The reason we have our speeds throttled as a way to prevent congestion has always bothered me for this reason. Say Comcast/AT&T/Whoever has a 10 gig/s link up and running 24/7. At 4pm that link is moving about 5 gig/s and when everyone gets home at 5 or 6 the link saturates right up to 10 gig/s.
If I start downloading a game off steam at 4, shouldn't they want to leave my connection un-throttled so I can get it over and done with in a few minutes while their link is dead, instead of spreading it out to a time when the link fills from 6 to 9pm?
To put it more basically, how does letting your bandwidth sit idle solve the problem of not having enough bandwidth?/This is a Chewbaca.//Wookies on Endor
Ok I'll go out on a limb here and make a prediction. MS is just copying the osX iOS split from Apple, but doing it wrong.
Basically they're going to want all their applications to be redone in html 5 and javascript so that they can be optimised for touch interfaces (like apple did with iOS). They're doing this because for some misguided reason they think touch will take off on the desktop. I saw their demo and I'm guessing that if you want your app to get it's own live tile on the "Main" screen, then you'll have to create a html5 interface for it. Chances are that they'll try to announce a something to ease the transition in Visual Studio this September, but development isn't going as well as it should and they know they're probably going to miss that deadline.
Either way it's just people moaning that they have to redo their presentation layer. Big whoop, if you're a even a terrible coder html and javascript should not be difficult to pick up.
I learned a whole lot from VB. I learned what happens when you don't have separation of concerns. I learned all about SQL injection. I found out what it was like to code in a non-OO language that wanted to pretend to be OO. I learned how global variable usage can mess an entire project up. I learned how terrible goto logic can be. I learned the real importance of commenting code.
A summary since we don't seem to have a good one here: AMD releases two new video cards targeted at the CAD type audience competing with the Quadro line from Nvidia. The hardware itself isn't anything you couldn't find in your average high end gaming card, but new but they've done stupid amount of driver optimisation for design work which is why these cards cost more. More interesting though is how (comparatively) low AMD has priced these models ($599 and $999).
From the Article: "We’ll do a follow-up article with the charts and graphs that the more pedantic among you expect, along with some interesting comparisons to other products, but in the meantime, I will summarize it with this: In SpecViewperf 11, the V7900 is about neck-and-neck with the $4000 NVIDIA Quadro 6000, and in some tests exceeded the legendary Q6000."
I have invested so much time and effort convincing management to let me remove all references to VB6 from our internal systems. If this turns out to be true and some jackass ports legacy support for those awful spaghetti messes to linux I will need professional counseling, and a new job.
I've been thanking MS for years for the decision to kill off VB6 and will hate them with the fury of a thousand suns if that corpse rises again as an oss zombie.
My ideal work flow. Left Monitor contains unit test on the left, stubs and what not on the right Middle Monitor: Code I'm actually working on to the left, Code it interacts with in the middle right, project explorer on the right Right Monitor: PyDoc/PerlDoc/MSDN on the left, Browser in the middle, output logs on the right.
If I could get them to give me a fourth I'd be more productive.
Do you know how I know you're from around the Michigan Indiana border? Because you're pissed about the nuclear waste transport NIMBY mess that meant that the reactor near the Michigan Indiana border had to bury the waste locally instead of shipping it to the middle of the desert.
Not that I'm complaining too hard; a lot of my friends in construction got jobs burying that stuff right next to the worlds largest fresh water reserve (the great lakes). It's just a little ironic that it's not safe enough to spend on the road for 10 hours, but it is safe to be buried forever it in the source waters for the Mississippi river (that supplies most of middle America with drinking water. No we're cool Iowa, 100 years from now when those things start to leak out and irradiate 90% of our country food supply we'll be able to point to the decision that you guys made not to let us put this stuff in the desert.
You're not sending your good employees (you know, the ones that you already know are intelligent) out to get certs. You're attempting to hire talent that already comes pre-trained so you don't have to do it. Anyone can fake their way through a class and memorize questions for a test, your goal should be to know your workers and send the ones that show promise off.
