... if this technique could save you so much money by shifting your power consumption to off-peak hours and providing a good backup power source during outages, then the car just seems like an unnecessary middleman. why not just have the battery cell and power converter tucked away in your garage, happily charging at night and dispensing during the day and clicking on when the mains disappears?
You're absolutely right, every-time I hear someone yell that the sky is falling because of 3D printers I ask them how it is that books managed to survive the era of the home printer... just because you CAN print something at home doesn't mean it's cheaper or easier than going to the store.
I'm sure we'll get to a point where lots of people have their own 3D printer (I'm actually looking at building/buying one myself) but consumer technology is ALWAYS behind the curve compared to what is being used in industry... so to matter how fast/cheap/good home printing gets... the industrial equivalent will always be faster/cheaper/better. Its the same reason the desktop paper printer never effected people going to the store to buy their books... because as well as desktop printing has progressed, industrial techniques have always been further ahead of the curve.
Is there a form of viable power production that doesn't require a mechanical generator of some sort?
I get it... turbine generators have really good efficiency and we've refined their use for over a century. But it seems to me that every worth-while method of power production uses them...
Wind - air turns a blade which turns a generator to create electricity
Hydo - water turn a turbine which turns a generator to create electricity
Petrol - fuel runs through a combustion engine which turns a generator to create electricity
Coal - coal burns and heats up water to create steam which turns a turbine which turns a generator to create electricity
Nuclear - a nuclear reaction heats up water to create steam which turns a turbine which turns a generator to create electricity
Geo-Thermal - the earth's core heats up water to create steam which turns a turbine which turns a generator to create electricity
Solar Tower- a greenhouse is used to heat up air which turns a turbine which turns a generator to create electricity
Solar Cells, and Lightning Rods seem to be the only methods I can think of that produce electricity without the use a turbine/generator combo but neither are viable for wide spread use. It seems to me that we'd do well to invest in methods of converting heat directly into electricity (giant Peltiers?) without the use of a turbine/generator. I would think doing so would theoretically make a number of our existing methods that much more efficient and perhaps open the door for other methods of power production.
.. is that "games" is too generic a term to describe what we have here...
The way I see it, we really have 3 completely separate types of entertainment under the "games" umbrella:
Interactive Narratives:This is your Heavy Rain, your Final Fantasy, or the "campaign" part of most FPSs. Like films, this can range from a cliche action flick with plot-holes all over the place, to an art-house style drama with fantastic writing and acting.
Complex Games: These are things such as MMOs, fighting games, racing games, or the online/multiplayer part of most FPSs. In general these are defined as games with complex mechanics designed for interaction between human players. Some do have a narrative along with it. but the biggest difference is that an "Interactive Narrative" is typically an experience with a definitive start and end point, where as "Complex Games" are more repetitive in nature and are typically based more on your skill than your decisions
Simple Games These are your titles like Tetris, Bejeweled, FarmVille, Angry Birds, etc. They are usually absent of any significant narrative and feature very simple mechanics. These are mostly the electronic equivalent of classic board and card games.
I think the sooner the "Game" Industry realizes that there are really 3 distinct types of games, each catering to different types of gamers who have different wants and needs, the better off they'll be.
The problem is they're assuming the market for someone buying Angry Birds is the same as the market for someone buying Heavy Rain... That's like saying Movies should be shorter because a lot of people play blackjack and a game of black jack takes less time and cards are cheap.
Maybe if they separated out these ideas we'd no longer get stupid puzzles and mini-games in the middle of our iterative narratives. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it's appropriate, other times it's just bizarre that I'm required to play a round of pipe-dream while I'm in the middle of trying to figure out the societal implications of my antihero's actions.
Another Problem is that they assume because Call of Duty's Multiplayer is so successful that all games should have multiplayer components so they start shoe-horning that into titles where it doesn't belong (Like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed). Honestly it's puzzling why each Call of Duty release isn't two completely separate games. The Single Player Narrative should be one game and the Multiplayer should be another. Granted the online portion of most FPSs was born from the fact that they already had the assets and game engine developed so they could add replay value by simply throwing a bunch of players together in the same room and letting them have fun with it. But the multiplayer component has become so dominant in the market that they actually have completely separate development teams for the campaign and multiplayer portions, and for some games they don't even use the same engine... Really that's just bundling two separate games together that just happen to have the same name and visual style.
That pretty much mirrors my experience. I honestly think what Wikipedia needs most is a method to stop that kind of behavior. Maybe only allow people to make up to 10 revisions on an article per year (including reverts). That would prevent people from "camping", allow others to contribute, and encourage people to make small contributions to numerous articles instead of major contributions to a select few articles. It would also encourage people to really think about the changes they're making before pushing through the update.
