Well, "us" in Western Europe value freedom of speech as well (in fact, one could argue we value freedom more in general, as in the past decade we don't seem to be passing many laws to limit the freedom of our citizens, but that's another discussion), yet there is no creationism museum over here... nor are there any schools where darwinism is not taught or has to compete with creationism...
Ah, so that banning head scarves was some other "Western Europe". Now I understand. Its the ol' "We value freedoms and long as you accept only our values." In this latest round all of the Western Democracies have fallen short of freedom.
What!?! Our culture is superficial - surely you jest. Why just the other day I remember hearing on the the 30 second news between the 3 minute commercial about some actor getting out of his BMW to admonish Wal-Mart over their pay scale. Shocking.
Google/YouTube did not upload copyrighted material to itself and it is not responsible for policing itself. If a copyright holder finds material they report it and it gets pulled.
That is like saying, "I didn't rob that bank I only drove the car. I also did not see the bank being robbed since I was parked in the street. I did not see they were armed because I had my eyes clothes, neither did I hear the gunshots because I had my fingers in my ears and was singing 'La La La'."
That is why Kinkos, PIP, and the others all have those signs about copying copy-writed materials using their machines - they can be held accountable if a reasonable person would have known what was happening.
Personally I predict GTube will succeed because they have methods in place to remove copy-writed material. Thus a copy-write holder simply has to show that they do indeed own the copy-write and it will get removed. I imagine they might be able to claim a "common carrier" type of protection. Using the various P2P lawsuits as a guide it will turn on if the majority of the site contains violations of copywrite.
Ah yes, OilForFoodFacts.com - I am sure that there is a place to get the truth. Nope, no spin-doctoring there at all. I would expect that to be at the site OilForFoodLies.com
Until they reach the age of 18, (or whatever age the courts decide is adult,) their actions should be as good as your actions.
Wow, you must be the bright one of the litter. So, lets say a full capable child around 16 does something stupid. They are not held responsible as an individual - instead their actions are held to their parents? So that four-year old that finds a gun at someone's house then shoots somebody - that is just as if the parent found the gun and shot somebody? Do you have any gray matter working in that skull of yours - or is it just a place to store air?
The iTunes Music Store's business model is to pressure manufacturers to drastically cut production costs,...
Given the iTMS goal of selling iPods, the yes. Apple does that with iPods.... undercut prices offered by smaller businesses,...
iTMS does that directly, it is not a profit center itself as it is a marketing vehicle for iPod. Hence the 0.99 price, and low margins. Operating at or slightly over cost.
In other words is the Microsoft Business Model, the IBM model, the model of all companies that dominate any space. Wal-Mart and Target used to dominate the physical DVD sales space and drove down prices across the board - they thought that they dominated DVD sales. Well, now they are getting their turn in the pickle barrel as people are equating physical ownership with electronic ownership. Thus they will either have to adapt or adjust their model.
I am fine with iTMS driving down the price of physical DVDs as I was with the big boxes driving down the price of personal goods. I both suffer and benefit from it. It is just funny to watch these companies whining the same whine that the smaller stores whined when the big boxes first rose up.
The article in question is actually well-written (not saying much) compared to the summary that is little more crap that someone dropped on their keyboard.
Read the article and it is very much typical Gartner crap. In order to justify their own existence they have to come out with ideas writ large. Not just what everyone else is talking about, but the "next big thing." Otherwise few people would pay for their warmed over ideas. There really is nothing new about what they are saying and many companies have been doing this for years.
When Gartner actually manages a really new idea or spots a new tread - then that really will be something to behold.
That all depends on your POV. If you are a back-end guy - then data modelling is the most critical component. If you are a front-end guy then the GUI and Controllers are the most important. In a "classic" MVC stack the model is interchangeable as well - otherwise it is not really a "classic" MVC stack. Instead it is some MVC stack as seen from a data-guy.
Actually a better approach would be to completely lock down the access points that are sold. Then someone who wants to share can make the change to share. Those that simply want to plop down some wireless to connect their home laptop should have it easy. This makes this easy as a toaster for the technologically-challenged, but gives those that want to do something the ease to do it. What we currently have is crappy Windows-like security - what we want to get to is better BSD-style of security.
Traditionally, i'm against government stepping in. I'm a firm believer that the market should (and will) regulate itself, only requiring laws breaking monopolies on limited necessities. But with consumer's getting more stupidly passive, and companies more ingeniously aggressive, i'm left without a force to join, and the companies, who as a result of frequent changeover and short-termed decisions, never think of the customers as more than a quick way to make money, we need a government body stepping in.