Find that smart kid from ops who seems to spend his days fixing printers and ghosting machines and send him out to get a MSCE. You'll probably wind up with half decent net admin when you're done. Hiring some mouth breather just because he paid for a cert and you've got a 95% chance of failure.
Actually that could be a way to weed out cert idiots, just ask them who paid for the cert. If it's their last employer it could be an indicator that they saw some talent there. Food for thought that.
From first hand experience I know this to be true.
When I get home and want to tinker with something, I know my bosses at work would love it if I spent a bunch of time learning perl so I could come to work and work on those ancient obfuscated scripts. What they don't understand is that I play with python in my free time specifically because I don't want to have to be the guy that has to deal with that mess. If they sent me off to do some training I'd be more than happy to go, but it's like the article said. I'm instantly profitable racking up hours doing C#, let the grizzled veterans sort out the 15 year old legacy perl (they do a better job of it than I could anyways please please please don't ever retire and make me do it).
The title of your post is "No user-serviceable parts inside". How about technician serviceable parts. I'm the geek that gets called on to fix the entire family's computers, and from hard experience I can tell you that having a current AM3 processor that I can dump into a 5 year old PC will really bring things back to life, Also If I have an known good AM2+ board laying around you can test pretty much anything, and testing really helps keep costs down for non-business types.
Compare with an intel system where if something stops working you have to trash almost the whole system unless you get really lucky. I've seen guys trash everything but their ram only to discover that it was the ram that went south in their system, just because they had no spare parts to test with. Granted nothing is ever that black and white, but I've had much better luck isolating problems with AMD based systems just due to having spare parts laying around that work.
Hey I went pre-paid, and it was the best decision I ever made. $100 for 1000 minutes that are good for a whole year, and I can roll those minutes into the next year if I re-up (last year I used about 850, this year I started with 1150). Yeah it's weird, but I spend 99% of my time next to the work phone on my desk or a land line at home. I don't need anything more than that.
If you're the type that hates talking, but needs a phone number for emergencies I can't recommend the year long prepaid plans enough. Now granted there's only one carrier that offers a deal like this, so you'll have to head into your nearest T-Mob....
If I had picked one up on a two year contract 9 months ago I'd have hoped that they would keep it up to date for two years, but expected at least the 1 year that was covered by the warranty. I mean slashdot car analogy here, but if I buy a new Hyundai and it's got a 10 year 100,000 mile drive train warranty, I'm going to expect that Hyundai is going to keep enough parts around to fix something. I'm also going to hope that if they find that the 2009 Elantra has a defect (bug) that they'll send out an update to all the dealers letting them know how to fix the problem.
Hyundai has no legal obligation to do this, but they will. Do you know why? Because they know that Hyundai will get a rep as a car with problems if they don't.
Apple has no legal obligation to keep peoples 9 month old phones up to date, but these vulnerabilities are published and out there. The TIFF vulnerability is especially embarrassing due to the sheer amount of time everyone has known about it. Also Apple can't hide behind their tried and true, no one is going to bother hacking us because no one runs our OS like they have with OSX. They are the leader now and they'd best get used to it or their reputation for "It Just Works", will be replaced by "It Just Gets Pwntd".
Court: You're slamming us with paperwork so if you want to load our asses up with any more you have to summarize it first and give the other guy a chance to write a short summary of why you're full of it.
Google: Summary time then. You can't patent byte code and virtual machines. We're asking the US Patent office to take a second look at these dumb patents, and we're also asking that we put the whole trial on hold till we get an answer.
Court: You're still on the hook because Oracle says you have bunch of copied source files in Android. That's copyrights not patents.
Google: All but 12 of those source files are interfaces and we've got 3 previous cases that show that you can copy interfaces because they're interfaces and don't contain any actual code.
Google: Also two of the 12 files that they're suing us for were written by Google employees and given to Sun under an open source license.
Google: The remaining 10 files that we're totally not admitting that we straight stole from Java comprises less than one percent of the Android code base so we can get away with it because of "de minimus", which basically means we legally get to copy your crap so long as we don't do it too much.
