One example of this is building units. In particular, you should be able to build multiple unit production buildings, issuing build requests and they are load-balanced between the two, i.e. if I want two marines, and I have two barracks, I should be able to select both barracks, and ask for two marines. Both barracks would build one simultaneously.
Slight flaw there. Lets assume you have 2 barracks, one on one side of the map, and one on another. Now, you have a Zerg swarm inbound on one of them, so you queue up 20 marines to help fend off the attack. The problem with your system is that now you have 10 marines at each base, when what you really wanted was 10 marines at one base. What would be nice, is if you could select multiple buildings of the same type and have it load balance between them, that way you could gain the load balancing when you have several of the same type in one base, but still have the granularity to produce units exactly where you want them.
Last I heard the Zune didn't use PFS, they have some new DRM that MS made just for the Zune. I assume from this statement your talking about the new line of Zune players that MS is getting ready to send down the bowl?
This is way outside my field, but I can give it a shot. From what I understand spin isn't a question of energy state, rather it's a property of electrons, like magnetism is for some metals (this is probably a terribly innacurate comparison, so any physicists out there cut me some slack). An electron can either have up spin or down spin, so you have the capability to represent a bit with the spin state of a electron. Now, what makes spintronics looks so good is two properties. One, because you aren't shoving electrons around inside conductors (or through non-conductors) you don't have to worry about all that nasty waste heat, and second spin state propagates through materials at high speeds (I don't remember quite what, and it's been a while since I've seen the article on it, but I seem to remember it being better than normal electron propagation speeds, although that might only have been in superconductors).
Now, if you say changed Ford Prefect's name to "Ford Escort," you'd be violating the copyright. You have created a derivitive work, and that is explicitly forbidden under copyright law.
Actually you can do anything you want all the way up to ripping out every other page and your still perfectly fine. Where the line is drawn is if you then subsequently attempt to resell the work either as the original, or as a new work of your own. Copyright does not say anything at all about what I can do to a work (except for visual arts which prevent me from altering them and then saying their the original in such a way as to damage the reputation of the author), it only restricts how the work can be redistributed.
You want a seer? Try Jules Verne. Now that guy was pretty damn amazing. Also Robert A. Heinlein. I still can't believe how accurate some of his stuff was considering a lot of it was written around the 1950s and 60s.
For typing up an inter-office memo in Word, most likely. But I'm a programmer, and I can barely read out loud some perfectly fine code, I can't imagine trying to enter it all with voice recognition, no matter how good it gets.
It makes perfect sense to stop those who spend years studying law from actually making laws.
The problem is you have a conflict of interest. The lawyers make their money by exploiting loopholes in the legal system, so it's in their best interest to keep those loopholes in place. You don't have to be a lawyer to study law, but people seem to assume that politicians MUST be lawyers because they know the law. It's the same principle as banning people on a sports team from placing bets on their games, it's a conflict of interest.
Without lawyers I am quite certain the world be a better place.
(Before anyone starts, yes I know there are good decent lawyers who do their jobs really well who practice criminal law, not this corporate bullshit)
This is semi-offtopic at this point, but here's a good start, ban lawyers from holding political office. 90% of the problems we have with lawyers stem from the fact that almost all politicians started as lawyers, and so it's impossible to pass any laws that have a negative impact on the income of lawyers, and laws pass all the time that improve the income of lawyers.
Is it just an urban legend that they were too cheap to buy a pair of binoculars?
Yes, it's an Urban Legend. They had binoculars and they afforded them an excellent view of fog. Of course, knowing they were going into water that had icebergs floating in it, they probably would have been smart to drastically cut their speed, or perhaps plot a coarse around the fog bank, but then again, they believed the marketing kool-aid. In other news Vista is the most successful OS ever created.
In other news, a recent study shows that using modern materials as well as safety and engineering best practices might have prevented the Titanic disaster.
Seriously, it's been said many times on here already, but, how is this news?
if you simply weight "I don't like this user" significantly higher than "I like them", then even a massive coordinated attack by the fucktards to "like" people won't work.
However, a massive coordinated attack by the fucktards to "hate" people would work quite effectivly. Just drive the noise ratio high enough and the signal is lost. I do like the idea to some extent, but I think voting on someones play style or such would provide better results than a simple like/hate thing. One thing I wish you could do is flag loot ninjas. Get enough flags and you get some sort of mark on your character and maybe get banned from things like the LFG/LFM tools.
Ignores should be account-based, rather than character-based.
On one of the servers I play (Deathwing) on, there's a player (girlygirl) that is famous for being on basically the entire servers ignore list as he (and despite the name, it is a he) tends to spam the trade channel with mindless dribble. He apparently discovered another flaw with the ignore system because he deleted his character and remade it with the same exact name, thereby getting himself removed from everyones ban list.
