Actually, many newer, more portable gaming laptops come with power saving features that will shut down cores and either run the GPU in a low power mode or run a separate low power GPU (like an integrated one). My brother's small Alienware (an older version of the M14x - not sure if the model is the same) gets about 5-6 hours of battery life. He also owns a behemoth M17x that gets about an hour, though - and yes, he has more money than he knows what to do with because he isn't even a gamer - he mainly likes the looks and the CPU performance... ugh - such a waste.
I hate it when manufacturers don't print the tRAS number (which is at minimum 24 for the CAS-11 and 20 for the CAS-9 using the CAS + tRCD + 2 formula, where CAS is Column Access Strobe, RAS is Row Access Strobe, and tRCD is RAS-to-CAS delay). If that final number is ungainly high compared to the minimum, it is a often a sign of poorly designed memory (or so I recall from talking to my brother, who works as a RAM designer).
And for reference, as a general rule, RAM at half the speed and half the CAS number is about the same speed, so you can interpolate a bit to compare different pieces of RAM. For instance, "800" speed RAM at CAS 5 would be about the same as "1600" RAM at CAS 10. It isn't exactly a 1-1 comparison, but is a rule of thumb.
This is the fuzzy math politicians use - they compare the US GNP of around 14.5 trillion (calling that income) and debt being 14.3 trillion, so US debt-to-income ratio is about 1:1. They are not comparing US taxed income (2.1 trillion) to debt because that paints a much more hideous picture. They also sweep under the rug total obligation (e.g. medicare and social security), which makes the picture even more bleak. In my opinion, the way politicians compare debt is a lot like saying "my company makes X amount of money, so my personal debt is only Y and I don't even need to count my mortgage!"
If you want a real picture, it is estimated that US total obligation is about 78 billion. With roughly 2.1 billion in tax revenue, that ratio is closer 37:1, which puts them closer to J P Morgan Chase in the GP's article, and the US insures J P Morgan Chase... Some estimates say total obligation (over a longer period of time - I think 40 years) is 200 trillion, which is something like 95:1.
I won't call politicians liars, I'll just let the math speak for itself - the US needs to take corrective actions to at least deal with the national debt (it's a start), and then start working toward fixing total obligation. If that means ditching Social Security and Medicare, so be it. I'm not counting on either one being around when I retire in about 20 years (I am hoping to retire before 65), but I know a lot of people that are - austerity measures suck.
Tax the rich solves nothing - they don't pay taxes. What do you think all those loopholes in the tax code are for, anyway?
And I hear the Mexicans are leaving for jobs in, *shock* Mexico because the US economy stinks. We may need to toss in a retention bonus for our illegal immigrants as we give them green cards.
Calling that a grand deal is silly - that doesn't even scratch the surface at the revenue needed in the next 10 years. The US only counts debt, not total obligation, and with baby boomers retiring and social security and medicare picking up the tab, it is estimated that total obligation is around 65 trillion (more than the GDP for the entire world). Some estimates peg it as high as 200 trillion.
Here's Fox News even quoting it (I've also seen this on liberal media, so it is both sides). Of course, there are people that think debt is fictitious as far as governments are concerned because they can just print whatever money they need, but doing so devalues the dollar and causes inflation. Anyone that seriously thinks that is a solution should revisit Germany from the end of the Great War (World War 1) to 1923 when the economy completely collapsed under hyperinflation and drew radicals like Hitler into power.
Most games from that era actually look quite similar to D&D, and in some ways V&V was no exception. For instance, I believe normal stats were 3-18 (not that they couldn't be boosted or reduced - I remember insect powers reduced my character's intelligence to zero, but then I got power armor with intelligence 22...). Also there could be a massive disparate power balance - I think I had something like 11 powers when all was said and done, but two other heroes had only two. The GM went out of his way to pummel my character because he was so massively imbalanced when compared to the others (I could fly, had power armor with a force field and weapons, controlled the elements, could change solids to liquids, had insect powers, could shoot energy bolts, and had absorption as I recall - another char could basically run fast and shoot a gun and would be killed with 1/50 of the damage just my power armor's shield could take).
If you compare basic things like character stats and names of those stats for most late 1970s to early 1980s games, they are nearly identical, and usually those stats don't really mean much. Ars Magica was the first RPG I remember that really strayed from the familiar tropes, with stats from -7 to 7 (I believe) and an intentional imbalance of power (mages just are better in that game), and stats that actually directly influenced rolls, but several others did about the same time with different schemes (e.g. Cyberpunk 2020). In older games stats like strength influenced rolls like D&D's "bend bars and lift gates," but you never made direct stat checks and you had to role-play to those stats (so if your int was 3, you needed to act like you had an int of 3 - we had one guy that the GM forced to roll a D30 [yes, a D30] and get a 1 to volunteer a smart idea).
