Of course it's cheaper to sell things there. However, when the cheaper labour and operating costs result in a foreign retailer being able to offer me identical goods to a local one at a lower total price (including postage and import duty) then I am still legally prevented from taking advantage of this. I am being forced to pay a higher price or go without.
Since corporate profits come from offshoring their labour costs, let me hurt their profits by offshoring my purchasing. And if that fucks up the economy then I have a simple answer, and it involves employing local people.
It's not the time difference that gets me. It's the difference in price.
I have to compete directly for jobs with people in India, China, Eastern Europe and anywhere else you can outsource IT to. This impacts the amount I can earn, and my chances of getting a job in the first place.
However, I am forced by EU/UK law to pay a higher price for goods, as demonstrated by this court case.
Frankly this pisses me off. I'm getting fucked over both ways.
Apple makes (very nice) hardware that will run it.
But not nice software that will run it.
Windows based gaming is my sole reason for staying on Windows. Give me another OS that can run the same games at the same speed with the same ease and I'll consider switching. Base it on a *nix variant and I'll want to switch. Make the hardware commodity price competitive with a "specify my own system" approach (my last two computers both cost around £2000 because I specified parts; off the shelf Dell equivalents didn't exist and Alienware were 30% more expensive) and I will switch.
The whole widget market suffers from the problem that general computing needs are different for everybody. A single widget doesn't adapt as well to multiple uses as collections of specialised widgets, and although the desire still exists to go out and buy one widget that's ideal, I'm not sure Apple sell it.
Modelling half a machine gunner is quite easy - he doesn't really move all that much;)
The robots act based on specific sensor input. That sensor input is quite tightly bounded and can thus be simulated. The simulation must obviously calculate what the sensor input would be, taking into account the activities of the other participants, and do so for each of the participants.
It would be considerably easier to model on a "each sensor can only update its input once every 5ms" timescale, as that gives you discrete time blocks in which to run the robot 'brain' on the inputs and accept its outputs (drive controls, etc), and calculate the impact of those on the simulation ready for the next timeslice. (doing so across all robots)
The smaller you can make those timeslices the more accurate the simulation would be, up to the actual digital sensitivity level of the sensors.
If the sensors are analogue, and are interpreted and acted upon as such by the robot then ideally you'll want to simulate on an analogue level. I'll concede I lack the mathematical and signal processing background to give you a glib description of how to make that work. I am now wondering whether a digital simulation would be 'close enough' anyway, but I guess the answer is to run the simulation and test it with the robots..
However, these robots are programmed to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli (received from their sensors).
That behaviour is easily simulated on a computer.
I would hope that they did model this on a computer, and the robots are merely a practical experiment to prove the simulation, attract media attention/further funding and ground their assumptions.
I put a similar amount of time into just one single MUD for three consecutive years at university. I also played other muds, began an ongoing Angband addiction, learned Unix (to a small extent), and how to do OO programming, worked a part time job, spent far too much cash in the SU bars, worked fulltime between terms, represented my university at sport and also picked up a very good degree from a very good university.
I finished with a character over 6 months old (/played equivalent), a lot of very close friends (who continue to be my closest friends) and never once became a zombie.
Other people spend their time watching TV, raising children, helping the poor or working for a living. 42 weeks at 40 hours a week is less than most people spend working, and I know which I'd rather be doing.
These days of course I am working full time, and I gave up WoW with just 45 days/played a year after the game was released. But I don't regret that time spent mudding at Uni, I greatly appreciate what it gave to me.
I reserve the right to be a complete arsehole to people on the internet and believe that gives them no right at all to violently assault me.
It does give them the right to ignore me, say nasty things about me and potentially seek legal action against me. That'd be that personal responsibility thing we don't hear enough about.
Even if the other guy is a bigger 'asshat', he should stay within the law.
these kinds of "rage" attacks are definitely on the increase
I thought media reporting of them was on the increase. I see no real evidence that significantly more attacks occur.
my impression is that in Britain, we seem to be the worst of any nation for this
Why, because we don't engage in multi-generational feuds, we don't just shoot people that annoy us, we don't engage in acts of destruction and violence that can't be traced? Those things all go on elsewhere for similar reasons.
look at the wider picture here, with binge drinking also increasing
Again, is it increasing? I seem to recall the previous generation getting equally pissed, cases of alcohol driven domestic violence being very prevalent. At one point alcohol was preferred to water for health reasons.
I go out to other European countries a lot, particularly Spain, and I don't hear or see any of these kinds of behaviours
So there's never violence at Spanish football games? Amazing. Yet they have exactly the same advertising and media as the UK, and you're certain that the media are at the core of this.
I'm confused.
This is a really sad incident and we should be ashamed that it happened here.
This is a really funny incident and we should be grateful that it happened to someone else.
The world is full of idiots. Many of them lack adequate self control. Trust me, this is not an exclusively British trait. So be sensible, act sensibly, and control access to your personal information online.