I think we need a period where products sold in the USA have to be 100% made in the USA, from the first stroke of the pen to the last decal on the front panel.
I don't think that's realistic. There are a lot of companies that aren't based in the USA that should be allowed to manufacture their products in their home country. I wouldn't expect a French Wine company to start manufacturing in the US, it would lose the whole point of the product. Similarly, while companies like Samsung and Sony could technically make their products here I wouldn't expect them to manufacture here.
A more reasonable method would be to throw a nice big tax on imported goods. Something that would offset the cost of manufacturing outside of the US. and make it more desirable to manufacturing here in the US. Alternatively they could impose a federal sales tax on all goods, and wave it for products manufactured in the US. That would put the issue in the face of US consumers and if they still continue to buy foreign products over domestic then at least we could put that money to good use repairing roads, or reviving the space and other science programs to create more jobs.
I can't tell if you're serious or trolling.... I'm going to assume you're serious since you didn't post AC. IIRC they DID hack the PS3 to support
Other OS (isn't this what ghotz did?) the PSN "Hactivist" attacks didn't start until Sony decided to sue ghotz BECAUSE he "posted how to do it to the public."
Care to elaborate on the difference between geek and weirdo?
Hint: Here is what Merriam-Webster has to say about the topic.
and Here is what Merriam-Webster has to say about the term Weirdo... they're different terms and those in TFA more closely resemble "weirdos" what's your point?
I typically buy a $50 (4000MP) card at my local brick & mortar store and the throw the points on my console... I don't see how that would really help MS gain interest on my purchase.
I do this for 2 reasons:
1. Using a points card means I don't have to have a CC associated with my online account
2. I can more easily keep track of my spending, if I'm limit myself to buying say 1 card every 6 months then when I'm low on points I'm less likely to make impulse purchases since I can't just add more points from my CC with the push of a button.
Honestly I really don't give a sh*t if someone is making interest on my $50... it's worth what? a few pennies TOPS. Good for them if they're smart enough to leverage that advantage, at least they're putting that money to better use than anything I'm doing with it (buying virtual garbage).
You joke but that was ACTUALLY my first thought when I read the summary. If they had some mechanic to easily cluster these together I'd be curious how many you'd need before you'd have the equivalent power of a typical PC....
For $25 I'd be inclined to pick one up for every TV in my house to use for web-browsing.
You can blame a home owner for not putting a good lock on their door but the person that breaks in should still go to jail.
Blaming the victim is just lame.
That's a BS analogy... This situation is more like the home owner blaming their bank for not putting a lock on the vault... In that situation the bank (Sony) has just as much responsibility to good protection as the thief had a responsibility to not steal it.
Why not "test" the jurors every so often to determine if they're really effective jurors?
It would work something like this: you would have a small group (employees of facebook, or wherever) that takes (actual) select complains and determine how their "ideal" juror would handle the complaint. feed these at random to the jury pool and if they're not voting the way they should, reduce (or remove) their voting power in effecting the outcome in the decision making process, alternatively if they have a strong history of voting exactly the way they should then their votes would carry more weight in non-test cases.
I wouldn't necessarily "kick out" jurors, but their voting power could be diminished to nothing if they have a very poor track record... I also don't think that the jurors should know that they're being tested nor, what their voting power is, nor that their voting power even has more or less weight than anyone else's.
More features to break down? Guess what... that ship has already sailed. "simple mechanicals" hasn't been a common feature in the automotive marketplace for nearly 3 decades.
Honestly I see this playing out just like any other automotive technology. A few cars will use it, it will be clumsy and unreliable, the manufacturers will learn from from their mistakes and improve on it year after year making it more robust. Within a decade or two it becomes the superior choice to the old system in nearly every aspect, at which point nearly every car on the market uses it, and no one but a small group of older gear-heads will care.
do you honestly believe that 95% of the people buying Android phones give 2 shits about Openess? Most of them probably don't know what that is... Heck I'm the biggest open-source advocate I know and that didn't even factor one iota into my decision to buy an Android phone.
this could very well change with person to person transfers.... unless the fees are free or very small people who frequently make transfers would likely switch to whichever company has the lowest rate. At very least if Visa is smart they'll undercut PayPal.
I took "still in use" to mean "in concept" for instance, when building ancient stone buildings they'd put log rollers under the stone and carry the rollers that rolled out the back to the front.... this tool is no longer used, however the concept still exists in modern tank style treads. Similarly while some obscure tape format might not be used anymore, there are a lot of places that still use "magnetic tape" for recording, backup and storage.
if you take the question at face value, then there are literally thousands of readily available SPECIFIC tools that are no longer used (or at least not commonly used or supported) but if you consider the question on a conceptual level then I can't think of a one.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one welcome our new cybernetic..... peers?
