the point is that on some days you'll use 20/3/2009, other days you'll use 20/03/2009, then you might use 20th March 2009 and all that's assuming just a single date ordering from days to years which is common in Britain but not so in the US which uses months, days, years or Europe which mostly follows years, months, days.
I guess it depends how many games you have, but having one e-mail address per game is a bit over the top, people really shouldn't have to deal with that.
Also, afaik, as part of the EULA you're not allowed to sell on or allow accounts to change hands, so Valve can also easily get eBay to pull such auctions, it also prevents you selling to places like Walmart etc. because they wont deal with this sort of thing.
Not only that but when I have used them I've found them annoying as they're often case sensitive and it's easy to forget what you entered or how you entered it. What is your dog's name? Which dog? What is your date of birth? What date format?
They're just bad all round, often the questions you get to choose from either fall into the category of far too easily guessed/socially engineered such as where were you born which 90% of people you've ever met can tell from something like your accent or where you work and live if you never moved away or they fall into the category of being too ambiguous such that when it comes back to remembering how you entered it 3 tries will probably get you locked out.
Creating a list of questions that truly are secret and of which at least one is common to everyone is near impossible. You could start asking things like "Who at your workplace would you most like to sleep with" but I don't think most people would want to answer such intrusive questions!
With Steam infesting every game that comes out nowadays forcing you to tie a game to an account and forcing you to activate online for the sole purpose of killing the second hand market off I'm guessing this'll be a fairly short lived venture for PC games at least.
Still it's not a bad idea for the console market and I guess that's where most money is now in this anyway?
I have to agree, just because it has a low market share doesn't mean it's dissapointing.
Personally, for me, the number 1 most dissapointing peice of technology in the last 5 years has been the Wii. It looked great, it had so much potential but now it's sat gathering dust I can't help but feel it was a massive waste of money. The games just haven't come through for it, you go into a game store and 99% of the games are just complete and utter tat. There's a few gems for sure, but you can count them on one hand.
Now that's dissapointment, when something with so much potential turns out to be so dull. Of course, that doesn't mean it'll remain a dissapointment, if we start seeing some more interesting, more mature games it could still pull through.
But of course, many people love the Wii, so it's down to this - one man's dissapointment is another's greatest gadget in decades.
He's not going to "Love" Angela Jolie more because he doesn't know her to have that bond.
That doesn't mean he wouldn't rather shag her though!
Or do most of the newer Guitar Hero releases basically just add features that really should've just been in a single release in the first place?
When most companies design a game, they create a list of features and implement them into the game and release it. The Guitar Hero guys seem to make the same list, but make a whole new game for each feature.
I love Guitar Hero, but unlike most games I wont buy every version, I bought Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band but nothing since then, it just seems to be getting a little silly - a lot like EA with it's sports games that are really little different from version to version.
Still, it's a cash cow I guess so it's hard to blame them for it if people continue to buy it - the same can be said for EA's sports games I suppose!
You seem to assume because I'm very anti-Labour that I'm pro-Conservative?
I'm not at all, I think Cameron is equally dangerous in the long run because he's blinded by ignorance and a pro-family, anti-everything else think-of-the-children stance, I do however think that at the start, most politicians are a lot more cautious and the Conservatives are at least a little better than Labour in that they're willing to get rid of the DNA database and do away with some of Labour's totalitarian plans possibly the likes of Contactpoint and so on. They're also looking for a public sector cull which is important (I've worked in public sector, it needs to happen).
I'd rather see neither Labour or Conservative in at the next election, I would however prefer to see the Conservatives in over Labour for at least one term, simply because it seems the only way to remind Labour that they can't do whatever they want without the backing of the population or opposition.
Regarding Conservative support when Labour backbenchers rebelled on the more totalitarian legislation - do you have any examples? I used to think the same but when I looked at the voting record, these laws all got through only because Labour have enough seats to push them through single handedly such that even when the whole of the Conservatives and Lib Dems voted against them it still gets passed. Labour have unilaterally pushed nearly all of the worst of the laws through by themselves - I was suprised too when I looked into it.
