Or more accurately, assaulting an officer means trying to defend yourself from aggressive police.
I can't speak about this particular case, but there is always in regards to hierarchical organizations, especially military and law-enforcement, people draw into its ranks seeking authority and respect. To such a mentality any slight against their authority is in itself a crime worthy of physical punishment. And anyone from within their own ranks that dare speak up are themselves criminals and traitors; often such whistle-blowers are effectively committing career-suicide.
Unfortunately proving that law enforcers used excessive force is almost practically impossible, unless the incident were clearly recorded, or the victim is an obvious cripple of such a nature and appearance that it instils immediate feelings of sympathy in most people (read: media). For the rest of the citizenry the best they can hope for is to have the charges dropped. Peter Watts will, in my opinion, probably find himself banned from visiting the US for quite some time to come; regardless of how badly he might have been mistreated.
I don't know about that being irrelevant information. The formation of our planet seems like something we may want to get as much information as possible about
Indeed, and I'd go so far that to claim that the atmosphere is a part of any planet that has one; and as such how it developed, and which factors contributed to it's evolution, is highly relevant.
I wont claim any sort of knowledge, or particular interest, in how our atmosphere came to be, but I welcome any thesis, in any field, that challenges current theories. In so far as it forces scientists and researchers to dispute and discuss; ensuring that established theories are as consistent with available data as possible.
Yeah goon on "you" Slashdot for keep up the good work. Must say that I sincerely wish that the comment system used by Slashdot would inspire other news-sites as it is, in my own personal experience, the best system for making the decent comments readable and pushing the crap down into lower, and thus hidden from anyone not actively looking, tiers of the structure. While it is perhaps not perfect it is functional and, as I said, better than anything else I have seen.
Now on a different note; I wonder how many stories it would be in total if they removed all the double, or triple, posts.
Now tell me the pattern for creating an image of unspeakable evil; like the Great Cthulhu. Cthulhu fhtagn! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Ia! The sleeper awakens!
Or parents could be parents. Don't want you kids looking at something? Act as the filter don't let them buy/play games that expose them to things you don't want 'em to see....
Or better yet lobby for introducing mandatory implantation of filter chips directly into children's brain; tracking their movements, emotions and thoughts. That way bad and anti-social behaviour can be punished with electroshocks immediately. Remember it is all about keeping our children safe!!
And what's the big deal, anyway? For every successful game, there have always been a few clones
So to within the world of literature. After many ground breaking works; like say Tolkien, there were multitudes of new works from aspiring authors that wanted to write that type of literature; with a range of quality from piss poor to works that could be called unique in their own way. This to can be found, as mentioned, among computer games, just look at Wolfenstein3D/Doom and all the clones that popped up over the years. While most are now entirely forgotten some became hits in their own right; and FPS games are still being made today.
Of course if we are talking about someone taking a game and just remaking it on another platform, with almost no alterations, we might be talking plagiarism. But concept "cloning" is, in my mind, entirely legitimate.
According to this article (in Norwegian); John Espen Lien (senior spokesperson for the Norwegian Defence Operations Headquarters; loosely translated) has confirmed that they had been informed about a Russian missile launch in the Barents Sea at the time of the light phenomena. Lien said this was most likely caused by the missile launch; though he couldn't confirm that at this time; but investigations are under way.
$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
Personally I wouldn't pay $300 for the current available models, they are (in my opinion) not good enough; but I have no doubt that a few years down the line the quality of the readers will be such that I would have no doubt paying $300 or more; maybe even a lot more. For now I am content waiting for the technology and services to improve to what I would consider an acceptable level. I still remember my first mp3 player, and my first mobile phone; large, chunky, heavy, low battery time, poor UI, and generally stone age tools compared to their current equivalent. But while my player and phone provided functions I felt a genuine need for, an e-reader would have to be fairly good to get me away from books on paper. But as I said, only a matter of time; and I whole heartily support companies creating new readers to compete with what is available to date.
My greatest concern so far is the restrictions and regulations hindering the development of a proper online service for buying, accessing, and sorting through the e-books you have purchased. Personally I would love to see something as user friendly as Steam for buying and downloading your books, or subscribing to regular releases like magazines or comics. But as far as I know the various distribution deals, not to mention various nations regulation, makes the creation of this type of service, particularly for the European market, a pain in the nutsack.