Technically you don't own a copy of the copyrighted material - the publisher owns all of the copyrighted material. You own the physical media it is published on and (usually) a perpetual license to use it, so by that definition you are stealing because you are taking a license and you didn't pay for it
In the US you technically can't even show that licensed media to anyone without having them also pay for a license, which is why DVD and Blu-ray movies often say something about "for home use only" (fair use allows you to show it to your family and friends if they are there, but it is ambiguous about when that becomes a public display).
Don't expect to be doing a lot of coding AI in an intro course. If they're anything like my AI classes, they are 9 parts conceptual, 1 part pseudo-code. Maybe you'll get to write a bit of Lisp in the meantime (AI people think Lisp is the language of the gods, and trying to change that is like prying CoBOL from bankers or FORTRAN from Mech-E people).
Actually the text doesn't literally translate well (literally "hear nothing, work nothing, only simple"), but the funny thing is (unless I'm missing an idiom, which is possible) it seems to mean the opposite of that phrase - I translate it as more "hear nothing and do nothing makes you a simpleton."
The differences between iOS and MacOS X are at a higher level than the differences between Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7. Windows phone is based on the WindowsCE kernel, which is a developed from scratch kernel, not derived from NT like the current Windows 7 kernel. iOS and MacOS X, on the other hand, both run the same Darwin kernel and some of the same core components. So the main issue with merging the OSes is which pieces that sit on top of the kernel should be kept and which should be ditched. For instance, should they keep the full version of OpenGL with 25+ years of legacy or go with OpenGL 2.0 ES, which is used in WebGL? My guess would be Apple would go with the latter, mainly because they don't have CAD companies that rely on the legacy fixed function pipeline breathing down their necks.
GPL3 is a (commercial) plague - anything that uses any GPL3 library MUST comply by GPL3 and any license that is not GPL3 becomes GPL3, so Apple had to abandon SAMBA - if they integrate a SAMBA interfacing gui into their OS (which they did under GPL2), they immediately are required to release the entire OS under the GPL.
IMO, GPL3 is an extension of a religious war between Richard M Stallman (RMS) and the commercial world. RMS believes all software should be free and is willing to force his belief by any means necessary, and others like me think that is absurd and would be a giant leap backwards toward 1970. Imagine having to buy all games on hard media today with built in DRM (so the software developers get paid) - it is inane in the world of Steam and digital downloads, but that is exactly what RMS is demanding (or we can just charge $50000 for each console or PC - imagine the sticker shock there!). If I were, say, Apple and had such a requirement, I would never release software upgrades without forcing the user to buy new hardware - again, just silly.
OTOH, I can understand RMS's love of hacker culture and available source - View Source is an amazing way to learn html, and probably was the single biggest driver of early web development, and may be the primary reason why html destroyed similar but competing technologies like gopher. As someone that created content for both gopher and the web early on and mocked early html (which lacked the graphical browser gopher had - it was a text only interface in 1990 and had very limited capability), I sure picked the wrong technology to bet on. A couple of years later I saw World Wide Web on the NeXT boxes and was blown away, but I really didn't start making my own pages until Mosiac the next year (the school had limited availability of the NeXT boxes and I had no access whatsoever aside from through friends), and by the Netscape beta I had completely fallen in love with html (which had a similar but simpler syntax than gopher, since it was largely borrowed from gopher).
I feel there is space for both free software and commercial software and I can understand why there is a GPL3, but I have a hard time validating using it because of its invasive license. It is less like "free as in speech" and more like "free as in herpes viral infection" - you can give it to everyone and you can't get rid of it.
I use both VirtualBox and VMWare daily (but not mac VMWare, and therefore not Fusion) and both tend to have their pluses and minuses in the Windows and Linux world (the two server OS's my current project supports). I can see VMWare being better on mac though - VirtualBox's mac support is relatively new and VMWare has been in that space for a while, so I'm sure the interface and integration are much more refined. On that note, I have a mac loving friend that swears on Parallels and hates VMWare Fusion with a passion, but I have no idea why other than I think Parallels has been in the mac space longer than VMWare (with that guy everything is a holy relic though - from his macbook air to his iPad 2 to his Parallels for those "awful times I need to run Windows," so I take a lot of it with a grain of salt).