Regarding the Lib Dems, the only reason they're not worth voting for is because well, people don't vote for them. It's stupid to say I'm not going to vote for them because they're not worth voting for. For what it's worth, the Lib Dems currently are only 4% behind Labour in the polls - if everyone who wants to vote Lib Dems actually voted for them they'd come second, and once they come second then what? Sure they wont get in this time with second place - but if the Tories show themselves to asses again, what about next time? It's possible.
At very least getting the Lib Dems in second place changes the field away from the two major parties situation you describe and people will realise there is a viable third party out there. In the absolute worst case, by voting Lib Dem you're at least showing the country they have more support than people thought - that's better than artificially suggesting Labour or the Conservatives have more support than they really do because people vote for one just so the other doesn't get in.
"If people want to elect somebody over and over, that is their decision"
It is, but it's also not a closed decision - Putin quite clearly ordered the assassination of Litvinenko on British soil, he also clearly ordered the harassment of Georgia and the massing of troops in South Ossetia which is actually Georgian territory to the point they managed to get a war out of it. If they make a decision that persistently causes problems with other nations then other nations have the right to point out their idiocy, just as much of the world did when Bush was busy war mongering across the world.
No I certainly agree about Brown's potential (or lack of), but my point is I can see now how countries can allow themselves to be taken over by much more evil dictators. Brown is only going to lose this next election because of his lack of charisma and incompetence and not because of his policies that seek to further control the population.
Essentially, I can see now how countries can allow themselves to be taken over by these people in the first place, if Labour had someone more competent and charismatic in at the next election and they got in and further stepped towards totalitarianism to the extent they have this election and the people just sat back and accepted it until they have recently that creep towards such a situation is worryingly possible.
Whilst you mention Labour haven't murdered their opponents that might not necessarily be true (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_David_Kelly#Death), and they have certainly at least had their politicial opponents arrested (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Green#2008_arrest). They also pushed for the ability to hold terror suspects for 45 days without trial, which is particularly unnerving in light of the fact that recent stats have shown only 13% of people arrested on terror charges are ever actually convicted of them.
I'm not actually sure the Labour government is any better than this Guatamalan dictatorship - the only real difference is they perhaps don't have the backing of important forces such as the army, although the Police in the UK do seem to be unnervingly in the pockets of the home office which they are not supposed to be. Evidence of this comes from things such as the fact the police are willing to arrest political opponents but are entirely unwilling to pursue investigations against the likes of Phorm which would be a clear cut prosecution and which the EU has deemed illegal, of course, the home office strongly supports Phorm and has been guilty of collusion with it (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8021661.stm).
One things for sure, as you say, Brown and Labour are no threat, if however they had the army and such wrapped round their finger like they do the police and security services such that they could literally get away with what they want I do not believe it is beyond Brown and Labour to order the execution of political opponents, if that hasn't even already happened as per the above.
My point about shortened terms, hung governments etc. is more a reference to the idea that we should've been able to get rid of Labour before now - they started to lose general acceptance about 2 years ago.
We'll have to wait and see how it comes out of Google's random censorship machine.
I mean, this is a company that is more scared of the DMCA than it is offending a whole nation such as Turkey. This is also the same company that rapidly bad anti-Scientology and anti-Islam videos whilst being the single biggest repository of anti-Western, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-Atheist hate videos.
I'm not a fan of any religion, but christ I wish Google would stop censoring videos of only some religions but not touching the others.
As for my bet? My bet is they wont touch it for the afformentioned reason that Google is more scared of a DMCA takedown notice than it is the leader of an entire nation bitching at it. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, what I am sure of though is that they have their priorities fucked - they'll make a stand against an evil dictator but if Mr music industry lawyer comes knocking about a perfectly valid fair use video they'll run shit scared with their tail between their legs removing the video immediately.
If there's one thing Google needs to sort out at YouTube, it's their censorship policy to at very least add some amount of objectivity and common sense to it.