The problem here is that there are no market forces in most places. If you want high-speed internet access you have maybe 1 DSL provider and 1 cable provider. If I want to start up my own high-speed service I cannot because I an not allowed to run my own wires because of a government created monopoly. That is why there is people trying all kinds of things like WAPs and Fixed Wireless.
By this logic, wouldn't firing *everyone* make you the most productive?
Every company has dead weight - larger companies have more dead weight. I would hazzard a guess that large companies actually have a higher percentage of dead weight because a non-productive person can hide easier within the system. In a smaller company the dead weight is more easily noticed.
The key is to identify the dead weight and jettison then every so often. Intel has such a back-log of getting rid of dead weight they need a major laxative to clear their tubes. The difficulty is to not lose the good with the bad (no baby, yes bathwater) - thus they need to watch out for teacher's pet syndrome (ass-kissing dead weight is kept).
Let's see, your advice is to NOT get into the position where you are drinking at bars and having sex with women. j-turkey is worried about "accidentally" killing a man with a single punch when shit goes down. Yeah, I think I'm gonna go hang out with j-turkey.
The one-punch thing happened while I was at Purdue. Coming out of a bar one guy thought another guy took off with his jacket. There was an altercation and accuser threw a punch and caught the other guy in the head. Burst some blood vessel and the guy just dropped dead.
I am still a bit off from that (my oldest is 5), but when I reached that age my deal was the following. I got my dad's car (my dad bought himself another car). I paid for all my gas, 1/2 of my insurance (assuming I kept a B average so the rates were lower), all of the normal service, 1/2 of major service that was not caused by my own mistakes (drop reverses ruining the trans = my fault = I paid in full).
However, in exchange for that my car was also my dad's emergency car and his need for it trumped my own. It was a pretty good deal overall. I did have the option of buying the car from him for the KBB value and paying everything 100% of the way - in which case my car would not be considered my dad's emergency vehicle. But the first option gave me a bit more spending cash and in 3 years with that car he needed less than a dozen times.
Then again I also can't believe you're starting to think Samsung is looking good. They've improved a lot, thanks to improvements in South Korea itself, but they're still kind of crap and have a long way to go. South Korea used to be one of the WORST countries in as far as quality manufacturing goes, but they've done a lot in the past 5 years or so to try and fix things.
See, I just do not understand that. I just got three boxes full of hundred dollar bills from Korea and the quality seems very good. I plan to order from the "House of Il" again; although frankly their website looks like crap.
Tivo won. echostar bought a judge who says, "don't worry about that pesky court loss, I say you can sell your DVRs"
Wow, you really do not know much about things do you. This is pretty standard practice. The judge agrees to take the case - they will typically stay any injunction until they have time to look over the case for any mistakes or issues they need to rule on that may have effected the outcome. This really is very common and has nothing to do with "buying" off someone.
I suggest that you take off the tin-foil hat very slowly as to not disrupt your delicate balance. Come. Join the rest of us in the real world.
These guys were giving demo games at Gen Con. It's the most realistic space combat game I've ever played. Full 3-dimensional movement, Newtonian physics and everything from laser fire to thrust has been accurately modeled. For example, when you fire a laser at a ship, you hit the area of the ship facing the laser.
Wow, that was pretty good of them. To have built multi-tonnage warships - invent powerful enough lasers to be used as weapons. Then blow the hell out of their new warships just to "accruately" model the damage. Newtonian physics? Seen it elsewhere in better form (Full Thrust). Area based damage? Again I have seen it better elsewhere (Bablyon 5 Wars).
That said, it is a fun game - mostly. IMO it does kill too many bodies of "fun" on the alter of "realism". But then there are plenty of quick and easy space battle games (Silent Death), so it is not too bad to have another chart-wars (SFB) game around the table.
My wife and I just came through an addictive run with Oblivion and we're both wondering: Among Gamers Who Know (that would be you folks), what are the options for one-on-one, Dungeons-and-Dragons-style role playing games?
We do that all the time at home, on the road, etc. It's story-telling with very occasional dice-slinging when we have the time, but its mostly story-telling. When we put the family on the road for a long trip the kids are in the back with a movie and we can sit up front passing the time telling stories. Since I run my own fantasy world, she just runs characters in that world, but that is not necessary as there are plenty of pre-packaged worlds out there.