Google: So basically Oracle copyright claim is full of crap and we should dismiss this whole case till the USPTO gets a chance to look at the patents.
Oracle: We've got two days to come up with reasons that you're full of crap, so expect a formal response soon.
Luxury.
Why when I was a kid we used to have to get up at 3 in tha morning, head down to the old mine, mine out the materials for our desk, make it our school that was located at the bottom of a pond up hill both ways. In the snow for 50 miles with only the weight of our desk for keepin us warm. An when we got there we had to learn for 16 hours straight by watching a rock!
Actually most of the community that I've met seems to view this as a way to limit price gouging in online auctions. If you can buy that rare hat that you've always wanted for $3 from the store there's no way someone is going to be able to charge more than that for an item on Ebay like you see with WoW stuff.
There seems to be a lot of online moaning about this, but the reaction from 99% of people (that I've played with) in game seems positive.
I'll back this up by noting that I play on a server that specifically does this for weapons that CEVO and ETF2L have removed. It's a server for those that like to practice for more serious matches the way they'll be played in the league events. You should see the rage some people have when they can't play with their favourite load-out.
It's not that it's impossible to make a 'pure' server. It's just that everyone hates them and the servers sit empty till the admin takes them down. The only exception to this rule are the servers that limit a few select weapons that get a bit overpowered in smaller (6v6) matches with well organized teams. Those seem to be empty most of the times, but will occasionally see some traffic.
So yeah, GP is in a vast minority of players. The idea has been had, and implemented, and then promptly forgotten about because of it's vast unpopularity.
From the description: Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons and Dragons Adventure is not a film sequel to Dungeons and Dragons (2000), but the DVD equivalent of an interactive role-playing novel. There are over 900 short digitally animated sequences, leading every so often to a choice to be made with the remote control, resulting after about 90 minutes in one of four possible endings.
Sorry IBM, your prior art is sitting in a card board box in my basement.
The only game I have tried through Games for Windows Live is Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II and it has yet to ever be able to connect - it always returns error 0x81051911. The troubleshooting steps Microsoft has you go through include everything from port forwarding a half dozen ports to resetting your TCP/IP stack, yet I can play any other online game with no issues, including connecting to X-Box Live on my sons console. GFWL is a POS and I won't buy any other game that requires it.
Believe it or not I bought Bioshock 2 through steam, and it still required GFWL. I had to go through all that and more just to be able to save my progress in the game. Included in this mess is having to type in a CD Key twice for a digitally downloaded game (once to install the game, and once to tie it to my GFWL account).
Never again. Ever. YMMV, but all two games I've ever purchased that required GFWL have required googling for a solution to their DRM hassles to get the single player up and running. Never ever again.
So, basically from reading the two articles I'm pissed that they jerked me around like that. It's intentionally misleading and reactionary.
Everything could be true in that article if they would have prefaced, "Google has made a deal to put Net Neutrality into practice right now for everything but mobile traffic."
You are all being lied to by this article
Verizon Communications Inc. and Google Inc. have struck their own accord
on handling Internet traffic, as both participate in talks by U.S. officials
on Web policy, two people briefed by the companies said.
The compromise as described would restrict Verizon from selectively slowing
Internet content that travels over its wires, but wouldn't apply such limits
to Internet use on mobile phones, according to the people, who spoke yesterday
and asked not to be identified before an announcement.
Bravo slashdot. You made me panicked and then pissed off at your mods before breakfast.
I went to a Baptist highschool here. Granted it's in Michigan so we get a lot less of the southern weirdos, so take that for what it's worth.
Basically we were all forced to go through three of the following four science classes.
Earth Science: How to identify types of rock and clouds. How rain and volcanos work. Stuff like that Biology: How plants and animals work, including organs, photosynthesis, circulatory systems, and other stuff like that. Chemistry: How things atoms and molecules react with each other and how math drives it. (this was actually a really tough class) Human Anatomy. Basically Biology but all focused on people with some starter nursing program stuff.