That's because those videos are pretty much entirely just speculation and conspiracy theory created by paranoid nuts.
In contrast, this appears to be a real conspiracy, not just an unfounded, nonsensical theory by some nut job.
Because power corrupts, and even in Western democracies like Britain the ruling party Labour have been pushing more and more of a totalitarian agenda over the last few years.
Labour in the UK is in ruins, the party is done, it has no hope now of re-election, yet the leader, Gordon Brown continues, he continues blindly believing in his own mind that he is doing the right thing not being willing to step down.
It's for this reason that they are against it, because the reality is that they know, eventually, it will be used against them as it goes against what they themselves want - more power, despite being corrupt to the core as the last week in British politics has shown.
Leaders who remain good throughout their entire term in office are rare- we've seen it happen in Canada with the corruption in their previous ruling party, we've seen it happen in the US under Bush, although from pretty early on, we've seen it in Australia. It happens time and time again - the longer a single leader or party is in power, the more complacent they get, and the more they forget they're there to serve the people, not control them.
I believe this is why the European courts have done a better job at preventing Labour's attempts at ever more draconian measures to control the population- because the European court of human rights has no direct explicit power over each individual country in the EU and the lack of any direct explicit power means their is less scope for them to become drunk with power.
It's also why I'm a big fan of minority governments, there's an argument it makes them more efficient, but I believe it realistically increase efficiency because such a minority government is kept on it's toes, it's being constantly reminded of what it's there for, and if it forgets that a coalition of opposition parties will remind it by forcing an election. The only laws that get passed are laws acceptable to all parties, rather than as we have in the UK and as the US had for many years under Bush - a situation where they can implement any policy changes they want regardless of what the population or opposition thinks of it. I believe that leadership terms should be shortened to 2 to 3 years to more frequently remind those in power that they can be removed and removed at any moment.
It is a dangerous situation in the likes of Venezuelan where the people have been dumb enough to allow Chavez to stand indefinitely and in Russia where Putin appears to be gaming the system to continue controlling the nation well past his constitutionally allowed maximum term. If history has taught us anything, it is allowing leaders this much power for this long without challenge that has allowed many of the cruelest dictators throughout history to achieve power and maintain it until it was finally lost nearly always through bloodshed.
I believe many politicians become politicians because they are phsycologically inclined towards a thirst for power in the first place, not that they're necessarily competent or intelligent and want to make a specific country better.
To me that's the key difference between a good achievements system and a bad one.
Call of Duty 4 was imo quite good, 1000 points was achievable on the 360 if you played well, but you also didn't really have to go out of your way to get them - you just had to be quite good at the game to get the mile high club one and I liked that, getting it actually felt like an achievement.
Compare that to something like Fallout 3, where you're expected to do tedious, dull side quests that are no more exciting than your average dumbed down so the server doesn't keel over MMO quests and the main game story finishes in just a few hours and you have an example of a crap achievement system. Stuff like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 and some of the NHL games had silly achievements too where you effectively had to be the best online player in the world or thereabouts to achieve them. Most people don't have time to get themselves up to that level.
Sometimes the extra stuff on top of the main storyline works - some of the big open world games can be pretty fun with achievements like climb your way to the tallest part of the game world in Crackdown, but others, such as finding the 800 or whatever orbs it was you had to find total were just fucking stupid.
"Actually, I'm not. I just wish that anyone who still showed an interest in my book would be shown directly to a place where they could actually pay for it. And I wish that they wouldn't be tempted with all of the Torrent sites."
Why? I mean, you must have a reason for wishing they'd be shown a place where they could pay for it? Presumably so you can earn money off of it? If so then how can you simultaneously say you're not expecting to get money off of it? Either you are or you aren't, if you are expecting to get money off of it then the person you're responding to has a valid argument, if you're not then what's wrong with people downloading it from torrent sites?
"I know the book is ten years old. I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly."
I suppose it depends how you define fair, many might suggest that a book that has made it's author money for 10 years has been treated pretty fairly.