If you want to sling dice together then you can pick some simple systems like Fudge (http://www.fudgerpg.com/) or Fuzion (http://www.thefuze.com/). Both are very simplistic rules and you can get both as free PDFs. BESM (Anime), Iron Claw (Anthro), Feng Shui (Hong Kong action) are all simple rules that are IMO flawed in some ways but still very enjoyable in their own right.
But really the best place to start is with story-telling - not the White Wolf story-telling system - but just telling a structured story back and forth to each other. One person plays a character and the other plays everyone else.
d20 is one of the worst systems ever developed. Rather than fix all of the inherent problems in D&D, d20 relies on most of them, and throws in some dirty hacks on top. The d20 and OGL licenses are both laughable from an "open source" standpoint. All the "games" built around d20 are really little more than desktop themes. Here is the prime example of WotC using their marketing clout to make a bad product the core of an industry. I still can't wait for d20 to die.
Obviously you have not played too many systems if you think that d20 is the worst systems [sic] ever developed. There have been plenty of systems that beat out d20 in the race for that crown. I do have some d20 stuff on my shelf - mostly that which I consider to be of useful quality (Green Ronin, White Wolf, Privateer Press, Bottled Imp, and a few others).
Obviously they made the point about Asimov's Three Laws without having actually read more beyond that he wrote down Three Laws of Robotics and that he used that in something called "books." Efforts like that are so sad and pathetic - like children playing the art of politics using West Wing as an example.
$5500 a month? For software to manage the garage? That's roberry, plain and simple. And not only that, but robbery of a public organization that is likely not too well funded. When it somes down to brass tacks, this $5500 fee was cooked up arbitrarily by the Robotic. That works out to $66,000 a year. They could pay their own devel to make software to keep that place running AND add new functionality as needed as long as the hardware specs are available (which you know they aren't). Considering that a standard parking lot to house as many cars would require more land and probably some staffing that get paid minimum wage, I don't think it's not cost effective to have in-house development in this case.
Actually that is not that bad at all - considering all of the costs involved in this type of application. These are not simple routines when you take into account that you are tracking re-occuring vehicles and the time they are typically added/removed so that you can least-time the largest number of vehicles. That is some major simulation time for least-time under varying changes (non-standard days, repairs, etc.).
I spent just over a year as a contractor on a team doing this sort of work for a parts warehouse in OH. They had this huge automated system of lifts and trucks that would move parts around as needs. As workers would add or remove parts they scanned in the bin they were going into or taken out from - bins could be mixed parts. In fact the stockers job was to make sure that the bins were as close to 1 bin = 1 job station as they could (but they could really put the parts anywhere they wanted).
The company that bought this thing was on a 5-year lease-to-buy for the software and control hardware. They elevators, automated carts, etc. they owned outright. Thus after 5 years the company had a single buyout cost in order to own the software outfight, but leaving the development company with a perputual licence to the code based upon the revision they bought (thus we could not go back and snag any changes they made after they bought it out - and vice versa) - it was essentially forked at that point.
It was an interesting system that actually (as a side effect) really closed down on employee theft, since the storage boxes were sealed until they were scanned by people putting in or taking out. They were also weighed before they were racked - since each rack could only hold so much. Tracking down missing parts was pretty easy since everything was logged as to who opened what boxes and the weight change. There were ways to get away with things, but it made theft a hassle and pin-pointed it to a small group of people.
The myusic industry's products' utility is _unreproducible_, legally. You can't emulate perfectly a song they're copyrighted, legally. That's a relatively big difference.
That is wrong. Sure, you can reproduce a car - but you cannot reproduce a Mustang. Sure, you cannot reproduce the exact music Warner has copyrighted (just like the Mustang), but you can produce your own R&B, Jazz, Pop, Rock, etc music. There is no real difference at all. In both cases you cannot reproduce the exact product, but you can reproduce the utility of that product.
A couple of friends of mine ran into a M60A2 tank with volkswagen beatle, and I can assure you that any car has plenty of crumple zone when it hits a tank weighing 60-70 tons! Actualy they were quite lucky and both was thrown through the winshield and woke up on top of the tank rather than under it like their car.
Did these "friends" of yours also happen to have a car full of explosives and yelling "God is Great" when they hit the tank.
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Ah, so that banning head scarves was some other "Western Europe". Now I understand. Its the ol' "We value freedoms and long as you accept only our values." In this latest round all of the Western Democracies have fallen short of freedom.
What!?! Our culture is superficial - surely you jest. Why just the other day I remember hearing on the the 30 second news between the 3 minute commercial about some actor getting out of his BMW to admonish Wal-Mart over their pay scale. Shocking.