Personally I buy a lot of computer games, through Steam, when I was younger I used to get pirated versions ; usually because of financial, or simply distribution reasons (ten years ago games would arrive at local stores several weeks after their original release). These days if I feel confident about a game I will preorder, as with Dragon Age or Arkham Asylum, and if it entertains and leaves me wanting more I will buy whatever DLC comes along (if it sounds interesting). However if I am uncertain about the quality of a game I will download a "pirate version", try it, and then either buy it or throw it out.
Over the last few years I have found game reviews to be of declining value to me so in this frequently demo-less age it's either piracy or nothing; and when it comes to buying a game that often costs 49.99€ (that's about 72$ going by a randomly online converter), I really do want to ensure I get something worth paying for. It's not so much the price as that I don't want my list of Steam games cluttered with bullcrap not worth the scrolling. Perhaps this makes me a bad consumer in the eyes of some, but frankly I don't much care about what others think, I have purchased 23 unique games through steam since my account was created in 2007 and will continue to purchase games regularly for the foreseeable future.
Personally I have been using Dictionary.com for years now, got it incorporated with my dropdown list of search engines in Firefox to. Can't really see myself changing unless something drastic happens as Dictionary.com is plain, functional and provides the information without any hassle.
Once I accidentally saw a few seconds of "Grannies Gone Wild" I immediately ripped out my hard-drive, smashed it with a hammer, demagnetized it, dissolved the remains in acid, and buried it piece by piece across five counties; then I proceeded to rinse my eyes with sulphuric acid. Only way to to be safe.
Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost.
How inconsiderate. Think about all the potential engineers, administrators, janitors and etc, that would have been needed to do all that work the slow way; thus creating jobs for many for years to come. With one swoop all that potential future effort was made redundant, once again "researchers" have proven that they are unable to see the big picture!
Should have added that the game is in Open Beta at the moment so changes and rebalancing of both price, stats, levels and etc, is and should be expected.
Sorry, but paying to be playing competitively is something I'd expect in a F2P game with an ingame store, but not in a game that I buy at full price. No sale.
Battlefield Heroes is more like Quake Live; in that you can play the game for free through a web-browser interface. So you don't buy it "at full price" as such. Instead you create a character, log on, and play for free with some ads on the logon pages and such. However by playing, or paying, you get a type of points that you can use on certain types of items and gear; though these are not essential to playing as it is at the moment.
I believe that previous stated goal was to finance the game through ads and "micropayments"; so I really can't see why this change comes as any great surprise.
Not certain if it is relatable (the Henry David Thoreau thing talks about sharing notes with students) but at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) we used (and they still use) It's learning. It wasn't perfect (though it's been a few years since I was a student so I am sure it has seen quite a few updates since then), but it was pretty good for sharing notes, upcoming plans, dates, comments, study group information, and generally information of use to students, teachers and professors. And since you have to log in to use, and have permissions/access set, only relevant people can see or post in the various sections of the site. Mostly all tasks were posted online, and all works could be delivered though the site.
I guess running something like it's learning would cost money, but for educational purposes I reckon it is far superior to an alternative were google, or anyone else, can moderate and censor without warning, or in some cases cause.
I would, with little evidence to support my claim, say that cheating in level 80 PvP isn't really a big issue in WoW; at least not that I saw when I played it last. If you get caught cheating in WoW you risk getting an account ban; which means losing a lot of hours, sweat and blood; invested in the game. Of course gold farmers will still try to hack and cheat as much as they can, but at least they don't run around doing it in PvP.
They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.
I personally feel that the only system I have seen so far with a reasonable rate of success is dedicated servers with some sort of permaban of accounts caught cheating. While by no means a perfect system; my personal experience (with TF2 as that is the only FPS game besides MW2 I have played over the last few years) was that I found a gaming site that ran servers for a variety of games. An extended group of people frequented those servers, creating a community of sorts, and I personally never had much problems with cheaters (that I can recall). Either they were banned/kicked swiftly and effectively, or they never logged on that particular set of servers; or possible a combination of the two. Though it should be mentioned that over the last two weeks, or so, of playing Modern Warfare 2 I haven't really seen a lot of players that I could confidently claim were cheating; though I have seen a few that were ridiculously good. Perhaps that is just me not really paying attention.