We spent one week on the "Theory of Evolution" in Biology, which was a quick overview on what they expected us to know on the state exams. That's it. We didn't even touch on creationism. The teachers said it wasn't relevant to anything we'd have to know to succeed in life so we didn't need it.
We spent a while in Biology class on the process of evolution, understanding how it works, but never on memorizing dinosaurs and how long ago they died like our public school counterparts.
I find it amazing that the crowd even here on slashdot seems to be all about pushing teaching the Theory of Evolution instead of ignoring both sides as equally useless and getting down with something that might make a difference someday.
Your citation says nothing about diminished reaction time (motor control yes, but not reaction time). Also note that your citation only claims that psycomotor control is effected. Those are movements that you have to actually think about, not reactions. How often do you have to concentrate on keeping your gas pedal depressed for your whole car ride?
From your wiki citation: "Aside from a subjective change in perception and, most notably, mood, the most common short-term physical and neurological effects include increased heart rate, lowered blood pressure, impairment of short-term episodic memory, working memory, psychomotor coordination, and concentration"
Your American Council for Drug Education citation mentions loss of motor control, however they cite none of their sources, and the citation is more a list of talking points for drug enforcement officials than anything citable in a scientific sense. I guess the wiki isn't either, however I can follow their 112 links at the bottom to see what the actual science says.
That said if pot gets legalized I'd want it to be subjected to all the rules we have for alcohol till we can prove otherwise. Also the only reason I responded was because Cannabis is not a pure depressant, it's mix of stimulant, depressant, and psychoactive.
Steam is slightly better than the absolute worst of the DRM systems yes, but it still can take all your games away if you so much as look at it funny. Even SecuROM or StarForce can't do that. If you travel with a laptop, I suggest you buy your games somewhere else. Steam has a tendency to lock accounts that log in from multiple IP addresses. 'Cause, you know, that's a crime.
Visa is slightly better than the absolute worst of the credit card systems yes, but it still can take all your buying power away if you so much as look at it funny. Even MasterCard or AmericanExpress can't do that. If you travel with a credit card, I suggest you get your card somewhere else. Visa has a tendency to lock accounts that make payments from multiple geographical locations. 'Cause, you know, that's a crime.
The doctor recommended that I cure my overweightness + bad knees with a elliptical machine (told me to quit running, it's bad for me). Insurance will not pay for the $3000 machine, nor will it pay for a gym membership.
Doctors recommend things that you should do on your own. Doctors prescribe things that are necessary. His doctor only recommended a Wii, he did not prescribe one.
Also stupid because the court case is gonna cost way more than the $300 a wii with wii fit would cost.
There are also those of us with more than a passing interest in data security that are perfectly happy using facebook.
With every post I make, I keep in mind that the government, employers, and everyone that I've ever met can and will look me up. Sometimes I wonder why all these people are so paranoid. What are you doing that's so dangerous, posting your credit card numbers? Is your name and address such a valuable thing when it's been posted in the phone book since the days of rotary phones? Why are you posting things online for public review that you wouldn't want anyone to know? The fact that I see this argument from a lot of very technically savvy people (especially here on slashdot) really boggles my mind.
Facebook best feature is a chance to build a vision of your life and push it online for public review. Best of all, it's editable. You can go crazy editing your public profile (and many do), with the expectation that the interviewer you just talked to will probably be looking at it. Go ahead and post your job history, and all the impressive stuff you've done. Don't post pictures of yourself drinking on the job (or do if that's how you want to present yourself.) It's a tool, and a very powerful one. Think of it like the C++ of social tools, very easy to create something that will cause you grief later, but also very capable of crafting masterpieces that you can be proud of.
Why would anyone even passably technically inclined pass this up?
All Apple has to do is say that all apps released have to pass all their multitouch UI requirements. As far as I can tell they already do this.