Actually, if he didn't have legal permission to release it as GPL, the company could sue anyone using the GPL version for using stolen property, much as Microsoft has threatened to do numerous times to Linux users for various pieces of unproven "stolen" code.
My guess is he wrote this in his spare time (i.e. evenings and weekends), though, and in that case you've still got some ambiguity and it depends heavily on the contract signed when hired. Mine says the company basically owns anything I write at any time while employed if there is a business use for it, so they would have every right to take such a framework and redistribute it as a proprietary work if they so desire. My OSS projects have largely been graphics and game technology, and there is little business value there for my company - plus most are BSD, which allows for anyone to do that anyway (making toolkits is a hobby for me, and I actually want other people to use it for profit - hopefully they'll make something cool with it).
Speaking of, so far most of the Republican candidates are far right Tea Party nut jobs, which is not exactly how you woo the moderates. I'm definitely voting in the primaries this year (thankfully I live in a state that doesn't force primary voters to be party affiliated). I'll also toss a vote against Obama in the Dem primaries, though I've never seen an incumbent ousted (I tried with Bush, too - I'm not a big fan of leaders of Republics that treat them like dictatorships).
Note to parent - you mean "whole" not hole, and weak not "week" - if you don't want to sound weak minded you should use the correct word and not the homophone (word that sounds the same but is spelt [and yes, Firefox spellchecker, spelt is a legal alternative to spelled in English] differently).
The grandparent was referring to Somalia being in what we in the US consider a state of anarchy, but in fact most of the country has fallen under traditional tribal leadership and obeys tribal law for their various tribes and the central government has dissolved. No tribal leader has the influence or power to take control of the central government, so there is no central government, which has led to some areas being in a state of lawlessness. In some ways that is not necessarily a bad thing, because depending on who is in power, it could be a very oppressive dictatorship (think Taliban).
As for the 10th amendment, it is and pretty much always has been filigree with little substance - States are considered subordinate to federal law in all cases, which is understandable in some ways - for example, the South could potentially still have slavery if it weren't for the government stepping in. Before you argue that slaves are human and should therefore have rights under the constitution, remember that up until the end of the civil war slaves were considered more like an animal than a human (by the South).
Speaking of school shootings, if you read the US Secret Service report put together after Columbine, the #1 and #2 factors for attacks like this are VIOLENT BOOKS (27%) and VIOLENT MOVIES (24%) with video games third (12%).
And calling himself a "conservative Christian" is a crock - he can say he is Jesus for all I care, I'd like to see him justify "Thou Shall not Kill" and "Thou Shall not Steal" in front of God. Of course, in the Bible God is a bit of a hypocrite, smiting all the firstborn in Egypt, not to mention his murderous rampages elsewhere in the Bible (mostly Old Testament, but Revelation gets in a couple shots, too - but I guess if you are the creator, it is ok to kill - it is only bad if you're a minion).
Yeah - I've seen apps like that - I even had one that wanted to send a "legitimate" text for activation, but only would only text from my phone, which was problematic for me because I have normal texting turned off because it is too expensive (I can send/receive texts on my phone, just through a different number using the Internet - the main problem is I need to know if the number has been ported when sending, and people need to know to use my alternate number when texting me), so I just deleted it. Some other apps I've rejected outright, like why does a music player need access to my contacts list? I even found a guitar tuner that pretty much wanted full phone access (nuh uh... noob developer maybe?). If I ever created an android app, I'd very specifically say why the app needs special access to something like contacts (and even if it does, I may outright reject it anyway).
My RDR is still unfinished. Fun game, but much like most Bethesda games I never finished (Daggerfall, Battlespire [that one was mainly due to bugs], Morrowind, Fallout 3, Fallout 3 New Vegas, but not Oblivion - that one I finished because max stealth made it trivial), I tend to want to do everything in the open world rather than focusing on the core quests and eventually just get bored of the "fetch this" or "fetch that" quests and quit playing. I barely managed to get through 1/2 of Grand Theft Auto 3, as well (the whole gangsta thing isn't for me).
But even some games I love that weren't that long, like Uncharted I never finished - the ghoul thing near the end and respawns that required me to do it over and over again when I struggled with the controller doing what I wanted it to do made me quit it in frustration. I started Uncharted 2, but got sucked into RDR (a gift) and haven't gone back to playing it.