That is like saying, "I didn't rob that bank I only drove the car. I also did not see the bank being robbed since I was parked in the street. I did not see they were armed because I had my eyes clothes, neither did I hear the gunshots because I had my fingers in my ears and was singing 'La La La'."
That is why Kinkos, PIP, and the others all have those signs about copying copy-writed materials using their machines - they can be held accountable if a reasonable person would have known what was happening.
Personally I predict GTube will succeed because they have methods in place to remove copy-writed material. Thus a copy-write holder simply has to show that they do indeed own the copy-write and it will get removed. I imagine they might be able to claim a "common carrier" type of protection. Using the various P2P lawsuits as a guide it will turn on if the majority of the site contains violations of copywrite.
Ah yes, OilForFoodFacts.com - I am sure that there is a place to get the truth. Nope, no spin-doctoring there at all. I would expect that to be at the site OilForFoodLies.com
We have a name for those girls - its whores.
Wow, you must be the bright one of the litter. So, lets say a full capable child around 16 does something stupid. They are not held responsible as an individual - instead their actions are held to their parents? So that four-year old that finds a gun at someone's house then shoots somebody - that is just as if the parent found the gun and shot somebody? Do you have any gray matter working in that skull of yours - or is it just a place to store air?
In other words is the Microsoft Business Model, the IBM model, the model of all companies that dominate any space. Wal-Mart and Target used to dominate the physical DVD sales space and drove down prices across the board - they thought that they dominated DVD sales. Well, now they are getting their turn in the pickle barrel as people are equating physical ownership with electronic ownership. Thus they will either have to adapt or adjust their model.
I am fine with iTMS driving down the price of physical DVDs as I was with the big boxes driving down the price of personal goods. I both suffer and benefit from it. It is just funny to watch these companies whining the same whine that the smaller stores whined when the big boxes first rose up.
The article in question is actually well-written (not saying much) compared to the summary that is little more crap that someone dropped on their keyboard.
Read the article and it is very much typical Gartner crap. In order to justify their own existence they have to come out with ideas writ large. Not just what everyone else is talking about, but the "next big thing." Otherwise few people would pay for their warmed over ideas. There really is nothing new about what they are saying and many companies have been doing this for years.
When Gartner actually manages a really new idea or spots a new tread - then that really will be something to behold.
That all depends on your POV. If you are a back-end guy - then data modelling is the most critical component. If you are a front-end guy then the GUI and Controllers are the most important. In a "classic" MVC stack the model is interchangeable as well - otherwise it is not really a "classic" MVC stack. Instead it is some MVC stack as seen from a data-guy.
Actually a better approach would be to completely lock down the access points that are sold. Then someone who wants to share can make the change to share. Those that simply want to plop down some wireless to connect their home laptop should have it easy. This makes this easy as a toaster for the technologically-challenged, but gives those that want to do something the ease to do it. What we currently have is crappy Windows-like security - what we want to get to is better BSD-style of security.
The problem here is that there are no market forces in most places. If you want high-speed internet access you have maybe 1 DSL provider and 1 cable provider. If I want to start up my own high-speed service I cannot because I an not allowed to run my own wires because of a government created monopoly. That is why there is people trying all kinds of things like WAPs and Fixed Wireless.
Market forces only work with an active market.
Every company has dead weight - larger companies have more dead weight. I would hazzard a guess that large companies actually have a higher percentage of dead weight because a non-productive person can hide easier within the system. In a smaller company the dead weight is more easily noticed.
The key is to identify the dead weight and jettison then every so often. Intel has such a back-log of getting rid of dead weight they need a major laxative to clear their tubes. The difficulty is to not lose the good with the bad (no baby, yes bathwater) - thus they need to watch out for teacher's pet syndrome (ass-kissing dead weight is kept).
The one-punch thing happened while I was at Purdue. Coming out of a bar one guy thought another guy took off with his jacket. There was an altercation and accuser threw a punch and caught the other guy in the head. Burst some blood vessel and the guy just dropped dead.
I am still a bit off from that (my oldest is 5), but when I reached that age my deal was the following. I got my dad's car (my dad bought himself another car). I paid for all my gas, 1/2 of my insurance (assuming I kept a B average so the rates were lower), all of the normal service, 1/2 of major service that was not caused by my own mistakes (drop reverses ruining the trans = my fault = I paid in full).
However, in exchange for that my car was also my dad's emergency car and his need for it trumped my own. It was a pretty good deal overall. I did have the option of buying the car from him for the KBB value and paying everything 100% of the way - in which case my car would not be considered my dad's emergency vehicle. But the first option gave me a bit more spending cash and in 3 years with that car he needed less than a dozen times.