Even requiring that the apps call the apple specific APIs when using gestures would be fine. The devs can work with that. Requiring all the devs that want to write iPhone apps to learn and write in apples crappy little language is pure asinine.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason we have our speeds throttled as a way to prevent congestion has always bothered me for this reason. Say Comcast/AT&T/Whoever has a 10 gig/s link up and running 24/7. At 4pm that link is moving about 5 gig/s and when everyone gets home at 5 or 6 the link saturates right up to 10 gig/s.
If I start downloading a game off steam at 4, shouldn't they want to leave my connection un-throttled so I can get it over and done with in a few minutes while their link is dead, instead of spreading it out to a time when the link fills from 6 to 9pm?
To put it more basically, how does letting your bandwidth sit idle solve the problem of not having enough bandwidth? /This is a Chewbaca. //Wookies on Endor
Ok I'll go out on a limb here and make a prediction. MS is just copying the osX iOS split from Apple, but doing it wrong.
Basically they're going to want all their applications to be redone in html 5 and javascript so that they can be optimised for touch interfaces (like apple did with iOS). They're doing this because for some misguided reason they think touch will take off on the desktop. I saw their demo and I'm guessing that if you want your app to get it's own live tile on the "Main" screen, then you'll have to create a html5 interface for it. Chances are that they'll try to announce a something to ease the transition in Visual Studio this September, but development isn't going as well as it should and they know they're probably going to miss that deadline.
Either way it's just people moaning that they have to redo their presentation layer. Big whoop, if you're a even a terrible coder html and javascript should not be difficult to pick up.
I learned a whole lot from VB. I learned what happens when you don't have separation of concerns. I learned all about SQL injection. I found out what it was like to code in a non-OO language that wanted to pretend to be OO. I learned how global variable usage can mess an entire project up. I learned how terrible goto logic can be. I learned the real importance of commenting code.
Oh yes, I learned a lot from VB.
A summary since we don't seem to have a good one here:
AMD releases two new video cards targeted at the CAD type audience competing with the Quadro line from Nvidia. The hardware itself isn't anything you couldn't find in your average high end gaming card, but new but they've done stupid amount of driver optimisation for design work which is why these cards cost more. More interesting though is how (comparatively) low AMD has priced these models ($599 and $999).
From the Article:
"We’ll do a follow-up article with the charts and graphs that the more pedantic among you expect, along with some interesting comparisons to other products, but in the meantime, I will summarize it with this: In SpecViewperf 11, the V7900 is about neck-and-neck with the $4000 NVIDIA Quadro 6000, and in some tests exceeded the legendary Q6000."
I have invested so much time and effort convincing management to let me remove all references to VB6 from our internal systems. If this turns out to be true and some jackass ports legacy support for those awful spaghetti messes to linux I will need professional counseling, and a new job.
I've been thanking MS for years for the decision to kill off VB6 and will hate them with the fury of a thousand suns if that corpse rises again as an oss zombie.
My ideal work flow.
Left Monitor contains unit test on the left, stubs and what not on the right
Middle Monitor: Code I'm actually working on to the left, Code it interacts with in the middle right, project explorer on the right
Right Monitor: PyDoc/PerlDoc/MSDN on the left, Browser in the middle, output logs on the right.
If I could get them to give me a fourth I'd be more productive.
Do you know how I know you're from around the Michigan Indiana border? Because you're pissed about the nuclear waste transport NIMBY mess that meant that the reactor near the Michigan Indiana border had to bury the waste locally instead of shipping it to the middle of the desert.
Not that I'm complaining too hard; a lot of my friends in construction got jobs burying that stuff right next to the worlds largest fresh water reserve (the great lakes). It's just a little ironic that it's not safe enough to spend on the road for 10 hours, but it is safe to be buried forever it in the source waters for the Mississippi river (that supplies most of middle America with drinking water. No we're cool Iowa, 100 years from now when those things start to leak out and irradiate 90% of our country food supply we'll be able to point to the decision that you guys made not to let us put this stuff in the desert.
Way to go Champs! /Ok maybe a little complaining.
Your comment is telling.