On the other hand, I have thousands of hours invested in some games, some of which I no longer play, like the early Ultimas (1-4 - we customized them) Civilization (1,2,3,4), Medieval: Total War (1 - only 50 or so in 2), Unreal Tournament 2004, Diablo and Diablo 2, Master of Orion 2, and Guild Wars. I have hundreds of hours invested in others like Starcraft, Battlefield 2, Wizardry 1 & 2, Fallout 2, Rome: Total War, Empire: Total War, and Mass Effect 1 & 2. Mass Effect 2 is a good example of a relatively short game that I've replayed several times. Fallout 2 was also fairly short - in fact, it can be won in about an hour using some very specific tactics, but there were so many variables that replay was fun (playing it through with a 1 intelligence and 8 luck [boosted to 10 quickly] had hilarious dialog and luck gave me all the special encounters) and I probably replayed it 15-17 times over 10 years.
Some I wish I could return - I paid $50 for Master of Orion 3 and played it all of maybe 2 hours. I paid $12 for Midnight Nowhere and it wasn't worth that (I have never disliked a main character as much as that one) - again, 2 hours if that. Some like Myst I found fun, but really, the game took only about 8 hours to play for $40 and I could play Space Harrier, Gauntlet, or other quarter suckers for less than $5/hour in an arcade. Then there was Final Fantasy, which claimed hundreds of hours but my college roommate and I finished it in a single sitting (~16 hours), tag teaming between classes - the biggest plus there was it was borrowed and free (and the guy we borrowed it from played it for months).
I read about this yesterday, and the article says it landed on the roof of a building (it was the most read article on CNN for a while). Probably either solid stone or pebbles for a Minnesota two story*. He also doesn't know when it fell out during his skydive, but he landed 1/2 mile away from the phone, so it probably was a pretty good drop.
* - I have a bit of personal experience on roofs in Minnesota while I was in college at both UMD and the U of M for some reason - the roof of the U of M Science and Engineering building, the roof of Game Informer, several apartment complexes (including two at UMD - Grigg's hall and another building - the one next to the science building, but I never had classes there - astronomy I think), and a few others.
as trolling as that was, it does seem to have a bit of truth - Microsoft has kicked Silverlight to the curb by targeting it pretty much only for mobile and news from inside Microsoft seems to indicate they are ditching.NET for html 5. Knowing Microsoft, however, and seeing their open attack on the security of WebGL, I expect them to port over their Silverlight Direct 3D code and use that instead of using WebGL because a browser without proprietary features would be very un-Microsofty.
The thing that isn't often mentioned, however, is that Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight being compiled into html/javascript at their developer conference (or so I have heard) - that would be nice, and very un-Microsoft of them - write in Silverlight/.NET and run on html 5 browsers. Still, I bet proprietary tech gets in there as I mentioned above, and if so, Miguel's work will still be relevant.
The nVidia vs AMD/ATI open source driver issue is all because hardware manufacturers pay for the patents in OpenGL. If you consider the driver part of the patent licensing, as nVidia does, there is no way they can open source the driver. If you consider the driver and hardware separate, as ATI does, you can open source the driver, with some caveats - namely it can't be called an OpenGL driver (it is OpenGL compatible). WINE operates similarly as a Windows compatible API.
Personally I've found nVidia's extension support has traditionally been much better than ATIs on consumer hardware, though ATI promised changes to that a couple of years ago (my newest graphics card is 2 years old and nVidia, so I haven't checked it).
LTE (Long Term Evolution) is technically from the 3GPP (3G Partnership Project), so even the creators consider it 3G, but some marketers caught on that LTE was going to be one of the technologies for 4G networks and so started branding their phones 4G despite not meeting the other requirements for 4G (bandwidth, signal strength, etc). To separate from the 3G and 4G versions of LTE (which was probably a name chosen intentionally to bridge generations in the first place), they started dubbing 4G as LTE Advanced, and that is supposed to meet the 4G requirements, but that is in the early stages of rollout and no iPhones exist that support it (some Verizon phones exist - the Droid Charge and HTC Thunderbolt that I know of, but I don't recall hearing of anyone else with 4G phones yet - certainly not Apple).
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Actually, many newer, more portable gaming laptops come with power saving features that will shut down cores and either run the GPU in a low power mode or run a separate low power GPU (like an integrated one). My brother's small Alienware (an older version of the M14x - not sure if the model is the same) gets about 5-6 hours of battery life. He also owns a behemoth M17x that gets about an hour, though - and yes, he has more money than he knows what to do with because he isn't even a gamer - he mainly likes the looks and the CPU performance... ugh - such a waste.