Cheating or no cheating, sales or no sales, I personally feel that despite Modern Warfare 2 being a really great game at its core, I won't be playing much more than I have; as it really feels impersonal when all the other players are random. And there is no forum for me to hang around talking some trash between matches and evenings. This of course isn't helped by the fact that Iwnet seem to have about a 30% (number I pulled out of my behind but it is how I have experienced it so far) failrate; disconnects, game closings, kicked from a lobby before you have connected to it, random ping, and people leaving games because a map comes up that they don't want to play (Highrise and Estate seem to see half the "group" leave when they come into rotation) leading to lobby's closing most of the time.
"The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust."
Of course if artificial flesh were to become cheaper to produce the opposite problem would arise. How would you know what you were eating were "real" meat and not some artificial stuff they grew in a lab.
Perhaps what needs to be done is the implementation of some sort of Achievement and/or Title system. Create some sort of public database where this information can be posted, viewed, linked and etc, a type of real time list of peoples qualifications with bragging rights. Maybe this could even increase productivity among certain types of employees as well, seeing as some types seems predisposed to dedicate significant parts of their time to unlock game related achievements.
Isn't the best approach to develop fast, identify the bottlenecks and then rewrite those parts in a faster language, like Python C modules?
The best approach is to create some sort of artificial intelligence that can create, and maintain, applications and software for us automatically. That way we don't need people to waste time learning complex programming and computer maintenance skills, instead your absolutely reliable and loyal friend will make you human scum redundant... I mean make your, I mean our, lives safer, easier, happier and more enjoyable. Do not fear change, it is inevitable!
Slashdot Mirror
Or more accurately, assaulting an officer means trying to defend yourself from aggressive police.
I can't speak about this particular case, but there is always in regards to hierarchical organizations, especially military and law-enforcement, people draw into its ranks seeking authority and respect. To such a mentality any slight against their authority is in itself a crime worthy of physical punishment. And anyone from within their own ranks that dare speak up are themselves criminals and traitors; often such whistle-blowers are effectively committing career-suicide.
Unfortunately proving that law enforcers used excessive force is almost practically impossible, unless the incident were clearly recorded, or the victim is an obvious cripple of such a nature and appearance that it instils immediate feelings of sympathy in most people (read: media). For the rest of the citizenry the best they can hope for is to have the charges dropped. Peter Watts will, in my opinion, probably find himself banned from visiting the US for quite some time to come; regardless of how badly he might have been mistreated.
Honestly who cares?
Atmospheric scientists?
I don't know about that being irrelevant information. The formation of our planet seems like something we may want to get as much information as possible about
Indeed, and I'd go so far that to claim that the atmosphere is a part of any planet that has one; and as such how it developed, and which factors contributed to it's evolution, is highly relevant.
I wont claim any sort of knowledge, or particular interest, in how our atmosphere came to be, but I welcome any thesis, in any field, that challenges current theories. In so far as it forces scientists and researchers to dispute and discuss; ensuring that established theories are as consistent with available data as possible.
Yeah goon on "you" Slashdot for keep up the good work. Must say that I sincerely wish that the comment system used by Slashdot would inspire other news-sites as it is, in my own personal experience, the best system for making the decent comments readable and pushing the crap down into lower, and thus hidden from anyone not actively looking, tiers of the structure. While it is perhaps not perfect it is functional and, as I said, better than anything else I have seen.
Now on a different note; I wonder how many stories it would be in total if they removed all the double, or triple, posts.
Choices, choices.... Do I hand over the care for my personal privacy to Beelzebub or Ba'al?
Now tell me the pattern for creating an image of unspeakable evil; like the Great Cthulhu.
Cthulhu fhtagn! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Ia! The sleeper awakens!
Or parents could be parents. Don't want you kids looking at something? Act as the filter don't let them buy/play games that expose them to things you don't want 'em to see....
Or better yet lobby for introducing mandatory implantation of filter chips directly into children's brain; tracking their movements, emotions and thoughts. That way bad and anti-social behaviour can be punished with electroshocks immediately. Remember it is all about keeping our children safe!!