As to your second argument, good idea, except for the slight problem of the pre-paid game time cards. At that point all that would happen is that all the gold farmers would go out and stock up on game cards and just cycle one in everytime they got an account ban. Of course, this might have an interesting side effect of drying up the game card market in China.
1) Idiot A mouths off to Idiot B on-line
2) Idiot B looks up the real name and address of Idiot A.
3) Idiot B drives to Idiot A's house and shoots him. 4) Jack Thompson threatens to ban all video games
5) Idiot C drives to Thompsons house and shoots him.
6) ???
7) Profit!
And no, before someone says it I do not condone the shooting of Jack Thompson...
Shooting would be too good for him. He should be disbarred and die a lonely broken man, although considering his mental state (I don't believe for a minute he's actually sane, whether he passed a psych test or not) he'd probably just retreat into Thompson land and sit gibbering in a corner... actually, that might explain a few things.
I more or less agree with you, but just want to point out something. I don't think any word by itself is bad, nor can it ever be bad. A word is just a word, it's a building block to express a concept. What could be seen as bad is the underlying concept and as such the way certain words are used in sentences, or how certain sentences are used could be construed as bad. For instance, I could say "When people resort to personal attacks against someone in an attempt to defend their position, that's a really shitty thing to do" and that would be an acceptable thing because it conveys accurately my feeling on a topic in a effective manner, and the concept is not objectionable. If on the other hand I said "All these people are full of shit" that would be unacceptable because the concept is without merit. It wasn't he use of the word shit that made either one acceptable or not, but the intent behind it. This is the concept everyone seems to be so completely incapable of grasping. Saying fuck after something bad has happened and your upset is perfectly fine, you're expressing your opinion, and if others don't care to listen to your opinion then they can ignore you, or avoid you. Putting an outright ban on the use of the word fuck however is totally missing the point.
Second, what are the benefits (outside of copying games illegitimately and cheating) would you have by modding your XBox 360?
As someone else has already pointed out, it's not a moded 360, it's a moded DVD player. I don't know what it's being used for as far as games are concerned, but if I recall correctly isn't it a hack HD-DVD drive for the 360 that one of the groups has been using to retrieve HD-DVD keys? Perhaps this is a early strike by the MPAA through Microsoft to try to curb the widespread adoption of this attack?
Makes a bit of sense in the context of crap-tastic laws like Sarbanes-Oxley. Instead of putting real auditing in place, just mandate that this feature always be turned on, and your ass is covered without actually having to do anything, or providing a genuine audit trail.
Right now, IMHO, Ballmer need to be fired, and whoever takes his place need to sit down, figure out what all MSFT is spending cash on, and jettison all departments that aren't making money. Microsoft has been a monopoly for so long they don't know what they do anymore. The whole business is built around the concept that they own the desktop and can just muscle anyone else out of the scene, rather than spending money to develop superior products. The problem is, some competing products have managed to squeeze in and provide people with some actual choices, and people have started to ask some questions about what exactly it is Microsoft is providing. Now, if Microsoft can recover from this or not is hard to say, they could be on a downhill trend (although it's a very big hill, so they won't hit bottom for a VERY long time), or they may turn around and actually provide some compelling reasons to stay with their software. Of course, in order for the later to become a possibility they will need to sink some more capital into R&D, but considering the amount of capital they have, that shouldn't be a problem. So, no, they should not jettison all departments operating at a loss, they should however ask themselves what the goal of those departments is going to be.
The money goes to the ASSU (student body), not the University.
Actually, it says that the first years income would go to the ASSU, and that was because all the departments voted it that way. Even then, I don't draw a distinction between a organization like ASSU and the School proper; Either way the money is being spent on the school infrastructure. It's simple, if the school uses student money to repair a facility rather than diverting other funds, it still results in a net increase in the schools funds. You can be sure that the money that had been earmarked for whatever it was the fees pay for will be redirected back to some other pet project of one department or another.
I also prefer the Playsforsure thing and while I expect Apple to go with that eventually, it's not here yet.
I would be unbelievably suprised if Apple went with Playsforsure, especially as even Microsoft has dropped it. I don't think Apple is going to make any changes in the playback capability of the iPod, except maybe to add support for ogg (well, I can dream can't I?), particularly as they've been moving to try to drop DRM entirely (at least for audio playback).
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but how do you eliminate operating loss by lowering prices?
Well, seeing as the PS3 is just sitting on retail shelves at its current price they're not really making any money off of it. So, if you lower the price, and sales pick up, your making more money. A little income, is better than no income. Besides, the units have already been manufactured, and prices have also come down on the components I'm sure. They really have no choice but to lower the price, if they don't they'll never catch up with the others, and they might as well just write the PS3 off as a total loss.