I hate it when manufacturers don't print the tRAS number (which is at minimum 24 for the CAS-11 and 20 for the CAS-9 using the CAS + tRCD + 2 formula, where CAS is Column Access Strobe, RAS is Row Access Strobe, and tRCD is RAS-to-CAS delay). If that final number is ungainly high compared to the minimum, it is a often a sign of poorly designed memory (or so I recall from talking to my brother, who works as a RAM designer).
And for reference, as a general rule, RAM at half the speed and half the CAS number is about the same speed, so you can interpolate a bit to compare different pieces of RAM. For instance, "800" speed RAM at CAS 5 would be about the same as "1600" RAM at CAS 10. It isn't exactly a 1-1 comparison, but is a rule of thumb.
This is the fuzzy math politicians use - they compare the US GNP of around 14.5 trillion (calling that income) and debt being 14.3 trillion, so US debt-to-income ratio is about 1:1. They are not comparing US taxed income (2.1 trillion) to debt because that paints a much more hideous picture. They also sweep under the rug total obligation (e.g. medicare and social security), which makes the picture even more bleak. In my opinion, the way politicians compare debt is a lot like saying "my company makes X amount of money, so my personal debt is only Y and I don't even need to count my mortgage!"
If you want a real picture, it is estimated that US total obligation is about 78 billion. With roughly 2.1 billion in tax revenue, that ratio is closer 37:1, which puts them closer to J P Morgan Chase in the GP's article, and the US insures J P Morgan Chase... Some estimates say total obligation (over a longer period of time - I think 40 years) is 200 trillion, which is something like 95:1.
I won't call politicians liars, I'll just let the math speak for itself - the US needs to take corrective actions to at least deal with the national debt (it's a start), and then start working toward fixing total obligation. If that means ditching Social Security and Medicare, so be it. I'm not counting on either one being around when I retire in about 20 years (I am hoping to retire before 65), but I know a lot of people that are - austerity measures suck.
Tax the rich solves nothing - they don't pay taxes. What do you think all those loopholes in the tax code are for, anyway?
And I hear the Mexicans are leaving for jobs in, *shock* Mexico because the US economy stinks. We may need to toss in a retention bonus for our illegal immigrants as we give them green cards.
Calling that a grand deal is silly - that doesn't even scratch the surface at the revenue needed in the next 10 years. The US only counts debt, not total obligation, and with baby boomers retiring and social security and medicare picking up the tab, it is estimated that total obligation is around 65 trillion (more than the GDP for the entire world). Some estimates peg it as high as 200 trillion.
Here's Fox News even quoting it (I've also seen this on liberal media, so it is both sides). Of course, there are people that think debt is fictitious as far as governments are concerned because they can just print whatever money they need, but doing so devalues the dollar and causes inflation. Anyone that seriously thinks that is a solution should revisit Germany from the end of the Great War (World War 1) to 1923 when the economy completely collapsed under hyperinflation and drew radicals like Hitler into power.
Most games from that era actually look quite similar to D&D, and in some ways V&V was no exception. For instance, I believe normal stats were 3-18 (not that they couldn't be boosted or reduced - I remember insect powers reduced my character's intelligence to zero, but then I got power armor with intelligence 22...). Also there could be a massive disparate power balance - I think I had something like 11 powers when all was said and done, but two other heroes had only two. The GM went out of his way to pummel my character because he was so massively imbalanced when compared to the others (I could fly, had power armor with a force field and weapons, controlled the elements, could change solids to liquids, had insect powers, could shoot energy bolts, and had absorption as I recall - another char could basically run fast and shoot a gun and would be killed with 1/50 of the damage just my power armor's shield could take).
If you compare basic things like character stats and names of those stats for most late 1970s to early 1980s games, they are nearly identical, and usually those stats don't really mean much. Ars Magica was the first RPG I remember that really strayed from the familiar tropes, with stats from -7 to 7 (I believe) and an intentional imbalance of power (mages just are better in that game), and stats that actually directly influenced rolls, but several others did about the same time with different schemes (e.g. Cyberpunk 2020). In older games stats like strength influenced rolls like D&D's "bend bars and lift gates," but you never made direct stat checks and you had to role-play to those stats (so if your int was 3, you needed to act like you had an int of 3 - we had one guy that the GM forced to roll a D30 [yes, a D30] and get a 1 to volunteer a smart idea).