"In the end, my needs are inconsequential. The problem is that the better authors who write the newer books are going to be affected even more by piracy. And then they're going to do something else. So you can blame my book all you want, but we're all going to be hurt when the better books disappear."
This is mere speculation - I do not see any evidence on Amazon.com that there is a slow down in books being written. But here's a more important point, as someone who buys a lot of books I understand the criteria consumers use when deciding whether to buy a book, and here's the most important one for me - can I gain any useful knowledge from this book that I can't buy elsewhere? The answer regarding your book is no, I can't, because as per this thread the knowledge is available in a better, more uptodate form elsewhere for free, there is absolutely no value in me purchasing your book.
So what books do I buy? Books on subjects that aren't well covered elsewhere or that are simply much easier to follow on a hard copy book than on screen, and despite the massive amount of information on the internet some of this information is better presented in books, or the internet simply doesn't contain the relevant information. There are a vast amount of niche subjects out there that the internet doesn't cover, but that there is a decent amount of people looking for it. Sure that information may turn up online eventually, but here's the deal - like with pretty much every other job outside the creative industries, you've got to keep working. If you can keep producing books on niche subjects, people will keep buying them. I have purchased many mathematical and computing texts over the last decade where they simply weren't available or available to that quality online.
This is why your theory about books disspearing altogether is wrong, because some authors are capable of producing books that provide knowledge that is not more easily gained with a smaller price tag elsewhere. Your book may have filled a niche area 10 years ago, but it doesn't now, the questions you need to be asking yourself are whether you have increased your knowledge since you released that book, and whether you can use the knowledge you've learnt since then to produce another book whose contents aren't already covered better elsewhere.
Musicians, authors, songwriters and so on seem to be repeatedly missing this same point over and over - if you want to make money, you have to actually do some work. Yes copyright and the music cartel etc. have allowed you to get away with not doing any work for your money for a long time, but now you have to join the real world with the rest of us. Stay on top of your game, provide something people want and you can stay in your preferred business, if you aren't willing to do that then go get a job elsewhere.
Yep, that pretty much sums it up, and I found out how stupid the whole copyright on books thing was the other day.
A friend wanted to do some legitimate research on a book, published original in 1937. The research was to check whether the classification of a specific plant into a specific genus had not been done correctly. He had a copy of the 1959 and 1970 reprints of the book which stated the plant had been put into a particular genus by someone else, but the person who the book claimed had done this had never done so even though it was officially accepted as being in that genus - his question was whether anyone ever actually checked to see if that plant had ever been correctly classified or if it had only ever been accepted as a member of that genus due to an error on behalf of the author. He wanted to check whether the 1937 version of the book attributed the classification incorrectly also so simply needed to look briefly at this edition of the book.
Google books seemed perfect for this, as it had the book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=O749AAAAYAAJ&dq=Borg+cacti&q=&pgis=1#search_anchor
Unfortunately it can't be viewed, why? Because as it was reprinted in 1959 and 1970, it gets a copyright term of 95 years and so wont be available freely to look at until 2032.
There's something basically fucked up about that, despite this knowledge being archived, and despite it being relevant to important legitimate research, it's locked away for another 23 years. I do not believe there is any valid argument that something written in 1937 should under any circumstance be kept hidden away for this time period, and it is clearly and demonstrably holding back real research that ultimately benefits us.
Of course, in the era of the internet copyright is losing strength, frankly, I'd recommend people pirate anything that's been out for a reasonable amount of time - if the author starts crying about it then maybe they should actually go and do some more work to make money.
So in answer to the ask slashdot question - yes, you should go and get another fucking job just like everyone else instead of expecting to be paid for something you did 10 years ago and have already been paid for.
I've actually had larger heatsinks on my GPUs than CPUs in recent years with those double height graphics cards taking up two back plate slots and that was with a 2.83ghz quad core when it was high end! That said, the heatsinks often seem to be on the wrong side of the card in most motherboards/cases, that is, they're on the bottom, and of course, heat rises, so presumably it's more that than the actual size of the heat sinks? They seem to get round this by creating those heat tunnels that try to lead the hot air out the back of the system presumably drawing heat away from the components using convection by creating a cooler space underneath the components for heat to dissipate to.