And what's the big deal, anyway? For every successful game, there have always been a few clones
So to within the world of literature. After many ground breaking works; like say Tolkien, there were multitudes of new works from aspiring authors that wanted to write that type of literature; with a range of quality from piss poor to works that could be called unique in their own way. This to can be found, as mentioned, among computer games, just look at Wolfenstein3D/Doom and all the clones that popped up over the years. While most are now entirely forgotten some became hits in their own right; and FPS games are still being made today.
Of course if we are talking about someone taking a game and just remaking it on another platform, with almost no alterations, we might be talking plagiarism. But concept "cloning" is, in my mind, entirely legitimate.
Apparently there was a case reported about a month ago about another light phenomena in the barents sea which was apparently also because of a Russian missile test.
According to this article (in Norwegian); John Espen Lien (senior spokesperson for the Norwegian Defence Operations Headquarters; loosely translated) has confirmed that they had been informed about a Russian missile launch in the Barents Sea at the time of the light phenomena. Lien said this was most likely caused by the missile launch; though he couldn't confirm that at this time; but investigations are under way.
$300 for a device that's easier on the eyes than an LCD screen, and can store 1500 books? I think that's a perfectly reasonable price for what you get.
Personally I wouldn't pay $300 for the current available models, they are (in my opinion) not good enough; but I have no doubt that a few years down the line the quality of the readers will be such that I would have no doubt paying $300 or more; maybe even a lot more. For now I am content waiting for the technology and services to improve to what I would consider an acceptable level. I still remember my first mp3 player, and my first mobile phone; large, chunky, heavy, low battery time, poor UI, and generally stone age tools compared to their current equivalent. But while my player and phone provided functions I felt a genuine need for, an e-reader would have to be fairly good to get me away from books on paper. But as I said, only a matter of time; and I whole heartily support companies creating new readers to compete with what is available to date.
My greatest concern so far is the restrictions and regulations hindering the development of a proper online service for buying, accessing, and sorting through the e-books you have purchased. Personally I would love to see something as user friendly as Steam for buying and downloading your books, or subscribing to regular releases like magazines or comics. But as far as I know the various distribution deals, not to mention various nations regulation, makes the creation of this type of service, particularly for the European market, a pain in the nutsack.
Personally I buy a lot of computer games, through Steam, when I was younger I used to get pirated versions ; usually because of financial, or simply distribution reasons (ten years ago games would arrive at local stores several weeks after their original release). These days if I feel confident about a game I will preorder, as with Dragon Age or Arkham Asylum, and if it entertains and leaves me wanting more I will buy whatever DLC comes along (if it sounds interesting). However if I am uncertain about the quality of a game I will download a "pirate version", try it, and then either buy it or throw it out.
Over the last few years I have found game reviews to be of declining value to me so in this frequently demo-less age it's either piracy or nothing; and when it comes to buying a game that often costs 49.99€ (that's about 72$ going by a randomly online converter), I really do want to ensure I get something worth paying for. It's not so much the price as that I don't want my list of Steam games cluttered with bullcrap not worth the scrolling. Perhaps this makes me a bad consumer in the eyes of some, but frankly I don't much care about what others think, I have purchased 23 unique games through steam since my account was created in 2007 and will continue to purchase games regularly for the foreseeable future.
Well, at least this seems to set an ultimate limit to Moore's law, since it's not very easy to go to less than one atom per transistor.
Reckon it is time to start working on a Matrioshka brain to ensure our future computing needs are covered.
Personally I have been using Dictionary.com for years now, got it incorporated with my dropdown list of search engines in Firefox to. Can't really see myself changing unless something drastic happens as Dictionary.com is plain, functional and provides the information without any hassle.
Once I accidentally saw a few seconds of "Grannies Gone Wild" I immediately ripped out my hard-drive, smashed it with a hammer, demagnetized it, dissolved the remains in acid, and buried it piece by piece across five counties; then I proceeded to rinse my eyes with sulphuric acid. Only way to to be safe.
Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost.
How inconsiderate. Think about all the potential engineers, administrators, janitors and etc, that would have been needed to do all that work the slow way; thus creating jobs for many for years to come. With one swoop all that potential future effort was made redundant, once again "researchers" have proven that they are unable to see the big picture!