You're not sending your good employees (you know, the ones that you already know are intelligent) out to get certs. You're attempting to hire talent that already comes pre-trained so you don't have to do it. Anyone can fake their way through a class and memorize questions for a test, your goal should be to know your workers and send the ones that show promise off.
Find that smart kid from ops who seems to spend his days fixing printers and ghosting machines and send him out to get a MSCE. You'll probably wind up with half decent net admin when you're done. Hiring some mouth breather just because he paid for a cert and you've got a 95% chance of failure.
Actually that could be a way to weed out cert idiots, just ask them who paid for the cert. If it's their last employer it could be an indicator that they saw some talent there. Food for thought that.
From first hand experience I know this to be true.
When I get home and want to tinker with something, I know my bosses at work would love it if I spent a bunch of time learning perl so I could come to work and work on those ancient obfuscated scripts. What they don't understand is that I play with python in my free time specifically because I don't want to have to be the guy that has to deal with that mess. If they sent me off to do some training I'd be more than happy to go, but it's like the article said. I'm instantly profitable racking up hours doing C#, let the grizzled veterans sort out the 15 year old legacy perl (they do a better job of it than I could anyways please please please don't ever retire and make me do it).
The title of your post is "No user-serviceable parts inside". How about technician serviceable parts. I'm the geek that gets called on to fix the entire family's computers, and from hard experience I can tell you that having a current AM3 processor that I can dump into a 5 year old PC will really bring things back to life, Also If I have an known good AM2+ board laying around you can test pretty much anything, and testing really helps keep costs down for non-business types.
Compare with an intel system where if something stops working you have to trash almost the whole system unless you get really lucky. I've seen guys trash everything but their ram only to discover that it was the ram that went south in their system, just because they had no spare parts to test with. Granted nothing is ever that black and white, but I've had much better luck isolating problems with AMD based systems just due to having spare parts laying around that work.
Hey I went pre-paid, and it was the best decision I ever made. $100 for 1000 minutes that are good for a whole year, and I can roll those minutes into the next year if I re-up (last year I used about 850, this year I started with 1150). Yeah it's weird, but I spend 99% of my time next to the work phone on my desk or a land line at home. I don't need anything more than that.
If you're the type that hates talking, but needs a phone number for emergencies I can't recommend the year long prepaid plans enough. Now granted there's only one carrier that offers a deal like this, so you'll have to head into your nearest T-Mob....
Oh wait.
Except the IPhone 3G has a 1 year warranty.
http://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/iphone/3g.html
If I had picked one up on a two year contract 9 months ago I'd have hoped that they would keep it up to date for two years, but expected at least the 1 year that was covered by the warranty. I mean slashdot car analogy here, but if I buy a new Hyundai and it's got a 10 year 100,000 mile drive train warranty, I'm going to expect that Hyundai is going to keep enough parts around to fix something. I'm also going to hope that if they find that the 2009 Elantra has a defect (bug) that they'll send out an update to all the dealers letting them know how to fix the problem.
Hyundai has no legal obligation to do this, but they will. Do you know why? Because they know that Hyundai will get a rep as a car with problems if they don't.
Apple has no legal obligation to keep peoples 9 month old phones up to date, but these vulnerabilities are published and out there. The TIFF vulnerability is especially embarrassing due to the sheer amount of time everyone has known about it. Also Apple can't hide behind their tried and true, no one is going to bother hacking us because no one runs our OS like they have with OSX. They are the leader now and they'd best get used to it or their reputation for "It Just Works", will be replaced by "It Just Gets Pwntd".
Article summary from this and Groklaw:
Court: You're slamming us with paperwork so if you want to load our asses up with any more you have to summarize it first and give the other guy a chance to write a short summary of why you're full of it.
Google: Summary time then. You can't patent byte code and virtual machines. We're asking the US Patent office to take a second look at these dumb patents, and we're also asking that we put the whole trial on hold till we get an answer.
Court: You're still on the hook because Oracle says you have bunch of copied source files in Android. That's copyrights not patents.
Google: All but 12 of those source files are interfaces and we've got 3 previous cases that show that you can copy interfaces because they're interfaces and don't contain any actual code.