... if this technique could save you so much money by shifting your power consumption to off-peak hours and providing a good backup power source during outages, then the car just seems like an unnecessary middleman. why not just have the battery cell and power converter tucked away in your garage, happily charging at night and dispensing during the day and clicking on when the mains disappears?
You're absolutely right, every-time I hear someone yell that the sky is falling because of 3D printers I ask them how it is that books managed to survive the era of the home printer... just because you CAN print something at home doesn't mean it's cheaper or easier than going to the store.
I'm sure we'll get to a point where lots of people have their own 3D printer (I'm actually looking at building/buying one myself) but consumer technology is ALWAYS behind the curve compared to what is being used in industry... so to matter how fast/cheap/good home printing gets... the industrial equivalent will always be faster/cheaper/better. Its the same reason the desktop paper printer never effected people going to the store to buy their books... because as well as desktop printing has progressed, industrial techniques have always been further ahead of the curve.
I get it... turbine generators have really good efficiency and we've refined their use for over a century. But it seems to me that every worth-while method of power production uses them...
Solar Cells, and Lightning Rods seem to be the only methods I can think of that produce electricity without the use a turbine/generator combo but neither are viable for wide spread use. It seems to me that we'd do well to invest in methods of converting heat directly into electricity (giant Peltiers?) without the use of a turbine/generator. I would think doing so would theoretically make a number of our existing methods that much more efficient and perhaps open the door for other methods of power production.
The way I see it, we really have 3 completely separate types of entertainment under the "games" umbrella:
I think the sooner the "Game" Industry realizes that there are really 3 distinct types of games, each catering to different types of gamers who have different wants and needs, the better off they'll be.
The problem is they're assuming the market for someone buying Angry Birds is the same as the market for someone buying Heavy Rain... That's like saying Movies should be shorter because a lot of people play blackjack and a game of black jack takes less time and cards are cheap.
Maybe if they separated out these ideas we'd no longer get stupid puzzles and mini-games in the middle of our iterative narratives. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it's appropriate, other times it's just bizarre that I'm required to play a round of pipe-dream while I'm in the middle of trying to figure out the societal implications of my antihero's actions.
Another Problem is that they assume because Call of Duty's Multiplayer is so successful that all games should have multiplayer components so they start shoe-horning that into titles where it doesn't belong (Like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed). Honestly it's puzzling why each Call of Duty release isn't two completely separate games. The Single Player Narrative should be one game and the Multiplayer should be another. Granted the online portion of most FPSs was born from the fact that they already had the assets and game engine developed so they could add replay value by simply throwing a bunch of players together in the same room and letting them have fun with it. But the multiplayer component has become so dominant in the market that they actually have completely separate development teams for the campaign and multiplayer portions, and for some games they don't even use the same engine... Really that's just bundling two separate games together that just happen to have the same name and visual style.
Yes because it is much better to send somebody a URL that looks like this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=42+St+-+Port+Authority+Bus+Terminal+%4040.757308,-73.989735&daddr=350+5th+Avenue,+New+York,+NY+10118+(Empire+State+Building)&hl=en&ll=40.75267,-73.987169&spn=0.009899,0.016158&sll=40.752459,-73.987169&sspn=0.009899,0.016158&geocode=FTzobQIdmQGX-w%3BFUvGbQIdERKX-yFzdY-mZOGFkSlpdBGzqVnCiTEsrLWKpFygrA&mra=ls&dirflg=w&z=16
Instead of using the shortener.
clearly... http://maps.g.co/maps?saddr=42+St+-+Port+Authority+Bus+Terminal+%4040.757308,-73.989735&daddr=350+5th+Avenue,+New+York,+NY+10118+(Empire+State+Building)&hl=en&ll=40.75267,-73.987169&spn=0.009899,0.016158&sll=40.752459,-73.987169&sspn=0.009899,0.016158&geocode=FTzobQIdmQGX-w%3BFUvGbQIdERKX-yFzdY-mZOGFkSlpdBGzqVnCiTEsrLWKpFygrA&mra=ls&dirflg=w&z=16 is a HUGE improvement.
~3%... you might get a whole foot out of the deal!
That pretty much mirrors my experience. I honestly think what Wikipedia needs most is a method to stop that kind of behavior. Maybe only allow people to make up to 10 revisions on an article per year (including reverts). That would prevent people from "camping", allow others to contribute, and encourage people to make small contributions to numerous articles instead of major contributions to a select few articles. It would also encourage people to really think about the changes they're making before pushing through the update.