In the smart phone market the killer app is MAKING PHONE CALLS! Everything else is just fluff.
Not just that, but the interface you can get on a phone is vastly different than the interface on various other devices. This is something that Microsoft has had trouble grasping. Why did the iPod do so well? It had a great interface that allowed you to do what you wanted easily. By the same token, I imagine Apple will do the smart thing, and put the best interface they can on the iPhone, and pick the features based on which ones can be fitted to match the interface. Microsoft on the other hand, will probably do something unbelievably stupid like try to put Word and Excel on their phone. I'm sorry, but there is no way in hell you're going to be able to implement a decent version of Word on a phone. You might be able to make a decent read only version, so you could look over some documents on the road, but trying to type anything would be a nightmare, and on top of that it would look weird when you sized it back up to a normal display.
Right now I've got a Razer, and I picked it for one reason, which is that it's the smallest phone you can get. It has all kinds of features, and among them, the only one I've used more than once or twice, aside from making calls, is the camera. I don't even use the text messaging (always hated that, just pick up the phone and call the person, it takes less time) and I sure don't use any applications or media playback.
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Slight flaw there. Lets assume you have 2 barracks, one on one side of the map, and one on another. Now, you have a Zerg swarm inbound on one of them, so you queue up 20 marines to help fend off the attack. The problem with your system is that now you have 10 marines at each base, when what you really wanted was 10 marines at one base. What would be nice, is if you could select multiple buildings of the same type and have it load balance between them, that way you could gain the load balancing when you have several of the same type in one base, but still have the granularity to produce units exactly where you want them.
Last I heard the Zune didn't use PFS, they have some new DRM that MS made just for the Zune. I assume from this statement your talking about the new line of Zune players that MS is getting ready to send down the bowl?
This is way outside my field, but I can give it a shot. From what I understand spin isn't a question of energy state, rather it's a property of electrons, like magnetism is for some metals (this is probably a terribly innacurate comparison, so any physicists out there cut me some slack). An electron can either have up spin or down spin, so you have the capability to represent a bit with the spin state of a electron. Now, what makes spintronics looks so good is two properties. One, because you aren't shoving electrons around inside conductors (or through non-conductors) you don't have to worry about all that nasty waste heat, and second spin state propagates through materials at high speeds (I don't remember quite what, and it's been a while since I've seen the article on it, but I seem to remember it being better than normal electron propagation speeds, although that might only have been in superconductors).
Actually you can do anything you want all the way up to ripping out every other page and your still perfectly fine. Where the line is drawn is if you then subsequently attempt to resell the work either as the original, or as a new work of your own. Copyright does not say anything at all about what I can do to a work (except for visual arts which prevent me from altering them and then saying their the original in such a way as to damage the reputation of the author), it only restricts how the work can be redistributed.
For typing up an inter-office memo in Word, most likely. But I'm a programmer, and I can barely read out loud some perfectly fine code, I can't imagine trying to enter it all with voice recognition, no matter how good it gets.
The problem is you have a conflict of interest. The lawyers make their money by exploiting loopholes in the legal system, so it's in their best interest to keep those loopholes in place. You don't have to be a lawyer to study law, but people seem to assume that politicians MUST be lawyers because they know the law. It's the same principle as banning people on a sports team from placing bets on their games, it's a conflict of interest.
This is semi-offtopic at this point, but here's a good start, ban lawyers from holding political office. 90% of the problems we have with lawyers stem from the fact that almost all politicians started as lawyers, and so it's impossible to pass any laws that have a negative impact on the income of lawyers, and laws pass all the time that improve the income of lawyers.
Yes, it's an Urban Legend. They had binoculars and they afforded them an excellent view of fog. Of course, knowing they were going into water that had icebergs floating in it, they probably would have been smart to drastically cut their speed, or perhaps plot a coarse around the fog bank, but then again, they believed the marketing kool-aid. In other news Vista is the most successful OS ever created.
The same could also be said for games in general.
In other news, a recent study shows that using modern materials as well as safety and engineering best practices might have prevented the Titanic disaster.
Seriously, it's been said many times on here already, but, how is this news?
However, a massive coordinated attack by the fucktards to "hate" people would work quite effectivly. Just drive the noise ratio high enough and the signal is lost. I do like the idea to some extent, but I think voting on someones play style or such would provide better results than a simple like/hate thing. One thing I wish you could do is flag loot ninjas. Get enough flags and you get some sort of mark on your character and maybe get banned from things like the LFG/LFM tools.
On one of the servers I play (Deathwing) on, there's a player (girlygirl) that is famous for being on basically the entire servers ignore list as he (and despite the name, it is a he) tends to spam the trade channel with mindless dribble. He apparently discovered another flaw with the ignore system because he deleted his character and remade it with the same exact name, thereby getting himself removed from everyones ban list.