Google: Also two of the 12 files that they're suing us for were written by Google employees and given to Sun under an open source license.
Google: The remaining 10 files that we're totally not admitting that we straight stole from Java comprises less than one percent of the Android code base so we can get away with it because of "de minimus", which basically means we legally get to copy your crap so long as we don't do it too much.
Google: So basically Oracle copyright claim is full of crap and we should dismiss this whole case till the USPTO gets a chance to look at the patents.
Oracle: We've got two days to come up with reasons that you're full of crap, so expect a formal response soon.
Luxury. Why when I was a kid we used to have to get up at 3 in tha morning, head down to the old mine, mine out the materials for our desk, make it our school that was located at the bottom of a pond up hill both ways. In the snow for 50 miles with only the weight of our desk for keepin us warm. An when we got there we had to learn for 16 hours straight by watching a rock!
Actually most of the community that I've met seems to view this as a way to limit price gouging in online auctions. If you can buy that rare hat that you've always wanted for $3 from the store there's no way someone is going to be able to charge more than that for an item on Ebay like you see with WoW stuff. There seems to be a lot of online moaning about this, but the reaction from 99% of people (that I've played with) in game seems positive.
I'll back this up by noting that I play on a server that specifically does this for weapons that CEVO and ETF2L have removed. It's a server for those that like to practice for more serious matches the way they'll be played in the league events. You should see the rage some people have when they can't play with their favourite load-out.
It's not that it's impossible to make a 'pure' server. It's just that everyone hates them and the servers sit empty till the admin takes them down. The only exception to this rule are the servers that limit a few select weapons that get a bit overpowered in smaller (6v6) matches with well organized teams. Those seem to be empty most of the times, but will occasionally see some traffic.
So yeah, GP is in a vast minority of players. The idea has been had, and implemented, and then promptly forgotten about because of it's vast unpopularity.
Ahem, Scourge of Worlds - A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure (2003) would like a word here.
http://www.amazon.com/Scourge-Worlds-Dungeons-Dragons-Adventure/dp/B00009KU8L
From the description: Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons and Dragons Adventure is not a film sequel to Dungeons and Dragons (2000), but the DVD equivalent of an interactive role-playing novel. There are over 900 short digitally animated sequences, leading every so often to a choice to be made with the remote control, resulting after about 90 minutes in one of four possible endings.
Sorry IBM, your prior art is sitting in a card board box in my basement.
The only game I have tried through Games for Windows Live is Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II and it has yet to ever be able to connect - it always returns error 0x81051911. The troubleshooting steps Microsoft has you go through include everything from port forwarding a half dozen ports to resetting your TCP/IP stack, yet I can play any other online game with no issues, including connecting to X-Box Live on my sons console. GFWL is a POS and I won't buy any other game that requires it.
Believe it or not I bought Bioshock 2 through steam, and it still required GFWL. I had to go through all that and more just to be able to save my progress in the game. Included in this mess is having to type in a CD Key twice for a digitally downloaded game (once to install the game, and once to tie it to my GFWL account).
Never again. Ever. YMMV, but all two games I've ever purchased that required GFWL have required googling for a solution to their DRM hassles to get the single player up and running. Never ever again.
Everything could be true in that article if they would have prefaced, "Google has made a deal to put Net Neutrality into practice right now for everything but mobile traffic." You are all being lied to by this article
Bravo slashdot. You made me panicked and then pissed off at your mods before breakfast.
I went to a Baptist highschool here. Granted it's in Michigan so we get a lot less of the southern weirdos, so take that for what it's worth.
Basically we were all forced to go through three of the following four science classes.
Earth Science: How to identify types of rock and clouds. How rain and volcanos work. Stuff like that
Biology: How plants and animals work, including organs, photosynthesis, circulatory systems, and other stuff like that.
Chemistry: How things atoms and molecules react with each other and how math drives it. (this was actually a really tough class)
Human Anatomy. Basically Biology but all focused on people with some starter nursing program stuff.