I don't think that's realistic. There are a lot of companies that aren't based in the USA that should be allowed to manufacture their products in their home country. I wouldn't expect a French Wine company to start manufacturing in the US, it would lose the whole point of the product. Similarly, while companies like Samsung and Sony could technically make their products here I wouldn't expect them to manufacture here.
A more reasonable method would be to throw a nice big tax on imported goods. Something that would offset the cost of manufacturing outside of the US. and make it more desirable to manufacturing here in the US. Alternatively they could impose a federal sales tax on all goods, and wave it for products manufactured in the US. That would put the issue in the face of US consumers and if they still continue to buy foreign products over domestic then at least we could put that money to good use repairing roads, or reviving the space and other science programs to create more jobs.
I can't tell if you're serious or trolling.... I'm going to assume you're serious since you didn't post AC. IIRC they DID hack the PS3 to support Other OS (isn't this what ghotz did?) the PSN "Hactivist" attacks didn't start until Sony decided to sue ghotz BECAUSE he "posted how to do it to the public."
if I had mod points... they would be yours right now.
Care to elaborate on the difference between geek and weirdo?
Hint: Here is what Merriam-Webster has to say about the topic.
and Here is what Merriam-Webster has to say about the term Weirdo... they're different terms and those in TFA more closely resemble "weirdos" what's your point?
I do this for 2 reasons:
Honestly I really don't give a sh*t if someone is making interest on my $50... it's worth what? a few pennies TOPS. Good for them if they're smart enough to leverage that advantage, at least they're putting that money to better use than anything I'm doing with it (buying virtual garbage).
You joke but that was ACTUALLY my first thought when I read the summary. If they had some mechanic to easily cluster these together I'd be curious how many you'd need before you'd have the equivalent power of a typical PC....
For $25 I'd be inclined to pick one up for every TV in my house to use for web-browsing.
That's a BS analogy... This situation is more like the home owner blaming their bank for not putting a lock on the vault... In that situation the bank (Sony) has just as much responsibility to good protection as the thief had a responsibility to not steal it.
This doesn't really work for me since most of my heavy network activity is through video game consoles (Gaming / Netflix / downloading demos / etc)
Why not "test" the jurors every so often to determine if they're really effective jurors?
It would work something like this: you would have a small group (employees of facebook, or wherever) that takes (actual) select complains and determine how their "ideal" juror would handle the complaint. feed these at random to the jury pool and if they're not voting the way they should, reduce (or remove) their voting power in effecting the outcome in the decision making process, alternatively if they have a strong history of voting exactly the way they should then their votes would carry more weight in non-test cases.
I wouldn't necessarily "kick out" jurors, but their voting power could be diminished to nothing if they have a very poor track record... I also don't think that the jurors should know that they're being tested nor, what their voting power is, nor that their voting power even has more or less weight than anyone else's.
More features to break down? Guess what... that ship has already sailed. "simple mechanicals" hasn't been a common feature in the automotive marketplace for nearly 3 decades.
Honestly I see this playing out just like any other automotive technology. A few cars will use it, it will be clumsy and unreliable, the manufacturers will learn from from their mistakes and improve on it year after year making it more robust. Within a decade or two it becomes the superior choice to the old system in nearly every aspect, at which point nearly every car on the market uses it, and no one but a small group of older gear-heads will care.
do you honestly believe that 95% of the people buying Android phones give 2 shits about Openess? Most of them probably don't know what that is... Heck I'm the biggest open-source advocate I know and that didn't even factor one iota into my decision to buy an Android phone.
^that's a very good point, here's another:
"I've been drinking but I should be good to drive.... hmm looks like there's a checkpoint on my way home, maybe I shouldn't risk it..."
If you're too drunk to drive, you're probably also too drunk to operate a smart phone well enough to locate sobriety checkpoints.
this could very well change with person to person transfers.... unless the fees are free or very small people who frequently make transfers would likely switch to whichever company has the lowest rate. At very least if Visa is smart they'll undercut PayPal.
The real sad part is that evolution favors the "characteristic" of humans that causes them to not believe in it.
Rez
So how exactly does that benefit the iPad 2 more-so than iDevices in general?
I took "still in use" to mean "in concept" for instance, when building ancient stone buildings they'd put log rollers under the stone and carry the rollers that rolled out the back to the front.... this tool is no longer used, however the concept still exists in modern tank style treads. Similarly while some obscure tape format might not be used anymore, there are a lot of places that still use "magnetic tape" for recording, backup and storage.
if you take the question at face value, then there are literally thousands of readily available SPECIFIC tools that are no longer used (or at least not commonly used or supported) but if you consider the question on a conceptual level then I can't think of a one.