Technically you don't own a copy of the copyrighted material - the publisher owns all of the copyrighted material. You own the physical media it is published on and (usually) a perpetual license to use it, so by that definition you are stealing because you are taking a license and you didn't pay for it
In the US you technically can't even show that licensed media to anyone without having them also pay for a license, which is why DVD and Blu-ray movies often say something about "for home use only" (fair use allows you to show it to your family and friends if they are there, but it is ambiguous about when that becomes a public display).
Don't expect to be doing a lot of coding AI in an intro course. If they're anything like my AI classes, they are 9 parts conceptual, 1 part pseudo-code. Maybe you'll get to write a bit of Lisp in the meantime (AI people think Lisp is the language of the gods, and trying to change that is like prying CoBOL from bankers or FORTRAN from Mech-E people).
Actually the text doesn't literally translate well (literally "hear nothing, work nothing, only simple"), but the funny thing is (unless I'm missing an idiom, which is possible) it seems to mean the opposite of that phrase - I translate it as more "hear nothing and do nothing makes you a simpleton."
The differences between iOS and MacOS X are at a higher level than the differences between Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7. Windows phone is based on the WindowsCE kernel, which is a developed from scratch kernel, not derived from NT like the current Windows 7 kernel. iOS and MacOS X, on the other hand, both run the same Darwin kernel and some of the same core components. So the main issue with merging the OSes is which pieces that sit on top of the kernel should be kept and which should be ditched. For instance, should they keep the full version of OpenGL with 25+ years of legacy or go with OpenGL 2.0 ES, which is used in WebGL? My guess would be Apple would go with the latter, mainly because they don't have CAD companies that rely on the legacy fixed function pipeline breathing down their necks.
Hmm... it almost is...
Randi = Germanic (derived from Scandinavian) feminine name, meaning Counsel or Beautiful
Zuckerburg = German, literally "sugar castle"
So basically "beautiful sugar castle" - for a better porn star name you need a slight change - Randi Zuckerbergs (beautiful sugar mountains).
GPL3 is a (commercial) plague - anything that uses any GPL3 library MUST comply by GPL3 and any license that is not GPL3 becomes GPL3, so Apple had to abandon SAMBA - if they integrate a SAMBA interfacing gui into their OS (which they did under GPL2), they immediately are required to release the entire OS under the GPL.
IMO, GPL3 is an extension of a religious war between Richard M Stallman (RMS) and the commercial world. RMS believes all software should be free and is willing to force his belief by any means necessary, and others like me think that is absurd and would be a giant leap backwards toward 1970. Imagine having to buy all games on hard media today with built in DRM (so the software developers get paid) - it is inane in the world of Steam and digital downloads, but that is exactly what RMS is demanding (or we can just charge $50000 for each console or PC - imagine the sticker shock there!). If I were, say, Apple and had such a requirement, I would never release software upgrades without forcing the user to buy new hardware - again, just silly.
OTOH, I can understand RMS's love of hacker culture and available source - View Source is an amazing way to learn html, and probably was the single biggest driver of early web development, and may be the primary reason why html destroyed similar but competing technologies like gopher. As someone that created content for both gopher and the web early on and mocked early html (which lacked the graphical browser gopher had - it was a text only interface in 1990 and had very limited capability), I sure picked the wrong technology to bet on. A couple of years later I saw World Wide Web on the NeXT boxes and was blown away, but I really didn't start making my own pages until Mosiac the next year (the school had limited availability of the NeXT boxes and I had no access whatsoever aside from through friends), and by the Netscape beta I had completely fallen in love with html (which had a similar but simpler syntax than gopher, since it was largely borrowed from gopher).
I feel there is space for both free software and commercial software and I can understand why there is a GPL3, but I have a hard time validating using it because of its invasive license. It is less like "free as in speech" and more like "free as in herpes viral infection" - you can give it to everyone and you can't get rid of it.
I use both VirtualBox and VMWare daily (but not mac VMWare, and therefore not Fusion) and both tend to have their pluses and minuses in the Windows and Linux world (the two server OS's my current project supports). I can see VMWare being better on mac though - VirtualBox's mac support is relatively new and VMWare has been in that space for a while, so I'm sure the interface and integration are much more refined. On that note, I have a mac loving friend that swears on Parallels and hates VMWare Fusion with a passion, but I have no idea why other than I think Parallels has been in the mac space longer than VMWare (with that guy everything is a holy relic though - from his macbook air to his iPad 2 to his Parallels for those "awful times I need to run Windows," so I take a lot of it with a grain of salt).
lol - Eliza is exactly what I thought about when I saw this. ...