I bought BF1942. Loved it. I bought BF:V. Loved it. I bought BF2. Really liked it.
BF2142: Massive extension of the BF2 system that rewards people for playing the game obsessively by giving them in-game advantages over people that have a life. That alone was putting me off buying it - I resent dying to somebody purely because they don't have to work for a living and could thus 'earn' the bigger better equipment.
Now this? Absolutely no. I have no spare CPU cycles anyway, why waste them being advertised to. I also don't trust EA.
I for one would love to assist the judge (via teleconference, for obvious reasons) and assure him that the spirit of his request was being applied.
"M'lord, this is a computer. It does exactly what you ask it to do, and you asked for www.spamhaus.org to be delisted. That's exactly what happened. If you want the whole spamhaus.org to disappear then you must state that, as a computer can't read the mind of a fucking imbecile."
When courts of law get involved, the cute word games really matter.
Assume that Icann are planning to roll over and destroy themselves by complying with the court order (they are in a no-win situation here).
If the court order is worded such that "The spamhaus.org DNS entry must be disabled until such time that Spamhaus stop blocking email from the plaintiff" then that's pretty easy to comply with - Spamhaus don't block the email.
I suspect the court wont be quite that stupid (although using an international organisation to enforce an inappropriate US court decision isn't the best indication of the court's intelligence) and will use wording along the lines of "remove the plaintiff's IP address from their black list"
What makes you think a teacher of physics would be a great programmer?
Being open and honest enough to admit "I don't know" requires a mindset that happens to occur in the best programmers. This may be coincidence, it may be rhetoric or it may be valuable material for a sociology thesis. I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's cheaper to sell things there. However, when the cheaper labour and operating costs result in a foreign retailer being able to offer me identical goods to a local one at a lower total price (including postage and import duty) then I am still legally prevented from taking advantage of this. I am being forced to pay a higher price or go without.
Since corporate profits come from offshoring their labour costs, let me hurt their profits by offshoring my purchasing. And if that fucks up the economy then I have a simple answer, and it involves employing local people.
It's not the time difference that gets me. It's the difference in price.
I have to compete directly for jobs with people in India, China, Eastern Europe and anywhere else you can outsource IT to. This impacts the amount I can earn, and my chances of getting a job in the first place.
However, I am forced by EU/UK law to pay a higher price for goods, as demonstrated by this court case.
Frankly this pisses me off. I'm getting fucked over both ways.
I always laugh at people buying VW Passats when they could just buy a Skoda, which is the same damn thing.
Apple makes (very nice) hardware that will run it.
But not nice software that will run it.
Windows based gaming is my sole reason for staying on Windows. Give me another OS that can run the same games at the same speed with the same ease and I'll consider switching. Base it on a *nix variant and I'll want to switch. Make the hardware commodity price competitive with a "specify my own system" approach (my last two computers both cost around £2000 because I specified parts; off the shelf Dell equivalents didn't exist and Alienware were 30% more expensive) and I will switch.
The whole widget market suffers from the problem that general computing needs are different for everybody. A single widget doesn't adapt as well to multiple uses as collections of specialised widgets, and although the desire still exists to go out and buy one widget that's ideal, I'm not sure Apple sell it.
Indeed. Jaguar went from "I want one, more than a Merc or a BMW" to "If you gave me one for free I'd sell it and buy something else"
A Jag estate? Please!
Financial prudence.
Modelling half a machine gunner is quite easy - he doesn't really move all that much
The robots act based on specific sensor input. That sensor input is quite tightly bounded and can thus be simulated. The simulation must obviously calculate what the sensor input would be, taking into account the activities of the other participants, and do so for each of the participants.
It would be considerably easier to model on a "each sensor can only update its input once every 5ms" timescale, as that gives you discrete time blocks in which to run the robot 'brain' on the inputs and accept its outputs (drive controls, etc), and calculate the impact of those on the simulation ready for the next timeslice. (doing so across all robots)
The smaller you can make those timeslices the more accurate the simulation would be, up to the actual digital sensitivity level of the sensors.
If the sensors are analogue, and are interpreted and acted upon as such by the robot then ideally you'll want to simulate on an analogue level. I'll concede I lack the mathematical and signal processing background to give you a glib description of how to make that work. I am now wondering whether a digital simulation would be 'close enough' anyway, but I guess the answer is to run the simulation and test it with the robots..
However, these robots are programmed to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli (received from their sensors).
That behaviour is easily simulated on a computer.
I would hope that they did model this on a computer, and the robots are merely a practical experiment to prove the simulation, attract media attention/further funding and ground their assumptions.
70 days played, not 70 hours. I make it just under 6 hours and 27 minutes a day at 5 days a week.
To do 70 hours over the course of a year takes under 20 minutes a day. Or one fulltime week of 70 hours and the rest of the year off.