No, AMD don't have a bad track record you're right, however ATI do, I can't comment on them now though.
I was in tech. support for 7 years from 2000 to 2007 and the fact is that ATI drivers were consistently crap. Our team supported over 10,000 systems, ranging from low end desktops, to high end workstations and big high end laptops to small netbook type systems.
Time and time again the only cards that provided driver issues were ATI, it was absolutely horrendous how bad ATI's drivers were, they've simply never been up to scratch historically and if they couldn't get their act together in releasing stable drivers in over 12 years between releasing their first 3D accellerator cards and me finishing dealing with them in tech. support I'd be surprised if they've made any strides since then, even if AMD has acquired them, judging by comments from the tech. support guys where I work now they really haven't, but I wouldn't like to say that for sure without first hand knowledge.
It's easy to see things differently one way or the other if you're only basing your view on your home systems, but if you deal with thousands of systems like I have, and like this guy you're responding to probably has in his job then you'll find ATI cards have always been consistently far worse in terms of drivers over the years.
No, because it's so small it wouldn't have the slightest effect.
To put it into perspective, it's less than £1bn and the bank of England has just pumped £125bn into the British economy in quantitive easing, we're also around £150 - £200bn in debt for the next year or two.
Now multiply that across all the other countries in Europe and you'll realise that this fine would have no effect on improving European economies.
I'm not entirely sure what you meant by weak economy either, whether you're referring to any specific country or the EU as a whole, if it's the latter it's worth pointing out the EU is the largest economy in the world, beating out even the US by a decent amount. The euro has done well too in the current economic situation which has also helped many European economies come out okay. Even if one European countries economy is weak, the EU as a whole has the power to make sure things do well - this is why Iceland, whose economy pretty much collapsed in the current recession is now desperately trying to get in the EU because it can help them.
Realistically, this fine is in the millions, the hundreds of millions but in the millions, whilst the US and Europe are talking in the trillions to fix their economies.
Even fairly cheap Logitech ones have been able to do this for a few years, but not only that they can overlay your face with rendered characters also so that you can have, say, an aliens head whos eyelids blink when yours do and whose head tilts and turns with your and whose mouth and expressions are mapped to yours. Effectively it recognises key points on your face that define expressions and maps them to a 3D rendered facial model - everything from aliens to dinosaurs to sharks. It can also apply overlays to your face, like drawing a moustache, glasses or a hat in the correct place on your face as you move around.
I think his idea isn't so much aimed at people who share and download, but at sites like The Pirate Bay.
I'll admit I haven't RTFA, but I'm guessing the idea is that a ton of content would be available for anyone to use if they pay royalties, so for example, the guys behind TPB could go legit using this license by paying royalties from their ad-revenue.
Effectively it'd make a way for new business ideas to be carried out without hassle. You could go home tonight and create your pay subscription site for the TV program Lost for example that has every episode available for download in 1080p to people you pay x amount per month. You could then pay the royalties out of that.
It wont ever work of course, because no one is going to pick up the idea, particularly the cartels who own all the content, it's a nice idea though and would be win-win for everyone as long as everyone was sensible - i.e. sensible royalty percentages etc. It'd mean the likes of TPB could go legit, artists etc. could get some money, and people could get content cheap or even free with an ad based revenue model or similar.
"Here (in the UK) I don't remember being taught much more than 'oh, and the Japanese, Chinese and Americans were having a bit of a fight over there too'."
I'm in the UK too and it's certainly something we were taught, primarily because the British were over there too. We still pretty much had a lot of our empire at that time and Australia and New Zealand were still much more friendly and to an extent tied to us, similarly we had Hong Kong and fought with the Chinese.
About the only theatre that was under-taught was probably the Russian front, that's not that it wasn't taught at all, but that proportionally it wasn't given the importance it deserved.