"Yes"
Eliza: "Why so assertive all of a sudden?"
"You're supposed to say 'and do you take this man as your lawfully wedded husband?'"
Eliza: "Why do you think I should say that"
"Because it is in the goddamned script!"
Eliza: Please don't swear.
Actually, if he didn't have legal permission to release it as GPL, the company could sue anyone using the GPL version for using stolen property, much as Microsoft has threatened to do numerous times to Linux users for various pieces of unproven "stolen" code.
My guess is he wrote this in his spare time (i.e. evenings and weekends), though, and in that case you've still got some ambiguity and it depends heavily on the contract signed when hired. Mine says the company basically owns anything I write at any time while employed if there is a business use for it, so they would have every right to take such a framework and redistribute it as a proprietary work if they so desire. My OSS projects have largely been graphics and game technology, and there is little business value there for my company - plus most are BSD, which allows for anyone to do that anyway (making toolkits is a hobby for me, and I actually want other people to use it for profit - hopefully they'll make something cool with it).
I think my SA is the BOFH... a hug may get me killed... or committed. I'll stick to the Code Hack zone, where it is safe I think.
Speaking of, so far most of the Republican candidates are far right Tea Party nut jobs, which is not exactly how you woo the moderates. I'm definitely voting in the primaries this year (thankfully I live in a state that doesn't force primary voters to be party affiliated). I'll also toss a vote against Obama in the Dem primaries, though I've never seen an incumbent ousted (I tried with Bush, too - I'm not a big fan of leaders of Republics that treat them like dictatorships).
Note to parent - you mean "whole" not hole, and weak not "week" - if you don't want to sound weak minded you should use the correct word and not the homophone (word that sounds the same but is spelt [and yes, Firefox spellchecker, spelt is a legal alternative to spelled in English] differently).
The grandparent was referring to Somalia being in what we in the US consider a state of anarchy, but in fact most of the country has fallen under traditional tribal leadership and obeys tribal law for their various tribes and the central government has dissolved. No tribal leader has the influence or power to take control of the central government, so there is no central government, which has led to some areas being in a state of lawlessness. In some ways that is not necessarily a bad thing, because depending on who is in power, it could be a very oppressive dictatorship (think Taliban).
As for the 10th amendment, it is and pretty much always has been filigree with little substance - States are considered subordinate to federal law in all cases, which is understandable in some ways - for example, the South could potentially still have slavery if it weren't for the government stepping in. Before you argue that slaves are human and should therefore have rights under the constitution, remember that up until the end of the civil war slaves were considered more like an animal than a human (by the South).
Speaking of school shootings, if you read the US Secret Service report put together after Columbine, the #1 and #2 factors for attacks like this are VIOLENT BOOKS (27%) and VIOLENT MOVIES (24%) with video games third (12%).
And calling himself a "conservative Christian" is a crock - he can say he is Jesus for all I care, I'd like to see him justify "Thou Shall not Kill" and "Thou Shall not Steal" in front of God. Of course, in the Bible God is a bit of a hypocrite, smiting all the firstborn in Egypt, not to mention his murderous rampages elsewhere in the Bible (mostly Old Testament, but Revelation gets in a couple shots, too - but I guess if you are the creator, it is ok to kill - it is only bad if you're a minion).
Yeah - I've seen apps like that - I even had one that wanted to send a "legitimate" text for activation, but only would only text from my phone, which was problematic for me because I have normal texting turned off because it is too expensive (I can send/receive texts on my phone, just through a different number using the Internet - the main problem is I need to know if the number has been ported when sending, and people need to know to use my alternate number when texting me), so I just deleted it. Some other apps I've rejected outright, like why does a music player need access to my contacts list? I even found a guitar tuner that pretty much wanted full phone access (nuh uh... noob developer maybe?). If I ever created an android app, I'd very specifically say why the app needs special access to something like contacts (and even if it does, I may outright reject it anyway).
My RDR is still unfinished. Fun game, but much like most Bethesda games I never finished (Daggerfall, Battlespire [that one was mainly due to bugs], Morrowind, Fallout 3, Fallout 3 New Vegas, but not Oblivion - that one I finished because max stealth made it trivial), I tend to want to do everything in the open world rather than focusing on the core quests and eventually just get bored of the "fetch this" or "fetch that" quests and quit playing. I barely managed to get through 1/2 of Grand Theft Auto 3, as well (the whole gangsta thing isn't for me).