As to your second argument, good idea, except for the slight problem of the pre-paid game time cards. At that point all that would happen is that all the gold farmers would go out and stock up on game cards and just cycle one in everytime they got an account ban. Of course, this might have an interesting side effect of drying up the game card market in China.
I know you did not just compare Thompson to one of the great old ones.
2) Idiot B looks up the real name and address of Idiot A.
3) Idiot B drives to Idiot A's house and shoots him.
4) Jack Thompson threatens to ban all video games
5) Idiot C drives to Thompsons house and shoots him.
6) ???
7) Profit!
And no, before someone says it I do not condone the shooting of Jack Thompson...
Shooting would be too good for him. He should be disbarred and die a lonely broken man, although considering his mental state (I don't believe for a minute he's actually sane, whether he passed a psych test or not) he'd probably just retreat into Thompson land and sit gibbering in a corner... actually, that might explain a few things.
I more or less agree with you, but just want to point out something. I don't think any word by itself is bad, nor can it ever be bad. A word is just a word, it's a building block to express a concept. What could be seen as bad is the underlying concept and as such the way certain words are used in sentences, or how certain sentences are used could be construed as bad. For instance, I could say "When people resort to personal attacks against someone in an attempt to defend their position, that's a really shitty thing to do" and that would be an acceptable thing because it conveys accurately my feeling on a topic in a effective manner, and the concept is not objectionable. If on the other hand I said "All these people are full of shit" that would be unacceptable because the concept is without merit. It wasn't he use of the word shit that made either one acceptable or not, but the intent behind it. This is the concept everyone seems to be so completely incapable of grasping. Saying fuck after something bad has happened and your upset is perfectly fine, you're expressing your opinion, and if others don't care to listen to your opinion then they can ignore you, or avoid you. Putting an outright ban on the use of the word fuck however is totally missing the point.
*cough*guitar hero*cough*
Not that I disagree with your general sentiment, but there are exceptions.
As someone else has already pointed out, it's not a moded 360, it's a moded DVD player. I don't know what it's being used for as far as games are concerned, but if I recall correctly isn't it a hack HD-DVD drive for the 360 that one of the groups has been using to retrieve HD-DVD keys? Perhaps this is a early strike by the MPAA through Microsoft to try to curb the widespread adoption of this attack?
Makes a bit of sense in the context of crap-tastic laws like Sarbanes-Oxley. Instead of putting real auditing in place, just mandate that this feature always be turned on, and your ass is covered without actually having to do anything, or providing a genuine audit trail.
Actually, it says that the first years income would go to the ASSU, and that was because all the departments voted it that way. Even then, I don't draw a distinction between a organization like ASSU and the School proper; Either way the money is being spent on the school infrastructure. It's simple, if the school uses student money to repair a facility rather than diverting other funds, it still results in a net increase in the schools funds. You can be sure that the money that had been earmarked for whatever it was the fees pay for will be redirected back to some other pet project of one department or another.
I would be unbelievably suprised if Apple went with Playsforsure, especially as even Microsoft has dropped it. I don't think Apple is going to make any changes in the playback capability of the iPod, except maybe to add support for ogg (well, I can dream can't I?), particularly as they've been moving to try to drop DRM entirely (at least for audio playback).
Stanford saw the *AA making sweet money on trumped up charges and decided to cut themselves in for a share.
Well, seeing as the PS3 is just sitting on retail shelves at its current price they're not really making any money off of it. So, if you lower the price, and sales pick up, your making more money. A little income, is better than no income. Besides, the units have already been manufactured, and prices have also come down on the components I'm sure. They really have no choice but to lower the price, if they don't they'll never catch up with the others, and they might as well just write the PS3 off as a total loss.
Not just that, but the interface you can get on a phone is vastly different than the interface on various other devices. This is something that Microsoft has had trouble grasping. Why did the iPod do so well? It had a great interface that allowed you to do what you wanted easily. By the same token, I imagine Apple will do the smart thing, and put the best interface they can on the iPhone, and pick the features based on which ones can be fitted to match the interface. Microsoft on the other hand, will probably do something unbelievably stupid like try to put Word and Excel on their phone. I'm sorry, but there is no way in hell you're going to be able to implement a decent version of Word on a phone. You might be able to make a decent read only version, so you could look over some documents on the road, but trying to type anything would be a nightmare, and on top of that it would look weird when you sized it back up to a normal display.
Right now I've got a Razer, and I picked it for one reason, which is that it's the smallest phone you can get. It has all kinds of features, and among them, the only one I've used more than once or twice, aside from making calls, is the camera. I don't even use the text messaging (always hated that, just pick up the phone and call the person, it takes less time) and I sure don't use any applications or media playback.