I put a similar amount of time into just one single MUD for three consecutive years at university. I also played other muds, began an ongoing Angband addiction, learned Unix (to a small extent), and how to do OO programming, worked a part time job, spent far too much cash in the SU bars, worked fulltime between terms, represented my university at sport and also picked up a very good degree from a very good university.
I finished with a character over 6 months old (/played equivalent), a lot of very close friends (who continue to be my closest friends) and never once became a zombie.
Other people spend their time watching TV, raising children, helping the poor or working for a living. 42 weeks at 40 hours a week is less than most people spend working, and I know which I'd rather be doing.
These days of course I am working full time, and I gave up WoW with just 45 days
I reserve the right to be a complete arsehole to people on the internet and believe that gives them no right at all to violently assault me.
It does give them the right to ignore me, say nasty things about me and potentially seek legal action against me. That'd be that personal responsibility thing we don't hear enough about.
Even if the other guy is a bigger 'asshat', he should stay within the law.
these kinds of "rage" attacks are definitely on the increase
I thought media reporting of them was on the increase. I see no real evidence that significantly more attacks occur.
my impression is that in Britain, we seem to be the worst of any nation for this
Why, because we don't engage in multi-generational feuds, we don't just shoot people that annoy us, we don't engage in acts of destruction and violence that can't be traced? Those things all go on elsewhere for similar reasons.
look at the wider picture here, with binge drinking also increasing
Again, is it increasing? I seem to recall the previous generation getting equally pissed, cases of alcohol driven domestic violence being very prevalent. At one point alcohol was preferred to water for health reasons.
I go out to other European countries a lot, particularly Spain, and I don't hear or see any of these kinds of behaviours
So there's never violence at Spanish football games? Amazing. Yet they have exactly the same advertising and media as the UK, and you're certain that the media are at the core of this.
I'm confused.
This is a really sad incident and we should be ashamed that it happened here.
This is a really funny incident and we should be grateful that it happened to someone else.
The world is full of idiots. Many of them lack adequate self control. Trust me, this is not an exclusively British trait. So be sensible, act sensibly, and control access to your personal information online.
I bought BF1942. Loved it.
I bought BF:V. Loved it.
I bought BF2. Really liked it.
BF2142: Massive extension of the BF2 system that rewards people for playing the game obsessively by giving them in-game advantages over people that have a life. That alone was putting me off buying it - I resent dying to somebody purely because they don't have to work for a living and could thus 'earn' the bigger better equipment.
Now this? Absolutely no. I have no spare CPU cycles anyway, why waste them being advertised to. I also don't trust EA.
Sorry, but no Dice.
I change the rules. I always put the seat down, and close the lid.
That way she can't complain, and she has to go to the same effort to open it that I do.
If I was really nasty I'd complain about her leaving the lid open, but that would be overtly aggressive, rather than my current passive stance.
But in order to win you need three things - a legal principle, evidence of some kind of loss, and a preponderance of evidence to support your claims.
In America it seems that in order to win you need one thing: The opposition to be unable to turn up.
$11m? How the fuck can one individual posting on a few websites cause damage worth more money than the plaintiff would ever earn in their life?
You're assuming that they were lies.
Dear Indian Government,
Please do not trample over simple common sense and make frankly idiotic claims in an effort to apply inappropriate laws.
If you wish to enact a tax upon Internet communications then please put in place the appropriate legislation and do precisely that.
In the meantime, please expect and welcome the ridicule of citizens of your country and others across the globe.
Yours faithfully,
~Cederic
I for one would love to assist the judge (via teleconference, for obvious reasons) and assure him that the spirit of his request was being applied.
"M'lord, this is a computer. It does exactly what you ask it to do, and you asked for www.spamhaus.org to be delisted. That's exactly what happened. If you want the whole spamhaus.org to disappear then you must state that, as a computer can't read the mind of a fucking imbecile."
Sorry, which crime have Spamhaus committed?
The only possible crime would be refusing to obey a (US) court order. That has nothing to do with DNS entries...
When courts of law get involved, the cute word games really matter.
Assume that Icann are planning to roll over and destroy themselves by complying with the court order (they are in a no-win situation here).
If the court order is worded such that "The spamhaus.org DNS entry must be disabled until such time that Spamhaus stop blocking email from the plaintiff" then that's pretty easy to comply with - Spamhaus don't block the email.
I suspect the court wont be quite that stupid (although using an international organisation to enforce an inappropriate US court decision isn't the best indication of the court's intelligence) and will use wording along the lines of "remove the plaintiff's IP address from their black list"
Either way I hope Spamhaus refuse to give in.
Except that the gun in this situation is Spamhaus..
soldiers with your eggs
You've just explained why so much badly designed software exists.
Programmers design too. Whether they realise it or not.
What makes you think a teacher of physics would be a great programmer?
Being open and honest enough to admit "I don't know" requires a mindset that happens to occur in the best programmers. This may be coincidence, it may be rhetoric or it may be valuable material for a sociology thesis. I don't know.
Nominet email servers melt under the load from