But even some games I love that weren't that long, like Uncharted I never finished - the ghoul thing near the end and respawns that required me to do it over and over again when I struggled with the controller doing what I wanted it to do made me quit it in frustration. I started Uncharted 2, but got sucked into RDR (a gift) and haven't gone back to playing it.
On the other hand, I have thousands of hours invested in some games, some of which I no longer play, like the early Ultimas (1-4 - we customized them) Civilization (1,2,3,4), Medieval: Total War (1 - only 50 or so in 2), Unreal Tournament 2004, Diablo and Diablo 2, Master of Orion 2, and Guild Wars. I have hundreds of hours invested in others like Starcraft, Battlefield 2, Wizardry 1 & 2, Fallout 2, Rome: Total War, Empire: Total War, and Mass Effect 1 & 2. Mass Effect 2 is a good example of a relatively short game that I've replayed several times. Fallout 2 was also fairly short - in fact, it can be won in about an hour using some very specific tactics, but there were so many variables that replay was fun (playing it through with a 1 intelligence and 8 luck [boosted to 10 quickly] had hilarious dialog and luck gave me all the special encounters) and I probably replayed it 15-17 times over 10 years.
Some I wish I could return - I paid $50 for Master of Orion 3 and played it all of maybe 2 hours. I paid $12 for Midnight Nowhere and it wasn't worth that (I have never disliked a main character as much as that one) - again, 2 hours if that. Some like Myst I found fun, but really, the game took only about 8 hours to play for $40 and I could play Space Harrier, Gauntlet, or other quarter suckers for less than $5/hour in an arcade. Then there was Final Fantasy, which claimed hundreds of hours but my college roommate and I finished it in a single sitting (~16 hours), tag teaming between classes - the biggest plus there was it was borrowed and free (and the guy we borrowed it from played it for months).
I read about this yesterday, and the article says it landed on the roof of a building (it was the most read article on CNN for a while). Probably either solid stone or pebbles for a Minnesota two story*. He also doesn't know when it fell out during his skydive, but he landed 1/2 mile away from the phone, so it probably was a pretty good drop.
* - I have a bit of personal experience on roofs in Minnesota while I was in college at both UMD and the U of M for some reason - the roof of the U of M Science and Engineering building, the roof of Game Informer, several apartment complexes (including two at UMD - Grigg's hall and another building - the one next to the science building, but I never had classes there - astronomy I think), and a few others.
as trolling as that was, it does seem to have a bit of truth - Microsoft has kicked Silverlight to the curb by targeting it pretty much only for mobile and news from inside Microsoft seems to indicate they are ditching .NET for html 5. Knowing Microsoft, however, and seeing their open attack on the security of WebGL, I expect them to port over their Silverlight Direct 3D code and use that instead of using WebGL because a browser without proprietary features would be very un-Microsofty.
The thing that isn't often mentioned, however, is that Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight being compiled into html/javascript at their developer conference (or so I have heard) - that would be nice, and very un-Microsoft of them - write in Silverlight/.NET and run on html 5 browsers. Still, I bet proprietary tech gets in there as I mentioned above, and if so, Miguel's work will still be relevant.
The nVidia vs AMD/ATI open source driver issue is all because hardware manufacturers pay for the patents in OpenGL. If you consider the driver part of the patent licensing, as nVidia does, there is no way they can open source the driver. If you consider the driver and hardware separate, as ATI does, you can open source the driver, with some caveats - namely it can't be called an OpenGL driver (it is OpenGL compatible). WINE operates similarly as a Windows compatible API.
Personally I've found nVidia's extension support has traditionally been much better than ATIs on consumer hardware, though ATI promised changes to that a couple of years ago (my newest graphics card is 2 years old and nVidia, so I haven't checked it).
LTE (Long Term Evolution) is technically from the 3GPP (3G Partnership Project), so even the creators consider it 3G, but some marketers caught on that LTE was going to be one of the technologies for 4G networks and so started branding their phones 4G despite not meeting the other requirements for 4G (bandwidth, signal strength, etc). To separate from the 3G and 4G versions of LTE (which was probably a name chosen intentionally to bridge generations in the first place), they started dubbing 4G as LTE Advanced, and that is supposed to meet the 4G requirements, but that is in the early stages of rollout and no iPhones exist that support it (some Verizon phones exist - the Droid Charge and HTC Thunderbolt that I know of, but I don't recall hearing of anyone else with 4G phones yet - certainly not Apple).