Should have added that the game is in Open Beta at the moment so changes and rebalancing of both price, stats, levels and etc, is and should be expected.
Sorry, but paying to be playing competitively is something I'd expect in a F2P game with an ingame store, but not in a game that I buy at full price. No sale.
Battlefield Heroes is more like Quake Live; in that you can play the game for free through a web-browser interface. So you don't buy it "at full price" as such. Instead you create a character, log on, and play for free with some ads on the logon pages and such. However by playing, or paying, you get a type of points that you can use on certain types of items and gear; though these are not essential to playing as it is at the moment.
I believe that previous stated goal was to finance the game through ads and "micropayments"; so I really can't see why this change comes as any great surprise.
Not certain if it is relatable (the Henry David Thoreau thing talks about sharing notes with students) but at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) we used (and they still use) It's learning. It wasn't perfect (though it's been a few years since I was a student so I am sure it has seen quite a few updates since then), but it was pretty good for sharing notes, upcoming plans, dates, comments, study group information, and generally information of use to students, teachers and professors. And since you have to log in to use, and have permissions/access set, only relevant people can see or post in the various sections of the site. Mostly all tasks were posted online, and all works could be delivered though the site.
I guess running something like it's learning would cost money, but for educational purposes I reckon it is far superior to an alternative were google, or anyone else, can moderate and censor without warning, or in some cases cause.
I would, with little evidence to support my claim, say that cheating in level 80 PvP isn't really a big issue in WoW; at least not that I saw when I played it last. If you get caught cheating in WoW you risk getting an account ban; which means losing a lot of hours, sweat and blood; invested in the game. Of course gold farmers will still try to hack and cheat as much as they can, but at least they don't run around doing it in PvP.
They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.
I personally feel that the only system I have seen so far with a reasonable rate of success is dedicated servers with some sort of permaban of accounts caught cheating. While by no means a perfect system; my personal experience (with TF2 as that is the only FPS game besides MW2 I have played over the last few years) was that I found a gaming site that ran servers for a variety of games. An extended group of people frequented those servers, creating a community of sorts, and I personally never had much problems with cheaters (that I can recall). Either they were banned/kicked swiftly and effectively, or they never logged on that particular set of servers; or possible a combination of the two. Though it should be mentioned that over the last two weeks, or so, of playing Modern Warfare 2 I haven't really seen a lot of players that I could confidently claim were cheating; though I have seen a few that were ridiculously good. Perhaps that is just me not really paying attention.
Cheating or no cheating, sales or no sales, I personally feel that despite Modern Warfare 2 being a really great game at its core, I won't be playing much more than I have; as it really feels impersonal when all the other players are random. And there is no forum for me to hang around talking some trash between matches and evenings. This of course isn't helped by the fact that Iwnet seem to have about a 30% (number I pulled out of my behind but it is how I have experienced it so far) failrate; disconnects, game closings, kicked from a lobby before you have connected to it, random ping, and people leaving games because a map comes up that they don't want to play (Highrise and Estate seem to see half the "group" leave when they come into rotation) leading to lobby's closing most of the time.
"The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust."
Of course if artificial flesh were to become cheaper to produce the opposite problem would arise. How would you know what you were eating were "real" meat and not some artificial stuff they grew in a lab.
Perhaps what needs to be done is the implementation of some sort of Achievement and/or Title system. Create some sort of public database where this information can be posted, viewed, linked and etc, a type of real time list of peoples qualifications with bragging rights. Maybe this could even increase productivity among certain types of employees as well, seeing as some types seems predisposed to dedicate significant parts of their time to unlock game related achievements.
What I want to know is what type of Achievements this program will feature.
Isn't the best approach to develop fast, identify the bottlenecks and then rewrite those parts in a faster language, like Python C modules?
The best approach is to create some sort of artificial intelligence that can create, and maintain, applications and software for us automatically. That way we don't need people to waste time learning complex programming and computer maintenance skills, instead your absolutely reliable and loyal friend will make you human scum redundant... I mean make your, I mean our, lives safer, easier, happier and more enjoyable. Do not fear change, it is inevitable!