See, I just do not understand that. I just got three boxes full of hundred dollar bills from Korea and the quality seems very good. I plan to order from the "House of Il" again; although frankly their website looks like crap.
Wow, you really do not know much about things do you. This is pretty standard practice. The judge agrees to take the case - they will typically stay any injunction until they have time to look over the case for any mistakes or issues they need to rule on that may have effected the outcome. This really is very common and has nothing to do with "buying" off someone.
I suggest that you take off the tin-foil hat very slowly as to not disrupt your delicate balance. Come. Join the rest of us in the real world.
Wow, that was pretty good of them. To have built multi-tonnage warships - invent powerful enough lasers to be used as weapons. Then blow the hell out of their new warships just to "accruately" model the damage. Newtonian physics? Seen it elsewhere in better form (Full Thrust). Area based damage? Again I have seen it better elsewhere (Bablyon 5 Wars).
That said, it is a fun game - mostly. IMO it does kill too many bodies of "fun" on the alter of "realism". But then there are plenty of quick and easy space battle games (Silent Death), so it is not too bad to have another chart-wars (SFB) game around the table.
We do that all the time at home, on the road, etc. It's story-telling with very occasional dice-slinging when we have the time, but its mostly story-telling. When we put the family on the road for a long trip the kids are in the back with a movie and we can sit up front passing the time telling stories. Since I run my own fantasy world, she just runs characters in that world, but that is not necessary as there are plenty of pre-packaged worlds out there.
If you want to sling dice together then you can pick some simple systems like Fudge (http://www.fudgerpg.com/) or Fuzion (http://www.thefuze.com/). Both are very simplistic rules and you can get both as free PDFs. BESM (Anime), Iron Claw (Anthro), Feng Shui (Hong Kong action) are all simple rules that are IMO flawed in some ways but still very enjoyable in their own right.
But really the best place to start is with story-telling - not the White Wolf story-telling system - but just telling a structured story back and forth to each other. One person plays a character and the other plays everyone else.
Obviously you have not played too many systems if you think that d20 is the worst systems [sic] ever developed. There have been plenty of systems that beat out d20 in the race for that crown. I do have some d20 stuff on my shelf - mostly that which I consider to be of useful quality (Green Ronin, White Wolf, Privateer Press, Bottled Imp, and a few others).
Obviously they made the point about Asimov's Three Laws without having actually read more beyond that he wrote down Three Laws of Robotics and that he used that in something called "books." Efforts like that are so sad and pathetic - like children playing the art of politics using West Wing as an example.
Actually that is not that bad at all - considering all of the costs involved in this type of application. These are not simple routines when you take into account that you are tracking re-occuring vehicles and the time they are typically added/removed so that you can least-time the largest number of vehicles. That is some major simulation time for least-time under varying changes (non-standard days, repairs, etc.).
I spent just over a year as a contractor on a team doing this sort of work for a parts warehouse in OH. They had this huge automated system of lifts and trucks that would move parts around as needs. As workers would add or remove parts they scanned in the bin they were going into or taken out from - bins could be mixed parts. In fact the stockers job was to make sure that the bins were as close to 1 bin = 1 job station as they could (but they could really put the parts anywhere they wanted).
The company that bought this thing was on a 5-year lease-to-buy for the software and control hardware. They elevators, automated carts, etc. they owned outright. Thus after 5 years the company had a single buyout cost in order to own the software outfight, but leaving the development company with a perputual licence to the code based upon the revision they bought (thus we could not go back and snag any changes they made after they bought it out - and vice versa) - it was essentially forked at that point.
It was an interesting system that actually (as a side effect) really closed down on employee theft, since the storage boxes were sealed until they were scanned by people putting in or taking out. They were also weighed before they were racked - since each rack could only hold so much. Tracking down missing parts was pretty easy since everything was logged as to who opened what boxes and the weight change. There were ways to get away with things, but it made theft a hassle and pin-pointed it to a small group of people.
That is wrong. Sure, you can reproduce a car - but you cannot reproduce a Mustang. Sure, you cannot reproduce the exact music Warner has copyrighted (just like the Mustang), but you can produce your own R&B, Jazz, Pop, Rock, etc music. There is no real difference at all. In both cases you cannot reproduce the exact product, but you can reproduce the utility of that product.
Did these "friends" of yours also happen to have a car full of explosives and yelling "God is Great" when they hit the tank.