We spent one week on the "Theory of Evolution" in Biology, which was a quick overview on what they expected us to know on the state exams. That's it. We didn't even touch on creationism. The teachers said it wasn't relevant to anything we'd have to know to succeed in life so we didn't need it.
We spent a while in Biology class on the process of evolution, understanding how it works, but never on memorizing dinosaurs and how long ago they died like our public school counterparts.
I find it amazing that the crowd even here on slashdot seems to be all about pushing teaching the Theory of Evolution instead of ignoring both sides as equally useless and getting down with something that might make a difference someday.
Your citation says nothing about diminished reaction time (motor control yes, but not reaction time). Also note that your citation only claims that psycomotor control is effected. Those are movements that you have to actually think about, not reactions. How often do you have to concentrate on keeping your gas pedal depressed for your whole car ride?
From your wiki citation: "Aside from a subjective change in perception and, most notably, mood, the most common short-term physical and neurological effects include increased heart rate, lowered blood pressure, impairment of short-term episodic memory, working memory, psychomotor coordination, and concentration"
Your American Council for Drug Education citation mentions loss of motor control, however they cite none of their sources, and the citation is more a list of talking points for drug enforcement officials than anything citable in a scientific sense. I guess the wiki isn't either, however I can follow their 112 links at the bottom to see what the actual science says.
That said if pot gets legalized I'd want it to be subjected to all the rules we have for alcohol till we can prove otherwise. Also the only reason I responded was because Cannabis is not a pure depressant, it's mix of stimulant, depressant, and psychoactive.
Steam is slightly better than the absolute worst of the DRM systems yes, but it still can take all your games away if you so much as look at it funny. Even SecuROM or StarForce can't do that. If you travel with a laptop, I suggest you buy your games somewhere else. Steam has a tendency to lock accounts that log in from multiple IP addresses. 'Cause, you know, that's a crime.
Visa is slightly better than the absolute worst of the credit card systems yes, but it still can take all your buying power away if you so much as look at it funny. Even MasterCard or AmericanExpress can't do that. If you travel with a credit card, I suggest you get your card somewhere else. Visa has a tendency to lock accounts that make payments from multiple geographical locations. 'Cause, you know, that's a crime.
The doctor recommended that I cure my overweightness + bad knees with a elliptical machine (told me to quit running, it's bad for me). Insurance will not pay for the $3000 machine, nor will it pay for a gym membership.
Doctors recommend things that you should do on your own. Doctors prescribe things that are necessary. His doctor only recommended a Wii, he did not prescribe one.
Also stupid because the court case is gonna cost way more than the $300 a wii with wii fit would cost.
There are also those of us with more than a passing interest in data security that are perfectly happy using facebook.
With every post I make, I keep in mind that the government, employers, and everyone that I've ever met can and will look me up. Sometimes I wonder why all these people are so paranoid. What are you doing that's so dangerous, posting your credit card numbers? Is your name and address such a valuable thing when it's been posted in the phone book since the days of rotary phones? Why are you posting things online for public review that you wouldn't want anyone to know? The fact that I see this argument from a lot of very technically savvy people (especially here on slashdot) really boggles my mind.
Facebook best feature is a chance to build a vision of your life and push it online for public review. Best of all, it's editable. You can go crazy editing your public profile (and many do), with the expectation that the interviewer you just talked to will probably be looking at it. Go ahead and post your job history, and all the impressive stuff you've done. Don't post pictures of yourself drinking on the job (or do if that's how you want to present yourself.) It's a tool, and a very powerful one. Think of it like the C++ of social tools, very easy to create something that will cause you grief later, but also very capable of crafting masterpieces that you can be proud of.
Why would anyone even passably technically inclined pass this up?
BS.
All Apple has to do is say that all apps released have to pass all their multitouch UI requirements. As far as I can tell they already do this.
Even requiring that the apps call the apple specific APIs when using gestures would be fine. The devs can work with that. Requiring all the devs that want to write iPhone apps to learn and write in apples crappy little language is pure asinine.